Doctor Who: The BBC Books #11 – Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#6
Alien Bodies
By Lawrence Miles

So then. Alien Bodies. Bit of a big deal, as these things go. It’s The Lawrence Miles Book That Everyone Likes, which is no small feat. Plus it’s stuffed to the gills with lore and ideas, much of which will go on to inform the Eighth Doctor Adventures later. It’s sort of like the BBC Books equivalent of Timewyrm: Revelation, showing up in a puff of colourful smoke to say — well that’s all good fun as far as it goes, but what are we doing here, what’s it all for?

The range editors must have sat up very straight when Lawrence Miles (I’m presuming it was him) suggested we see the Doctor’s funeral. Well, if you wanted to look to the future, how’s that? It certainly kicks the dust out of the tyres to gallop so far ahead, then drop that clanger right into the present so the Doctor can react to it here and now. The Doctor of Alien Bodies is still coming to terms with his latest regeneration. (“He wanted to be a force of nature again, he wanted to be the incredible escaping equation all the time, but instead he was trapped in a half-human body with a baby-face and floppy curls.”) Knowing for sure that he’s going to snuff it might well help with his sense of identity.

Events conspire against him on that front — but like Miles, I’ve jumped ahead. I should have mentioned that the Doctor becomes inveigled in an auction for an ancient relic, and that it turns out the relic is his corpse. Naturally this creates great interest. (Just imagine all the Whovians trying to get access.) Only the auctioneer, a slippery figure called Mr Qixotl, knows that the bloke in the green velvet with the brown curls is the Doctor; for obvious reasons he is keen that this stays a secret. Uninvited and unwelcome, the Doctor skirts around the edges of events. It feels like he has trespassed in somebody else’s book. Heck, there are more than two Doctors in Alien Bodies — we meet one at the start, then we see a future one later who may or may not also be the one in the casket — which pushes Dr. Number Eight, as Paul often puts it, even further from the spotlight.

If he is not always in front of you, however, he is still often on your mind. Alien Bodies has a stacked guest cast, and you might well notice certain patterns about them. There’s the two officers from UNISYC: a dotty old explorer and his young, female, insecure-but-capable second in command who does all the work. There’s a legit Time Lord and his futuristic, disguised-as-a-humanoid-female TARDIS, who share a professional bond but appear to be in denial about caring for each other at all. (They do.) And there’s a couple of spooky cultists who arrive in what is, when all’s said and done, a TARDIS, albeit one that operates on black magic. The operator is an aloof young woman and her second is a grubby, angry up and comer. Lots of double acts here, all sort of… mirroring something. Hmm! At a time when the Doctor is (apparently) unsure of himself, it’s interesting to surround him with echoes and surrogates.

Of course he’s only half the equation, and all of this is just as revealing about the symbiotic heart of all these stories, showing just how easily that balance can go wrong. The strongest Eighth Doctor books so far — in true Star Trek movie style it’s the even-numbered ones — have been very interested in the relationship between the Doctor and the companion. I’ve struggled a bit with Sam, sometimes feeling that she’s more a companion-shaped placeholder than a person. (I know that’s not entirely fair or accurate, but it’s my general impression of her.) Well, either they decided to turn a bug into a feature or that was the plan all along, because Sam is confirmed to be something along those lines here. Again I’m getting ahead of myself, but why not: it’s revealed in Alien Bodies that Sam is somehow living the wrong life, or rather a version of it that involves the Doctor, with a separate set of biodata that never met him, and never became the sort of person who would tear off in the TARDIS. Where this is going, I don’t exactly know, although Miles plays amusingly fast and loose with the concept even here. Has Sam been manipulated by a third party? On some level, the Doctor doubts it. Is the Doctor somehow influencing time and space to bring about someone like her? It’s proposed, but who knows. (And frankly, it sounds like a fib.) The wider supporting point that the Doctor always needs someone around, or-does-a-tree-falling-make-a-sound etc, feels earnest enough, but I dunno. Watch this space I guess. (And there we are! Seated and interested in where the series is going. Job’s a good’un.)

The downside to this is the trade off between very interesting (and it is!) context and yer actual, pound for pound scenes with these characters. Sam’s psychoanalysis plays out very much externally in a nightmarish sequence with blood-coloured duplicates, and it’s shared with Lieutenant Bregman (the junior UNISYC officer) who undergoes something similar. The whole biodata thing is then discussed over Sam, between the “antibody” version of her and later on, the Doctor. Sam herself impacts the novel like a small stone impacting a window. I’ll be honest, this was a little disappointing. I wish Miles had found a way to make this turning point for Sam more, you know, Sam’s turning point. But it’s a very busy book and I guess it had to give.

I mean, look at all those characters. And we do, taking time out to hear each of their stories. These are all quite interesting, but they mostly serve to set up the wider stakes in the world of these books. Because oh yes, the Time Lords have got competition.

Quick sidebar: I’ve read Alien Bodies before. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say it was back when I were a nipper and this was all trees as far as the eye could see. I was an adult when I first read this one. More or less.) Alien Bodies is The One That Introduces Faction Paradox, aka the creepy cult version of the Time Lords. And for some reason my brain decided in the intervening years that they were the book’s antagonists. I mean, they are antagonists, but they’re not the enemy the Time Lords are facing. The unspecified Enemy (no name, ooooh) have beaten them back so much that the Doctor’s corpse (and all its weird upgrades) could seriously turn the tide of war. Their agents include anarchitects, beings who can rearrange and delete matter, such as buildings. Miles had by this point already toyed with the idea of unimaginable wars across time and space in Down, and he would go on to perfect it in Dead Romance. (Where amusingly, for rights reasons, the Time Lords are the unnamed party.) All of this strangeness is much more my preference for what a Time War should look and sound like than, to pick a totally random example, Time Lords Vs Daleks, done for the simple virtue that you’ve heard of both of them. (Ever the time traveller, Miles manages to rip the piss out of that idea nearly a decade before the TV series did it: “Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.”)

The Enemy — who don’t exactly appear in Alien Bodies, for much the same reason we’re not resolving the Sam crisis right now — are not the only oddities. Alien Bodies is bursting with possibilities, including a third party in the war, the Celestis: descendants of Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency who took themselves out of time and corporeal reality and mostly use zombies as their agents. Look at characters like Mr Trask (a zombie) and Mr Shift (a concept of language who floats through people’s perceptions in a way that is distinct each time it happens and also distinct from the bits where Miles has chunks of prose acting like dialogue, sometimes in conversation, which in itself is very hard to pull off). Look again at that secondary Time Lord and his female TARDIS, the gently impressive pushing along of that technology. And look at bloody Faction Paradox! A gross, creepy, upside down version of Time Lord orthodoxy where the ultimate punishment is erasure through self-murder. They don’t, contrary to my wrong memories, figure all that hugely in Alien Bodies, but it’s still a hell of an impact, and I can see why they encouraged further study. (And having them not be the novel’s be all, end all is just more of a flex. This is one of its ideas. There are other flexes, like the intriguing early setup for a Brigadoon-style disappearing city, which is explained pages later as a simple trick that Mr Qixotl “doubted anyone would have noticed.”)

I’ve complained before (who, me?) about Lawrence Miles’s tendency to have ideas and just sort of sit in them. Alien Bodies… well, it does do that, quite frankly. Don’t worry, we’re not swerving into “actually Alien Bodies is terrible” here, but it’s worth saying that all of this creativity and setup is not what you’d call a very forward moving plot. The auction is called; the interested parties arrive; the Doctor, rather inconveniently, is there too; several parties stir up trouble; trouble overflows until it explodes and then the Doctor does a thing. I did reach a certain point in Alien Bodies where I thought, oh this is it, isn’t it, plot-wise? And the frequent diversions to hear this person’s story or that tenuously sentient form of language’s story made it a bit of a higgledy-piggledy read at times, although I don’t remember that being the case when I first read it. (Back when I were only twenty-one and this were all trees m’lad, etc etc, music from that Hovis advert.) I suspect my attention span has shifted (Shifted?) a bit over the years, or perhaps it’s just the accumulated weight of 130-odd Doctor bloody Who books rattling around my head now, but anyway, dash through Alien Bodies I did not. Although I highly enjoyed paddling through it.

And that’s the last big thing I’ve not mentioned yet. Alien Bodies is somehow really really fun. It’s pleased as punch most of the time, despite the sepulchral, well, everything, frequently letting these events and characters be funny even when the situation is creepy. Look at the Doctor’s funeral, which comes with a joke about how this omnipotent focal point of the universe can still bugger up a timer. Look at the Doctor’s first scene, when he escapes an assassination attempt by diving out of a window into the TARDIS parked 90 degrees up against a wall. (Was Moffat taking notes?) Mr Qixotl is perhaps the funnest single thing here, and you do get to care about the sneaky little git despite, well, him. But then the rivalry between Time Lords and Faction Paradox — big, lore-y stuff! — is allowed to mostly play out as bitchiness. There are plenty of honest to god goofy little jokes sprinkled about as well, mostly the kind that would specifically tickle a Whovian, like the Doctor’s quasi-mystical relationship with his pockets, or the Raston lap-dancing robots (“the most perfect dancing machines ever devised”), or what appears to be a lightning-fast dig at War Of The Daleks (“My Dalek history’s always been a bit rusty. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t keep changing all the time”), or the big joke that everyone remembers about Alien Bodies that even now, wading in spoilers, I don’t want to spoil just in case, which then pivots into possibly a meta comment on the previous unavailability of certain characters, and then becomes a clever reinvention of a crap baddie.

So, it’s a fun one, especially for long term fans. But it also manages to be quite sweet about the old two-hearted sod, at least occasionally in between all the buffoonish facsimiles, the winking references and horrible blood rituals. My memory had no trouble preserving the Doctor’s funeral for Laika, his rage about her mistreatment, the unspoken bond he feels with the lost dog. That truly has stayed with me ever since. I had though, delightfully, forgotten Mr Qixotl’s cheeky hint that despite all this fuss over his casket, the Doctor of the future might have pulled a fast one after all and not even be in there.

Alien Bodies then. It’s a lot. At the same time it is strangely small, with the zesty pluck of a murder mystery. (And speaking of Bernice, he manages to sneak in a reference to Tyler’s Folly from Down, one of the Bernice Summerfield NAs. I read them all so I guess it’s my job to spot them.) Normally that’s just what I’m after, but — at the risk of angering the gestalt — I do think Alien Bodies could have been stronger. The hall of mirrors approach to characterisation has its ups and downs, and I could have got more of a feel for Sam in this — indeed, that felt like the point of her story here. Also, I know it seems picky to criticise a Doctor Who book for being more in love with the idea of the Doctor as a general concept than with the McGann version specifically, and I don’t even think he’s poorly served here, getting flourishes of anger and cleverness that would glitter on any Doctor’s resume, but — might as well be honest here — it’s a just plain very crowded book and he’s only one part of it.

Hey, every book deserves the occasional poke and prod to make sure it’s all up to snuff. Even the sainted ones. This one’s still pretty bloody good.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #10 – Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#5
Illegal Alien
By Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

Daleks! No, wait, it’s the other one. Cybermen weren’t as elusive in print as the pepperpots, but it still feels like a coup for them to show up this early in BBC Books, and in the same month as the Daleks, no less.

Before we get to them, however, it’s worth saying that Illegal Alien is a bit of a milestone. The Seventh Doctor and Ace represented the show’s present when the New Adventures came along. Their stories were the direction Doctor Who was going in, to the extent that it could move without TV screens. Now they are part of its past, and we will only visit them on occasional jollies, handing them back afterwards like a couple of tuckered out grandkids. It’s a subtle change of context but, when you’re used to following the evolution of the strange little chap with the funny umbrella, it’s a noticeable one.

Now we’re getting the Doctor and Ace as they were on telly: thick as thieves and looking for trouble. Who better to write that than someone who worked on the show, and while we’re at it, co-wrote a non-fiction book about Ace with Sophie Aldred? So here comes effects guru Mike Tucker — along with Robert Perry — to bring back memories.

Illegal Alien does this literally and figuratively. It’s set during the Blitz, which is a good call from a character point of view since Ace is a tough Londoner with a keen eye for prejudice; in the shadow of the Nazis she soon has cause to remember her friend Manisha getting bombed out by racists. (See Ghost Light.) There are a few moments where she — not so subtly, it must be said — recalls recent history, for instance wondering how her grandmother is getting on. (See The Curse Of Fenric.) And of course, pitting Ace against another famous Doctor Who monster brings to mind the time she introduced a Dalek to a baseball bat. (See Remembrance Of The you-know-who.)

The Doctor is treading faintly familiar steps as well. He indulges an apparent interest in American culture — this time baseball rather than jazz, see The Happiness Patrol, Silver Nemesis — in his breezy interactions with a black barman. (See Remembrance again.) Later, he dusts off his chess skills against the villain of the piece. (See Fenric again.) I’m not complaining about these reference points, by the way. It makes sense for someone versed in the era to steep their novel in it. The early New Adventures were all over this as well. Tucker and Perry are no slouches at capturing the characters’ voices in general, but all this era window-dressing undoubtedly helps.

Not that I would exactly call Illegal Alien a character piece. With its spooky Cybermen stalking around an easily identifiable, highly atmospheric setting, it’s trad as heck, and it tends never to be far away from its next action sequence. You’re thrown right into that with a bit of first person narration courtesy of Cody McBride, a down on his luck American PI in London. (Circa 1940, so very down on his luck, then.) McBride’s inner monologue might as well come with a boozy jazz accompaniment; at one point he recalls a girl back home named Dolores who, “if he’d asked, would have married him there and then.” After following a crashed spaceship he then thinks of the local law enforcement: “Of all the strange, glowing, flying-sphere-filled bomb craters in all the world, Mullen had to walk into [mine].” I don’t know if Terrance Dicks ever had the time or inclination to read other people’s Who novels, but he’d surely have enjoyed this one — partly because of Cody, partly because he also wrote a Seventh Doctor and Ace vs the Nazis book, but mostly because there are a couple of Cybermen in this disguised as gangsters. (Not a joke. The man would have stood up and applauded.)

There’s lots of goofy, meaty excitement to be had here, what with a confused Cyberman on the run committing random murders (and smearing itself with all the blood and gore — lovely) and Cybermats, converted from local wildlife, carrying out targeted killings. Combined with the unmistakeable squalor of Blitz London, the general ordure brings to mind The Bodysnatchers — and sure enough, Illegal Alien is another BBC Book that a younger me actually bothered to read in 1997, happily hooked by its horrors. Cybermen have a tendency to be very nasty in print, as Iceberg and Killing Ground showed over at Virgin, and they continue that trend here, not only with the berserk Cyber-Leader ripping apart vagrants, but in the perhaps inevitable scene delving into the awful transformation from human to machine. (Here, like Mark Morris with his Skarasen rampage, Tucker and Perry arguably go too far by introducing a converted baby.) While I think you could make the point and still rein it in a little, I nonetheless appreciate it when authors push the Cybermen to a place that Daleks don’t go. As perennial runners up of Doctor Who monsterdom, they could use that distinction.

Atmosphere, action, getting the era right… you can tell what I’m about to say, right? And yes, the odd one out here is plot. Because there’s not much that actually interests Cybermen, it’s perhaps hard to find labyrinthine ways to tell stories about them. Illegal Alien lands on a simple enough structure: some Cybermen wound up here more or less by accident, and some overzealous humans have tried to take advantage. (To their credit, they did surprisingly well in the Not Getting Converted department.) The bulk of the book comes down to finding out who is pulling what string, and what they want out of it. While that’s not uninteresting, in execution it perhaps belies a shortcoming with getting a writer who has hands on, very practical experience of making the programme: we very authentically capture the feeling of moving between half a dozen sets, over and over again, until enough has been revealed or it’s time for another cliffhanger. McBride spends about a quarter of it in a prison cell off screen, perhaps giving us the verisimilitude of an actor on holiday that week.

Eventually the story gets crazy and relocates to a Nazi stronghold on Jersey — which is good character fodder for Ace, obviously, but also low hanging fruit, commentary-on-the-evils-of-mankind-wise, especially coming so suddenly in the last act. It’s even more conspicuous when you remember that Virgin Publishing, as well as already producing the proverbial Really Good Seventh Doctor WW2 Book in Exodus, went and did it again in Just War, and they set that one in the Channel Islands. (Messrs Tucker and Perry can at least claim to have done “the Nazis get their hands on modern technology because of Ace” before Big Finish, but Steve Lyons — who has surely read this — would get more out of it when writing Colditz.)

Much of Illegal Alien seems to be about just understanding the assignment, and there really is something to be said for the characterisation of the Doctor in this, hewing closer to the calculating yet loveable presence he was before the New Adventures looked under the hood. At one point he charms the occupants of an air raid shelter by “conducting an off-key choir with a stick of rhubarb”; at another he (inevitably) turns out to have gamed his chess playing to achieve a secret result. That said, a moment where McBride correctly guesses at the Doctor’s inner darkness all in one go does not convince, and conversely I’m not sure I buy the Doctor’s obliviousness with the villain of the piece, needing to have the penny dropped for him by McBride. They’re going for a pretty obvious Moriarty thing here, and although the secret malefactor is not an unwelcome creation — wanting knowledge for its own sake and causing an Allies/Nazi Cyber-arms race to get there — they overdo the misdirecting wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly thing, making it seem rather unlikely that he’d actually be steeped in so much wrongdoing. Hey ho: I know he comes back in a Tucker/Perry sequel, which I also read years back. Maybe he’s a bona fide stinker there.

You get bang for your buck monster-wise, atmosphere-wise and this-feels-like-they-could-have-made-it-on-the-telly-(with heavy editing)-wise. But with all the memberberries I can’t help considering if other stories did some of these things better, and the wrench from a fairly bloody runaround to a sudden Nazi showdown left me feeling less than satisfied with it as a coherent whole. If you’re into what Illegal Alien has to offer after a chapter or two, though, you ought to enjoy following it between its bombed-out set pieces.

6/10