#1
The Devil Goblins From Neptune
By Keith Topping and Martin Day
The Past Doctor Adventures, then. It ought to go without saying that if you’re doing a book range about the current Doctor then you should also do one about the rest, but you know what? That wasn’t a thing until Virgin did it with the New and Missing Adventures, so pour one out for the MAs. The BBC took their lunch money.
That said, the Missing Adventures never quite figured out what to do with themselves. Replicate the style of a TV script? Too derivative. Get experimental or dark? That’s what the New Adventures are for. They tended to oscillate between these extremes, with only occasional gems like The Empire Of Glass grasping that you can just tell a good story in an era.
I mention the MAs because, well, the comparison is inevitable, but also because there seems to be some crossover here. The Devil Goblins From Neptune (I’ll say it, goofy title) was co-written by Martin Day, who got his start with Virgin’s The Menagerie. (Many of the BBC Books writers cut their teeth with Virgin, which is sort of nice. And it’s good sense, because you don’t want to rely on a procession of first time novelists. You could try established higher-profile writers, but they may not flock to your TV tie-in range – no offence.)
On a character level, too, an argument can be made that Goblins is in keeping with the MAs. It’s set between Seasons Seven and Eight on telly: a sea change occurred there, with Liz Shaw disappearing without a peep and Mike Yates materialising as if we’d always known him. Despite sitting in this gap, Goblins does not have Mike arrive on the scene for the first time – so The Eye Of The Giant might still stand. And despite being the first thing that comes to mind when looking at that continuity gap, this is not The Proverbial Liz Shaw Leaving Story either. (Although there’s an epilogue set eight months after she left UNIT.) Is that a case of simply not writing that story right now, or are they politely letting The Scales Of Injustice stay where it is? I guess we’ll see. (Quick reminder here that Virgin sent Liz on her way twice, the first time in the first Decalog. So it wouldn’t exactly be crime of the century if Topping and Day did it again here. But they didn’t.)
I’m probably being unfair to Goblins by starting off with such a lot of fanwank, because it’s not that kind of book. So let’s get back on track. Season Seven strikes me as a good setting for a Doctor Who novel. The stories were longer than usual in the first place, with plenty of characters and subplots and okay, a generous amount of padding. Crucially it was also a time of change for the Doctor, in that suddenly he was part of a team. Yes, he’s always the most interesting one, but crucially he’s not the only one driving the action. Goblins flies with this, allowing the focus to follow the Doctor, Liz, Mike Yates, the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton and visiting Russian UNIT officer Shuskin as needed. There’s enough going on that you’re always fairly engaged – so it doesn’t have to be the Doctor all the time, and the fact that none of the rest of them truly know or understand him anyway gives the authors license to let him hang back and work in an ensemble. (They arguably push this a bit far by having him slip into a coma twice, but again – plenty going on elsewhere.)
Season Seven was also a murkier, nastier kind of storytelling than viewers were used to. Spearhead From Space hints at bodysnatching paranoia. The Silurians features an out of control plague and a morally grey ending that borders on genocide; The Ambassadors Of Death suggests that people are the real problem. And in Inferno we really push the boat out, with the world turning to outright fascism and then ending in lava and screams. (But it’s not our world, so phew I guess.) The season is a good setting for murky allegiances, violence with consequences and unexpected changes of setting: all grist to the mill for a book running about twice the length of a Target novelisation.
So in Goblins, it’s not just a case of aliens invading London and the Doctor leading the charge against them. Shadowy forces are working against UNIT and we follow their agent: Thomas Bruce, suave American and all round, 24-carat a-hole. The aliens have help from humanity – bad apples, of course – so we occasionally dip into the world of Viscount Rose, a part of the English gentry who reckons Armageddon will work in his favour. (Guess how that works out.) There are hippies more or less on board with this, the “Venus people”, led by Rose’s son Arlo, and we occasionally meet them or people on similar drugs. And of course the goblins of the title are out there killing people, so we occasionally cut away to those events, meeting people ever so briefly before, y’know.
A lot of this feels reflective of those long seven parters, particularly the sheer necessity of action scenes. (“Action by HAVOC” appears at the start. Accurate.) Shuskin’s initial mission to recruit the Doctor leads to three failed kidnap attempts, all of which are nominally pointless because she just wants his help but UNIT kept blowing her off, and then actually pointless because the whole “go and investigate happenings in Russia” plot is a massive, insidious red herring. Not that I’m exactly complaining: it’s written with maximum excitement in mind, bullets flying everywhere and the Doctor jauntily eluding danger at all turns. Marvellous. But I know when a certain degree of chain yanking is occurring and – apologies to Thomas Bruce and friends – here be yanks.
Perhaps the most enjoyable part of this (in all honesty, quite sprawling) plot is the stuff with the Brigadier. Realising that Shuskin’s experiences indicate rot at a high level, he departs for Geneva to see what’s what. (This smartly ensures that the red herring plot doesn’t go to waste.) The Brigadier often seemed a bit of a buffoon on screen, particularly as the years went on, but he flourishes here, responding to dangerous changes of circumstance with intelligence and taking command of soldiers so that any consequences are off their shoulders. I was never entirely sure what the authors were driving at with where this is all going – the “rot” goes very high up and it must be addressed, but that doesn’t obviously reflect anything in Season Eight and beyond, so are other authors going to pick this up? – but each cut away to his one-man spy movie was enjoyable.
There’s also solid character work happening for the rest of the gang. Mike Yates seems to be having crises of confidence, first when he’s placed in charge and then when it’s taken away – again not entirely sure if that ties into anything, but it fleshes him out. Benton gets partially blown up by a stray bomb, but then adorably rushes back to work and tries to infiltrate the Venus People, which goes surprisingly well until the goblins turn up. And Liz, while not making a point of leaving this time, feels like a person in her own right with skills and interests that just don’t naturally align with UNIT. (She much prefers academia.) Her mentor, Bernard Trainor, turns out to be in cahoots with Viscount Rose, although he soon regrets it. Shortly after she finds out (and after he has changed sides again) he dies of a heart attack, and we see a broken Liz: “Why did you have to go now? Why did you have to go when I hate you?” Leaving now or not, the events of the novel certainly feel like they’re going in Liz’s “cons” column for UNIT, not the “pros”. It may not be her leaving story, which is quite bold in itself, but it contributes meaningfully to that event.
That death is one of several examples that feel a little less throwaway than you’d expect in a monster invasion story. There is certainly more violence than you’d see on television or in a Target novelisation – enough that, combined with the spy shenanigans and the loving detail of all the military hardware involved, I wondered if kids would enjoy reading this at all. (Indeed, I didn’t stick with it as a twelve year old.) But most of it feels consequential and felt. Notably, the Brigadier contends with possibly having to take a life for the first time – a thoughtful character beat, albeit one the Doctor would laugh into silence after some of the orders he’s given recently. (Has he really not done it before?) That said, the Doctor calmly engineers the death of an entire species here, reasoning (albeit not happily) that they “have only themselves to blame.” I think it’s sufficient to say I don’t buy that, and if the Doctor had been any higher in the novel’s mix and thus under more conscious scrutiny from the authors I don’t think he would either.
I’ve gone a long time without talking about those goblins, haven’t I? And with some reason: the Waro (not to be confused with any nefarious yellow-clad plumbers) are murderous aliens who hate everything else in the universe because, basically, they’re the worst and that’s all there is to it. Huh. They have no real voice in the novel (though at one point the Doctor mind melds, aka “soul catches” with one) but they do have a vague environmental disaster back story. And honestly, they’re more of a thing that occasionally happens than a character you’d have any cause to think about. They’re the weakest link in the novel, but I suppose you could argue they’re meant to only be a part of it, like the Doctor; they are stitched into the betrayals and confusions that drive the action, but the real interest comes from the big picture. Spurious reasoning, I know, but I enjoyed the book despite finding the threat boring and the eventual action-packed relocation to a certain UFO site in Nevada also, as it happens, spurious.
In amongst all this is the Doctor, occasionally protesting about wanting to get off Earth, as is his way. I think he protests too much. In a passage that for once does give way to the ol’ fanwank a little, he catches up with Trainor about recent UNIT exploits, and the pair briefly discuss Ian Chesterton, whom the Doctor has met up with offscreen. (!) The sheer domesticity of this leapt off the page at me – the idea that he and Ian occupy the same world now as casual acquaintances. (Ian has a son with Barbara, FYI.) Shortly afterwards the Doctor resumes his membership at the swanky, rather dubious Progressive Men’s Club, in that way that seems quintessential to this Doctor. Later there is a somewhat on-the-nose reference to UNIT being “like a family,” and there are enough hints that the Doctor has settled into it without even noticing, which provides another nicely subtle bridge between the two seasons and a pleasing snapshot of this time and place, in what is otherwise a sprawling, bloodthirsty, giddily globetrotting and sometimes oddly thoughtful ride of a novel.
7/10
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