Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#13
Invasion Of The Cat-People
By Gary Russell
Well this
one just had “Classic” written all over it. If the goofy title and
unnervingly ridiculous front cover aren’t enough to draw you in, take a look at
that by-line.
Seriously,
what could go right?
Just by virtue of being Gary Russell and not, for example,
latter day James Goss, you know the title doesn’t signal a rich postmodern
piss-take: Gary’s just going to write a load of cobblers about evil Cat-People in deadly earnest.
Still, Invasion
(let’s abbreviate) has some other ideas, and some of them are quite
interesting.
Of
course, in order to find them you’ll have to climb over the bad stuff.
And let’s start right away with the absolutely mind-bendingly bad science.
We open on Earth, 3978 BC, when we are told the molten core of the Earth is
“still cooling” (?) and the spaceship-exploding death of the dinosaurs occurred
“within the last million years”. A small group of aliens is inadvertently
stranded here when their mothership explodes, and we later learn they left a
series of “buoys” all over the planet to aid their rescue; these buoys have
moved significantly since then much to their annoyance, due to continental
drift. To recap, that’s continental drift happening in the last 6,000
years. Once we pass the first page, however, 6,000 years becomes 40,000 and Gary
doesn’t look back. Whoops. At one point the Doctor offers this
helpful nugget to patch it all up: “In cosmic terms, a
few million years is a blink of an eye. The core energy would still be
powerful enough way back, or when the Euterpians arrived, now or in 1994.
The lessening of power would be negligible. Satisfied?”
Er, given
that you can’t tell the difference between 6,000 and 40,000, and think that geologically
speaking we’ve only just missed the dinosaurs… not exactly, no.
He might
have got away with it (at least until the numbers mix-up) if he hadn’t felt the
need to bung in nods to Earthshock and City Of Death, which put the death of
the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and the start of life on Earth about
400 million years ago respectively. And right there is the most obvious
reason not to expect much from this book: Gary Russell’s serious fanwank
problem. It is novel and interesting to write a story about the Second
Doctor, Ben and Polly, a period of the show’s history that lasted for little
over a month. It is the opposite of
interesting to then have the Doctor blether on about his youth in the
Academy and regeneration – the latter being a word the show didn’t even use
until the mid-seventies, yoinking us right out of the period he’s supposedly
trying to establish. And that’s peanuts to the unbelievably wankeriffic
bit where the Doctor says he’ll need to re-work the TARDIS’s interior once he
reaches his Fourth incarnation. What the hell does that have to do with
anything? Gary, I am thrilled that
you’ve seen Logopolis. I’ve seen it too. Not strictly relevant here
though, is it?
With
steaming continuity dumps like the above, it’s a little surprising that the
Cat-People aren’t something he found in his Doctor Who
annuals. Oh, he draws a direct line between them and the Cheetah People
in Survival – of course he does! – but they’re essentially new monsters, which
is a good sign. Then again, look at the name. That is literally
what they are called throughout the book. Nyurgh. Did you take them
seriously for a moment? Well stop it, because they sound ridiculous,
cough up hairballs, love milk and use litter trays. They’re like cats,
you guys – I’m not sure I made that clear enough.
Even when
the writing isn’t making them look and sound ridiculous – two of them are
called Nypp and Tuq, LOL? – it’s giving them nothing to work with. These
are dull, violent space jerks that happen to look like cats. You could
replace them with people and they would only be marginally more boring to read.
They have some back-biting politics going on between them, but since none of
them are interesting or sympathetic, what’s at stake? Oh, and they’re not
here to invade. They specifically want to destroy the Earth and use its
energy. So, the title’s kind of incorrect. Wizard.
It’s,
ah, not very well written. Like a lot of fanboy writers Russell is
adept enough at the trademark characters, as there’s so much footage and other
stuff to work with; not so much everyone else. The Doctor displays just
the kind of devious “clumsiness” you’d expect, and generally has a frantic and
fun energy that rings true. The villains lean towards tired
condescension, as do the barely-qualifies-as-ambiguous characters that turn out
to be villains, at which point they promptly begin acting like it.
Nuanced lines such as “What I say, Godwanna,
is that you are totally and utterly insane!” and “I’ll get you for
this, Doctor!” rear their heads. Meanwhile everyone else spends their
time either asking what’s going on or explaining it, sometimes more than once.
His knack for dialogue hasn’t come very far since Legacy, although the
characters seem less irritated at having to talk to each other this time, which
is something.
Once
again there is a tendency towards firing random details into the prose, as if
that adds colour and doesn’t just make it more like work having to remember it
all: “Barely held
together by rust and flaking paint, the vehicle was being driven at a vaguely
insane speed by a sullen-looking man with a streak of pure white through the
centre of his jet black hair.” / “Peter, the other
student, a second generation Trinidadian from Wood Green, tugged at his
seatbelt which was creasing his precious Ice T T-shirt.” / “He straightened the
bow-tie attached to the collar of his sky-blue shirt with a safety pin and
grasped Bridgeman by the hand.” He tries to use the colour of the
Doctor’s eyes as a sort of theme, as nobody’s sure what they’re looking at
cos-he’s-all-mysterious-innit, but it mostly ends up as an irritating
repetition. Elsewhere his dull obsession with what people are wearing
leads to them sounding strangely disembodied: “A scruffy black ankle
boot poked through, stopping the movement. … Following the ankle-boot was a leg
in oversized checked trousers and then the body of a middle-aged dark-haired
man in a long black frock-coat. He carried himself as if the words brush,
comb and ironing board were alien gibberish and smiled benignly at Kerbe and
Bridgeman, seemingly unaware of the Mauser.”
It’s strangely
infuriating when sentences get it right, like at
the end of that last one, suggesting he has some glimmer of understanding that
it’s more evocative to focus on what people are
doing and why.
Nonetheless you have to wade through all the other irrelevant chaff
first. But at least you get the odd accidental laugh out of the Separate
Body Parts Effect: “Thorsuun’s
right hand slapped him across the face.” How is it relevant which
hand it was? What was the left one up to?
Hey, I
said it wasn’t all bad. What was all that about? Well, there are
times in Invasion
Of The Cat-People (nope, still hate the title, did he want people to
back away from the book in embarrassment?) when you can see something
interesting going on. The Euterpians, stranded aliens whom the book is
secretly all about, have the power to sing matter into being. That’s a
pleasantly weird idea with a lot of (violent) potential, which Russell then
ties into Aboriginal culture. He also tosses in a bit about ley lines,
which gets a bit muddled when you try to make sense of the continental drift
dating, but contributes to a pretty cohesive spiritualist theme. Out of
body experiences come into play, along with Tarot readings and strange
existences between one world and the next. I mean, in real life I think
that’s all bollocks, but it’s an interesting back-drop for a story. It is pretty
ridiculous to suggest that all humans (such as Polly) have latent magic powers,
however, since we know it will never come up again.
There are
moments, sadly quite fleeting, when he digs into the emotion of his characters.
Bridgeman is a stuttering university professor with a genuinely tragic
back-story, and a none-too-happy experience in this story: there’s no magic
reset button, or not completely (they earn the one they use), but he does come
to terms with things. Similarly a couple of Euterpians have been enduring
life on Earth (probably best if you don’t try working out how long!) and they
carve out quite an affecting love story. There’s an arguable theme of
living with disability linking them with Bridgeman, but frankly I’m not sure
what Russell was getting at there.
There’s a
villainous character (who never develops much, despite his best efforts) who
gets to live part of her life all over again. This is a little confusing
until you realise He’s Doing A Thing and hasn’t just forgotten which order the
scenes should go. (It wouldn’t surprise me.) The whole thing is a
bit of a non sequitur, but still, it’s pretty cool. You also get the
impression Russell’s having fun with a scene in (let’s just say “Ancient”)
Baghdad, which is seen through the eyes of a young man who can barely
articulate what he’s looking at; again, it’s a more or less random burst of
creativity, and he can’t quite keep it in check as he uses anachronistic words
like “cash”, but it’s a welcome addition.
And hey,
check out Ben and Polly. This isn’t a defining book for either of them,
but it’s rather moving when they wander around town trying to make sense of the
“modern day”, wondering if they still have a place in the world. This
snowballs into a bit of a theme, especially for Polly. Her story with
Atimkos, a maybe-good-but-probably-not Euterpian who keeps her around for some
reason, isn’t as effective as her occasional private horror that she doesn’t
belong here. For all the banging on about magic powers, she doesn’t do
much with them, but she does seem to get something out of the story. I’m
not convinced Anneke Wills read the book before writing a Foreword, but she’d
probably have liked the Polly stuff.
As with
Legacy, the good stuff comes along in random splodges. Ditto the bad
stuff. I liked Bridgeman’s back story; I didn’t like having a sudden
four-page flashback about it because he saw a wheelchair. Russell is
coming along as a writer, but slowly,
tentatively adding his own ideas to the litany of trivia he’s memorised.
A tedious need for details might explain the bizarre post-script, when he lists
his ideal cast for an Invasion Of The
Cat-People Virgin Film, featuring Jude Law! Hey, if you can be
bothered to dig through the book, there are things to like.
But this probably isn’t the sort of result that will have Jude Law kicking
Gary’s door down.
4/10
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