Saturday 18 January 2020

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #77 – GodEngine by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#51
GodEngine
By Craig Hinton

Boring.

Well, why dress it up?  Some of these novels are great and deserve to be rediscovered.  Some are abominable.  But there’s a hefty chunk of fillery fan fiction that just sort of... exists.  Books like GodEngine are what most people think of when you say you’re reading a tie-in novel.

As just about any of his reviewers will tell you, Craig Hinton coined the term “fanwank”.  Perhaps the reason it keeps coming up is that, despite nailing the perfectly disdainful term for it, he kept practising it.  GodEngine isn’t as knowingly silly as The Crystal Bucephalus or as creative as Millennial Rites, so a lot of the continuity references just sit uselessly on top of the text.  You expect this from fans, but you’d hope that published writers – fans or otherwise – would rise above it.

Setting your story alongside The Dalek Invasion Of Earth?  You’d better have a random bit-part be related to one of its characters.  Need a tragic back story?  Room for references there!  (“He had lost his job as a psychometric assessor at IMC because he had become hooked on vraxoin.”)  Remember to chuck in nods to Tereleptils, Nimons, Magnus Greel, Professor Kettlewell – anything so that we don’t forget we’re reading Doctor Who.  Although if you can also elbow Star Trek and, sod it, Die Hard then you might get some bonus points.  (Let’s call them garyrussells.)  And hey, going back to Dalek Invasion Of Earth, why not retcon that story’s central (admittedly very silly) plot device into something of your own?  It’s lazier than making up your own thing wholesale, but everyone loves that story so... maybe that’ll rub off somehow?

It’s surprisingly not the first New Adventure to skirt around The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (Lucifer Rising did it better), but at least this one has some added novelty value.  Holy crap, there are Daleks in this?!  Er... sort of.  Numerous books have alluded to or even shown them a bit before, but I suspect GodEngine goes as far as Virgin’s permissions will allow.  The Daleks are after the titular thingumabob; their ships blow up a moon some of our character are sitting on; a Dalek communicates via hologram; and the resident humans still don’t know what Daleks are.  This keeps them in the shadows, and the actual word count of “Dalek” is kept to a minimum.  (Do the Nation Estate count words?  I wouldn’t rule it out.)  The New Adventures more than survived without a licence to exterminate, but it’s still exciting to glimpse the pepperpots.  The new series and Big Finish have a tendency to overdo them, so the restraint here is refreshing.  But it’s probably the only example of restraint in the novel, and I think Hinton oversteps the mark by changing their motivation in that earlier story.  That’s not adding to a previous script, that’s rewriting it.

As for what he’s rewriting it with... whatever you think the GodEngine is, it’s probably more interesting than what he comes up with.  The book endlessly oohs and ahhs over its big scary namesake – and yes, “GodEngine” is a lazy “Ooh isn’t this epic” name for a Big Bad – and eventually bursts the balloon with... a death ray.  A big-ass death ray, make no mistake, but 200 pages is still an awfully long wait for “I dunno, the thing from Star Wars or whatever?”

Still, I’m undecided whether that is the dampest squib here.  How about the destruction of the TARDIS?  Heavy, laboured sigh… no reader is going to buy that for a nanosecond, and any story or characterisation built on such an obvious fake-out – for instance, the Doctor suddenly turning into a moody, xenophobic jerk – is entirely redundant.  But GodEngine soldiers on, handing you the ultimate blowy-uppiness of the TARDIS in deadly earnest and honestly expecting you to take that as read.  It’s a naff, obvious shock, and one of many decisions that make me surprised this is Craig Hinton’s third book, and not his first go at fan-fiction that fell down the back of his hard drive.

Of course there are other indicators, such as the prose, which wobbles between ghastly and laughable.  Hinton was already over-fond of chopping and changing in The Crystal Bucephalus, but he’s absolutely mad about it here.  We initially leap between 1) the Doctor, Roz and some colonists on Mars, 2) Chris and some scientists on Charon, 3) a group of Ice Warriors and 4) another group of Ice Warriors, but they soon mix it up a bit so we can follow Chris on his own, some of the scientists, various internecine Ice Warrior struggles and more.  For me, nothing stops ongoing tension like changing the setting every half a page.  Nothing builds.  But then, wherever we are we’re stuck with wooden characters, and that includes the regulars.

They’re not helped by the prose or the dialogue, which are creaky even on a technical level.  Hinton can’t distinguish between interesting details and technobabble, so you end up with turgid claptrap like “it was an optical illusion caused by the universe’s interaction with the primary subspace meniscus”, or endless dramatic moments hinging on a “subspace infarction”, or just fantasy gloop like “Thanks to the Fississ-cal-oon, Aklaar, Cleece, Esstar and Sstaal had reached Ikk-ett-Saleth.”  Jesus, imagine it as an audiobook!  Most of the book is a trek through the innards of Mars, but it never feels very important that anyone gets anywhere, and none of the locations or perils stand out.

Hinton is obsessed with putting the other character’s name into every line, so it’s “But wait, Doctor,” then “What is it, Roz”, even when there’s only two characters in the room.  Some names get said three or four times per page – it’s like the characters can’t understand who is speaking unless there’s a formal invitation.  Heartfelt moments are often signified by a touch on the arm – or in one not-meant-to-be-hilarious moment, two separate arm-touches on the same guy – and sometimes you get a bit of both.  Sstaal squeezed McGuire’s hand.  ‘I can only [forgive you] once you have forgiven yourself.  And that, Antony, is going to be the hardest thing of all.’  As for how Hinton handles the Ice Warriors, that was one speaking, so yeah, they sound just as clumsily melodramatic as everyone else here.  We do find out that their hand-clamps are just wildly impractical gloves, and there’s a bit where one of them gets his genitals out, so that’s like, two garyrussells right there, probably?

Meanwhile, back-story is unspooled like we’re using it to put out fires.  One angry character dislikes Martians, as well as people who like Martians: “Bleeding heart liberal!  McGuire’s wife and children were dead because the Martians had acted first.  /  McGuire blamed the Ice Warriors for the death of his wife and children; discovering that one of the party was preparing to give birth to a new generation of Martians probably wasn’t the best news that he could have received.  The prose is always happy to wade in and point out the obvious, or better yet ask an inane rhetorical question.  [She] began to wonder about this mysterious Michael.  He had obviously influenced Rachel’s feelings towards Martians, but how, why?  /  Had the destruction of the TARDIS been the final straw; was he cracking up on them?  /  ‘Is that important?’  Obviously it was, but given the Doctor’s current reticence to engage in conversation, such questions were necessary, just to keep him talking.”  /  ‘Any good ideas?’  Because she certainly didn’t have any.  /  ‘Professor Anders?  The head of the ill-fated Charon research project?’  She nodded.  Who was this odd-looking man?  ‘And you?’  GodEngine’s characters sound like absolute idiots, mentally narrating a film trailer from the ’50s and prefacing or underlining every thought.  I was willing the death ray to explode.

So we come to the regulars, and… oh dear.  It seems safe to assume that Hinton intended Bernice to be in this one, as 1) it’s a novel primarily about Mars and Ice Warriors, and 2) the novel never shuts up about the fact that Bernice isn’t in it, even ending with a Martian symbolically giving Roz a book of Martian lore… to give to Benny at some point, even though he hasn’t met her.  Roz is somewhat out of sorts here, making occasional efforts towards flippancy and getting teary-eyed at the sight of the TARDIS (oh shoot, spoiler alert?), and generally feeling like a dodgy Bernice substitute.  (But we do get some Rozzy signifiers with typical GodEngine grace: “But xenophobia’s my province, isn’t it?”)  Chris spends most of his time away from the Doctor, believing – as the Doctor and Roz do of him – that his friends are dead.  This is as compelling as when Hinton “killed off” Tegan and Turlough in Bucephalus.

There are two varyingly unfriendly groups of Martians in this, and Chris has run-ins with the worst of them, eventually going on a one-man terrorist spree to distract them, using tools given to him by the Doctor.  He’s really chuffed with this, and so is the Doctor: “That was a very nice bit of terrorism.”  At one point it’s confirmed that 200 Martians died because of it.  Very nice work, indeed.  For good measure, Roz becomes suspicious of one of the humans, who it turns out committed several murders during their journey.  They bond, her motivation turns out to be sort of for the good of mankind, and then Roz and co. just sort of forget about the murdering bit.  Charming.  Still, we shouldn’t be asking the Doctor any moral questions, as he thinks the TARDIS has been destroyed, which apparently gives him cart blanche to make xenophobic assumptions about Martians, long past the point when it’s demonstrated again that their society has facets just like anybody else’s.  Who.  Are.  These.  People?

It’s obvious from the afterword that Craig Hinton wanted to do the Ice Warriors proud, but for whatever reason, a good novel was not the result.  All his worst writerly habits have a field day – there’s no grasp of the characters, new or established, no compelling drive to the story, but significant time is given to fanwank.  Viewing it charitably, it’s bland and by-the-numbers, you’ve read worse.  But viewing it now, having just spent what felt like 58 years on a load of thankless dreck, I’m annoyed they let it escape.

3/10

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