Doctor Who: The BBC Books #23 – Catastrophea by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#11
Catastrophea
By Terrance Dicks

Or: Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Colonialism.

On their way home after Planet Of The Daleks, the Doctor suddenly gets a psychic jolt from the planet Catastrophea and rushes off to investigate. There he finds a world of subjugated natives, uneasy peacekeepers, an opportunistic company waiting to take over and subjugate the natives even more, activists who want to help the natives, drug smugglers and drug users. The general feeling is of a powder keg.

Pretty soon we get the most interesting thing about the book: the fact that, on the face of it, the Doctor can’t help. “This wasn’t one simple evil like the Daleks; it was a complicated and tragic mixture of extraterrestrial and human interaction that he had seen repeated on many worlds. Perhaps he would just have to let this planet play out its own sad history.”

But wouldn’t you know it, he gets dragged in anyway. When Jo intercedes to stop a Company man beating a native they’re both put on the authorities’ watch list. When the activists get wind of this they wrongly assume that the Doctor is their promised revolutionary hero, El Llama. Then the authorities hear about this, and now they think he’s El Llama too. All the Doctor wants to do is leave (because the planet’s problems are too systemic) but all these wrong assumptions prevent him doing so.

It’s a frustrating setup, because almost everyone involved is stubbornly wrong about something in a way that reinforces everyone else’s wrongness, but at the same time it’s sort of interesting that the Doctor gets involved in a crisis genuinely without even trying, in fact despite conscious effort not to get involved. I clung to that while reading Catastrophea because not a great deal else about it is interesting.

The planet, for example, which is actually named Kastopheria but was nicknamed after a catastrophe — something we are told within the prose rather than in dialogue, which seems clunky, and then we’re told a few more times later for good measure. For all the effort though, I still don’t know how to pronounce it. Is it Ca-TASS-trophe-uh, or Cata-STROFF-ee-uh? Either way it feels like one of Ken Campbell’s “jokoids”: something with the shape of a joke that is not inherently funny.

Most of the planet’s troubles are recognisably human, which helps the reader identify with them, but also takes away any particularly exotic alien quality that you might otherwise have expected what with setting it on an alien planet. We’re familiar enough with the plight of natives under the British Empire, for example, to recognise that being replicated here. But it is just replicated, with awful land owners beating their gardeners and calling them “boy”, and customers thrashing their rickshaw drivers for no reason. Emotive, yes, but there’s not much imagination being applied here. Dicks doesn’t even need to break a sweat writing the actual natives — literally, aliens — apart from making them very big and golden skinned, because it’s plot relevant that they are passive and mute. The Doctor and Jo, of course, despair at the way society ignores them and works around them, but the book steadfastly does it too. They’re even referred to as “The People” — an unfortunate bit of New Adventures overlap there — a name they chose themselves that only makes them more anonymous.

There is something to be said for the simple allegory here, literally being so generic that it can represent any subjugation and thus make the point, if you like, that this happens much the same everywhere. But I suspect this is a charitable view, since it’s (British) humans doing the subjugating — so it’s the actual same thing, then — and just generally, knowing his books, I’m not convinced Dicks was thinking along those lines. More likely it’s: here is a thing you will recognise. (Which, to be fair, is a popular strategy.)

There’s a fair bit of that in Catastrophea, with policemen speaking the apparently “immortal words of policemen everywhere” saying “All right, all right, what’s going on here then?” (“Immortal” circa 1970s telly?) Jo sees a military base and comments that it looks just like Fort Apache, “‘Like it’s a Western.’ The Doctor [nods]. ‘Very similar situation.’” There’s even a café where the various parties can all mix on neutral ground which — groan — is actually called “Rik’s” and — groannn — when we meet the proprietor his first line is, “Of all the cafés in all the planets in the galaxy, you had to throw him into mine!” That’s not wearing your influences on your sleeve, it’s painting them on your face.

Dicks has a habit of writing in allusions to stuff he likes, and more generally just transposing settings and tropes wholesale. Look at Megacity (aka 1920s Chicago) in Shakedown and Mean Streets, which comes with old-timey anachronisms galore even though it’s, y’know, on another planet. Catastrophea follows a similar pattern, with drug dealers being just as awful as they were in Mean Streets and The Eight Doctors, and drugs/drug culture being on much the same basic “this is bad” level as they were there. It’s not a bad style, per se, but I find it all just a bit pedestrian. When everything’s an archetype, none of it pops.

Dicks (and the Doctor) at least finds the activists interesting — which is to say, he generally disapproves of their “do-gooding” as it’s not really helping, and he suspects their motives overall. (This contributes to a perhaps unintentional theme of anti-activism in the BBC Books run so far — see also Kursaal and Dreamstone Moon. I’m not sure where all that’s coming from, especially with pro-activist Sam as our representative.) As for the occupying military, they seem benign enough, apart from being an occupying military, and apart from things like General Walton regularly threatening to have the Doctor and Jo shot — before folding every time because they seem like good eggs after all. What a guy!

It’s hard to know where the book really stands on this stuff. The Doctor is confident that everyone should leave the People alone, of course, but he also seems disconcertingly sure that they’ve brought this on themselves, what with them years ago mentally calming their rages in a way that allowed their occupation, and then not fighting back against it. (The Doctor here smacks a little of his anti-pacifist stance in the first Dalek story, an aspect Terry Nation apparently later regretted.) Combined with a general “it’s bad that they’re here but oh well they’re mostly not that bad” attitude to the military, I think it’s best just to avoid looking under the hood here. At least the plot lands on the side of right, eventually giving the planet back to the People. (What it thinks of the People at that point is a little… hazy.)

There is at least, and at last, a sci-fi idea here, with the People having a history of psychic powers and a need to change who they are to avert catastrophe (ahem), only to find themselves mistreated by humanity afterwards. (If you think that sounds awfully like Colony In Space, well done: so does Dicks, who promptly lampshades that fact.) With their source of mental control fading, the People are on the verge of a mass breakdown — think, Vulcans losing their logic — and a violent uprising seems inevitable. They want the Doctor to help them transition to a less controlled way of life, but not a bloodthirsty one.

Continuing the idea of “he doesn’t think he can help,” the Doctor is critically indecisive about all this, and it ends up being a third party that triggers the change for selfish reasons. The People do, indeed, get a bit bloodthirsty before securing the planet for themselves, with the Doctor frantically asking everyone else not to fight back or they’ll make things worse. (There is something quite neat about forcing pacifism back onto the oppressors, but I’m not sure the book really registered it.)

The question of “was it right to interfere” is raised by Jo. (She dwells comfortably at the “charming nitwit” end of Jo Grant writing throughout, showing absolutely no evidence of the desire to leave that the Doctor somehow clocks at the start of this. Ah well, we’ll always have Dancing The Code.) I don’t think Catastrophea ever really grapples with that, since the Doctor’s involvement is entirely involuntary and, at every crunch point, he’s at best asking people to be nice to each other. You could argue these events would generally have happened without him. The psychic business at least allows a revolution to come, and explains why one hasn’t come already (as well as helpfully breaking us away from the “nothing we can do about it” line), but the real answer here is that the People got their planet back because they put up a fight for it. No one really has to make any hard choices, which is a slightly disappointing end to that promising starting point. All told, I’m not sure the story says anything about occupations that isn’t readily apparent.

It all trundles along with the usual easy reading pace of Terrance Dicks. It’s nice to see the Draconians again, although I think it’s a stretch to put one on the front cover. (Based on that I thought we might get a story that really delves into their culture for once, but alas.) Pertwee’s Doctor is very well captured — we should expect nothing less from his script editor — although I sometimes wondered at his outlook in this. What Catastrophea generally aims for is laudable enough, and it’s as nicely digestible as anything else by Dicks, apart from an awkward contrast between its general children’s adventure tone and some blunt swearing. As a story it takes a few too many shortcuts to really achieve anything, but I suppose it’s no catastrophe. Uh.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #22 – Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#11
Dreamstone Moon
By Paul Leonard

Hey everyone, Sam’s back! I hope she’s refreshed from her *checks notes* one book away.

Not that the timing matters, as her absence wasn’t the point of the exercise.* (Anyway, it’s all relative. If like me you’ve also clocked up two Past Doctor Adventures and a book of short stories in that time, then she’s been gone a little while.) Steve Cole was unhappy with the writing for Sam and he wanted a clearing of the decks. So, no pressure, let’s get it right this time.

Paul Leonard is a good choice for her first book back. Genocide already did a good job of putting Sam and her views into context, and it gave her a not insignificant amount of trauma to deal with at the end, causing the death of a Tractite. Leonard and Sam are on similar wavelengths in Dreamstone Moon, questioning her values and putting her through the wringer throughout.

We pick up immediately after Longest Day, as she requires rescuing from the Kusk ship she had been “helpfully” bundled onto. (I hope we see Anstaar again just so Sam, or the Doctor, or both can go “what the HELL, Anstaar?”) She meets some people on their way to a Dreamstone mine: Daniel, a career miner, and Aloisse, an alien very much against the mining.

Right away we can see another thing Paul Leonard is very good (possibly the best?) at: writing aliens. All the non-humans in this are memorable and have ways of communicating that are unique and often subtle. Aloisse is a Krakenite (a human bastardisation of their name), a sort of large tentacled tube with one big eye and a beak. Despite her left-field appearance she is a thoughtful presence, and as a character she is far more defined by her choices and her views than her lack of digits. You don’t need to look far to see other examples of this. Anton, a central human character, has a girlfriend who’s a Besiddian/large anthropomorphic cat, but her emotions and bankroll are more important than her tail. Anton, seeking answers in a very lowdown part of the city, encounters a dubious fellow who is a Zmm-Zmm/bipedal form of fly. They fight and the Zmm-Zmm is killed, a fact that haunts Anton because well, it’s murder, and when later on he briefly contemplates that the victim “was only a Zmm-Zmm … Not a real person,” he is rightly horrified because “He hadn’t thought he was like that.” Consideration for the rights of the unlike runs throughout Dreamstone Moon, and is easily one of its strongest ideas. (Although it has some pitfalls which we’ll come back to.)

Sam is not immune from this. Based on her appearance, she initially assumes that Aloisse means her harm, when in fact she’s saving Sam’s life. Later, having apologised for this, when she sees dangerous creatures underground she thinks they might be related to Aloisse because they look similar. It’s significant that the initial correction doesn’t stop Sam getting it wrong again — and she makes other mistakes, such as dropping a pretty serious cultural faux pas against a couple of Arachnons/very large spiders, then frantically rushing back to apologise when she realises her mistake. People ain’t perfect.

This is very much Sam’s ethos in Dreamstone Moon. She doesn’t know what to do next — she can’t go home, her best friend is (as far she knows) dead, so what else is there? These are canny questions if you want to redefine the character. Immediately presented with two sides of a situation, she tries to make the right call. Does she support the miners, who are just doing their jobs and are clearly in danger? Or does she go with Aloisse to protest against the Dreamstone company? The latter seems like the obvious choice, but she interrogates it anyway: do the protesters know what they’re doing? Could they be exacerbating things, or even fabricating them? Even if it’s for a good cause, that’s not a positive. At a funeral for some dead protesters she has already come to know as friends, Sam is appalled when the eulogies take the form of ecological grandstanding. But then again, maybe that is genuinely what they would have wanted? (Forgive the drive-by, but all of this is so much more thoughtful than the approach to eco-activism we saw in Kursaal. They need to be better at this sort of thing, since it is obviously critical to Sam as a character.)

Whilst trying to make sense of things, she naturally falls into a Doctor/companion rhythm with those around her. Aloisse, for all Sam’s misunderstandings, is worldly and charming, and even behaves “like the Doctor … She doesn’t know that’s true — she just thinks it might be. And all of us will panic less if we don’t think we’re being bombed, so she presents it as the truth.” Sam seems a little in awe of her. (And perhaps there’s some guilt in there because she left the Doctor.) Later, separated from Aloisse, she finds herself with a journalist (Madge) under her wing, and promptly takes on a heroic role. This has dreadful consequences, but before long she’s in the same role with a clearly out-of-it Anton, and is much more careful this time. It might be tempting to view these dynamics as an obvious go-to in the Doctor’s absence, but I think they make sense for a suddenly isolated companion, especially such a young one. She gets to look at both sides of a lot of things here, and apply a learning curve as she goes.

Sam’s arc is perhaps the strongest thing in Dreamstone Moon, which is good since I think that’s what most readers are here for. (Certainly it’s what Steve Cole had his money on.) Hot on the heels of this is the reunion with the Doctor, but circumstance (aka the plan for the next book) means that it’s not going to happen here. Dreamstone Moon gets tantalisingly close, no doubt because, as per the Pieces Of Eighth pod, that was originally the plan: the Doctor, following Sam, ends up investigating the same thing; they see each other, a dangerous attack separates them again, and then despite heading for the same location at the end Sam is hauled away from him sight unseen. I didn’t know this going in (although as the page count rose it did seem less and less likely that they were going to sail off together this week), and it’s a bit disappointing to tantalise only to then drag it out like that. Especially when the previous EDA, by complete coincidence, also teased and then welshed on a significant reunion. (The Doctor and Susan.) It can’t be helped, but it does leave Dreamstone Moon feeling a bit surplus to requirements.

Still, none of this is what a casual reader is here for. What about the plot, and what are those dreamstones I mentioned? Well, Anton is a professional dreamer. He records and sells his dreams. Much to his chagrin, the Dreamstone company offers alien rocks that will supply endless dreams without all the work. The good news (that’s debatable) is that some are faulty and provide bad, even dangerous dreams. Anton finds himself on a mission to buy up dreamstones, then trace their origin, in the hopes of exposing the company.

This is all quite intriguing but, sadly, the execution is lacking. You would think for all this fuss about dreams we’d see a bunch of them, wouldn’t you? But no, despite a few abstract sit-bolt-upright-screaming reactions from people the actual dreams are treated as a transaction; society at large might as well be addicted to Pogs. I’ve no idea what’s so incredible about Anton’s dreams that’s so popular — it’s not like he meets any satisfied customers armed with feedback. The only people we encounter who even use dreamstones are the ones using a shady drug-den analog to have deliberately bad dreams, screaming all the while, so they’re not representative. The whole plot is predicated on dreams and these ubiquitous bloody dreamstones, but the world-building — very unusually for Leonard — doesn’t strengthen the point, so I was never heavily invested in it.

The nuts-and-bolts action of the story isn’t very interesting either. The moon of the title is having mysterious earthquakes, so the intergalactic Earth military are on site to help. (Or so they say.) Sam is off investigating/pitching in with the protesters, until she falls into danger alongside them. (She falls into danger pretty constantly, which you would think would be exciting, but honestly “Sam is running out of air!” loses some of its shine the third or fourth time around.) The Doctor, hot on her trail and finally getting a search result, assumes she’s safe enough where she is (?!?) and focuses on investigating too. Only he’s totally unable to convince the local figurehead because she, and the entire military, is massively speciesist.

This is another, critical aspect that isn’t underpinned enough by world-building. Yes, I can believe that a traumatised Earth would respond to Dalek invasion with a mistrust of the unlike. And it certainly feeds Leonard’s theme of the importance of respecting other cultures. But the sheer vehemence of, say, Captain Cleomides is necessary to drive the plot, so it ought to be fleshed out and supported. She outright refuses to believe the Doctor when he tries to help, and is even willing to execute him no questions asked just for trying, all because he is non-human. This is a barrier he doesn’t normally face, so it is worth examining to some degree. But there’s seemingly no time for him to reflect on the unusual reception or even offer much of a counter-argument. (Although I’m sure it would do no good.)

Later, possibly as a last minute tweak from Leonard to hold off that reunion, Cleomides – having softened to him a little – suddenly abandons the Doctor to a likely death in order to force an escape with Daniel and Sam. The Doctor makes repeated reference to his belief that she is not an evil person, but as to what she is, there isn’t enough material to get into it. Her actions speak to someone who is broadly terrible but might be reachable... but isn’t when it counts here, so never mind then? (Unless we’re going to see her again and develop this further, but that seems unlikely.) Certainly the rest of her lot, her maniacal boss and her psychotic underlings, come across as simple rotten eggs whom we can dismiss. The whole thing feels a bit left-field and surface level, despite fitting the theme, or perhaps even because of it, since the rest of society that we see in Dreamstone Moon seems pretty damn enlightened about all this. Are the military the only people traumatised by Daleks?

At the centre of all this are the dreamstones, and Leonard’s conclusion here is not one of his best. The Doctor, at least, enjoys some of that Sam-esque pondering about what to do next (which puts them marvellously on the same wavelength): he assumes the dreamstones are alive and lashing out at the miners and dreamstone users deliberately. He is wrong. (The use of illusions to trick soldiers and spaceships into friendly fire is a really neat idea by the way that, once again, doesn’t quite do the homework. It’s something we’re aware of and briefly see happen but it never feels like a primary concern.) What’s actually happening is more instinctual: the planet/moon are “alive” but as to the actual images, those are being generated by a single dreamstone user with, unwittingly, too much influence. This concept is articulated a bit too late for me to really get hold of it, and the preceding lack of definition with dreams and dreamstones makes it difficult to care about what this all means beyond a surface level “killing a living thing is wrong”. I think perhaps the concept of a living planet/living rocks is an alien too far even for Paul Leonard. Certainly the whole thing is packed away too quickly at the end — it’s hard to imagine that being due to the last minute reunion-nixing, and harder still to believe that these somewhat two-dimensional space racists will let it lie.

Dreamstone Moon has a lot on its mind. (And let’s be fair, a lot in the brief.) I think some of it really works. Leonard’s consistent strength is his view on unusual forms of life, and this is (mostly) another strong example of that. Sam is in an interesting place, questioning her role in her travels. Her feelings for the Doctor are unresolved — and definitely still there, by the way — and by the end she’s even uncertain about whether she can travel with him again. Exciting times, despite the enforced annoyance of the To Be Continued.

On the flip-side, the Doctor is not as well served, being mainly on the receiving end of some slightly hysterical prejudice throughout, but also quite frankly not trying that hard to see Sam again, even (in the end) toying with the idea that maybe she doesn’t want him back. All of which I am hoping Blum and Orman put to good use in the next book (I’m sure they will), but it highlights that The Sam Problem was never all about Sam. What’s the Doctor’s investment, beyond what he has with every companion? I don’t think that’s ever been clear, to the books’ detriment — there are times when he might as well be looking after a favourite ornament — and Dreamstone Moon doesn’t move the needle much. I hope subsequent authors give it some thought.

There are great ideas but, as so often happens, they’re not quite in focus. I can imagine a version of this that went off a bit more around dreams, illusions and the conflict of a day to day world filled with life vs a military that doesn’t recognise aliens. But that’s not Dreamstone Moon, which just sort of tells us that stuff instead as it plods through various tunnel collapses. Some of the problem is the lack of catharsis, which isn’t on Paul Leonard, but then some of the author’s strengths are absolutely on display, so it’s not a total loss.

6/10

*All the same, I did imagine the arc that could have been, with a few more Sam-less or even Doctor-less novels gradually drawing them together again. Hey ho.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #21 – The Hollow Men by Keith Topping and Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#10
The Hollow Men
By Keith Topping & Martin Day

This one caught me off guard.

The ingredients are all fairly typical. You’ve got a creepy village with some even creepier scarecrows, some none-too-wholesome villagers in between. All very “British horror movie”, with an eventual link to a Classic Who story to calm the fans. But The Hollow Men feels more rounded than the jolly genre exercise I expected. It is also, for the people excited by the mere mention of horror, a good deal nastier.

The Doctor has been intrigued by Hexen Bridge for some time. This is a mild retcon, but it wouldn’t be the first time this particular Doctor has revealed a body-hopping interest in a place or a thing. Besides, I like the idea that we’re not privy to all of his adventures, and the suggestion that he’s been intrigued by a town very near Devil’s End ever since Jon Pertwee’s Favourite Story (TM), but has been unable to put his finger on exactly why, puts him at a curious disadvantage.

That wrong-footed feeling stays with the Doctor for most of The Hollow Men, despite his efforts. And we see some of them, such as his visits to the town throughout its history. He was on the school board some years ago, in a couple of different guises it seems, and several of the villagers remember him to some degree. This is a level of familiarity you don’t normally see around the Doctor — especially this Doctor — and there’s a vulnerability in that, because the people who remember him are not as awed by him as newcomers tend to be.

Well, he’s waited long enough, and it’s time for answers. But before he can get any he comes across some particularly nefarious locals (one of whom knew him at school) and they bundle him into a car and off to Liverpool for seeing too much. Again, you sort of expect the Seventh Doctor to wheedle his way out of something like this — it’s a car full of normal people, for goodness sake! — and there might be something to be said here about misreading the character. But I think he’s deliberately written out of sorts. He’s confused by the behaviour of these townspeople he sort of, kinda likes. He’s not one step ahead of what’s happening in Hexen Bridge. Why shouldn’t that mess up his routine?

(Just to be clear, I know this was originally intended as an Eighth Doctor novel, so some of that behaviour probably wasn’t meant to juxtapose against the great chess player of Doctor Who. But it’s his book now, and I think it juxtaposes nicely, so if you don’t mind I’ll behave like all humans according to the Eighth Doctor and see patterns that aren’t there.)

Something is definitely iffy about Hexen Bridge, and some of it is just the sort of thing you’d expect. We open with a horrific flashback to not long after the Civil War, with a mad judge executing all the men in the village — clearly a precursor to some very bad things. Later there are glimpses of nightmarish rituals involving people in hoods (well obviously, you gotta have hoods) and what about all those scarecrows hanging about? But there’s an atmosphere here that goes beyond all that. The people aren’t quite right.

A good example of this is Rebecca, a schoolteacher and daughter of the local vicar, whom Ace quickly befriends. Rebecca stands up for the younger girl against the fairly awful pub landlord, and you can tell they’ve hit it off. But when looking at the creepily identical handwriting of some local kids, Ace notices Rebecca’s is just the same. Later, she turns out to be sleeping with the extremely toxic Matthew Hatch, a young politician of some standing with grand evil plans just out of sight. (Think Roger ap William in 73 Yards.) How much a part of Hexen Bridge is she?

That’s a question asked throughout the book, and of course, there’s no easy answer, as the people seem to go back and forth. Something is poisoning the villagers’ minds and ensuring their cooperation. (It is also ensuring a degree of population control — see, rituals and hoods.) This manifests locally in a level of mistrust and violence, mostly aimed at strangers. The Chens moved here to open a restaurant, and the local publican keeps making racist attacks against them. To be fair (well, not fair, he’s a racist) his wife is sleeping with one of them. But even his relationship with his wife seems on-again-off-again, love-hate in a way that’s not quite right, even with the infidelity. Why does she stay with him? How much does she want Steven Chen? Is that Hexen Bridge, or are some people just a bit inexplicable?

Further afield, this strangeness manifests in the schemes of Matthew Hatch, as well as the crimes of his less charming classmate Shanks. It’s mainly these crimes that ensnare the Doctor, forcing him to enter a club strapped with explosives so he’ll plant drugs on an unsuspecting policeman’s daughter, or else. (I expected a clever bit of sleight of hand would get him out of this, but although he does use his smarts while his captors aren’t looking, it doesn’t work. This results in a grimly funny moment where he tries to defuse the bomb by remembering what Ace has taught him about explosives, which is another unexpected moment of vulnerability, him needing her like that.) This whole Liverpool section seems an unusual fit at first, and maybe it is, but the earthy violence of it and the general atmosphere of crime and urban horror — not to mention the laboratory revulsion of Hatch’s plans — made me strangely nostalgic for the New Adventures, so I didn’t mind.

Back in the village, Ace is exercising her social justice muscles to defend the Chens. This is all very Ace, although it amuses me that it was presumably almost Sam. (I think Ace is her closest on-screen equivalent, and likely a major inspiration, hence a certain ease in swapping them out.) There’s a certain I-don’t-give-a-damn experience to Ace in this, which makes sense after the fairly traumatic TV stories set before this one. She seems indomitable in a way many companions aren’t in the absence of the Doctor, even sort of deputising Steven Chen as a companion for a bit. She seems to win people over in that Doctor-y way. Ace does some investigating in his absence — she knows him well enough not to panic when he seems to have just wandered off — and she gets to more closely observe the scarecrows. Lucky her, eh?

It’s surprising really that there aren’t more creepy scarecrows in Doctor Who. The ones in The Hollow Men are nightmarish indeed, being (spoiler?) converted villagers, slaves to the force underneath Hexen Bridge. Like a lot of great monsters there is a sadness to them, as they seem at least dimly aware of what they used to be. Topping and Day don’t make a very big thing of them, despite what the front cover suggests. (Never bet on the front cover.) This sort of heightens the horror when they do appear, and keeps them from feeling overplayed. Besides, the real horror of The Hollow Men is the effect the town has on its people. It’s predominantly not a “monster” story. (Good. I thought the weakest part of The Devil Goblins From Neptune was the goblins. Maybe the authors felt the same way and deliberately shifted the focus away from the monsters? Or maybe not. You know humans, patterns and all that.)

When the violence really kicks off, which it does increasingly through the second half and then like mad near the end, it’s horribly indiscriminate. Some quite nice people end up dying, and at least one certified bastard doesn’t. This seems to speak to the authors’ interest in the murkiness of people, which is also enhanced by the relative absence of aliens and monsters.

The finale is another thing that (probably by accident) made me nostalgic for the New Adventures, since it is (forgive me) all a bit metaphysical and weird. The Doctor confronts the malevolent force in a strange representation of Hexen Bridge found through a mirror, while in the real world scarecrows battle other supernatural manifestations for the souls of the villagers, who are themselves going mad with random violence. (RTD voice: “Marvellous!” Seriously, if you told me this one was written five years earlier I wouldn’t blink.) But it ends on a genuinely sombre note, even apart from the locals living in the wake of chaos, as we see that the Doctor still doesn’t understand these people. It’s not that he was outplayed by a master chess player — the alien intelligence isn’t that intelligent. It’s just that too many humans can make things harder to predict. (Possibly. That’s my reading anyway. Patterns etc.)

For me it’s a good sign to finish a book and still want to turn it over in my mind. The nature of villainy and the apparent difficulty the Doctor faces made The Hollow Men an interesting experience. If I can climb over the (imagined?) 90s-ness of it that I so enjoyed, however, it is a bit messy. Pulling the action apart across the country feels a smidge random, and the finale (for all its earned, “here’s what you paid to see” excess) does go on a bit. The characters are also a bit thin, but maybe that’s a deliberate thing and they’re supposed to be a bit weird and unknowable? It’s a story with unease hanging in the air, even when it’s just me wondering how many people in Hexen Bridge know the Doctor in a dull way like as an old half-forgotten teacher (because how weird is that), so even when it doesn’t entirely work I still want to look at it and wonder what that’s about. Before running away, obviously, from those bloody scarecrows.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #20 – Legacy Of The Daleks by John Peel

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#10
Legacy Of The Daleks
By John Peel

So. Daleks again.

That’s nice, obviously, and we are lucky to have got two novels featuring the most famous monsters in Doctor Who.

But… gratitude aside (and I promise, I’m grateful!) all that they’ve really achieved is to underline how Doctor Who print fiction was, if not better off, at least doing fine without them. Which is also sort of nice, when you think about it?

This is largely thanks to the Nation Estate, whose “punishing terms” (as per Stephen Cole) meant it wasn’t worth doing a lot with them, and meant that the best author for the job was John Peel. That’s not bad news in itself, as he has handled Daleks very well in print: his novelisations are good and his previous novel, War Of The Daleks, at times cleverly underlined the menace of these monsters by limiting their appearances. But Peel’s original fiction tends to be a bit rudderless, the writing set in a sort of grottier Terry Nation style, added to which is a strange need to tick continuity boxes. War Of The Daleks was a case of diminishing returns as the book went along, and sadly Legacy Of The Daleks is not an improvement.

It’s at least a very different setup for a story, which is something I appreciate. Rather than another space-faring adventure we’re checking in on Earth after the Dalek invasion. The Daleks are ostensibly wiped out, which again allows Peel to limit their appearances. (You do begin to wonder if the Nation Estate charges by the page.) The people are rebuilding, albeit slowly, and it’s in this crucible that the story is told. The Doctor receives a distress call from Susan; already on the lookout for Sam, he decides to kill two birds with one stone by visiting Earth.

A couple of nitpicks already with this setup. One: I’m not sure the dates line up for Sam to even be here post-Longest Day — all we’re told is “In Thannos time it had been 3177, so allowing for that…” — and a ravaged, decimated Earth seems like a very messy information point for a galactic search. Two: Susan’s message wasn’t from Earth. He’s deliberately going to see her before she left Earth and sent the message from somewhere else, partly so he can find out more (which, if she hasn’t sent it yet, he probably won’t…?) and partly to stop whatever it was from happening in the first place, reasoning “it would be tweaking the laws of Time, and he would no doubt get a slap on the wrist the next time he visited Gallifrey. But what did that matter, compared to all of the complaints they undoubtedly had against him already?” Which, I mean, I suppose he might come up with that excuse, but why is he fine with it now but not the many other times he didn’t want to change history, despite it being in his best interest? And of course, changing this would create an immediate and obvious paradox, with him now not needing to go back and change it. The character setup is a bit of a wash to put it mildly — no doubt because Peel wasn’t enamoured with the Where Is Sam? arc — but the rest of the book brushes it off anyway, so never mind, I guess?

Anyway, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth is a fan-favourite for a bunch of reasons, so it’s reasonable to assume this will be an interesting time and place to revisit. What does Earth look like now? The first chapter sets out its stall: a young girl growing up on a farm needs kittens to keep down the rat population, so she follows a friendly, pregnant stray to her hideout. She is soon ambushed by a leftover Slyther — everyone’s favourite rubbish monster on screen, which is luckily more menacing on paper — which is then defeated by a knight on horseback. Immediately we can see that there are some very unusual mixtures going on, almost with different eras combined. And even more offbeat, the knight is a woman named Donna. This is all good stuff, and it’s an effective start, the plucky adventure of Becca (perhaps a nod to one of Terry’s favourite names?) setting a likeable template.

The drop-off happens almost immediately. We don’t see Becca again for most of the book, following Donna instead. She’s a perpetually angry character, for good reason at least, and most of her dialogue is her lamely snapping at people. Besides her we follow the power struggles of Lord Haldoran. Already in control of one of Britain’s domains, he wants the rest of it courtesy of a defeated Lord London. Haldoran is a nasty piece of work, but not in an interesting way where there are layers to peel back; he’s just a vicious, brutal dictator, and he’s having a splendid time with all of that. (Some sadistic sexual habits are also hinted at for extra yuck points.) His lieutenants are variously terrible as well, with their own internecine squabbles and a general wish to depose Haldoran. When we briefly see Lord London and his lot they don’t seem much better. Haldoran, though, has the added bonus of a special adviser: Estro, a small mysterious man with a pointed beard, sunken eyes, a black suit, powers of hypnosis and a special gun that shrinks people to death. And that’s all the clues you’re getting.

Setting aside for a moment the elephant in the Nehru suit, these people just aren’t interesting. I longed for the relative moral complexity of War Of The Daleks, with its variously trustworthy and untrustworthy Thals. It could be argued that the lack of sympathetic characters in Legacy is a nod to its setting, but if so, it’s a far from perfect translation. The Dalek Invasion Of Earth showed a cross section of humanity. You had good people, but also a deluded resistance leader, some downright unhelpful resistance people, self-serving survivors living on the outskirts as well as outright collaborators. It was a believably fractured response to something as dreadful as a Dalek occupation with (impressively) no rose-tinted Blitz spirit to unite them. Now compare that to Legacy Of The Daleks in which every character is horrible or miserable or both. I just wanted to not be in their company. The incongruity of a future world with knights on horseback is certainly interesting, but it doesn’t get a chance to add anything beyond that, and the post-Dalek Invasion setting quickly stops mattering in a literal sense — we don’t see anything like the Slyther again. Was there really nothing else he could do with that landscape? All we’ve got, until things heat up later on (see: Nehru suit), are power struggles between awful people. They’re not even awful because of Daleks, which is normally the inspiration behind this sort of thing; most of them seem not to remember the pepperpots. They’re just awful because there happens to be a power vacuum, which makes it awkwardly possible to tell this story in places that aren’t specific to this time period. I was increasingly keen for some Daleks to turn up and kill everybody.

Donna is the most likeable one here, and she can generally be found biting the Doctor’s head off. We also have Susan and David, but they’re mostly pootling along in the background, in Susan’s case largely separate from everyone else. Susan at least automatically earns our sympathy because we know her, but she’s also having a worse time than you might have hoped. Her alien metabolism has meant she still looks eighteen while her husband ages normally, which is causing tension in both directions. Also, they can’t conceive. (Peel includes the suggestion that Susan dresses up in ways that capitalise on her young appearance in order to appease David sexually and, you know what John, we’re good, we maybe didn’t need that bit thanks.) Peel, in the Pieces Of Eighth podcast, seemed keen to pursue this doomed relationship as dramatic fodder. But it doesn’t really pay off, since his main insight into what would happen if Susan stayed in a relationship which has fundamental problems is, there would be fundamental problems. Where else is there to go? (He also says the characters “hadn’t thought it through” to begin with, but that seems a bit unfair since Time Lord metabolisms didn’t exist in 1964.)

It’s all a bit grim, but on the plus side there’s a reunion to look forward to. Right? That’s surely a major selling point of bringing her back. But, whether he deliberately chose to avoid the obvious or he just missed a trick, Peel holds back on that for most of the novel, with Susan and the Doctor separately investigating the Dalek artefact Lord Haldoran is after. This has the effect of making the reader go “Oh right, yeah” every time we cut back to Susan, which strikes me as a strange way to utilise her. But not as strange as the punchline: besides a violent crossfire that leaves Susan thinking he’s dead, there is no reunion. The Doctor then makes some very tenuous assumptions about Susan being fine after all and just leaves her to it. Susan, at least, is set up to have the book equivalent of a Big Finish spin-off. I have no idea if any authors ran with that, but given that she spends most of Legacy Of The Daleks either depressed, sneaking around behind a Dalek or being taken hostage, I wouldn’t expect much of a queue to form.

The Doctor isn’t having a great time either. Behaving a little strangely from the outset, viz “let’s change history, why not,” he’s then pre-emptively rude to Donna about her personal life, and nastily dismissive of the state of humanity. (He happens to be right about that one, but only because he has the author on his side.) His attitude to violence wobbles throughout, for instance making the usual “no guns” noises, then at one point tossing Donna a gun during a violent confrontation and then being surprised when she shoots their aggressor with it. Later he threatens Estro at gunpoint, and of course, Daleks are his free pass to just blow up the baddies. (You get the general impression Peel would rather he cut the pacifism and just get on with it.) Between a half-hearted search for Sam and a quickly second-tier quest for Susan he doesn’t have much motivation here besides, coo, them Daleks, eh? What a bunch of rotters! (Humans: got my eye on you. Don’t push your luck.)

Thanks to Estro’s misplaced ambitions the Daleks do eventually turn up. Sorry to spoil, but it’s called (something) Of The Daleks, and we all know how that goes. It did occur to me that you could write a story about their legacy and not actually invoke them, but a) that would probably be seen as a waste of the license and b) what we’ve got instead is utterly pedestrian, so bring ‘em on. The human characters are all flat and unpleasant, and their inner voices aren’t much better: everyone, the Doctor included, has this routine of blandly reciting what they’ve learned and then asking rhetorical questions about it. “But how?” “But why?” Etc. The dialogue is mostly just death threats dressed up with weak sarcasm, but there’s a lot of blunt exposition too, with Becca’s dad, Donna, Estro and even the bloody Daleks cheerfully pausing to explain what the world is like/what their evil plan is, muahaha. (This works well when it’s someone telling a story to lay the groundwork for the book, but then the book keeps doing it. Elegant it is not.) In amongst all that, the Daleks are fine, bordering on forgettable, which seems crazy when they’re such a rarity. They just want to do all the normal Dalek stuff, viz make more Daleks and use them to shoot more humans. Where’s the twist? Stephen Cole seemed keen to get to the heart of what makes them scary, and this book is extremely not that, devoting most if its energies to human infighting instead.

Well, not totally human. Is it a spoiler to say that Estro is the Master? Was Peel even going for a surprise reveal here, given that on Page 13 he has Estro say “You will obey me … I am the master [sic]”? The character is recognisably himself, but rather pettier than usual, ostensibly doing all this Evil Vizier stuff with Haldoran just to pass the time. (“I was forced to wait for the implementation of my main scheme, so I dabbled in local politics in the meantime.”) You might expect his reunion with the Doctor to be as worthwhile as the Doctor meeting Susan again, and these two do at least meet with dialogue and everything, but there’s nothing interesting about it besides the Doctor stage whispering that they’ve actually met out of sequence. Oh, how thrilling.

Between Haldoran, his lackeys, Donna, the Doctor and Susan it’s a somewhat cluttered book, and that’s before you bring in the Master. (And that’s before you bring in the Daleks.) You do sort of assume there will be a point to Ol’ Pointy Beard in this. So, about that: you know how the generally agreed upon worst bit of War Of The Daleks was the chapter tying together all the 70s and 80s Dalek stories into one big conspiracy theory? Well Peel’s back, baby, and he’s got a box to tick. Escaping with the Daleks’ secret weapon and a hostage (Susan), the Master goes to Terserus to try it out. But he underestimates his furious captive, who attacks him psychically and then shoots him and his Dalek weapon, scarring him horribly. Yes, we’re really doing “How did the Master end up scarred in The Deadly Assassin” at the end of a story about Daleks and the future of Susan. To call it a gratuitous add-on would be a whimsical understatement. (Yes, this sequence gives Susan something like an empowering end to her story. But what a shame that violence against a person she doesn’t know was the answer, and what a random piece of continuity to get out of mothballs to do it. The whole sequence just doesn’t speak to Susan at all.) 

There are good ideas in here. Well, okay, there are germs. Earth post-Dalek Invasion could be interesting. What Susan Did Next could be interesting. What Would Susan And The Doctor Say To Each Other could be interesting. At every turn, though, Legacy Of The Daleks either advances its ideas one faltering step or it just doesn’t do them at all. This was to be the last Dalek novel of the range, but if they were to continue being delivered by the grace of the Nation Estate’s ever tightening monkey’s paw — and by all accounts, they would have been — then that’s probably for the best.

4/10