Doctor Who: The BBC Books #19 – Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who
Short Trips
Edited by Stephen Cole

Just when you thought Virgin Publishing had been relieved of all their lunch money, BBC Books goes and finds another couple of quid round the back. Short stories with different Doctors seem a perfectly obvious thing for a Doctor Who publishing company to do, but who knows if they would still have done them without the leg up? For what it’s worth, Virgin — who had not long ago concluded the Decalogs with a volume of pure, license-free sci-fi — warrant this oblique little nod from Stephen Cole: “Linking the stories thematically had traditionally proven successful in this area of Doctor Who publishing.” Naming no names…

Short Trips follows that tradition with its own linking theme, albeit not one featured on the front cover: freedom. I like it — it’s nebulous enough that it seems more likely to inspire storytelling than create a nagging obligation for each story to fill.

Cole also mentions in his introduction that the writers were encouraged to write to the length they needed, hence this is the longest BBC Book yet at 340 pages. Will the stories benefit from all that breathing room? We’ll see.

And away we go…

*

Model Train Set
By Jonathan Blum

Jonathan Blum flies solo in this charming vignette about the Doctor’s train set. He uses this for some colourful insight into previous Doctors, such as the thought that the Sixth would rather be a colourful and noisy train that build a train set, and “No matter what else you said about [the Seventh], he made the trains run on time.” As with Vampire Science, this makes some clear statements about the guy with the brown curls, who once again tries to step away from his predecessor’s controlling nature but struggles to get the balance right. The final image of him just trying to save his little wooden people a bit of effort is some quintessential Doctoring.

For continuity enthusiasts, there is no sign of Sam, so this could easily be the Doctor’s next adventure after Longest Day.

*

Old Flames
By Paul Magrs

A couple of very significant firsts happen in this one: the first published Doctor Who story by Paul Magrs, who has continued contributing to this day, and the first appearance of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor’s scraggly half-cut mirror image. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah find themselves at an 18th century ball attended by wayward time traveller Iris and her slightly befuddled companion, Captain Turner. They are soon all investigating a mysterious big cat on the grounds.

Magrs makes quite an impression here, with derring do and striking imagery such as the Doctor being rescued from drowning, or perhaps more notably Iris’s same-size-on-the-inside TARDIS in the shape of a double decker bus. Magrs’s uninhibited sense of humour twists the prose quite jauntily and he keeps the plot tight. This one’s a keeper.

*

War Crimes
By Simon Bucher-Jones

An evocative sideways step during the finale of The War Games, as one of the many unseen non-human experiments of the War Lords is sent (still augmented) back to its homeworld, where it tries to avoid its new programming. It then encounters the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe, still making their last desperate escape attempt. This one ends rather abruptly, but not before relating the creature’s agonies to the story it’s sitting next to. This is good stuff — I can imagine these ideas splintering off into their own book. I’m not sure if it really satisfies as a short story though.

*

The Last Days
By Evan Pritchard

A First Doctor story about not changing history featuring Ian, Barbara and Susan might seem an unfortunate thing to publish in the same month as The Witch Hunters, but The Last Days finds another angle. Evan Pritchard makes this Ian’s (rather than Susan’s) dilemma, and offers a chilling new perspective on letting history take its course: at the siege of Masada, when the Jewish rebels are about to be captured by Romans, Barbara explains that their mass suicide is the best course of action for them in the here and now. Incredibly it gets darker from there, with Ian forced to perform a pivotal role in their last defiance, then make a symbolic statement that throws his struggle almost into mockery.

This is The Romans as seen through a very different lens. The Doctor and Ian are figuratively and literally opposed, so much so that it’s hard to imagine how Ian ever had a spring in his step after this. Barbara believably uses her knowledge of Roman slavery to back up her views, but while I was reading it I wrongly assumed she meant her literal experience in The Romans — before remembering that Susan is still here, so that hasn’t happened yet. (The Last Days makes for a very odd prequel to that adventure, considering their misery here and their later high spirits.)

Possible continuity wobble aside, it’s powerful stuff, and proof that you can revisit the same sort of story and get a different result. If only that were true of history.

*

Stop The Pigeon
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

As you can probably guess from the byline, the Seventh Doctor and Ace feature in this one. It’s a madcap story about a bogus anti-ageing process featuring time anomalies and a talking pigeon. There are plenty of fun moments, such as an aggrieved Ace threatening to bend the Doctor’s spoons, and the aforementioned pigeon puffing a joint. (!) The plot just barely hangs together, and the authors throw in fan favourite ideas in a way that doesn’t feel entirely justified. I’m mainly looking at the Master here, chronologically in his first outing since Survival; as well as the writing being something of a poor relation (the Doctor’s pleas not to give in to his animal self simply recall “If we fight like animals, we die like animals”, only windier), it’s not even the first person-into-animal transformation in this collection (thanks to Old Flames) which lessens his impact. It’s good zany fun, if a little misconceived.

*

Freedom
By Steve Lyons

Perhaps the most literal use of the “freedom” theme comes from the writer who suggested it to Stephen Cole. The Third Doctor and Jo fall into one of the (still captive) Master’s traps, and the Brigadier is forced to ask their nemesis for help in retrieving them. The Master’s freedom is at stake, as is the Doctor’s. (For good measure the Master has also set up a company called Freedom. What was that theme again?)

It was an odd choice to sequence two Master stories right next to each other. This one inevitably echoes The Face Of The Enemy, almost word for word in the Brigadier’s attempted interrogation scene; there is also a sequence at the end that somewhat retreads the Third Doctor’s segment from The Eight Doctors, with him once again willing to hang everyone else out to dry if it gets him out of exile. I can understand this take on the character, indeed we’ve seen it on screen, but it sticks in my craw when it’s drummed up within the tight confines of a short story. It just seems a bit flippant that way. Elsewhere, the Doctor’s “future echoes” are a nifty touch, and the scenes of Jo contemplating her eternal captivity stick out in an otherwise rather familiar tale.

*

Glass
By Tara Samms

Ah, Tara Samms. Much like Michael Collier, she has mysteriously never been seen in the same room as Stephen Cole. Authorities remain baffled.

Glass is from the perspective of a regular person who suddenly finds a disembodied face staring at her through glass surfaces. The Fourth Doctor and Romana II arrive to take care of it — a remnant of Shada — and then they’re off again, leaving our poor narrator a traumatised wreck. It’s the sort of perspective you can easily believe, especially with a TARDIS team this confident and (to most humans) this unrelatable. I’m not sure it’s a perspective you’d really want to see very often, as it suggests a rather unhappy world on the periphery of Doctor Who. As a one-off though it’s rather neat, not unlike a Big Finish one-parter.

*

Mondas Passing
By Paul Grice

Um, so apparently this is Stephen Cole as well? I’m beginning to wonder if he’s ever paid for a subscription service in his life. This is definitely a man experienced in free trials.

This is another downbeat one, but it’s interesting, looking in on Ben and Polly as they reunite briefly on New Year’s Eve, 1986. Reminiscing about their adventures (one of which must have just happened over at the North Pole), they all but acknowledge a shared attraction that never got off the ground. They’re both with someone now and, as you might expect, neither of them has an outlet to discuss their bizarre adventures. This is probably true of most companions after they leave, but it seems especially sad here, with the added tacit admission that this will be their last reunion.

It’s a worthwhile little bite; short and sour. Do we think Stephen Cole was feeling okay when he worked on this book?

*

There Are Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden
By Sam Lester

As far as I can tell Sam Lester is a real person and not another variant of Stephen Cole. Just FYI. But it’s hard to be sure, isn’t it? I look in the mirror now and wonder if I’m secretly Stephen Cole.

This is a short, evocative piece with the First Doctor and Dodo visiting a smelly world of flowers — and surprisingly, fairies. Dodo’s preconceptions are somewhat challenged, while the Doctor demonstrates an appreciation for beauty that goes beyond the obvious. It’s more expressionistic than anything else.

*

Mother’s Little Helper
By Matthew Jones

I’m always game for more writing from Matthew Jones, so this was a nice surprise. “Nice” is of course relative, as Jones seems drawn to explorations of emotional and physical violence, and this story continues that trend. A young girl named Nanci crosses paths with a boy who seems able to take away people’s pain, as well as a severe woman controlling him. The Second Doctor is in pursuit. (No companion is mentioned so I dunno when this is set.) Nanci is inexorably drawn to help him.

It’s one of those stories with interesting ideas but not enough time to delve into them. It’s good and it works, but it feels a bit like a summary of a story.

*

The Parliament Of Rats
By Daniel O’Mahony

A strange bit of swashbuckling from the author of the divisive Falls The Shadow, this shares with that novel some wide and interesting ideas that speak to the Doctor and Gallifrey, along with a certain bewildering dreamlike execution. I don’t entirely recognise the angrily dour Fifth Doctor in this, although Nyssa gives him a bit of analysis to show that a lot of thought has gone into it. It could probably benefit from a second read. Right now, I’d definitely call it interesting, but it’s perhaps not my cup of tea.

*

Rights
By Paul Grice

Okay, break’s over, it’s Stephen Cole time again.

We return to the Fourth Doctor and Sarah in a rather heated situation involving a non-bipedal species faced with environmental disaster. (Inevitable shades of Venusian Lullaby there.) The main avenue of research against this seems, for some reason, to require foetus harvesting, which understandably is causing disagreements. It’s a contentious story idea, perhaps with its roots in stem cell research, and the way it’s handled leaves a bit to be desired, at times reaching into black comedy. There is some good reflection here on the Doctor’s limits when interfering in other cultures, and Sarah gets to think like a journalist and weigh up the good and bad of this situation even beyond the foetus science. But no two ways about it, this is an odd duck.

*

Wish You Were Here
By Guy Clapperton

The Sixth Doctor! And it seems not a moment too soon…

This one would slot neatly into Colin’s era. (There’s no companion so if you had to place it, it’s probably some time after Trial?) Visiting a holiday resort run by robots, where naturally things have gone awry, the Doctor encounters a young female operative sent from the company. They have very different ways of investigating.

The reason things are going wrong is a neat one, very pleasingly childlike in its logic. The ending works nicely around the Doctor’s compassion for all forms of life, even artificial ones, and the very ending brings us back to the kind of black comedy that a malfunctioning holiday resort naturally suggests. It’s a fun, clever story that makes good use of this particular Doctor.

The only niggle for me is the continuing insistence on highlighting the Sixth Doctor’s waistline. His voice breaks through very believably, which is what matters, but there’s something unfortunate about having to preface his adventures with “Make way for fatty!”

*

Ace Of Hearts
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Putting the “short” into “short story” (5 pages), Perry and Tucker return for a sweet vignette: the Seventh Doctor goes to a party attended by three generations of Dudmans, ostensibly so he can take a moment to apologise to baby Ace for his later manipulations. I don’t know whether this sort of time transgression is more or less likely given it’s this particular Doctor, but it juxtaposes nicely against his cheery pratfalls at the party. There’s not much to say about it other than it’s a little drive-by poignancy, very rewarding for fans of this era. (So, cool people who know where it’s at.)

*

The People’s Temple
By Paul Leonard

We end on a high note with the Eighth Doctor and Sam — so technically with a Past Doctor Adventure, if you like. Sam wants to see the early days of Stonehenge and the Doctor obliges, landing them in the middle of a very heated power struggle between the slightly mad leader Coyn and the tribe, run by his best friend, enslaved to his purpose. In typical Paul Leonard style the good and the bad refuse to sit still; Sam’s urge to help the repressed tribe ends up backfiring and Coyn might have some humanity in him after all. It’s long enough to warrant a prologue and an epilogue, and it’s a very satisfying piece to go out on.

*

15 stories is good value for money (or was, pre-eBay), and the majority of these are hits. Old Flames is essential reading; The Last Days and Wish You Were Here really jumped out at me; Glass and Mondas Passing provide unusual perspectives; Perry and Tucker display real range; you get a rare sighting of Matthew Jones; Paul Leonard rarely misses. The standard is quite high. Even Stephen Cole’s various aliases manage a distinct variety of storytelling.

As for the theme, it went how I’d hoped: unobtrusively, so you might never know there was a theme at all. It’s a good approach, encouraging writers to really come up with their own ideas. I’m curious what the other volumes will end up going with.

All in all, I remain more of a fan of novels than short stories, but I think we’re better off having Decalogs and Short Trips in the mix as well. I’m glad BBC Books had the same idea.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #18 – The Witch Hunters by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#9
The Witch Hunters
By Steve Lyons

Well well, Steve Lyons. You dark horse.

I’ve found him a rather difficult author to pin down. In the course of four Virgin books he executed some near-perfect fannish fun (Conundrum), a somewhat remixed and darker version of that (Head Games), and two grim stories set in the Colin Baker years that really ran with the “video nasty” label (Time Of Your Life and Killing Ground). If I had to say what kind of thing speaks to him as a writer, bearing in mind these very different tones, maybe it’s a kind of era accuracy that borders on pastiche? (Or just pastiche generally, viz Conundrum.)

Now on over to BBC Books and The Murder Game, which almost sent me to sleep with (what felt to me like) accuracy — although to be fair, maybe I just don’t like that kind of Troughton-y adventure. The Witch Hunters is much more my kind of thing. We have the First Doctor, a personal favourite who at last completes our BBC Books roster, alongside his original companions. Plus it’s a historical, which was a particularly strong avenue for Doctor Who in Hartnell’s day. (It has already proved a success in these books; see The Roundheads.) I could have guessed what we were in for just glancing at the cover, but although I would broadly say The Witch Hunters does what you’d expect, which seems Very Steve Lyons to a certain extent, there’s a good deal more to it along the way.

The Doctor and co. find themselves in Salem, 1692, just at the onset of the witch trials. I’m fairly ignorant about all this: never learned about it in detail, never saw The Crucible. But Doctor Who historicals are there, at least on some level, to educate, and I think Lyons does a good job of that here.

The key players are identified and their motivations are made clear. You’ve got to be careful with this sort of thing, fictionalising tragedies with real people and psychoanalysing why they did things, lest you cheapen or trivialise them — but then plenty of academics and writers got there first, not least Arthur Miller. Lyons grounds the deadly accusations in youthful repression, and he credits the accusers with the possibility that their hysterical fits felt largely (or even entirely) unforced, with convincing hallucinations a symptom of their undiagnosed hysteria. These people become even more of a mess in always trying to do the right thing, which often means trying not to get accused or ostracised themselves. There is a real powerlessness to this cycle once it has begun, particularly for the sympathetic Mary, but with the notable exceptions of Samuel Parris, Reverend, who deep down covets control, and his niece Abigail Williams, who feels a power and a pleasure in her actions that she can’t find elsewhere. Even this rather partisan take speaks to a way of life that has already become a powder keg outside of these individuals. (I understand, regardless of not having read up, that it’s not a new take.) It’s still debatable how much these two are in the know.

A grimly fascinating history it may be, but you’ve also got to make it a Doctor Who story. That’s another area where you need to tread carefully — you don’t want to blame the whole thing on aliens. The Hartnell era had a bit more leeway to just let history be history, and use only the science fiction stuff you’ve brought with you. The Witch Hunters is no exception, using the perspective of the time travellers to enrich the events, and inevitably using the TARDIS as a lightning rod. If it’s really about anything besides the history, though, it’s the regular characters’ response to that history.

Susan is the perfect choice for a story about teenagers with unknown potential. The Doctor is never overtly mean about this, but he is a dominant, patriarchal force in her life. There is a parallel. We find Susan in the first scene playing parlour games with the local girls, inviting trouble, telling them too much about herself. The story (some would say, inevitably) takes the line of whether or not history can be changed, whether an awful tragedy can be averted — it’s Susan’s The Aztecs, they very much say so in the text. However she’s more of an instigator than Barbara was in Mexico, with her fledgeling telepathic powers tuning into, and then amplifying the girls’ hallucinations and fits.

Does this take us into “cheapen and trivialise”/“blame it on aliens” territory? I think it squeaks a pass. It’s made clear that what’s happening here is going to happen regardless; there’s just the possibility that Susan has inadvertently accelerated it. Like anything else, I think as long as you use it to enrich the story then it’s probably worth doing, and Susan’s unwitting part in these events helps mark The Witch Hunters out from being quite so transparently “Susan’s The Aztecs”. Her judgement is even more compromised than Barbara’s; at one point she’s so mixed up, she even implicates Barbara. She goes from having an inherently dangerous desire to prevent this from happening to being an unconscious instigator, and then finally being just as accepting as the original accusers, beaten down by the relentless march of history, an awareness of her own part in it, a distinct lack of options to the contrary and simply wanting to survive, as Mary does. Susan’s good intentions and her failure to make good on them create a pretty downbeat story, but they also underline — in a suitably This Is Now A Doctor Who Story way — what many of the girls were going through and what this cycle is about, without (I think) applying too big of a sci-fi lampshade.

That’s not to say Lyons lets this play out from A to B, as an authentic historical might have done. We skip right through these events in the first chapter (starting with Susan and the girls in situ), then sidestep to meet another version of Hartnell’s Doctor, this one revisiting the story after he was taken out of time for The Five Doctors. (There’s that Conundrum-ey Steve Lyons!) His purpose becomes clear much later. Which is all a bit different, isn’t it? We then start again, from the beginning this time, as they all arrive and Susan becomes enmeshed — only then the Doctor spirits them away, just barely escaping the wrath of the townsfolk, effectively ending The Witch Hunters with 200 pages to spare. After an ill-advised trip to see The Crucible (in the hopes of providing useful context — whoops), the Doctor simply enrages Susan further, causing her to use the fast return switch to go BACK to Salem. She forces them to take the long road with this problem, at which point I felt completely discombobulated, which is a wonderful place to be when you’re expecting another Murder Game. (Yes, this is altogether more SF than say, Marco Polo, but at least it’s using an SF device set up in a Hartnell story. Lyons even has the Doctor plan to use it himself, now that it’s fixed, which is something you would have thought the original writers might have done. He also disables it at the end, which perhaps explains why he didn’t use it later when it might have come in handy. Looking at you, The Chase.)

The Witch Hunters is perhaps working against set expectations from the reader — especially if said reader knows more American history, or even more theatre than I do. You’ll inevitably expect the “can we change history” debate, and on both scores I think Lyons’s narrative trickery keeps things from getting predictable. With Susan as a vehicle, he manages to retell the story itself, but he also gets to put the Doctor through the wringer over this old point of contention. A key adversary in Barbara’s Aztec plans, he is famous for not wanting history to be changed, but Salem feels so much more cruel an event than the cultural violence of the Aztecs. This naturally throws his statesmanlike indifference into a murkier light, and The Witch Hunters doesn’t much let him get away with it, weighing the events on him until he begins to waver. Rebecca Nurse, a downright saintly member of the accused, somehow gets him to promise he will save her life, something he promptly regrets. He does his best to let her down gently, which plays out somewhat beautifully by the novel’s end when we catch up with that older (wiser?) First Doctor. He still gives Ian both barrels when he pulls stuff like that, but then we all know this Doctor doesn’t practice what he preaches.

Curiously enough, the argument about changing history is not won as decisively as it was against Barbara — something she spots a mile off. Ian causes some small changes, just as Susan has done, albeit both end up contributing to existing history. When the Doctor makes changes, but then panics and makes changes again the other way, it seems more rooted in superstition than science. Is the Doctor in awe of time as if it were a supernatural force? I mean, it might as well be, what with The Reign Of Terror’s jolly supposition that you couldn’t assassinate a historical monster before time without your gun failing. He’s definitely got no concrete answer to Barbara’s brilliant, unmistakably fannish argument here that every TARDIS landing is in someone’s past. The Doctor later says that the hysterical reactions in Salem might as well be magic given their apparent effectiveness; that, and his uncertain faith in time’s rules, serves to make the Doctor sound less certain, less perfect, and somewhat on Salem’s wavelength. Which all adds to the novel’s prickly sense of danger, working against the reader’s expectations.

I think it would be fair to say that Ian and Barbara are supporting roles in this, although Ian (as foretold in The Face Of The Enemy) has a thoroughly awful time in prison. The story is really Susan’s and the Doctor’s, and if I had a criticism, it’s that we could have landed more thoroughly with the former. Susan isn’t herself for some of The Witch Hunters, and by the finale she’s just glad to get out of here — as are we! — with the Doctor, at various points in his life, picking up the conclusions. I don’t know if that’s a flaw, and the story does make something of Susan’s withering agency. Maybe I just found it a shame that it couldn’t decisively be her book, but then at that point maybe I’m just sad that it isn’t a different book.

What we do get in The Witch Hunters is a smart, unpredictable use of Susan, and a quietly deceptive role for the Doctor in a — bleak! — story told about as interestingly as it could have been. Not to keep ragging on The Murder Game, which was fine, honest, but it’s useful to have that comparison so I can say: that is a traditional way of doing things, and this is not. I’m loving that the Past Doctor Adventures, with books like Eye Of Heaven and now The Witch Hunters, have room for both, they can play it straight or play with the running order, and make it fit the period. The overriding feeling of The Witch Hunters is of a compelling trip into a hell made of troubled people and their choices, but I’m very here for the cool stuff as well.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #17 – Longest Day by Michael Collier

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#9
Longest Day
By Michael Collier

Well, I’ve certainly had quicker days.

Michael Collier — otherwise known as BBC Books editor Stephen Cole, perhaps wearing a jaunty false moustache — throws his authorial hat in the ring with Longest Day. I am guessing this was so he could keep a close eye on the canon event (to use Spider-Verse parlance) that needs to happen at the end of it, a bit like Peter Darvill-Evans joining the New Adventures when it was time to bring Ace back. However, as with Deceit, I came away from this feeling like the canon event — in this case, Sam and the Doctor getting separated — could have been folded into a better book. Or any other book at all, really. Nothing about Longest Day screams: “This is the only sequence of events that could lead to that outcome!”

None of which is a problem if you happened to enjoy the sequence of events we got, but alas, here we are.

Time moves at varying speeds in Longest Day, including so slowly that there is nothing to do but die by degrees, slowly melting away into agonised nothingness. Coincidentally, this phenomenon also occurs in the book’s plot. The prologue is the best example of this, with one character getting caught in a rush of time that ages them in front of the other’s eyes. To make matters more interesting, the scenes are shuffled about — shades of Eye Of Heaven? — but that approach is not seen again.

Before we get nitpicky, that’s my critical complaint with this one. A planet with separate time-zones which can kill you in an instant is full of promise, but Longest Day doesn’t take full advantage of that, for the most part marooning its characters (and us) on a boring desert world that could just as easily be Tatooine, with any random natural disaster you fancy happening underneath. Most of the strife and conflict here is simply not reliant on the time problem, with characters needing to metaphorically turn to the camera and tell us this planet’s got its dates fatally mixed up and any minute now, just you wait, it’ll go foom! Probably!

Longest Day is far more invested in the various aggressive factions fighting or just trying to survive on Hirath (the planet in question), and it’s in these characters that we get our best look at the bones of Collier/Cole’s writing. We’re introduced to characters like Taaln and Vost, who feature in the prologue and don’t make much contribution beyond that. Then there’s Anstaar and Vasid, bored workers on the orbiting moon station that monitors the time shifts. Then back on Hirath there’s a band of rebels against a galactic regime, with leader Felbaac and fellows Tanhith, Yast, Maadip, Elb, Dwynaar, Sost, Yattle, Caft and Crichter. Later they are menaced by said regime in the form of Sangton, Traxes and Fettal.

A couple of problems leap out at me there, and they complement each other. Unless your book is very long or somehow finds time to develop everyone (and have a plot) in 280 pages or less, that’s too many characters. (I haven’t even mentioned the invading army of Kusks, seen on the cover, who thank goodness don’t have names.) Also, I get that it’s SF and these aren’t meant to be human beings, but good god this has to be the most tin-eared collection of random noises masquerading as names I’ve ever seen. It does not remotely help when a novel is bouncing frantically from one bunch of people to another, as this one (weary sigh) does constantly, to then have nothing instinctive to grab onto about their names. “Felbaac” doesn’t evoke anything. “Taaln” sounds like a vocal warm-up. How do you even pronounce “Crichter”? As if to throw us a life jacket, the dialogue frequently does that “use the other person’s name” trick that comes in so handy in audio drama but tends to sound forced elsewhere. It’s positively embarrassing here. “You’re so smug, Anstaar.” “Dwynaar, we have all toiled.” “‘Fair words, Yast,’ replied Felbaac.” Verily, Zlorgak, but what hath Vortron to say about it?

But hey, what’s in a name? As long as a character is interesting, it doesn’t matter if they have a teeth-itchingly clumsy sci-fi moniker. And on that score: hmm. I think it’s fair to say that Cole is going for a degree of nuance here, especially with the rebels stranded on Hirath. Their leader has real objections to the K’Arme (brutalist police regime and only sci-fi-apostrophe-name in the book), but he is also a glory hound who will instantly harm or sacrifice subordinates for his cause, which half the time seems to be just self gratification anyway. Second in command Tanhith seems like an all round better egg, and he rescues Sam (or at least delays her execution) at one point, but later he sacrifices a wounded enemy without a second thought to save the group. Fettal is a sadistic enemy soldier, but when critically hurt she still turns to her adversaries for help.

These are shades of grey, more or less, but Malcolm Hulke or Paul Leonard it ain’t. The overwhelming effect of these characters is that they’re all as bad as each other. Even the ones we’re unambiguously supposed to like, such as Anstaar (I am having to scroll up and check these names every single time, FFS) complains so much that it’s hard to get attached. I reached a point early on in Longest Day when I thought, what am I meant to enjoy about this? Who am I clinging to? Certainly not Vasid, a whiny, paranoid and violent sex pest, but then for some reason he’s our designated co-pilot for about a hundred pages of the Doctor’s scenes. (I sat there thinking, this will pay off, he’ll become a deeper character somehow. He absolutely does not.)

There’s not a lot of nuance outside of the goodies-or-are-they-baddies-actually. When the K’Arme arrive on Hirath they’re so obviously brutal that their mission to avoid bad publicity (!) seems like merely delaying the inevitable. The Kusks are keen to get their hands/mandibles etc on something hidden on Hirath, which will of course allow them to rule the universe etc. They’re a bland bunch to read about. (They even have a Leader who says “Excellent!”) Their physical description suggests something very offbeat, but that could also have done with some red pen: I got lost trying to picture them, although the combination of a “protruding groin” and “hardened breasts” stuck out. Your move, fan artists. (No wonder the front cover is just the head.) Description is generally more miss than hit in Longest Day, with Cole returning curiously often to people having sweaty brows and things being “thick”. (Serious drinking game suggestion there, every time something is “thick”. It can be anything — a throat, fingers, a metaphorical fog…) Dialogue is rarely memorable, thanks in part to all those goofy names. We know the rebels don’t think Sam can be trusted, for instance, because they occasionally say things like “you stupid freak bitch”. (Yeah, but what do they really think?)

Ah, poor old Sam: she’s having a bit of a shocker. When we meet her she’s nursing downright unambiguous romantic feelings for the Doctor, which I’m not sure has been a consistent idea so far, but I guess the editor of the range ought to be able to set out his stall. On arrival at the moon station she starts quipping in a way that’s really more annoying than funny (with lots of exclamation marks! These denote humour!), but you could rightly argue that being crap at jokes is as in keeping with being seventeen as are her fluid feelings about this handsome guy she knows. When faced with a particularly paranoid Vasid, who has quite possibly just committed manslaughter, she launches into a painfully weird and unconvincing flirt to distract him, which involves implicating the Doctor which, uh, do you think that’s wise? Then for most of the book she’s stuck on Hirath, getting called names by rebels and used as a distraction by Felbaac. At one point she bludgeons herself unconscious with the butt of a rifle, which I’m not sure you could even do, but hey. It’s a rough old time, in a nutshell, peppered with some not entirely convincing behaviour.

She does at least pause to consider things now and again, such as the Doctor (nudge nudge), her parents (who as described here don’t quite align with the couple of activists set up in earlier books), her possible other self that exists in another timeline (set up in Alien Bodies — keep them story irons in the fire!) and her general sense of morality, which mainly takes the form of a polite dig at War Of The Daleks. (“She remembered trying to convince a Thal warrior that fighting and obeying orders you didn’t believe in were [sic] bad, that they killed your inner spirit. She shuddered at how fatuous her comments must have sounded. Life was never that simple … She’d try harder not to preach in future.”) Again, there’s some nuance in here, and that’s commendable. I just wish the experience stringing it all together was more enjoyable.

Over in the corner we’ve got the Doctor, cutting a not very impressive figure I must say. I’m not trying to score him on successes here, but he manages to miss what happens to Anstaar and then to Sam (both forcibly teleported away, hopefully not to their deaths), spends a lot of time with Vasid (no thanks) and seems powerless to do much of anything about the imminent doom of Hirath, or whatever’s going on with Sam. (He literally has no idea.) I don’t want to give the impression that If Character Not Succeed At Thing Then Story Bad — I just didn’t get a lot out of the action he was engaged with. It’s not as if he greatly reflects on the fact that he’s on the back foot the whole time.

Separating them like this certainly does nothing to suggest what the great appeal of Sam is to the Doctor. Yes, it helps Sam’s angst if he is (comically) oblivious to her feelings (and there is more of this later with Anstaar making an innuendo he just can’t grasp), but an integral part of the Doctor/companion dynamic is what they like about each other, and his side of that is AWOL. The Doctor really could be looking after a lost kid here. (But like, not very well, lol.) I would say fair enough, that’s just how it is, but that’s not consistent. Look at Vampire Science! (Frankly, “look at Vampire Science” ought to be a standard EDA rule.)

This lack of a relationship perhaps makes the ending weaker than it should be, but then, maybe that’s why we got the ending. Thinking the Doctor has died, Anstaar helps an unconscious Sam into a Kusk ship. As the Doctor revives, Sam is off to fates unknown, all by herself. (Anstaar bails in an escape pod before Sam wakes up. Remember, she’s the one we’re meant to like.) It’s possible that absence is intended to make the hearts grow fonder, and I’m curious how it’ll play out. As with much about Longest Day, though, the interesting thing here is more of a bullet point than a successful culmination of what the book is going for.

What this book has is a lot of characters, a lot of scenes, a lot of desert and a lot of unpleasantness. What it doesn’t have is a strong unifying story, so I absolutely waded through it, forcing my way across arguments and attacks and gobbledygook names that I just didn’t care about. It’s frustratingly still a good idea, this chopped-up planet thing: Doctor Who did something similar back in The War Games (although the Doctor seems to have forgotten about that here) and Virgin would have a go at it later in Return To The Fractured Planet. (They arguably already did in Oblivion, which came out the same month as this, but that was whole different timelines across a planet at once.) Longest Day sometimes glimpses what it could do with that, but all the same it ends up haplessly stuck in the same interminable, nightmarish stasis as its characters.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #16 – Eye Of Heaven by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#8
Eye Of Heaven
By Jim Mortimore

Mortimore alert! Stand by for strangeness.

I would not have laid odds that Jim Mortimore’s first BBC Book would be a Past Doctor Adventure. Wouldn’t it be more enticing for him — a well known experimental Who writer — to jump into something new instead? That is, of course, assuming that all PDAs will feel a bit like a lost telly episode, and that is, of course, entirely wrong in this case.

Eye Of Heaven feels new. For starters, after 33 fruitless Missing Adventures my prayers have been answered: Leeeelaaaaa! Now, it might be sheer coincidence that she never got a whole novel to herself at Virgin, but I tend to assume her popularity was at a low ebb at that time and nobody asked for one. Out of all the companions it could be said that she has the most unusual background and most identifiable narrative voice, which might have made her seem like an outlier? Eye Of Heaven clearly views this as a feature and not a bug, however, as it’s an entirely first person novel — which means we’re not only getting lashings of Leela, but Leela as-told-by-Leela. If you’re anything like me this is like several missed Christmases showing up at once.

Mortimore captures her voice well. She is a hunter, always assessing situations from a point of attack. She is blunt and to the point. (“My name is not ‘gel’. It’s Leela. Use it or do not speak to me.”) She lacks the context to understand civilisation’s foibles but does not lack intelligence; in 2024 this reads a bit like neurodivergence. Perhaps that’s just me, but regardless, it makes for an unusual and fun method of teasing out information as Leela interprets it all in her own way. (“The holy marks meant, The Times, London, 21 August 1872. The Doctor had told me this cloth was a sheet from something called a newspaper. He said there was a different newspaper every day. I thought this was good: the cloth was so flimsy I could poke a hole in it with my fingers. I did so now to prove how strong I was. The hole joined others beside different marks, ones I had been told meant, Noted Archaeologist Seeks Sponsorship for Expedition to South Seas.”) There’s also a good deal of comedy to be had here, as social mores pass her by: “Stockwood groped in his pocket and pulled out some breadcrumbs, which he threw at the birds. They began to fight over them. Clever. Provoke them to fight and then kill the survivors. Twice as much food for the tribe. I held my hand out for some bread.”

As if to make up for lost time, there are bits of back story around Leela’s family and the Sevateem way of life. This serves as a handy refresher for a character that hasn’t exactly been over-saturated in print, and it allows Mortimore to indulge in some visceral and highly visual moments. He’s good at those: the trippy first person account of the death of Leela’s younger sister is not likely to leave my brain, joining the likes of the perilous star-bridge crossing in Lucifer Rising. (Which was co-written, I know, but experience suggests that this bit was mostly Jim.)

Perhaps for the same reason, this is Leela at her most Leela, with the Doctor’s personal influence appearing somewhat minimal. She is fiercely superstitious throughout, convinced that various characters are agents of Cryuni, the Sevateem spectre of death. (The Doctor attempts to right her on this but it mostly just amounts to helpless eye-rolling.) She is also unapologetically violent, at first somewhat cautious about the Doctor’s no-killing rule, then eventually leading a wholesale war against a gang of pirates, killing many and “gutting” at least one. She justifies this quite understandably with “We were at war. To lose was to die.” Do I have any better ideas? No. But it is perhaps unfortunate that the Doctor has no opportunity to take her to task for this; it feels like a not insignificant step backwards from where she was in the series at the time. (This is way beyond a Janis thorn against an assassin, last deployed in The Talons Of Weng-Chiang.) All that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mortimore simply wanted to showcase what is different about the character in this instance, and if so he is successful.

It is not, however, an entirely Leela-driven novel. We toggle narrators as we go along, a list that eyebrow-raisingly includes the Doctor. This is another rare treat (added to Leela, and first person in general) and Mortimore carries it off with breezy confidence. The Fourth Doctor is a difficult character to crack, but the voice here straddles the line between whimsy and depth. Even in the other characters’ segments he leaps off the page as fun (“The Doctor took out a pocket watch and flipped open the lid. ‘Eighteen seventy-two… half past August’”) and mysterious (Leela, who is able to perceive honesty through body language, notes that “The Doctor’s expression told me nothing. His body also told me nothing — beyond his interest in Stockwood’s tale”). In his own passages he regards the human world with affection and occasional surprise, and we get occasional peeks behind the proverbial curtain, such as his use of transcendental meditation to cure a bullet wound. (Featuring, casual as you like, the back story to his acquiring the Holy Ghanta before The Abominable Snowmen.)

It’s also worth saying that, although I think Leela gorges on her impulses in Eye Of Heaven, when the Doctor takes an interest it rings very true: “‘I am a hunter. There is nothing here to hunt. Except fish.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘If the mind is willing there is always something to hunt.’ ‘I do not understand.’ ‘Then hunt that. Hunt understanding. Make it your enemy and track it to its lair. Grapple with it. Take it and make it your slave. Your tool. Use it. Feast upon it. Grow fat on it.’ ‘That is silly. Understanding is not an animal. It cannot fight.’ ‘Galileo wouldn't agree with you.’” I very much agree that “hunting understanding” is how Leela approaches the world around her. Big Finish makes for good further reading here. (As, I hope, will BBC Books.)

The Doctor isn’t in it much — quite right, as you wouldn’t want to overdo the first person bits with him, but even so Leela is mostly fending for herself here. This allows for a few more narrators. To list them all would verge on spoilers for the story he’s telling, so suffice to say the main one is Horace Stockwood: a fifty-something anthropologist who visited, and fled Easter Island decades ago, leaving a friend to die for fear of the natives (angry at his theft of a sacred tablet) and some apparently, terrifyingly mobile stone heads. Stockwood’s initial prologue is another of those “in the moment” Mortimore passages, all the better for being in first person. The juggling of narrators means taking a moment to orient yourself at the start of each chapter (do they mention Janis thorns, or refer to the TARDIS as “old thing”?), but it all helps to paint an interesting picture with the story, probably more so than if we’d just had one narrator. (That is, provided you don’t find this whole setup a bit annoying. I get the sense that some do, but that’s just the nature of taking a swing.)

But wait — there’s more. As well as being a first person novel, told by rare-book-companion Leela, but also told by the Doctor, and other characters as well, Eye Of Heaven also happens out of sequence. Not bewilderingly so, it must be said: we are for the most part either following the sea voyage back to Easter Island (so Stockwood can make things right — fulfilling what has become his life’s obsession) or the lead up to it in London. It’s quite binary. But as we go on, things juggle around more enthusiastically, with more narrators added into the mix. There is a whiff of a plot reason for this (see Chapter 23), but that comes and goes somewhat in isolation from the rest of the book, leaving the stronger impression that this was simply an interesting way to tell the story. If so, well — it is interesting! But I never quite felt the last-act-of-Memento zipping up of perspectives that I hoped was coming. For what it’s worth.

The blender of viewpoints only has minor casualties, such as a critical piece of Leela’s story only being related to us later by Stockwood after she told him about it. (You would think “how I escaped from inside a whale carcass caught inside a tornado” would be worthy of its own chapter, but BBC Books are pretty rigid on page counts, so maybe that bit had to go.) There is also a major character reveal that happens in the earlier portion of the story (pre-voyage) but is related to us in the later portion, entirely without ceremony because at that point the characters already know who it is, which seemed an odd choice. Nonetheless, I didn’t have too much trouble following it, and the vast majority of the story is there. (NB: If you’re struggling to keep it all together, as I was occasionally due to sheer attention span vs excessive chopping and changing, it might help your concentration if you try and figure out the correct order of events. This only occurred to me late on and all of a sudden I raced through it!)

You could be forgiven for thinking Eye Of Heaven was a pure historical, what with so much time being spent on London malfeasance and treachery at sea. It certainly reads like a kind of genre pastiche, not unlike Mark Gatiss’s approach in The Roundheads or Andy Lane’s in All-Consuming Fire. (Another first person-er!) There are shades of Robert Louis Stevenson here, and perhaps some H. Rider Haggard. But the story is bookended with horror and sci-fi, and when the time comes to tie it all up, there’s no doubt that we’re in Doctor Who territory. The secret of the stones is a satisfyingly brain-bending one, full of dazzling visuals and huge implications. It’s a pity this is only the icing on the cake, but again, I suspect BBC Books’s 280-pages-or-bust style guide had something to do with that. (The existence of Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts suggests there’s always more book somewhere.) For good measure, the Doctor does mention the Ogri, which perhaps subtly reminds us that there are only so many “stones moving about” stories you can tell in Doctor Who before you’re on the same ground. Maybe it avoids repetition if we keep them more as a spooky suggestion.

Eye Of Heaven takes some swings. Narratively, it’s an unusual thing sprinkled with different flavours and wrapped in another unusual thing, but I’ve seen criticism levelled at it for not having enough actual plot. Is there something to that? Well, what we have is comfortably secondary to the way it’s told; I think it’s fair to say there is more artifice here than is strictly needed. But in an ongoing book series, finding interesting ways to tell stories is vital, and frankly, it’s more fun that way. I doubt this particular approach is for everybody, but I lapped it up. The characters, despite all the first person, are not the most rounded individuals outside of Leela, but there’s still a definite poignancy to Stockwood’s life story, and latterly his part in the wider sci-fi meaning. Ultimately I’m glad we passed the narrative parcel.

It’s a deceptively straightforward story for Mortimore, at least at first glance, but the narrative complexity and commitment to intensity in its action sequences made it one that fizzed around my brain after reading it. I think it justifies its choices and I think it’s one I’ll read again.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #15 – Option Lock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#8
Option Lock
By Justin Richards

It’s time once again to spin our Lazy Susan of Returning Doctor Who Writers.

Of course BBC Books sought out Justin Richards. Another sensible choice, along with the likes of Bulis and McIntee, Richards had published several Who books already and was also contributing to the Bernice Summerfield range. Option Lock was his first novel of three published in 1998; he’d increase that to four the following year. We must assume he slept at some point.

I’ve always regarded him as a safe pair of hands, which I know sounds like a dig, but I genuinely think there’s something of Terrance Dicks in his work ethic and general readability. That said, he is capable of writing strange and unexpected things, such as The Sands Of Time, which indulged in a lot of timey-wimey storytelling before Steven Moffat did it. (Though admittedly after Kate Orman did it.) More often he likes to write thrillers that contain some element that personally interests him, such as theatre in Theatre Of War and programming in System Shock. We might infer from Option Lock that he finds nuclear warfare pretty interesting, given the loving detail it receives. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves where the plot is concerned, front cover mushroom cloud notwithstanding. (While we’re jumping ahead, though, this one feels like a mix of his “thriller with bits I like” and “bit odd” approaches.)

The TARDIS arrives (while experiencing an odd power loss) near a country house. As they make their usual recce, the Doctor and Sam are promptly taken for historical surveyors interested in some nearby ruins. They are welcomed into the home of Norton Silver and his wife Penelope, and by all accounts they spend a fair amount of time there. This passes pleasantly enough, apart from a Hot Fuzz-esque encounter with a robed miscreant, and a hypnosis-induced sleep-walk through a fountain at night. Sam builds a a rapport with a military man named Pickering, there to receive hypnotic therapy from Silver, who advises important people from across the globe in the same manner. There are mysteries regarding an ancient society that operates near the house, and the sudden death of a local painter (and what it was about his final painting that drove him to it), which keep the Doctor somewhat occupied.

All told, it’s a leisurely start — stuff is here and stuff is happening, but it’s not noticeably driving us anywhere. Even the Doctor at one point thinks “the whole enterprise was really rather boring in comparison with his usual investigations,” and honestly, including a line like that is absolute death, don’t do it. Because he’s right and now it feels like a lampshade. Option Lock drifts along amiably enough for a while, but it lacks a clear sense of what problem exists that the Doctor must solve. If I wasn’t determined from the outset to finish this book in order to get to the next one (because marathon), this one would be at serious risk of going on the “I’ll get back to you” shelf. It’s not bad, but there were times when I wondered how Richards even persevered writing it. Is this really a strong enough hook for a novel?

While all of this is happening (or barely happening at all, ho ho) there are cogs turning in America, with a political assassination and the replacement of the dead man in the President’s staff. This clearly has some link to Silver, but it’s obscured at first, which is fine — it’s a whole novel and you haven’t finished it yet, chill — but that sense of obscurity is not helped by hard-cutting the action from a country house in Britain to intrigue in the States and then back again. Richards is a good enough writer to buffer these jumps with similar-sounding prose: we go from “A moment later the gallery door opened and the two soldiers started down the staircase, their boots clanking on the metal steps” to “Their feet rang on the stone steps as they raced down towards the water gardens.” But even so, every time it happened it felt like jumping out of the frying pan and into a coffee table.

If you made it to around the 100 page mark (and to be fair, plenty of readers might love all that build-up and not find it stagnant), then Richards has a life-jacket for you. The action ramps up instantly, as some of the inhabitants of the house turn out to be working towards a grand plan, and we get the hardest cut yet: they have instigated a nuclear launch drill in Russia, but in such a way that it will actually launch the nukes. America scrambles to either retaliate or, in case this isn’t what it looks like, hold fire, just as forces in Russia struggle desperately to stop this happening. Events escalate past the point of no return and the US is forced into unveiling one of its deadliest secrets.

It’s a hell of a sequence, both as an exciting piece of writing and in length — it’s fully 50 pages of the book. Option Lock got my attention at last, but then it also raised further questions, such as: is there any chance Justin Richards thought of a great nuclear thriller plot and then had to retrofit it into Doctor Who? Because wow, the Doctor does nothing here. Eventually an escape is made, but until then he sits and watches this play out. Again I had that disoriented feeling of going from one thing to another — here, remembering with a thud that it was even a Doctor Who book.

Not long after this, we get some exposition (slightly inorganically with Sam asking what’s going on and the Doctor unspooling it — yes that’s the tradition way of it, but they really lean into it by the end), and this puts the first hundred pages, or at least the first ten, into context. I was honestly impressed by the pulling together of ideas here, although the most interesting one doesn’t amount to enough: the arrival of the TARDIS played a part in what’s happening. The way it’s executed, this is a functional and useful idea, but not a thought-provoking one. There is no pontification on the inherent dangers of landing somewhere, which perhaps throws away some of the impact of even suggesting it. Similarly, there are moments where Sam considers contacting her family, since this adventure makes that possible. She doesn’t though. (Just think, in the not too distant future of the series that would be unthinkable.) Ultimately all the “oh, how clever” feelings that follow that leaden first act don’t retroactively make it engaging to read. I wonder how many readers simply binned off before they got to the good bit.

I found it hard to shake the idea that the Doctor and Sam were passive voices in Option Lock, despite a growing emphasis on Sam’s interest in Pickering. (The comic possibilities of the name are not lost on Richards: “‘Pickering?’ the Doctor asked, in a voice that suggested he enjoyed a good picker when he got the chance.”) There is even more sitting and watching before the end, with the Doctor and Sam literally placed in front of a big screen, and when the time comes to prevent the villain from completing his mission it’s over to TV Tropes so that a secondary character can make the ultimate sacrifice instead of the Doctor. This is nonetheless a memorable, violent sequence, with a decent amount of psychological impact on Sam. She continues to feel these reverberations in a post-TARDIS epilogue. Both Sam and the Doctor have had one now; we must be building to something seismic. (For those keeping score, we can add Sam’s unwitting actions here to those mind-altered crimes in Kursaal and her regretted actions in Genocide. Her Scrapbook of Sadness floweth over.)

Despite the eventual downer, or rather before we get there, Richards writes a good rapport between the Doctor and Sam. Their overall level of “Is this a fun time, do they both want to be here” is higher than in some of their adventures so far, and that’s how I like it. (I’m not against a bad time in the TARDIS at all — Sam’s certainly getting the mileage for it! I just don’t like it to seem like a chore from the outset, which can be the default Doctor/companion setting — think early Sixth Doctor and Peri.) The Doctor overall has had better days than this, watching bad events unfold and failing as he does to spot treacherous parties all around him; a moment right before The Ultimate Sacrifice (of some other geezer) where he is totally capable of blowing up the bad guy goes bothersomely unexamined. Perhaps another time. (Again, I’ve nothing against saying bleak things about the characters or showing them to have flaws — I just want it to be for a reason. I can’t tell if the Doctor’s slight ineffectuality in Option Lock is there on purpose, if it is meant to say anything. For the most part he just seems a bit dotty.)

There’s a scene in Option Lock where characters must force themselves through a psychic barrier. That’s how I felt reading the first wodge of this (admittedly, without the nausea), and although Richards goes on to pull together his plot strands and pay off his mysteries, it’s still an uneven read, with the highs feeling like they wandered in from somewhere else altogether. There’s not enough personality to the high number of characters who, like the Doctor and Sam (only this time deliberately) are going through the motions — meanwhile, the shadowy force that sits behind them barely registers at all. It’s one of those stories that technically ticks the boxes but never quite comes alive, finishing up blinking blearily as if revived from hypnosis.

5/10