Doctor Who: The BBC Books #32 – The Janus Conjunction by Tevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#16
The Janus Conjunction
By Trevor Baxendale

There’s nothing like a new author to shake things up a bit. Here comes Trevor Baxendale with a story about human factions fighting over an abandoned alien artefact that doubles as a doomsday weapon and… actually, are we sure this is a new guy?

Certain tropes are bound to spring up in a long running series — especially one based on a long running series! — and the BBC Books run seems to have a few of its own by now. We’ve already had severely narky groups fighting over a dangerous alien thing in Longest Day and Vanderdeken’s Children. Alien ruins appeared and were utilised in both of those, as well as Alien Bodies, Kursaal, Option Lock, Seeing I, Legacy Of The Daleks and Last Man Running. (Probably others too.) It’s starting to look like a default setting: want to do SF? Have humans abusing, or wanting to abuse old alien tat for their own evil aims. Just add TARDIS.

This is pretty reductive, of course. It would be silly to put down books like Alien Bodies or Seeing I just for including familiar ideas. As I seem to say quite a lot, it’s what you do with your ideas that counts. And The Janus Conjunction… well… it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel there. But I think it does This Sort Of Thing better than most recent attempts. And I think there’s genuine merit in that.

Right away we’re plunged into a warzone on the eerie world we can see on the cover: permanently eclipsed, with strange blue luminescent sand for lighting, this is Janus Prime. Soldiers in sealed suits are attacking a few visitors from Menda. What their actual beef is, we don’t yet know, but it’s an exciting start that introduces enormous cybernetic “spidroids” and ends with a very well timed wheezing and groaning. The Doctor and Sam instantly fall in with the Mendans, but are then separated by the Link — a mysterious gateway to the sister planet on the other side of their dying star. The Doctor is now on Menda. Sam is now in trouble.

The longer Sam is on Janus Prime, the greater the risk of (spectacularly!) fatal radiation poisoning. But the occupying military figures are not sympathetic types. The Doctor, meanwhile, has to talk the more peaceful (but just as stubborn) Mendans into letting him rescue his friend — as well as stopping whatever it is the maniacal Zemler is up to over on the dark planet, which has something to do with the Link.

It’s worth mentioning here that they’re all human. In a bit of continuity that for once actually puts old stories to work in a way that inspires new ones, we learn that following the Dalek occupation humans made some scrappy efforts to visit the stars. One of those was to set up a colony on the fairly remote Menda. They were escorted by mercenaries led by Zemler, a disgraced military figure who wanted to stay busy. On arrival/crash landing, when it became apparent the mercs couldn’t go home, the mood turned sour. Following the discovery of a strange portal to the neighbouring Janus Prime, Zemler and co found a new lease of life — somewhere to go, a planet to conquer — however this turned out to be an irradiated dump and returning to Menda after too much exposure meant instant death. Worse, the Link couldn’t be used to get them back to Earth. The end result was a pack of mercenaries who hate Menda, and a mysterious Link sitting between them in Chekhov’s Gun fashion.

There’s not a lot of varied motivation here. The Mendans like their planet and Zemler’s troops are mad about stuff. I think, putting on a somewhat charitable hat, there’s a unifying idea here about people trying to make their way and struggling to deal with the consequences of that: the Mendans want a colony, Zemler wants to maintain a kind of career after disastrous crossfire ended his time in the military. With the added continuity (which I like in this case!) it does sort of loosely become a story about What Mankind Did Next, and the different impulses that might drive that — wanting the best for everyone vs wanting the best for yourself. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it the book’s theme — to the extent that it is, it must be a fairly late addition, Zemler’s gang having been aliens in early drafts — but it gives you something extra to latch onto if you want.

Because… yeah. The characters aren’t terribly interesting otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had worse, and I think they all function pretty well within their limits, but there are limits. Julya wants her colony to thrive and she sort of likes Lunder. Lunder is an ex-mercenary who grew a conscience, so he has history with Zemler/a tension with the mostly peaceful colonists, and he sort of likes Julya too. His loyalties don’t wobble as much as you might expect. (A moment where he openly talks a character into self-sacrifice rather than do it himself makes rational sense, but it’s still pretty mean and goes completely unexamined by the Doctor.) Of the rest of the colonists, few register at all, and Menda is pleasant but dull as a rock — basically your average somewhat old-timey Star Trek outpost. An odd thing to get killed over.

The mercenaries are pretty much going along with their mad boss because they’re all dying anyway and it’s something to do. (When one of them switches sides it happens between scenes, so we skip the actual interesting bit.) Zemler is an absolute Emperor Zurg-level bad guy, sitting in an evil lair stroking a pet. He seems openly resistant to any rational reason for what he’s doing, starting off generally annoyed and sinking into megalomania from there. When the story finally starts playing around with the doomsday device, however, with all the technobabble that creates, it’s sort of nice that the stakes are so clear. One guy hates everyone so much that he’ll destroy everything. Okay, that’s a very quantifiable problem if nothing else.

Again with the charitable hat: I don’t think it’s that hard to empathise with these different groups. The Mendans have a nice home, of course it makes sense to protect it. The mercenaries are dying, and dying horribly, so it makes an awful kind of sense that they’d want to lash out, and otherwise have no better ideas than just “whatever the boss says”. Baxendale underscores the point by putting a lot of effort into the horrors of radiation, bodies rotting until they die at which point they instantly liquify. You’re always horribly aware of what’s happening to them, or what’s going to.

I think he just about pulls back from revelling in it, with the cost of it weighing on Sam for a lot of the book. She really puts her principles to the test here, hanging out on Janus Prime (at certain points, voluntarily) and putting herself at risk to help others. She suffers greatly for all of that, getting visibly sicker until she actually dies — a spoileriffic thing to blurt out, I know, but it’s also a thing that is resolved within 5 pages in a way that Sam won’t notice and the Doctor didn’t either, which I think makes it okay to mention here and perhaps makes it a contender for the all time Damp Squib Awards. (I wonder if that brush with/actual encounter with death will somehow come into play at a later date. I suspect that, like her possession and unwitting crimes in Kursaal, it won’t.)

There’s some pretty good interrogation of Sam’s stance on guns (Genocide still casting a shadow it seems), with the awkward bonus that her attempt to create a distraction ends up taking alien lives. She never actively finds out about this, although I very much enjoyed the subtle suggestion that the Doctor tells her via a psychic bond. (“The explosions had stopped the moment the Doctor found out it was Sam using the ripgun.”) Perhaps it’s fair to spread the bad feelings about; the violence here, after all, emboldens the Doctor’s characterisation. He gets to display not only a literal, mental link with the spider creatures/Janusians, but he empathises strongly when they are killed, more so than anyone else around — and he rages when it’s done deliberately by Lunder.

The Doctor here is as dead-on as he gets, a whirlwind of charm that can turn instantly to serious consideration instead. He confronts Zemler fearlessly (albeit perhaps foolishly) and his distress at realising Sam has unwittingly taken lives is as palpable as when he realises just how ill she has become. He displays a pleasing amount of cheekiness as well, at one point using the TARDIS’s temporal orbit to sort out a problem without advancing the overall ticking clock (he should do that every week!) and at the end steering himself and Sam away from a party because “I’ve seen the future and we don’t go.”

The best thing about The Janus Conjunction is the pace. It doesn’t let up, leading to a highly readable story that only looks as if it’s dragging its feet near the very end. The constant and very visible threat of radiation, plus the equally constant, equally visible moon and sands of Janus Prime (and the danger they represent) propels the thing along even though it is, in all honesty, a meat and potatoes Doctor Who story, and a familiar one at that. The writing for the regulars is excellent; the writing for everyone else is good enough. I doubt it’s anyone’s favourite, and I’m very ready to move on from alien wreckages and doomsday machines, but it’s a very solid bit of work.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #31 – Last Man Running by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#15
Last Man Running
By Chris Boucher

I was excited to read this one for a couple of (pretty obvious) reasons.

More Leela is always a good thing. After being criminally ignored in the Missing Adventures she crops up fairly often in BBC Books, shaking things up with her unique perspective and the equally offbeat Doctor/companion relationship that surrounds her. Here she is in her second book already. Marvellous.

And who should be the writer this time but Chris Boucher — originator of Leela. What a coup! He’s written several celebrated Doctor Who scripts and was the power behind much of Blake’s 7. Even when he swings and misses, which happened on both shows, it tends to be at least interesting.

The premise isn’t bad. The Doctor and Leela arrive on a strangely ersatz world that looks deserted, apart from a couple of predators very keen on killing anything that moves, and a team of people on the hunt for a fugitive. There’s shades of The Android Invasion (a place with no wildlife where even the plant life isn’t real), with the exciting addition of everything that is there wanting to kill you. The whole fugitive thing seems promising too — how dangerous is the fugitive? And how trustworthy are the people hunting them? Good ideas here.

I’m highlighting this early sense of promise because in execution these ideas fall completely flat.

The world they’re on has shades of interest about it — particularly good are the random different climates, such as jungle suddenly segueing into forest, but nothing is really done with that besides creating a general sense of oddity when it happens to come up. It’s the sort of thing that might work better in a visual medium where the differences can be more apparent than saying “these trees aren’t like those trees”. (You could probably make the prose dig into what makes it like a forest vs what makes it like a jungle, but we generally don’t.) The same goes for the general lack of wildlife and activity — it worked for The Android Invasion because you could draw our attention to it with production values, but in a novel if you say “forest” or “jungle” I’m already relying on my imagination for birds or cicadas to be busying away, so their implied absence is somewhat abstract. (Given that it eventually turns out the planet is a sort of weapons training facility, where things hunting you is the whole point, you might think a bit of background hubbub would be useful. What’s the point training in conditions that you won’t find anywhere else?)

The setting is unfortunately the least of our problems. For about half the page count Last Man Running is a survival drama, aka an action movie. Sounds exciting, right? Making it a Leela story tips the balance, presumably making it more exciting, like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando: you almost feel bad for anybody getting in his way but it’s fun to watch it play out. Here, not so much. Leela is a match for the various snakes and multi-legged worms and flying things and underwater things and random-bipeds-with-sticks on this planet, and that’s never really in question. So far, so Arnie, but the individual threats are all animals (apart from the bipeds who might as well be), so there’s no outwitting, no sense of foiling something insidious, just the hard graft of chasing and killing things before they kill the Doctor or somebody else. This can take pages at a time to pull off, and then it’s just happening one time after another. Critically, no story is progressing between these attacks — we’re just rummaging around to find another thing she can disembowel. It’s monotonous action in search of a story.

It’s easy to forget that there are other characters since Leela for sure is the biggest moving part. It doesn’t help though that the supporting characters aren’t doing anything of significance. They’re here to find a fugitive, but they aren’t really looking for him; their main preoccupation is finding their ship (which has vanished) and then not getting killed. They mostly just bicker, or in one case flirt, and also their leader has some neuroses about not being good enough and not having a good enough team. In general they’re a deeply unlikeable bunch and — since their leader brought it up — they’re pretty bad at this, actually, so it’s hard to be invested in their success or survival. When one of them stupidly gets himself ensnared by a giant amphibian, you do sort of want it to hurry up and eat him.

The team are all from a species (human, human-ish?) with a number of odd tics. These all hint at world-building, which could be interesting, but none of it really is; it’s just added detail. They call each other “firsters” or “toodies” depending on if they were settled on their first or second planet; they have a thing about weight, with “skinny” being derogatory, so most of them are rather portly; they observe an odd naming convention where the first syllable is its own separate thing, which means they think the Doctor’s first name is “The” for almost the whole book even though they are all well aware of, and correctly use the word “the”; and they have a religious fascination with Shakespeare, but appear not to know who he is, which seems redundant but perhaps hand-waves towards the sheer age of their society. It might be worth remembering the Sevateem and the Tesh in Boucher’s The Face Of Evil, as their names and terminology changed over generations. I’d also point to The Robots Of Death, which contained another bunch of unlikeable drips as the supporting cast. In their case, though, being in an Agatha Christie pastiche, we were invited to wait for the next body to drop. Here we just have a bunch of pompous twerps stumbling into death traps to keep Leela busy. They disappear for a significant chunk near the end, perhaps to see if we’d even notice.

Around the two thirds mark the story shifts underground to the lair of the fugitive/runner of the title (although “last man running” coincidentally refers to something else here). It’s good to finally put a face to the name, so to speak; the Fourth Doctor is at his best when he has someone to run rings around, and this band of hopeless fugitive-hunters don’t cut it. (Incidentally, why he insists on humouring them with the “The” name and lies about his and Leela’s origins, I don’t know. Why should he care how they react to the truth? This Doctor especially. Very odd.) The fugitive is, unfortunately, not a fascinating guy either, and also seems rather a pipsqueak against this Doctor. It’s not really clear what his skills are — he’s a “weapons tech” but since he’s stumbled on the greatest and most intuitive weapons facility ever, he doesn’t really have to work for it. His plan has somewhat far reaching consequences for his people, but our brief forays into their society (hanging out with that useless gang notwithstanding) don’t give us much of a reason to care how that turns out. A major figure in this world is called Dikero Drew, “known to his subordinates as Skinny-dick,” which is just one example of this civilisation’s ehhh-inducing teenage sense of humour. Go to war, guys, seriously. I’m not bothered.

The underground section is suitably trippy, as people see other versions of themselves and wander along corridors to nowhere. It’s here that the book more directly starts to say something about Leela, as it becomes apparent that the fugitive’s plan hinges on her fighting skills. By the book’s end it’s clear that this was meant to be a learning, softening experience for her, but I didn’t really see that. Granted, I was very bored for a lot of it — corridors are corridors, never mind how weird they are — but Last Man Running mostly seems to reinforce Leela’s killer instincts, or just present them. Leela’s hall of mirrors sequence ought to thrum with meaning for her, but in practice it just feels like some more action.

It’s a phenomenon among Chris Boucher’s scripts that sometimes I just don’t see what he’s getting at, and Leela’s character arc in Last Man Running is probably another example. The writing is pretty good for her — you would expect nothing less, let’s face it — with plenty of that simple and direct thought process unique to her character. The Doctor fares less well, his actions (such as abandoning Leela to the TARDIS at the start) not always making sense. He has a real propensity here for philosophical meandering which eclipses his usual wit. (Though again, it’s hard to be witty with morons.) The story mainly being here to reinforce how indispensable Leela is, or so I’m guessing, it often leaves the Doctor up a figurative (and at one point literal) tree awaiting rescue. All a bit unfortunate, really, but I liked the bit about his dress sense being an apparently sincere effort to seem more normal.

It’s a frustrating read. Mainly a tedious one, yes, wading through chunks of Leela-fights-monsters this and idiots-flirt-or-complain-at-each-other that in search of a plot, but you get whiffs of something bigger and better. A mysterious world that can make anything — a memorial to a dead race. (So we find out in an egregious and late info-dump from the Doctor.) A society that has this peculiar relationship with Shakespeare. Leela, not just fighting lots but growing because of it. Could work, probably? Whether the perfect redraft just for some reason never happened, or whether he’s just more comfortable with scripts than novels, the end result is a clanging miss from Boucher. We’ll be seeing more from him and Leela later. I hope the next one’s better.

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #30 – The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#15
The Scarlet Empress
By Paul Magrs

Magrs attacks! After popping up in the first Short Trips collection, Paul Magrs — already a seasoned author — makes a splashier landing in The Scarlet Empress. It’s his first Doctor Who book of many.

You know his style when you see it. Imagination, colour, sheer abandon and a good degree of camp are never far away. He also has a fondness for shaggy dog stories, evidenced in the later audio series Hornets’ Nest (where the Fourth Doctor tells Mike Yates one yarn after another), but also back here in The Scarlet Empress, which owes some of its inspiration to Arabian Nights.

The Doctor and Sam are already running for their lives on the eccentric planet Hyspero when they encounter rambunctious lady Time Lord Iris Wildthyme; she’s on a quest which scoops them up as well. They must find and reunite the four members of a mercenary team and bring them to the Empress of the title. And… that’s sort of it for the overall plot, though there’s plenty of other stuff happening along the way.

You can tell Magrs is excited to explore every avenue — he said on Pieces Of Eighth that he put everything in here in case this proved to be his only go at it — from the fluid way The Scarlet Empress moves from one set piece to another. There’s a bus crash that leads to an encounter with a djinn; there’s a buttoned-up town that descends into madness every so often, like in Return Of The Archons or The Purge; there’s a society of shaved bears that all work for a blind bearded lady, above whom a society of birds live and obsess over stories; there’s a giant spider who guards an ancient passage and is crippled by loneliness; and there’s a battle on a pirate ship that ends only when a giant fish swallows some characters whole, leaving them marooned Jonah-style in its stomach.

The storytelling itself is rather fluid, showing us home video footage of characters larking about out of sequence, then slipping between narrators — occasionally working together to assemble the same story. Even on a prose level The Scarlet Empress barely contains its excitement, sometimes having character B react to a line from character A in a paragraph containing more “A” dialogue, so it reads momentarily like character A reacting to themselves. At every juncture the thing is bursting, perhaps even stumbling to express ideas.

All of this, of course, in a story featuring Iris Wildthyme: galactic adventurer and very probably world-class liar. Introduced in his Short Trip Old Flames (but actually before that as a non-Time Lord in one of his early novels), Iris is a cheery, working class Gallifreyan ragamuffin who chronicles her adventures — only most of those appear to be find-and-replace versions of the Doctor’s travels. This infuriates the Doctor no end, and the explanation seems to wobble somewhere between Iris being his unofficial biographer (since he never writes things down and, for the purposes of this book anyway, he tends to forget them) and those events maybe having been Iris all along, somehow. I’m guessing it would spoil things to be definitive about this. For good measure, the Doctor also gets hold of an ancient book called the Aja’ib which contains excerpts from his life, presumably with the names changed, and he never seems to notice. (I wondered if Magrs was Doing A Thing here and the book was leeching away his experiences, but as far as I can tell, no. Weird coincidence or all part of a rich themed tapestry? Probably the latter.)

Iris is surely the highlight of the book, evidenced by her continued existence in Doctor Who. (Some of it unofficial. There is no way that River Song doesn’t owe some of her boisterous, Doctor-infatuated history to the mad lady with the double decker bus.) Iris, and the proximity to her necessary in a quest story mostly taking place in her TARDIS/bus, provides an amusing flip side to the Doctor. Her attitude is different; she seems more down to Earth, which is perhaps why she seems less reliant on companions. She’s a love her or hate her sort of a character. I bought into the novel’s eventual investment in her safety above everything else.

The Doctor becomes more relatable and ordinary in her presence, even by simple virtue of being in a domestic setting, making breakfast and cups of tea for everybody, and occasionally driving the bus. He seems at once more irritable and more comfortable in his own skin than usual in The Scarlet Empress. He even takes over narrator duties several times, in a way that seems pointedly less momentous than when he did it in Eye Of Heaven. (Again with that narrative fluidity: narrators simply come and go here. If you ask why or to whom they’re even narrating, you are probably considered a party pooper.) He is given frequent cause to marvel at his surroundings in this, and just as frequently share moments of heroism with his colleagues on the quest, seeming like a more ordinary (but no less remarkable) character, only — in my opinion — coming unstuck from his character in a moment where he rambles on about how it’s his job is to avoid “tidy plots” and stay in more loosey-goosey genres, which feels more like the author on a meta soapbox.

It feels de rigueur to check in on Sam, so then: she’s good in this too, sharing in the Doctor’s wonderment while also making it clear inwardly where she stands with her travelling companion these days. (Caring about, not fancying; she sees herself as “his only link with the world of common sense.”) The rigours of the plot occasionally leave us scrambling to spin all the plates, with Sam and grouchy alligator man Gila over here, the Doctor and Iris over there, and moments of high drama (such as Sam thinking the Doctor and Iris are dead, eaten by the giant fish mentioned earlier) don’t really land. There are plenty of big moments that do that, such as the fate of the Duchess (last seen “heading for home” — is she dead?) and the confrontation with the, oh right, Scarlet Empress, which seems over in a ludicrous flash after all the build up. (I never quite shook the absurdity that the Empress is expending effort to capture Iris and friends even though they are expressly on their way to meet her.) But anyway, Sam acquits herself well, adding another layer of context to the absurd meta textual games of the Doctor and Iris.

And oh, what games. If you like references to things then you’ll be overjoyed with The Scarlet Empress, which is just as engrossed in colourful yarns as it is in cheekily referencing the plot of The Time Monster, companions from comic strips, Lungbarrow, unseen events in earlier Eighth Doctor Adventures and the fact that the Death Zone on Gallifrey looks suspiciously like North Wales. It’s fannish on deeper levels too, offering its own twisted alternative to Paul Cornell’s “Doctor afterlife” where they all live on in the current Doctor’s head — in this one, they perhaps do the same thing as heads on spikes. See also the rather spirited idea that Sam might be able to communicate with the Doctor across time. Or not. (Did that really happen? Fluidity again/god knows.)

I first read The Scarlet Empress years ago, long before any interest in marathons, and I loved it. I’m clearly a bit more lukewarm on it now. Mind you, I think I’ve changed somewhat as a reader. I like a sprawling bit of adventure fun as much as the next guy — just look at Sky Pirates! — but it seems there’s a certain amount of story-point juggling that starts to lose me, and Empress exceeded it, leaving me drifting in and out of the tale. It’s still a huge, colourful, joyful jaunt, and Magrs is still undoubtedly a welcome addition to the ranks. I suspect I’m just keener nowadays on stories themselves rather than the loosey goosey world of storytelling they inhabit.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #29 – Dreams Of Empire by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#14
Dreams Of Empire
By Justin Richards

Justin Richards finished up a very busy 1998 with Dreams Of Empire, his third published novel of that year. It is, impressively, not much like Option Lock (his Eighth Doctor Adventure about secret societies and nuclear war) or The Medusa Effect (Bernice Summerfield visits a haunted spaceship), although coincidentally each of these, like Dreams Of Empire, is a story fixated on its own past. (Armchair psychiatrists, start your engines.) Managing a breadth of tones as he does across these unrelated books, you can really see why BBC Books were keen to keep him around.

Dreams Of Empire is one of his more compelling efforts, although at first glance it doesn’t look all that interesting. Set almost entirely within a medieval-ish prison on an asteroid (well, I did say medieval-ish), it’s effectively a base under siege story — bread and butter to the Troughton era. And if you liked that, wait until the TARDIS arrives very near the site of a recent murder: would you believe the Doctor and co get into some hot water over that?

Fortunately Richards knows this stuff just as well as his target audience, so although he touches on the trope, he doesn’t wallow in it. We don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to prove the Doctor’s innocence — there’s no reason to bother when the situation with the guards and inmates of Santespri (a name so jaunty I was sure I’d heard it before) makes for a better whodunit.

Some time ago, the Haddron Republic very nearly became an Empire. A civil war erupted between three highly placed friends, and the aggressor — Kesar — became a figurehead. He was eventually defeated and sentenced to exile, but was attacked and badly hurt on his way to prison. He now resides on Santespri in an iron mask with a voice synthesiser to cover for his wrecked vocal chords. More interestingly, his remaining loyalists are there with him, some of them working alongside Republic soldiers as guards. (Sort of like Police Officers and PCSOs.) Attacks on the prison and murder plots within its walls could equally be happening to free Kesar or kill him — Kesar, for his part, seems content to remain imprisoned. When bodies start dropping and an unknown space cruiser approaches, no one knows what to expect. Thrillingly, “the three weirdos next to the police box did it” is not a popular theory.

There’s an oddly genial atmosphere to this civil war and its after-effects, particularly after Richards grounds it in friendship in the first chapter. There’s less animosity than you might expect between the different sets of guards, which is surprising given some tragic shared histories. I wonder if Richards is playing on his proximity to The Enemy Of The World, another story about a world-famous rotter that is placed directly after this one, in encouraging us to expect a lot of back-stabbing in the guy’s orbit. (I’ve seen some reviews point out this arguable overlap and then criticise him for it.) Dreams Of Empire takes a somewhat more optimistic view: most people who are hurt by a few dangerous personalities at the top just want to get on with their lives. I was surprised how well the book kept to this thesis statement, even in the face of some outright villainy and a few tragic deaths before the end.

If you want an example of civilised opposition, it doesn’t get much better than chess, which features heavily in Dreams Of Empire. (And on the cover.) I’ve never learned the rules, so chess scenes in stories to me are like high pressure card games in movies — I can tell which general direction it’s going in but you could make up the words and I wouldn’t notice. Fortunately the chess scenes here have a very clear intent, coming in handy plot-wise in ways anybody could follow, and they help contextualise the tensions in the story. I can see why it seemed important to Richards in a story about taking sides without aggression. It’s also a fun backdrop specifically for Troughton’s Doctor, a character of mercurial intelligence who may or may not be a few moves ahead.

For what it’s worth, I think Richards is betting on “may not be”. That’s not to say the Second Doctor here is not brilliant, or not capable of outsmarting the villains — he’s believably able to win people’s trust, just as he can piece together the bad guys’ schemes and his own counter-schemes. However, Richards puts a lot of effort into keeping up the slapstick side of his portrayal, at one point mixing up a flight from suspicion of murder with a comedy bit about a sandwich stuck to his bottom. The Doctor’s scatterbrained silliness doesn’t feel like a put on, and it also doesn’t contradict his brilliance — it’s all just one big amorphous self. He’s able to ping-pong believably from a stray comment by Jamie to a solution for the whole crisis, and make it a joke. (“He grabbed Jamie’s hand in both his and shook it vigorously. ‘You’re a genius.’ ‘I am?’ ‘Oh yes. Well’ — the Doctor considered — ‘one of us is.’”) I think it’s a great read on the Second Doctor, believably impish and yet intelligent all at once.

Richards is similarly apt when it comes to defining Jamie and Victoria. The former is on high alert around a scene that was once a warzone and might become so again; the latter is affected by the ruined dignity of important figures and shares their sense of loss. There’s a bit of tension when Victoria seems attracted to someone and Jamie doesn’t like it — all-too-easy stuff there, but it still seems well enough established in the era they come from. As the book progresses there’s less and less for the companions to do, perhaps betraying a certain authorial preference for the characters made out of whole cloth here. (Probably the most notable interaction is the Doctor unveiling the sonic screwdriver a few stories early, but in a way where Jamie and Victoria don’t see it, leaving continuity in tact. Phew!) The writing is as considered for them as it is for everyone else, highlighting any quiet words or private little glances. The contained location perhaps focuses the characterisation; just as if it were made for TV: you’ll go stir crazy looking at the walls and invest in all the little stuff instead.

Dreams Of Empire doesn’t build a huge head of steam, or not for a while at least, which I think is a side effect of all that geniality. It makes for oddly pleasant company to read, rather than a furious page-turner. But Richards is an old enough hand at this to reveal a very smart plot as he goes along, some of it not until the very end, and although you’re sort of expecting that (come on, it’s chess) it’s still satisfying when he plays the final moves.

7/10