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

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #91 – Eater Of Wasps by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#45

Eater of Wasps

By Trevor Baxendale

Yuck, obviously.

We’re three novels deep with Trevor Baxendale — at this point you can tell what he likes. Body horror, with an emphasis on degeneration. The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart both concerned worlds in a state of decay, with the inhabitants getting the worst of it. Eater Of Wasps continues that theme but on a much smaller scale: instead of alien planets it’s Earth, and instead of a planet-wide problem it’s a spot of bother in a quaint English village in the 1930s.

The spot of bother is, to be fair, revolting. Local wasps have somehow become intertwined with an alien artefact, causing them to swarm into people’s mouths and noses with the aim of controlling them. (We don’t go into that much detail but suffice to say it’s a “gestalt intelligence that causes genetic mutation” kind of arrangement, not “wasps driving people around like in Ratatouille”. Sadly.) This gradually causes human bodies to disintegrate, leaving a bizarre new life form in their place. If the Doctor doesn’t stop it then it will take over and/or kill everyone on Earth.

The difference in scale is a bit disorienting. Eater Of Wasps more closely resembles a nightmare version of Agatha Christie than Baxendale’s usual brand of sci-fi. This at least makes for a fun juxtaposition, and he accelerates the plot in a way you couldn’t do in a true period piece. Horrible wasp deaths occur early and more or less in plain view, the alien intelligence apparently having no truck with subtlety. Okay, it’s trying to take people over one at a time, and it successfully creates at least one spy, but otherwise it’s not doing a very good job of staying out of the papers. There is a “man vs wasp monster” set piece on top of a moving train at one point.

The downside to the smaller scale is a corresponding lack of plot. There’s no great mystery to unravel in Eater Of Wasps. There’s an alien weapon causing all the ruckus, but the people responsible for it are dead before we even get started. All that’s left is to stop the main host, Charles Rigby, before he starts sharing the love outside the village. (Once he goes “full monster” he ceases to be interesting. We are talking “calls the Doctor Doc-torrr.”) There is a secondary threat at least, a team of time agents sent to retrieve the weapon before it takes effect, or destroy the entire town to ensure it never does. This creates a bit of tension with the TARDIS crew and it eventually adds a ticking clock in the finale, but there’s nothing really to unpack there either; it’s not as if it’s very surprising, for instance, that the possibility of a bomb going off becomes a race to defuse it in time. They’re quite mysterious as a group, which at least creates the possibility of following that up in later books.

Is it so terrible for a book to skimp on the plot? Well, no: excitement is its own reward, and there’s a good amount of that here. The aforementioned train sequence might be a transparent effort to get us that bit closer to 280 pages but it’s still a good bit. (Equally obvious but less good is the bit where the Doctor and co. get arrested.) There’s not a huge amount here besides the plot, though. The denizens of Marpling have a certain degree of colour and back story, such as a local rogue and a young boy with questionable parentage, but most of it fails to ignite. There’s a critical relationship for example between Rigby and the boy: it’s enough that the wasp-addled man is still on some level trying to protect his friend. But what’s actually so important there that it transcends species? It’s not made clear, especially where young Liam is terrified into silence for most of it. (And no, Rigby is not his secret dad — but wouldn’t that have been an idea?)

The future people aren’t much better. Kala is sufficiently dimensional that she considers asking the Doctor for help rather than just going through with her contingency plan. By the end of the book she’s flirting with the possibility of joining him in the TARDIS, and it doesn’t sound all that implausible. (Hell, he must have said yes to Compassion.) The other two are for various reasons less interesting, and their modus operandi is a bit hard to fathom. Sorry, I know they’re from thousands of years in the future and time travellers be aloof and all that, but nuking Britain in 1933 is going to have big enough consequences that they might feel it too, despite their casual attitude here. Presumably they have ancestors who would be better off without any radioactive fallout? Or suddenly not existing at all due to the paradox? (The whole nuclear bomb threat feels like an easy reach for extra peril. And why does it have to be a nuke?)

The closest the book gets to Doing A Thing (character-wise) is with the Doctor, specifically the callous way he is sometimes perceived, especially by Anji. “‘Pity about the plants.’ ‘Oh yeah.’ Fitz nodded sardonically. ‘Terrible shame.’ He couldn’t remember the Doctor even passing comment about the death of Tom Colton.” / “‘Anji’ll be wondering where the hell we’ve got to.’ The Doctor just glanced at Fitz for a moment, almost as if he was trying to remember who Anji was.” / “No wonder you were so keen for us to go! You were worried about the flipping fragment, not me!” / “[Gleave] found the Doctor’s clinical detachment rather disconcerting; he couldn’t detect even a shred of sympathy.” / “He doesn’t care, though, Fitz. He does the things he does simply because he can, not because he really cares. It’s just something for him to do. Like a distraction, or a game.” / “All that sympathy for a few crushed wasps, and not one mention of Hilary Pink. Taking care not to risk harming the monster that Charles Rigby had become, but allowing him to keep Liam Jarrow hostage.” / “I just wish you’d get a bit more involved sometimes.”

Anji, and the various other characters in the mix there are not exactly wrong: the Doctor can appear flippant. He can be very interested in mint humbugs but not all that bothered about a dead man. The thing is though, it’s not exactly a fresh take on the character — and Eater Of Wasps barely does anything with it anyway. So he’s a bit aloof. So what? There’s an autopsy scene in this, and the mortician is aloof too. Besides, the Doctor clearly does care about stopping Rigby from doing more harm, or from becoming a monster with no way back. Anji gets a few opportunities to grouse about this but, like Liam, she also spends a chunk of the story as a mute hostage — not exactly time well spent. Then when she puts him on the spot at the end it’s easily dismissed: despite complaining that he misled the alien intelligence that was trying to kill them all (oh, what a bounder!) she is able to live with it after all and so nips off for a bath. It’s a bit of a nil-nil draw, characterisation-wise.

Plot and character are pretty threadbare, then. (I’ve barely even mentioned Fitz. Reader, he puts in the legal definition of an appearance.) What Eater Of Wasps does unequivocally have going for it is of course that Baxendale standard, the yuck: people falling apart, nasty things happening to them. He’s clearly landed on something good (I use the term advisedly) with the invasive wasps. It’s an arresting and unpleasant image, no doubt… but that’s sort of it. Not only is the horror of wasps-in-your-mouth repeated so often that it threatens to become normal, it doesn’t then speak to anything else, since the wasps are technically benign and they don’t have much of a plan. They don’t feel representative of something. And it never evolves into something greater or more horrible, apart from Rigby turning into your standard monster-man at the end. I frequently had the image of Baxendale spotting a wasp crawl into someone’s mouth and trying to spin a whole novel out of just that. The relative complexity or world-building of The Janus Conjunction and Coldheart is missed.

I’m aware that expectations such as complex plotting, thoughtful character work or identifiable themes are relative to the reader and potentially quite unfair, since most readers aren’t in the silly position of reading all the books in order, or even just reading lots of Doctor Who. They might not want or need that much variety, a bit of grisly fun like this might hit the spot just fine for a casual reader — it wouldn’t be the first time that they’ve aimed to produce just that. Eater Of Wasps has a similar skill for pacing to something like Vanishing Point, and it would make another decent showcase for Doctor Who stories that deal with monsters and whip along in good order. I enjoyed it in the moment. It’s just that, since we’re bringing it up, Vanishing Point also had unrealised potential. Eater Of Wasps has an icky front cover and novelises it.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #90 – The Shadow In The Glass by Stephen Cole & Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#41

The Shadow in the Glass

By Justin Richards and Stephen Cole

NB: I read the 2015 reprint for this, titled Shadow In The Glass (no “The”) by Stephen Cole & Justin Richards (in that order). Were those deliberate changes or did somebody jot it down wrong? I don’t know, so I’ll stick with the original title and order of authors.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: when a novel didn’t quite come together as planned, BBC Books were left with a gap to fill at short notice. Looking at you Millennium Shock, The Banquo Legacy and (I’m pretty sure) Grave Matter. This time Justin Richards — for it is usually he — also enlisted Stephen Cole, late of this parish, perhaps feeling that another editor (and fellow what-do-we-do-now sufferer) would speed things up. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to do another one of these by himself.

It’s tempting to look for signs of cobbled-togetherness in the finished book, especially when there’s an introduction telling us how it all came about. I think it’s safe to say they didn’t spend too long coming up with ideas: Richards had just read a book about the death of Hitler, turn that around and there’s your central premise. They felt like the Brigadier made sense in that context, so in he went. The Sixth Doctor hadn’t met him properly on screen yet, so he was recruited as well. Throw in a crashed spaceship for added Doctor Who points and you’re nearly all the way to The Shadow In The Glass.

This is not, however, their first rodeo. It has a certain economy of pace, I suspect because of that time-crunch: there are multiple occasions when the Doctor could sort something out just by hopping in the TARDIS, so dammit, that’s what he does, and to hell with the many occasions when only a much more long-winded plan would have done! But Richards and Cole (or Richards, or Cole) make a virtue of this, using the Doctor’s apparently casual time travels to create and solve a puzzle as they go. Similarly the premise is quite a straightforward one: is Hitler back from the dead, and if so, how could that be? But instead of launching into a protracted and noisy modern war with the Nazis the authors dive into the mystery aspect, turning The Shadow In The Glass into a fact-finding mission. There’s a wider sense of economy here, of taking their somewhat meagre grab bag of ingredients and thoroughly tasting each one. Get two editors in a room, I suppose.

It’s a peculiarly light book for something with Hitler in it, or it often felt that way to me. The alien plot has very knowing echoes of The Dæmons, a perennial UNIT Family favourite: there’s even a dangerous heat barrier surrounding a village, watched over by none other than Sgt Osgood! There’s also a suggestion that the Brigadier — retired, getting on a bit, not yet rejuvenated via Happy Endings — just fancies a bit of a lark. “Did some invisible imps near the Dorset coast count as a crisis? The week stretched emptily ahead. The Brigadier decided they did.” And so he gets, haranguing some lowly military men, investigating a crashed spaceship, nipping off to Russia (!) on reconnaissance, and making a few TARDIS trips to meet Hitler, at one point handing him a half-eaten sausage roll. (At another, smirking at the dictator’s historic demise.) The Brigadier is at his most avuncular in this one, not really trying for the action heroics of old. It feels like a mature understanding of where the character and actor were at. However, it’s not entirely Christmassy: when the time comes to fight, the Brigadier does so brutally and without apology. But more on the climax later.

It’s a memorably strong book for the Sixth Doctor as well. Travelling without companions — BBC Books no longer tell us when these are set, but we can easily put this between The Trial Of A Timelord and Business Unusual — he’s also in a gentler mood, albeit still a dizzyingly proactive one, again maybe because the book had one eye on its watch at all times. In need of answers about a wartime Nazi raid on a British town, he elects simply to take part in it, first calling in a favour from Churchill to smuggle him into France, then ingratiating himself with the high command. There are obvious moral questions here, unavoidable when the Germans shoot multiple British soldiers, but on that subject the Doctor takes a pragmatic, and not entirely painless view of history: “Would Churchill have the British reinforcements waiting? Would the raid be repulsed? … There was no sense angonising over what he should and shouldn’t do. Like a sleeping man can cheat an alarm call by incorporating it into his dream, as a fire alarm or a ringing telephone, so Time itself could effortlessly sublimate the tampering of even the most flagrant meddlers, such as himself. There was a simple elegance to the way it responded to such stimulus; efficiently mending its torn web, unthinking, again and again, like a spider.” It’s a useful (if slightly mixed!) panacea to such activities as hobnobbing with Hitler, but it’s one that he’ll come to regret by the end.

I suspect the book is only as light as it is because the threat mostly keeps to the shadows. The monsters, literally so: as the title suggests they live much of their lives in reflections or silhouettes. (This approach is honestly much creepier than having them skulk about in earnest.) Hitler, if it is he, is not yet ready to reveal himself to the world, which saves the writers a lot of fuss. Only a journalist, Claire Aldwych, knows about this; she enlists the Doctor and the Brigadier to help after a fellow reporter is seemingly murdered for his discovery. Since the roof has yet to blow off this situation Richards and Cole can keep the scale relatively small. (I know that sounds wrong in a story with aliens, Hitler and impromptu trips to Russia, but you’d be surprised how much of it happens while Claire is waiting for the kettle to boil.)

Claire is a memorable, irreverent presence, clearly filling the space where a companion would otherwise have gone. (I suspect the authors wanted to give the spotlight to the two male characters instead, since they never had one on screen. That or they just couldn’t be arsed writing for Peri or Mel.) Claire is not exactly likeable, or rather she’s goal-oriented to a point where I suspect the Doctor would have refused her coming aboard the TARDIS if she’d asked. Her nose is always pointed at news, even if it’s dangerous and even if it’s found by dishonest means. She also has a few mildly eyebrow-raising moments that I couldn’t help thinking of as blots in her copybook, such as patting the Brigadier on the bum and calling the TARDIS arriving “an awful noise.” (Saints preserve us!) It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the book finds a less than happy ending for Claire — but maybe I’m reading too much into that. Claire is more or less an innocent in the grand scheme of things, and the climax is shocking because of that.

The book doesn’t have much in the way of themes. Be fair, Richards and Cole weren’t trying to win a Booker Prize here — The Shadow In The Glass is mostly aimed at giving you the coffee-at-2am feel of a paranoid conspiracy, probably because that’s how it was written. But there is a tendency towards things not being what they seem. The crashed aliens, the Vvormak, are altogether creepy, and their quest to repair the spacecraft takes several human lives — but they’re still not as evil as they appear. You spend the whole book trying to figure out the crazy Venn diagram of “crashed aliens plus rejuvenated Hitler,” but that ends up not being quite the grand conspiracy it seemed. (Nazis, you would do well to remember, are crazy people. Their plans may contain barking mad assumptions that visiting aliens don’t know about.) The explanation for “Hitler in the modern day” is also a lot simpler than I would have guessed — I was looking in the wrong place entirely, as were the characters.

But then, after a novel that mostly felt like a spirited “what if” that occasionally takes place in a comfy abode, it becomes very serious indeed. It doesn’t feel like cheating to switch up the tone like that: it would have been disingenuous to write a book about that person, treat his being as a somewhat frivolous thought exercise and at no point present the horror of what he was. (Although the book does offer some challenging moments of sympathy too.) The final stretch in Hitler’s bunker, as we settle once and for all what occurred there, kills off multiple characters in very nasty ways. Despite that, there is a grim satisfaction as the puzzle pulls together; at one moment I actually looked up and went “ohhh!” realising a puzzle piece had not yet been accounted for and therefore what it was going to be. A malevolent character says “Perfect” at the possible killing of another, and from a structural point of view he is sadly correct.

I don’t know if it was Richards or Cole driving the time travel shenanigans — it’s too easy to compare it to Richards’ The Sands Of Time, apparently people are always wrongly assuming who wrote what here — but The Shadow In The Glass is definitely at the stronger end of Doctor Who novels using that format. It doesn’t rely on it too much, and then it makes a virtue of it. Time, as the Doctor reflected earlier, will make things fit no matter what; the ending gives a tremendous sense of time as an implacable and amoral force beyond the Doctor’s control. Suddenly you see that it has drawn together inexorably through the whole book, trapping several unwitting characters within. It’s a good way to stamp some meaning onto a satisfying, but otherwise slightly B-Movie endeavour.

And yeah, not to get all dismissive right at the end but The Shadow In The Glass is — like its aliens — a little bit ephemeral. I’m already having trouble remembering some of it. I think that’s just the “get it in before the deadline” of it all. With books like this the authors are probably just hoping to get away with it. While it does occasionally threaten to evaporate — such as the bits that resemble a Dæmons re-run — The Shadow In The Glass still for the most part resembles something they meant to do from the start.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #89 – Vanishing Point by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#44

Vanishing Point

By Stephen Cole

Now that we’ve all settled into the new normal for the EDAs we can finally get down to some good old fashioned Doctor Who stories. So naturally ex-range editor Stephen Cole rocks up with: what if God was real and he lives over there?

There are lots of big questions in Vanishing Point which we’ll get to, but first and foremost it seems to be a meat and potatoes (not meant as derogatory) challenge for the new regulars, something to test their mettle. They arrive on an unnamed planet where the people are putting up with, in no particular order: random terror attacks, random kidnappings and killings, a eugenics-based society that won’t allow genetic deviation, an office-based clergy who have all the answers but are frustratingly selective about their caseloads, a shadowy extra level to the clergy and a benevolent god that will vaporise you regardless if you approach his house. On top of all that our heroes must reunite with Fitz after he falls off a cliff, while also protecting Etty, a woman they met during one of those attempted kidnappings, plus her barn full of genetically imperfect kids. Lots to do then; action and incident galore.

There’s a breathlessness to Vanishing Point that keeps up the pace, assisted by Cole’s usual short chapters and a clear grasp of how it all looks. The ever-present jeopardy also helps reinforce the tenets of the characters. The Doctor for example is full of his usual fun and ebullience. (On arriving he notices that everyone looks human, which nicely underscores how long he’s been on Earth: “How dull. I’ve seen so many people lately. You don’t have any really good monsters around here, I suppose, do you?”) But he’s also forced to deal with violence, as the people he’s up against really aren’t open to anything else.

During the initial scrap over Etty he doesn’t hesitate to put a hand to someone’s throat and say “Go back to wherever you came from. You understand? Whatever you were meant to do here, you’ve failed.” Later, seeking information from a henchman, he says “Tell you what, if you do tell me I shan’t break your arms and legs. How does that sound?”, before banging his head against a door. He still shies away from guns, at one point trying to talk Anji out of using one, at another considering it for a second and then just throwing the thing like a rock, but he has no qualms about using force if needed. Violence has always been a messy point of contention for the Doctor, but Vanishing Point seems to find the right balance for an Eighth Doctor a) without all his memories, perhaps also without his usual checks and balances, b) with experiences such as Father Time behind him and c) still fundamentally the Doctor.

It’s also a strong outing for Anji, highlighting and challenging some of her personality traits. A world with an apparently resident god is automatically going to challenge her worldview, and this leads to some spirited debates with the Doctor, who takes the view that god in this instance is really just another word for what these people are experiencing — and this might be a shared experience with humanity while we’re at it. Anji’s knee-jerk atheism is perhaps something for her to work on, the better to understand cultures other than her own, and her own as well. The local obsession with death also leads her to remember Dave; she had been “taking it for granted they’d be growing old together.” It feels organic enough to bring him up in this way, without also betraying the sense of closure she got in EarthWorld. As in that book, we’ll see where they go with it.

There’s also lots of reinforcement of Anji as a TARDIS crew member, so she gets assigned tasks like looking after Etty, which quickly highlights the personality gap between her and the Doctor. (He wins people over more easily. “The Doctor could refresh certain parts other aliens couldn’t reach.”) Those spiritual debates also help cement the dynamic between Anji and the Doctor — the sceptic and the open-minded believer. She’s properly invested in Fitz’s safety, and (often for that reason) she mucks in when it comes to fighting off villainous forces. There are callbacks to her self-defence classes; it’s just a shame that these seem to amount to “kick him in the nards,” although that is admittedly effective. (Who taught the class, Bobby Hill?)

Fitz is the runner up for character development. It’s still a pretty good story for him, throwing him into his usual mildly farcical chaos as he is recruited by a strangely anonymous brute squad, then brainwashed, only it doesn’t take (presumably) because of his Swiss cheese brain. He gets thoroughly wounded, breaking his ankle and getting shot in the (presumably same?) leg, but as he’s a long-suffering comic relief guy he still has to put in a load of work afterwards. And, Fitz being Fitz, he manages to contrive a love interest, at least as far as sleeping with someone. I’m never sure if this sort of thing is an essential part of the character or if it’s just smirking writers playing “tick the box,” and it sits at a bit of a funny angle in Vanishing Point where his amour is a very sheltered young woman with physical abnormalities who just wants to grow up a bit. It’s… yeah. Good for her I guess, but I kind of wanted to back away from that bit regardless.

The supporting characters are a mixed bag, mostly because of the plot and how it’s executed. Etty is a surprisingly combative character for how central she is to the story, and for all that her (I don’t want to say “disabled” but that’s clearly what they’re going for) “mooncalves” love her, there’s not a lot of obvious affection going in the other direction. Vettul, the differently-limbed eldest daughter who pairs up with Fitz, is a bit easier to get your head around, yearning to see the world but also feeling overwhelmed by it. The whole mooncalf thing is a bit cartoonish and perhaps hasn’t aged well, but it serves the wider point of this planet’s cruel view of those who don’t conform.

Nathaniel Dark (the names aren’t very consistent) is a Diviner, aka a priest who helps track the progress of people’s lives and puts their affairs in order at the end. He’s having a crisis of conscience about how his world is run. He’s probably the most rounded secondary figure here, but Cole still can’t quite fit him into the book’s second half, by which time things are getting a bit frantic and overpopulated. (Dark, like Vettul and Fitz, significantly gets his end away here. I guess it passes the time.) We seem to spend more time with the villain, Cauchemar, whose limited dimensions are entirely dictated by how much plot he’s telling us about in each scene. His subordinates are mostly brainwashed units, so there’s not much to be had in the way of sparkling conversation there.

All of these characters, including the brainwashed guys, have a germ of something interesting, but it’s a struggle to get that out there. More broadly, Vanishing Point has ideas — perhaps even in abundance — but it fumbles their execution. Take the god stuff. The “Creator” is a physical force in this world. That’s very interesting, and a hugely significant thing for anyone to hear. We not only leave out the scene where Etty spells out how this actually works, skipping straight to Anji’s reaction — we then go the entire rest of the book without the Doctor, Anji or Fitz actively wanting to go and have a look. There’s a god here, a legit force that is a part of all life on the planet, and they’re not going to see if he’s home?! Yes, Cole establishes the weirdly deadly perimeter of his kingdom, but to not even bring it up as a possibility is massively strange.

The way the Creator filters through to these people takes a lot of explaining, and it’s a broadly interesting idea akin to reincarnation… but even after the required pages and pages of explanation, it’s tricky to get your head around and trickier still to care about. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to show the whole “godswitch”, end of life thing in action? Sort of, give us an example so we can relate to it emotionally later on? Sadly, that isn’t how the book works; it’s one of many BBC Books that’s more comfortable telling than showing.

See also, the brainwashing. It’s amusingly absurd that Fitz is mistaken for one of their number just because he’s wearing the guy’s coat; the idea that the same “person” is being downloaded into one unfortunate host after another is intriguing, as well as providing a counterpoint to how the whole Creator process works. But I don’t care because I don’t know any of them, before or after; there’s no sense of “real” people being snuffed out or “fake” people being somehow consistent in body after body. There aren’t any visible “people” in the whole equation. It’s just a thing of exposition, rather than an idea to explore. Feels like a waste.

That also goes for Dark’s profession. There isn’t much call to see it in action, and there are hardly any people for him to administer it to. Even the nitty-gritty stuff of how this all works is like an afterthought: the Diviners work for the Holiest, a more sinister ruling class who we find out in a stray line of dialogue are made up of dead tissue (?!), who then barely impact the story at all. So why include them?

Even the big, important eugenics bit doesn’t leave much impact. Yes, it’s horrible that Etty’s “mooncalves” are shunned by society, and would be killed if caught, but that’s a bit of an extreme example. Can’t we see what it means it be “normal” in this context? Where’s the cut-off point, exactly? Do a lot of people worry about not conforming? And really, once we’ve dispensed with the baddie and his campaign of terror, won’t it take a lot of work to unpick this clearly prejudiced society? How much of that is the Creator’s fault?

Vanishing Point has the makings of a challenging, emotional story about intolerance, but it seems much more interested in wittering on about genetic engineering. (I’m not even going there — trust me.) Similarly it could have been a refreshing examination of how atheism holds up against an infinite universe, really put Anji’s disbelief to the test, like, only whoops, we’re not going there at all outside of a few quick chats. It’s far better, apparently, to put all our stock in escapes, recaptures, bombings, car chases and hostage situations — the latter of which gets dragged out to extremes in the finale, which is one of those “He’s down! Oh wait he’s got a gun! Okay he’s down again! Oh no, a knife!” gauntlets. Action is by definition exciting, but doing it on a loop and without enough underlying meaning can turn it into monotony.

There’s enough action here that it’s very readable regardless, and that action forces (some) characters to behave in interesting and true ways, but I ended up bored with Vanishing Point anyway. There are big ideas, but too many of them, and there’s no space to meaningfully explore them. It’s like a philosophical discussion that barely asks, let alone answers the big questions. But with car chases.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #88 – Rags by Mick Lewis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#40

Rags

By Mick Lewis

Duck and cover, everyone. I’m doing Rags.

Doctor Who novels are a niche within a niche, so there’s not a lot of discourse surrounding them. Nevertheless, for good or ill a few books have stuck their heads above the parapet. Many readers (including me) think The Also People is pretty spiffy; lots of folks (hello again) think The Ghosts Of N-Space isn’t. That sort of thing.

Then you have a book like Rags. People don’t just dislike it: they haaaaaaate it. There is a vociferousness about the negative reactions to Rags that you don’t often see; helpfully, they are unanimous about what they don’t like, which is the violence. It is generally felt that Mick Lewis went too far here.

I wouldn’t dismiss that out of hand as a criticism. Rags is indeed a gleefully, gluttonously grisly book. I think there is a debate to be had, however, about quite how out of step that is with the book range that spawned it.

Doctor Who is a mostly non-violent show (pipe down, Mary Whitehouse) but expanded media is a little different. The New Adventures used those differences as a selling point: many of those books featured shocking (at times, I would argue, indefensible) violence. You might expect BBC Books to tone it down a little, and they’re certainly easier to recognise as Doctor Who products, but the writers have often felt just as comfortable throwing blood at the walls as the Virgin guys. Mark Morris wrote two books, both gore-fests; Mike Tucker and Robert Perry seem to specialise in people or things that murder the hell out of everyone else; Steve Emmerson had a zombie licking blood off a pitchfork as well as a tree decorated with heads; Keith Topping sat down and thought, “I know, I’ll have a scene where Turlough gets violently anal probed.”

So in other words, it’s not completely unheard of for BBC Books to get nasty, and “but it’s a Past Doctor story” doesn’t seem to make any difference to the rules. If you’re reading a lot of them, particularly in sequence, it’s just not that unusual. (Admittedly if you picked Rags out of a pile, or god forbid made this your first Doctor Who read, or even just read it as a child — which is not an unreasonable thing to do! — I’d understand being shocked.)

I know this seems like a pretty thin defence for big violence, so here’s another one: at least the violence is part of the story. We’ve had books before such as Strange England or Falls The Shadow where everything’s a bit weird in an anything-can-happen sort of way, and the “anything” just so happens to be ever-so-edgy violence. To me, that feels token. In Rags, the fact that people are temporarily losing their minds and attacking/killing each other in horrible ways is at least relevant to the plot, and beyond that the themes of repression. Okay, Mick Lewis still chose to write a story that is overall pretty gross, but it was also commissioned and edited. I guess what I’m saying is that if it appals you — and there’s nothing wrong or invalid about being appalled by it — then perhaps some searching questions need to be asked of BBC Books and Justin Richards et al, and not just Mick Lewis or his admittedly questionable taste.

I have to say that in other areas I quite liked his taste. When Rags isn’t staging horrible murders in the West Country — and occasionally when it is — Lewis demonstrates a very nice turn of phrase. Demented events will roll off the page like this: “The thing from the rock felt the rage of the two, and the rage was good. He wanted more. More of this. With sinews that had once been stone, the creature raised its arms. And the two men became one. Became none.” A band playing frightening counter-culture music becomes “a tremble of subversion in the sunshine.” A slim young woman is noted as having “a waist you could easily strangle.” When observing the kind of people coming to see the band, we find that “it was like the band attracted nature’s strange.” Rags is full of these odd, offbeat observations. I often found myself pausing to enjoy them.

Lewis also has a good grasp of the regular characters. Rags might be an objectively strange Third Doctor story, and it doesn’t always use the characters well, but the Doctor for instance is well characterised. Pertwee’s likeable pomposity is on full display here, with a few opportunities to rankle against intractable people, including the Brigadier when he insists on interrupting his experiments. He can also be utterly kind to outwardly unpleasant people. His current situation of being exiled to Earth is made somewhat relevant to the story, and Lewis makes note of this Doctor’s not-quite-black-and-white relationship with authority, observing that he “purported to be on the side of freedom, yet needed the narrow-minded might of the military and all its conservative, stifling authoritarianism to back him up.” That conflict is mirrored in the plot, which pivots around a mistrust of different groups, particularly authority figures. Pretty good work.

The rest of them work well, but it’s diminishing returns based on how well they’re utilised. Jo spends most of the book working undercover following a band on tour, an already dicey idea of the Doctor’s considering there is an obvious mesmeric influence at work here. Pretty much straight away she’s under the evil spell and beginning to doubt the Doctor and UNIT. Now, I wouldn’t put it past Jo to fall under the influence like this — the Master did that to her in her first story — and I think it’s quite neat to throw Jo into a movement like this and give her objections to her day job based on a moral stand, even if it’s fake. It’s a sort of funhouse mirror version of the environmentalists in The Green Death (whose point of view she actually shared), and you could even argue that this is a way to set that up: clearly Jo is not simpatico with UNIT. The trouble is, Jo’s in the book so little, in terms of actually doing anything, that there isn’t a proper conversation to have about it. She barely cools down with the Doctor afterwards. She just shows up, gets hypnotised, says and thinks some pretty nasty things about him and then gets better. I imagine big Jo fans were not impressed by Rags.

UNIT put in a good showing — sort of. The Brigadier’s mannerisms leap off the page, as does the wryly funny shared irritation between the Doctor and the Brig. (“The Brigadier took this as his cue to advance into the room, like a vampire receiving a welcome invitation.”) Mike Yates’s struggle to belong is nicely underlined by giving him a frustrating undercover job; Benton gets to assert his Sergeantly authoritah at times. But the plot requires that UNIT remain at a remove from danger for most of the book, a point that is occasionally articulated so we know it’s deliberate (“It really wasn’t like the Brigadier to procrastinate over something as important as this”) but it’s not articulated clearly enough that I actually know why they’re doing that. (It’s the same for the Doctor: “Maybe this time he would have been wise to let the Brigadier have his way. Maybe this time he had let things go on too long before making a direct move, and maybe he had endangered Jo in the process.” General evil influence I guess?)

I have my suspicions. Rags is on the short side for a BBC Book and, not to pick on Mick Lewis or anything, but there isn’t much plot to go around; it no doubt would have helped to meet the word count to say, “let’s keep UNIT on the other side of the barrier until page 200-and-something,” or “let’s have the Doctor disappear off to investigate in his lab for ages, then get stuck in a metaphysical realm for a bit so he can have, I dunno, some New Adventures-y angst about his selfish desire to leave Earth and his guilt about companions he left behind until he can show up again.” Tellingly, when it’s finally time to resolve things, the Doctor still doesn’t have much of a role: it’s one of those where the bad guy’s own nature somehow causes his downfall (?) helped along by a useful self-sacrifice from the supporting cast. Despite Lewis’s obvious familiarity with the characters, his choice to have the Doctor all but cheering “go on, son!” from the sidelines and Jo mostly off her nut the whole time means that Rags very nearly avoids being a bona fide Doctor Who story at all.

This is where critics of the excessive violence chime in with, “yeah, you could have fooled me.” So let’s add context: Rags is about a rock band who come into contact with a violent, apparently primordial force in the countryside which takes them over. They then travel around playing evil gigs and driving people insane, triggering murders at each site. This is eventually seen to be the work of the Ragman, an ancient alien not unlike Stephen King’s Pennywise, who thrives on violent energy — in particular the kind created by class warfare.

Lewis has some good ideas here, particularly the way an unscrupulous man uses the furore around the killings to more easily gain access to a popular figure, the better to exercise his own class warfare. (This goes horribly wrong.) I’m not sure Lewis really interrogates this stuff, however, since most of the people affected end up dead, or not heard from again. It’s for instance the Ragman, a disposable villain, who makes certain very arguable points about the Doctor’s flaws, and not someone actually useful like Jo, who has her own problems with him throughout the novel but all of those can be written off as hallucinations. UNIT are also forced to confront some very real classist undertones in the ranks, but again most of the perpetrators end up as crime scene decorations. If the Brigadier feels bad about his participation, well that’s just not important right now.

This is presumably where Lewis’s own characters ought to shine — it’s them, after all, that carry the novel home. He invests a lot of effort in the supporting cast and they do feel lived in and damaged, but there is a certain shared nastiness about them that gets in the way of actually caring about them. For example there’s Kane, a drunk with a hatred of bullies and a historical link to the Ragman, who ought to be central to the novel — but he just feels like another really unpleasant guy in the mix. Charmagne, a journalist who also matters greatly (at least in the grand scheme of things) spends too long lost in the curiously metaphysical back of a lorry. She has a recurring nightmare but there isn’t really time to dwell on it. I’m not sure what happened to her in the end.

More frequent characters include Sin, a young woman who is close to Jo for a lot of the book, but who doesn’t actually like Jo, hates her boyfriend and then completely falls in with the Ragman, at least until the very last second when it’s too late. Bit hard to chart an interesting character arc there. (Also: Sin is ethnically Chinese, which in one of Lewis’s rare weak characterisations means she is relentlessly referred to as “the Chinese girl.”) Other recurring figures like Jimmy, Nick and Rod run the risk of requiring a spotter’s guide, especially when (in the name of world-building) Lewis occasionally spends time on new characters who are only going to get splattered in a few pages anyway.

Perhaps inevitably, we’ve circled back around to the violence aspect. I suspect that this was another way, consciously or otherwise, to get Rags to the finish line: all those grotesque, protracted violent scenes that (here we go) do earn a place strictly speaking because the plot calls for them, nevertheless do go into a level of detail that is perhaps a bit much. I think the book’s reputation on this has been exaggerated, as these sequences are not at all constant, but much like the generally manky characters there is a certain skuzziness to the proceedings that is never far away. The story of Kane’s childhood bully feeding him slugs, for instance; the demonic band member who kisses Sin with a mouth full of maggots; the rest of the band who occasionally projectile puke, Exorcist-style, into their willing fans’ mouths. It’s a bit hard to stop and think, “hmm, yes, those themes of classism” when the book is generally just trying to gross you out.

So that naturally becomes the thing Rags is known for: violent scenes and gross bits. There isn’t a lot else to cling to, despite what is obviously supposed to be a general idea of repressed violence in society. The regulars are well characterised, but they feel peripheral; the supporting characters feel like they have lives, but they’re not dissimilar enough from each other; and although there is a plot and there are things to discover along the way (such as Kane’s family history, which to be honest still comes out of the blue), you more or less have the measure of Rags before the Doctor even turns up. Ancient evil glomming onto people and making them do horrible things, then generally sort of feeding on that was my guess after the opening car crash scene, and 250 pages later I wasn’t wrong. Attempts to enrich this include selling the Ragman as a “universal peril” that might worry even the Time Lords, but I just didn’t buy that.

Without a profound sense of threat (beyond just violence) or really any idea what can be done about it (beyond just, stop them I guess?) Rags becomes something of a slog despite its quick page-count: it’s a case of waiting for awfulness and then having the subsequent awfulness happen, rinse and repeat. All in all, the whole “small town generational folk horror” thing on display here held together better in The Hollow Men. I do think Mick Lewis displays a lot of talent on a sentence-by-sentence level, and he clearly loves Doctor Who, despite how he wants to present it. Rags isn’t the abhorrent wash-out I’d been dreading, nor is it unique in its mucky execution; it’s just not compelling or deep enough to justify all of that putrescence to any reader not fully on the author’s wavelength.

5/10