Doctor Who: The BBC Books #47 – Millennium Shock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#22

Millennium Shock

By Justin Richards

Justin Richards is famed for his reliability as a writer. There can be few greater examples of this than Millennium Shock, written at short notice to fill a gap and reportedly turned around in a matter of weeks. He makes this sort of thing look bafflingly easy, first doing this and then putting out a critical Bernice novel the following month, a BBC Book only 2 months prior, and later the same year pulling another quick turnaround to fill a gap for Virgin. At some point we must face the possibility that there was simply two of him all along.

Of course, a quick turnaround is all very nice — especially for the publisher! — but all that matters to the reader is whether the book is any good. There are reasons to suspect that Millennium Shock won’t be. There’s the aforementioned turnaround, although the reader shouldn’t be aware of that. And there’s the fact that it’s a sequel — a surprisingly rare commodity in Doctor Who noveldom, unless you count multi-book arcs or linked books such as Blood Harvest/Goth Opera and Shakedown/Lords Of The Storm. It’s even rarer for bridging Virgin and BBC Books — see also Business Unusual, at least, which revisits baddies but with a different Doctor.

Millennium Shock is more your sort of direct sequel. And by direct I mean it literally begins with the last scene of System Shock, albeit slightly expanded. The main action takes place immediately after that, making this arguably just the next 280 pages of System Shock. The entire plot that follows revolves around a pen that happened to be mentioned on that final page.

If all of this sounds like a desperate Hail Mary just to squeeze another book out of something, anything, well to be honest it probably was. But Millennium Shock doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that, picking up the gauntlet of “what happened next” and running with it at full pelt. The pace is crazy, but in a good way: the story stays on track and there isn’t so much of the author’s occasional chopping and changing of scenes and characters. I suspect there wasn’t time to spin that many plates in this one.

Richards, a noted programming enthusiast, would inevitably have been inspired by millennium angst. He uses that to power his latest plot for the Voracians, the semi-cybernetic snake people from System Shock. Still fixated on the ruling power of technology and still keen to release their all-powerful program Voractyll, they are now working within the government to circumvent efforts to fix the millennium bug, which will naturally create a chaotic vacuum they can fill. Said bug is a real gift to the novel — the baddies hardly even need their own weapon since they can just ensure that a problem already happening will run its course. This is a very fun way to incorporate real history into a story. (Or rather, given the publication date, current events. There’s an element of catastrophising in painting such a gloomy what if about the millennium, but that must have been irresistible at the time.)

Millennium Shock has a similar, if not quite as uncanny sense of timing to System Shock: the prior book placed its 70s characters in a fictional 1998, which at the time was 3 years in the future. We’ve still got a 70s character in this one (the Fourth Doctor, travelling solo this time) but he’s in what at time of publication was the present day. There’s still a novelty to that, just as there would be from having him show up in 2025. (The “modern day” for a TARDIS crew is always when they were filming, for obvious reasons.) Of course he manages to fit in easily among the technology of the day, at once being innocently perplexed by energy-saving dimmer switches and running rings around modern programmers.

Richards wrote very well for this Doctor in System Shock and there’s more of that here, such as a scene where he goes “undercover” (“He was in disguise, of course, hat in pocket and scarf tucked away inside his coat”), various moments of winning verbal playfulness (“‘Now,’ [the Doctor] said, ‘tell me, are you one of the people who’s breaking in, or are you as surprised at what’s going on as I am?’”) and in a great pratfall making use of sound in a way Richards would later revisit in The Joy Device. “Behind him the door rocked precariously near the edge of the stair. ‘Well done, Doctor,’ he congratulated himself as he passed the fifth floor. ‘No one will ever guess you were here.’ … ‘What was that?’ Bardell demanded. They had all heard the noise. Clark shook his head and shrugged. ‘It sounded like something heavy falling down a flight of stairs.’”

The Doctor wins people over with his (for want of a less hokey word) bohemian charm, aided by what can only be described as a book that isn’t remotely interested in messing about. There’s very little obstinacy among the government officials who aren’t Voracians, with one noting re the Doctor’s tall tales that “It actually makes no odds. Whether we believe the Doctor’s story or not, we are faced with the same problems, so I suggest we leave the question of alien invasion for now and concentrate on the things we can believe and agree on.” It’s such a relief just to let the plot fly without all that usual time-wasting “do you honestly expect me to believe this” guff. Millennium Shock only occasionally threatens to trip over its own feet in the rush: there’s a sequence where a government official is murdered in a way that will frame Harry Sullivan, but it only seems to matter for a chapter or two and then the open-minded good guys sweep it away so quickly it almost wasn’t worth doing. Ah well.

Speaking of Harry, he’s on companion duty this time, only it’s “modern day” MI5 Harry. I found it quietly touching to visit an older Ian Marter in System Shock and that is still the case here, with more insight into his rather Spartan home life and the regrets that come with his line of work. The action really does tear along to the extent that we’re not exactly having long character conversations, but his easy rapport with the Doctor is a treat — there’s a marked maturity compared to his more chauvinistic youth, and it’s so far not been possible to pair the two of them without Sarah in tow, so that’s its own kind of treat.

Richards manages to build a little pathos into his characters who more often than not come to tragic ends. Harry’s young cleaner becomes somewhat pivotal to his story when she becomes a target, and the Doctor’s interactions with a converted programmer end up being decisive for victory, as well as rather sad because a man’s identity has disappeared. There’s a general pathos to the Voracians, even though they are plainly a piss-take of mindless corporate bureaucracy: it’s reliably funny to hear these megalomaniac cyborgs calmly spout bobbins like “If matters do seem to be exceeding control parameters then you are authorised to issue a termination notice” or “‘We do have a containment strategy for your approval.’ Cutter nodded, evidently pleased with this. ‘Then present it, Mr Bardell. You won’t get unwarranted pushback from me.’ ‘Very well, Mr Cutter. I won’t speak to charts, if that is all right.’ ‘Verbals are fine.’” Yet underneath all that, there is a sadness about these quasi-organic beings who can no longer access what they once were, who now are repulsed by basic things like food and water. It’s sort of an obvious avenue for a semi-artificial villain race, I suppose, and yet it’s distinct from how others like the Cybermen are written, focussing on that specific sense of distaste. Good work, although there’s a chance we’re covering similar (if not exactly the same) ground as System Shock with all this.

The prior book was 4 years old and well out of print when Millennium Shock came along, and it’s been even longer since I last read it, so I can perhaps forgive Richards for playing the hits. And he has other things to draw from, now he has more books under his belt, additionally fitting in another nuclear missile crisis after writing one in Option Lock. (While this one is a bit less heart-stopping, I thought it was far more convincingly woven into the plot.) I do think the timely story makes a case for this being truly its own book, and in any case I thought the pace of it worked better than the first go around, blowing all the dust out at every opportunity and maintaining a real sense of spy-novel fun throughout. How much of the frantic excitement of Millennium Shock is truly down to the time crunch I doubt we’ll ever know, but I like to think that Richards turned a (millennium) bug into a feature.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #46 – Dominion by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#22

Dominion

By Nick Walters

New author! Fetch bunting!

Well, strictly speaking Nick Walters isn’t entirely new to this as he previously co-wrote a Bernice Summerfield novel with Paul Leonard. However, whilst I really liked Dry Pilgrimage I struggled to pin down a writing style that was uniquely Walters. He reportedly wrote most of it, so he should take credit for a good book, but it sounded like Leonard, delving into the moral greys of its characters and the oddity of its aliens. None of that is a bad thing — I guess the two writers were paired with good reason. It just means that I didn’t know what to expect from him the next time.

His first solo novel Dominion still doesn’t leave me sure of that. It does a few things very well and it’s clear that effort has gone into it — I believe this is a writer keen to get the EDAs “right”. But as a novel, a statement of what the writer is like, it’s not much to go on.

There‘s some memorable action at the start. A new character, Kerstin, wakes up to find her rented Swedish lake house half vanished, and her partner Johan MIA. Her landlord Björn barely survives an encounter with a terrifying predator that somehow materialises on his farm. And Sam Jones — moments after her final disagreement with Fitz in Revolution Man — is torn out of the TARDIS by some sort of anomaly, crashing the ship in the process and expelling its two remaining occupants so it can recuperate. The Doctor and Fitz wander around local Sweden looking for help and, so they hope, Sam, but as we’ll find out later Sam is nowhere nearby.

I doubt I’m the first or even the fiftieth person to say that a lot of this feels like The X-Files, with spooky forests, weird alien manifestations and people disappearing into special effects. (Well it was 1999.) We bolt on even more of this when it appears there’s a conspiracy to contain these events, but this swings us helpfully back to Doctor Who as the shadowy force is revealed to be UNIT, or rather, UNIT-and-C19: the even shadier bunch first seen in the Virgin books (Who Killed Kennedy) and then ported to BBC Books (Business Unusual).

You’ll have noticed a fair bit of continuity so far. There’s quite a lot of that in Dominion, but I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm: references don’t seem to be made here in order to bolster the writer’s fan card, but rather to pull the worlds of these stories closer together and serve a purpose here and now. It’s UNIT and C19 because that then creates a specific tension when you add the Doctor into the equation. A nod to UNIT’s troubles in Kebiria is therefore a nod to Paul Leonard’s Dancing The Code, sure — and therefore to Virgin still being canon — but it’s also a usefully violent text to back up the mindset of the character in question.

We get stuff like the TARDIS butterfly room, because that’s a great EDA staple, but also because it can serve a specific purpose when some aliens need a zero-gee hideaway, as well as the “soul-catching” ability introduced in The Devil Goblins Of Neptune (also seen in The Taint) which further pulls together the PDAs and the EDAs, but also helps underline a specifically “Eighth Doctor” skill. He was established as clairvoyant in the TV Movie, a fact given rare scrutiny in Dominion as the sudden loss of that ability is a useful way to show us the effect of the Doctor’s separation from the TARDIS.

Walters seems very adept at characterising the regulars, but only up to a point. The Doctor is best served, being terribly but convincingly out of sorts because the TARDIS has locked him out both physically and mentally — he doubts himself, he can’t do certain useful tricks that have helped him before, and he is generally a bit of a raw nerve. The choice to have Sam and the TARDIS in mortal peril however means that it’s difficult to parse what’s actually bothering him at times, or rather, it’s difficult to believe that Sam is the major crisis for him when the TARDIS is so much clearer in his behaviour. When we do get nods towards the more human weight on his mind, particularly Kerstin wondering (based solely on his expression) if he’s in love with Sam, it doesn’t convince.

Fitz behaves more like a Doctor Who companion than we’re used to, which is great: he actively wonders what the Doctor would do in certain situations, then applies his own bullish equivalent. He seems fully mucked in for the most part, albeit he hasn’t learnt the Doctor and Sam’s weird little number codes. (Another little bit of continuity, usefully deployed to show that he still has progress to make.) Fitz is as haplessly horny as ever, immediately getting the inappropriate hots for the bereaved Kerstin whom he can’t help noticing looks like Sam. Paging Dr Freud. (For good measure, he later mistakes Sam for Kirsten.)

The only real downside with Fitz is that while Walters is very aware of Revolution Man, and keen to pick up the threads of Fitz’s experiences and turmoil in it — particularly his closing disagreement with Sam, traumatically curtailed in their first scene here — he never really runs with it. Fitz never reckons with his years of brainwashing and (Kerstin hots notwithstanding) he doesn’t have much to mull over about Sam and where she fits into all of this. He’s a likeable presence better aligned to the series than before, and Walters knows his stuff, peppering in references to what happened to Fitz’s mum in The Taint. But the story evidently can’t do it all.

Sam, of course, draws the “no two companions may occupy the same story” card — because god forbid we ever build this three character dynamic — and she spends fully 100 pages out of sight. When we pick up with her in the Dominion (the strange world that is inadvertently stealing people and replacing them with aliens) it’s a decent showcase for Walters’ world-building skills, conjuring something not unlike the stuff Jim Mortimore was doing in Parasite. But aside from making friends with a local and trying not to die, there isn’t much for Sam to do. You’d be forgiven for empathising with Fitz who, on page 231, realises he’s forgotten all about her.

I don’t know if Walters was consciously writing towards Sam’s departure but there seem to be hints towards it. There’s Kerstin, the pseudo-Sam who goes the whole hog and considers signing up to the TARDIS life at the end; she even theorises that she has two “selves”, one of which is destined for adventure, which has specifically been a “Sam” thing since Alien Bodies. There’s Sam’s room in the TARDIS literally being lost which, I mean, maybe we don’t need Freud for that one. And when she’s finally reunited with the Doctor in a moment of possible death, despite everything in their past she kisses him — surely an implied “we’re almost done so why not” finality there.

This stuff is as close as Dominion gets to thoughtful character work, though. There’s the supporting cast, such as Björn and a long-suffering police officer keen to give obvious whackos like the Doctor enough rope to hang themselves with: they have reasonably interesting inner lives but they exit the book so abruptly that you might forget they were ever in it. There’s the military contingent at the heart of the plot — Dr. Nagle, the mind behind the teleportation device that has caused all the chaos, and Major Wolstencroft, the UNIT leader trying to contain said chaos — but they’ve both got such tunnel vision that there’s no progress for them to make. Nagle earns our sympathy by gradually understanding the Doctor’s fury over what she’s done, but her insistence on salvaging her work is an obvious death sentence from the outset. And Wolstencroft is the worst kind of one-note military blowhard, stubbornly refusing to believe that the Doctor might be useful and impeding him throughout just to keep the action rolling, leading to the Doctor’s applause-worthy lamp-shading: “Not again! We’ve been through all this before!” He mostly seems to be here to muddy the waters between UNIT and C19, making the former seem as bad as, if not worse than the latter, but in the end all that does is make you wonder why we’re seeing both.

That leaves Kerstin, and it’s fair to say I don’t get what Walters was going for there. If she’s a signpost towards Sam’s departure then okay, up to a point, but having a pointedly Sam-esque character eating up all those pages instead of Sam will inevitably feel as much like a parody of her obsolescence as a sincere attempt to prepare us for it. Even worse, when the time comes to say no to her future aboard the TARDIS it’s handled as abruptly as possible, with the Doctor (mentally back together again by this point) snapping rudely that she has her own life to live and anyway, they’ve got dangerous work to do. (Walters here bookends his follow-up to Revolution Man with a prelude to Unnatural History — only what looked like a means of characterisation the first time feels more like a cheap way out the second time.) The book ends with Kerstin wondering what the hell just happened, and it’s hard to imagine readers being a great deal more satisfied than she is. What a strange, rushed note to end on.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there is no great summing up at the end of Dominion. One of the reasons it took me so long to read and, I suppose, the real problem here is that it’s not about much of anything. Okay, these are Doctor Who tie-in novels, general sci-fi business tends to take priority over deep and thematic explorations of character, but Dominion is truly a “stuff happens” exercise outside of what it’s doing with the Doctor and Kerstin/Sam. It’s a sci-fi problem to be solved — a wormhole accidentally taking away people and things and replacing them likewise — but there’s nothing particularly rich about that as a conundrum, beside how unfortunate this will be for the Dominion. The figureheads of the problem are just some intransigent scientists and soldiers or some (academically interesting) aliens with no agenda and mostly no dialogue. It’s all much of a shooty exploding muchness, happy to trundle on until it’s time to stop. I didn’t egregiously dislike Dominion — did, in fact, appreciate the author’s attention to detail and his interest in the regulars — but I suspect the story’s heart has disappeared through a wormhole.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #45 – Players by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#21

Players

By Terrance Dicks

Hullo, what’s this? Short chapters? Callbacks? Escapes to danger? This can only mean we’re in Terry town once again. Whether you like it or not, as a certain someone said.

Despite his many successes as script editor, writer and noveliser, the bar for Terrance Dicks: Novelist remains low. He’s still got it when it comes to telling a story at a rollicking pace — try and stop him. The problem is the stories he chooses to tell. Time and again he returns to ideas and, more often, tropes that interest him. If they interest you too, hooray! But for the rest of us there is a feeling of going back to the same old well.

Players is reminiscent of a few Terry books — in fairness, often deliberately. The story, although definitely a novel, reads like two short stories and a novella. You can tick off Shakedown there in terms of structure. (Shakedown had an actual reason to do that at least, the middle bit being a novelisation.) The story concerns dangerous forces trying to change the course of history, manifesting mainly in the Second World War. Tick off Exodus for subject matter. (It’s literally referenced at one point — and quite subtly, I had to look it up.) Tom Dekker, a character from Blood Harvest (tick!) shows up and joins the main cast, and some of the wacky tone of that book — see also Mean Streets there, particularly Garshak the trench coat-wearing Private Eye — bleeds into this one. And then there are the great sweaty slabs of continuity, ostensibly there to move the story along but, let’s face it, mainly because Terry likes to remind us of things he enjoyed or wrote. (Or both.) The book’s DNA must therefore include a bit of The Eight Doctors as well.

I suppose it’s really only important to consider what the book is and not what it’s like, since the reader might not have read any of that and so might not feel any marathon-y fatigue. So: in Players the Sixth Doctor and Peri aim for London in 1899 (Peri wants to go somewhere nice — this is long overdue, poor duck) and they hit South Africa instead. It’s the Boer War — oops — and a young war correspondent needs their help. This war correspondent drops numerous plucky bon mots as he inspires all the men around him, and with a little help from the Doctor the war correspondent eventually wins out against some armed Boers and a mysterious assassin keen on killing the war correspondent — and if you’re sick of hearing “the war correspondent” as a very conspicuous placeholder when everyone else just gets referred to by their name, fear not, for he is revealed to be Winston Churchill! After which the novel interchangeably calls him “Churchill” or “Winston Churchill.” (In the second case sounding as excited as Ant-Man saying “I believe this is yours, Captain America.”)

There’s absolutely no escaping the fact that Terrance Dicks thought Winston Churchill was the bee’s knees, and possibly the rest of the bee as well. Players drips with hero worship. “[The Doctor] noticed Winston Churchill’s unscrupulous streak … Just do whatever had to be done to achieve your aims. He smiled faintly. Perhaps it was a characteristic of all great men.” / “‘I wish you were leading the troops instead of writing for some rotten paper,’ said the General.” / “Ever since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Churchill, and Churchill alone, had raised his voice in repeated warning about the Nazi menace.” / “The old boy didn’t miss much, thought the Doctor. Winston Churchill was a hard man to deceive.” / “Not many people can arrive unexpectedly at 10 Downing Street, demand an immediate meeting with the Prime Minister, and be shown inside — but Winston Churchill was one of them.” Enough subtlety, Terry, tell us what you really think.

There are at least indications of the man’s flaws, or that he could conceivably have had some. Mainly there’s his unscrupulousness, and we are (very) often reminded of how many times he failed in politics along his storied career. However, his lack of scruples ends up feeling like a compliment in disguise (just look at all his achievements!) and his political frustrations become a sort of mantra. Surely the universe was wrong to keep Winston Churchill from his destiny, when his magic oratory was all that the country needed to succeed? Surely his setbacks were everyone else’s fault? It’s like the bit in most biopics where the famous subject hints at a thing they will do later and someone whom we all should laugh at says “As if! That’ll never catch on!”

Hey ho: Churchill is here and Terry loves him. Now let’s return to that mysterious assassin in the Boer War. He is joined by a fellow anachronistic co-conspirator seeking to release Churchill from prison, then capture or kill him again. What’s all that about? Escaping with their and Churchill’s lives, the Doctor and Peri don’t worry too much about this — the first “short story” having neatly concluded — until Peri starts asking questions, which is largely her all-too-traditional purpose in the book. (Hey, at least someone got around to asking what the Boer War was all about. I’m not much the wiser now though.) The Doctor thinks he remembers something pertinent, so he quickly fishes out the thought scanner from the end of The Wheel In Space, then mentally unspools an entire 50-page sequel to The War Games starring the Second Doctor, here conscripted to work for the Time Lords before his regeneration takes effect and thus canonising the Season 6B fan theory. Fanwank? Where?

Stepping back in awe at the sheer indulgence of this, it is rather strange to detour your Sixth Doctor novel into a Second Doctor one for a bit. (And here we come to the second “short story.”) In it, the Doctor reunites with Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, who of course don’t remember him post-War Games, and they are all inveigled in an attack on a young officer. Who could the officer be but Churchill again, now a decade older! And wouldn’t you know it, the same nefarious people are still out to get him, this time hoping to more subtly detour his destiny by delivering him alive to Germany. Again they are foiled, and (as Carstairs and Lady Jennifer seal their affections — presumably some fans cheered) the Second Doctor whips back to Gallifrey. Our Doctor, in the present, decides to visit Churchill a third time, reasoning that whatever random date he picks will miraculously be the next time these malefactors pick on him, and they won’t have troubled him or anyone else in between. I would have no further questions if I were Dirk Gently and believed in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but of course the Doctor is right and when they arrive in 1936 the shadowy forces are at work again, so what do I know?

This is the bulk of the novel at last, and Terry is clearly enjoying himself no less than in the other segments. Those mysterious people are colluding with Nazis and (unknowingly) Wallis Simpson and the King to enable a German victory before the war even starts. Churchill, the Doctor (usually in that order), Peri, Dekker and an older Carstairs foil various Nazis and blackshirts and eventually even the King. It all tumbles along in as frenzied and rollicking a fashion as you’ve come to expect from Terrance Dicks, and the denouement is neat, but it’s pulpy (not especially Doctor Who-ey) nonsense — fun in the moment, gone the next. I only started it two days ago and I’ve already forgotten half of it. Still, that quick turnaround says something positive.

Buried under all the (strangely sectional) shenanigans are the “Players” of the title, and they’re a good idea. Here we have some time travelling figures (not human, I think?) who want to divert history purely for their own amusement. They have strict rules (which they often ignore) and they don’t know who the Doctor is, although they’ve now met two of him. This introduces an interesting wrinkle into the Doctor’s travels: how much of the time are they secretly there, changing events? How much of actual history is their doing? Who, while we’re on the subject, actually are they?

Strangely Players — a book named after them — doesn’t get into it. The antagonists barely feature; due to the nature of their machinations (or the ones more subtle than “get a gun and shoot Winston Churchill”, anyway) they often appear to be more sub-plot than plot. Which seems like an odd choice? This is, of course, just setup for future books. But considering how one-note these characters are — I’m not saying they’re poorly written, more that they’re barely written at all — it ends up a pretty weak teaser for things to come. What a shame. The premise has potential. Why not toss in a few personalities as well? Hell, names would do. (“The Consortium” is the best we’re getting.)

Players mostly serves as an excuse to write a figure whom the author really likes, or otherwise a creation he fancied digging up again. As a Sixth Doctor and Peri book it hits some of the right notes, but I got the sense Dicks mostly likes about them what he likes about Doctors and companions generally: he is an awful name-dropper (who will happily swap his colourful coat for something more era-appropriate — as if!); she is quite capable thank-you-very-much but will nonetheless need to flirt with guards and eventually get kidnapped. (“In the good old days, the heroine screamed and waited to be rescued.” No comment.) There’s a real possibility that it’s only Sixie because his “truculence” was the best fit for Churchill — to whom he is, of course favourably, compared.

One good idea. Three goes at it. Not much luck. Players is harmless and it’s Terry at his Terriest, but not coincidentally it’s also Terry at his most aggressively forgettable. Want to see World War 2 gone awry? Stick with Exodus.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #44 – Revolution Man by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#21

Revolution Man

By Paul Leonard

Hoo boy. This one is nuts.

There are things about Revolution Man that reminded me of the New Adventures. (Which perhaps contributes to its somewhat divisive reviews.) It has bonkers ideas. It’s primarily about drugs. There’s violence, some of it moving in unexpected directions. And main characters act, or are forced to act in ways outside their nature. I think, deep down, it’s just trying to make statements about the characters and what they are about, and it’s using very eye-catching — perhaps questionable — methods to do that. I really liked it for the most part.

We begin in media res (something I enjoy as it cuts out all the faff) with the Doctor noticing temporal anomalies on Earth. Someone is carving huge “R” symbols on landmarks in 1967. Mucking about with timelines is bad, to say nothing of the suggestive power of someone casually defacing ancient pyramids just for a bit of graffiti. The Doctor, Sam and Fitz go to London hoping to learn more about the supposed “Revolution Man” responsible. They plug into the burgeoning counter-culture scene, meeting the somewhat revolutionary Jean-Pierre Rex (an idol of Sam’s) and an attractive waitress who catches Fitz’s eye. Before long they discover that a drug, Om-Tsor, is responsible for these incidents. It grants the user incredible astral power and it has already claimed hundreds of lives in collateral damage. The Doctor is desperate to investigate and sort it all out. Fitz, finding himself suddenly in a position of care with waitress Maddie, decides he’ll stick around, possibly for good. But even without his TARDIS friends he finds himself investigating Om-Tsor with Maddie.

There’s already a lot here to raise eyebrows. The novel sets out its stall with the amazing, horrifying power of Om-Tsor. Maddie derails a train full of people simply because she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, so what would a genuinely malevolent user look like? The imagery is immediately hard to forget: a pyramid with a logo on it, guns hovering around shooting people, enormous astral projections stomping around the Himalayas or grabbing helicopters. It’s one of the most sock-you-in-the-jaw concepts we’ve had in these books, plus it’s distinct from the kind of mental powers we’ve already seen in Virgin books. (For the avoidance of doubt, “psi powers” warrant a mention here. +1 geek points.) Paul Leonard is never short of imagination but Revolution Man is him in widescreen and technicolour.

Go back a bit, though — what’s this about Fitz leaving? Characters going on sabbatical is practically a tradition at this point, with Ace and Sam having done it and both come back changed, but Fitz only just got here! This is clearly a point of contention with readers, but I think there’s some mileage in it. Fitz is not your typical Doctor Who companion: unlike Sam, he’s not here because he has a burning desire to go out there and, uh, be a Doctor Who companion. He was in a traumatic situation where his only relative died and now he’s wanted by the law. TARDIS travel sounded preferable to that and in any case, probably quite fun too. Whoever said it was a lifetime commitment? Faced with 1960s England again, a few years on from where he left and perhaps any consequences of his departure, is it inconceivable that he’d politely part ways? It’s not as if he’s yet formed a major attachment to the Doctor or Sam; his only adventure that we’ve been privy to made the point that he felt out of his depth and out of his element. I think the promise of new love and some stability makes as much sense as anything else for this guy the Doctor and Sam — not to mention, the readers — barely know.

All that said… he’s back on the Om-Tsor trail pretty much the next time we see him, which he must know is eventually going to lead back to the TARDIS. He’s happy enough with Maddie, and even a little conflicted about the decision to keep investigating, but all the same I wish there had been time for “domestic bliss” Fitz, or whatever normal life looked like for him for that little while. I don’t think anybody reading Revolution Man seriously thought he’d be gone for good, especially a third of the way through. (Who is he, Dodo?) It’s more likely that the device serves to underscore his commitment to joining the TARDIS crew.

Or does it? Later on Fitz’s investigation grows enormously dangerous — just as, thanks to Om-Tsor, he grows about fifty feet taller (!) — and in the wake of it he is spirited away to the Chinese military, brainwashed using the same drug that’s causing all the problems. He’s actively an antagonist towards the end of the book, and although he fights against it and wins, there isn’t time to flesh out his side of the story, what it was like losing his identity, whether — since we’re asking — he does actively want to see the universe. The final lines of the book suggest that he does, but as so often happens with Sam, putting the character out of his head means he’s not having that conversation for a chunk of the book. Taking him away from the TARDIS sets up the opportunity to examine the idea of going back to it but we’re only doing half the job if he doesn’t, y’know, examine it. Instead he is bundled back into the TARDIS after — eek — another traumatic situation.

Fitz is at least well written, capturing his weirdly theatrical persona and his otherwise down to earth wants and needs. He doesn’t feel like a gimmick character, which must so often be a temptation with born-in-print regulars. Leonard is equally adept at writing Sam, though of course he’s had more practice there.

After Blum & Orman I think he’s the writer most interested in developing Sam. Genocide, Dreamstone Moon and Revolution Man all put her activism in context, allowing her to see how other people approach it, each time with a slightly different level of maturity. In the post-Seeing I world we have a Sam who is more weathered, able to work with the Doctor without awkwardness, confident about popping to Rome on reconnaissance. On her travels she observes a younger activist, thinking her “a young, ill-informed anarchist with an almost insane idealism, not much intelligence, and no clear mission.” She dresses down her own idol, Jean-Pierre Rex, disagreeing with his heavy-handed methods, based on her own hard-won experience. (And her own Fitz-style sabbatical.) The sixties is a keystone of revolutionary politics but she’s not that impressed with it, being aware of “just how far the flower children had to go before they reached maturity. Most of them — she recalled again her parents’ generation — would never make it. On the other hand, the steps they had taken would make it possible for future generations to be better than they had been.”

Leonard isn’t painting Sam as a perfect paragon here — she’s grown and she’s good at what she does, but there’s more than a whiff of protesting too much about the failings in others. When she comes to have it out with Fitz concerning the story’s climax, her defence of the Doctor — “‘He’s a hero!’ Sam was shouting too, now. ‘And he never never never does anything wrong — you don’t understand!’” — sounds every bit as far-gone evangelical as the Revolution Man cult, suggesting a pedestal that can only come down. On the whole Revolution Man is a good bit of exercise for who and what Sam is, without suggesting that she’s truly finished growing as a person.

The dynamic with Fitz is also nurtured in a way that hadn’t happened yet. This is a critical aspect of a new companion — how do they fit in? — and although Leonard essentially dodges it again by giving him an out, for a time it is under the microscope. Sam sees his potential departure even before he does, and she understands the rationale behind it. All the same she hopes he will change his mind. She knows what TARDIS travel has done for her and she hopes that will also happen for Fitz. When she realises he is no longer himself, she is desperately keen to get him back. This perhaps lends weight to Leonard offering us a “join the TARDIS properly” story by the back door — not making it Fitz’s choice, making Sam want it. She reflects on Fitz’s embarrassing attempts to flirt with her, almost regretful in case that has spoiled his future in the TARDIS. In short, there’s good stuff in here, even though I feel like no author has yet nailed the three companions setup, or even really tried. We’re getting there.

Darting between the two companions and between crises is the Doctor, and it’s fair to say there’s a lot to unpack here. Some of it literally isn’t unpacked. I try not to be a nitpick guy these days, but is there any explanation for how Om-Tsor wreaks havoc in 1967 when in the “normal” run of things, it didn’t? If it’s simply a thing that happened until the Doctor stopped it happening then that would be part of established events, but it’s presented as an anomaly to be resolved. We know that the pyramid stuff is new. Yet there is no time travelling malefactor in Revolution Man and there are no aliens, just an alien drug that is somehow on Earth and is now part of a timeline where a dangerous idiot stole some of it for his crazy plan. It’s a bit chaotic, not necessarily by design.

On top of that, these events create absolute havoc for two straight years, including unnaturally instigated natural disasters, a world just short of nuclear war and — less important but just as visible — bloody great big letters drawn on the pyramids. Doesn’t any of that have consequences? It won’t if it’s all “established events”, but again, we seem to be in “anomaly” territory to begin with, and the novel’s cumulative mess seems an absurd thing to let stand. I was half expecting a reset button by the end (and the Doctor does mention “purging the vortex”) but no, we just go nuts and get out of there. The pace towards the end is so relentlessly manic that to be fair, the only solution seems to be to just stop.

If you can tear yourself away from the plot (which works quite well generally, just not at a few important junctures) then the Doctor is having quite an interesting time here. He really is frantic about all this, getting awkward about moving the TARDIS and being unsure about telling Fitz what’s going on (this, too, feels like an under-clarified point), but he’s still buzzing with Doctorliness, particularly when he races after a woman pronounced dead and fixes her up not with magic, but simply better medicine than they had in 1967. He gives Fitz a police box calling card for emergencies (which is a great idea we’ll either see again or never mention again), perhaps suggesting he didn’t really think Fitz was gone for good. He and Sam are a well-oiled machine with their own shorthand and backup plans; he sends her on errands, not unlike his more manipulative predecessor. And in the end… well. A thing happens, which if you’ve read the book you’ll have been waiting for.

It’s probably the Revolution Man talking point if there is one, so here we go: the real Revolution Man has been hidden through most of the novel (the scene where an Om-Tsor user appears to kill him during a concert, who did that? Pass) and he has a grand, yet harebrained scheme to unite the world with the drug. Or destroy it. A concert is hastily arranged at Wembley stadium and this well-travelled Om-Tsor user goes for broke. He wants power. He wants the TARDIS, now that he has learned about it from Maddie. A still partially brainwashed Fitz panics and shoots him — only this doesn’t entirely work, and things are only getting worse, so the Doctor picks up the gun and shoots the man dead. It’s the The Doctor Shoots Someone Dead novel.

To be clear: I think the book puts him in an impossible situation. Fitz’s actions (themselves arguably not Fitz’s fault) have caused a dangerous Om-Tsor user to pretty well go nuclear, which is having an immediate effect on the TARDIS that might rip apart the world. The man is dying anyway but he will make everything worse before he goes. And look, it’s not as if the Doctor enjoys it, or jumps straight to that as a solution. It’s just an unusual response to an unusual situation. There is context for it.

That said, it bumps us up against a recurring problem with Revolution Man: it’s too short. Much like Beltempest, this is a novel containing enormous, almost cartoonish chaos that nonetheless comes in 30 pages below the average for BBC Books. Why? There isn’t time for the Doctor to reckon with what has happened, and also therefore — conveniently for the action itself — there isn’t time for him to think of anything else. I don’t have a problem with the Doctor doing this if it makes sense in context. Hell, Sam has killed people, and/or inadvertently caused their deaths, and she’s only learned from it. Characters should be allowed to be imperfect, Sam’s allowed, why not the Doctor. But… if you skimp on the meaning of a thing then it’s like writing a huge life change into a short story. What’s the point if we’re not sticking around to hear more about it? Sam was haunted by the death of a Tractite. Do we need to wait for other authors to do the same for the Doctor?

Revolution Man gives you plenty to think about — some of it in a head-scratchy, hang onnn sort of way. It pushes its characters to interesting extremes using huge, colourful, often beautifully written set-pieces — but it’s in such a hurry that it doesn’t put everything away afterwards. This has the knock-on effect however of making it a deliriously readable and exciting story. It’s weird. It’s a bit messy. But I like it.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #43 – More Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who

More Short Trips

Edited by Stephen Cole

Right, that’s enough novels. Back down the short story mines with you.

There doesn’t seem to be a linking theme this time, although Stephen Cole — clearly amused by the less than imaginative title of More Short Trips, going by the introduction and blurb — suggests that the simple fact of an increased number of stories ought to cover it. Maybe themes are overrated?

He also mentions being the outgoing editor of Doctor Who for BBC Books, which is surprising to me as he still had roughly 30 more books to go at this point. Were they really working that far in advance or did the plans change?

Anyway. Short trips. More of them.

*

Totem

By Tara Samms

Ah yes, Tara Samms, finalist in the 1998 Steve Cole Lookalike Contest. (I’m suddenly wondering how many of this collection’s “new voices” are Cole.)

This one features the Eighth Doctor working for a widow in Portugal, bringing her somewhat out of her shell and inadvertently romancing her. According to Wikipedia he’s making amends for something the Seventh Doctor did, but the story’s so short I didn’t pick up on that. Anyway, it’s an evocative moment.

*

Scientific Adviser

By Ian Atkins

The Second Doctor gets some work on a film set recreating The Invasion. (I very much appreciated the line “Having problems with the invasion, then?”) He’s ostensibly there to ensure a lack of historical accuracy and thus keep UNIT’s secrets safe. However, another plot is percolating.

Ian Atkins does a marvellous job of evoking the odd charm of this Doctor, particularly around children, and it’s an amusingly subversive way into a Doctor Who story — it’s surprising, really, that more stories aren’t told in-universe about known alien invasions, but I suppose that’s the whole reason for UNIT’s actions here. This is an instant hit, although I can feel my brain wrinkling when I try to fit it into continuity.

*

Missing, Part One: Business as Usual

By Gary Russell

Mel’s back home! I’ve got no idea about the logistics of this (wasn’t she last seen leaving Iceworld on Glitz’s spaceship, presumably in the future?) but the character beats seem more important here. Mel has apparently not enjoyed her time with the Doctor, or not enough to consider it worthwhile, which is a somewhat sour take when the author’s Business Unusual (heavily referenced here) was also concerned with keeping Mel from her destiny. It’s not really how she was the last time she was with the Doctor, which frustratingly leaves a gap that we’re not filling. We’ll see what Part Two looks like, but for now this is a quick and rather moody check-in.

*

Moon Graffiti

By Dave Stone

A characteristically funny piece from Dave Stone featuring a moon covered in graffiti and a tiny spaceship full of irritable and sarcastic aliens. This does a pretty good job of world-building for an Earth gone temporarily to hell thanks to some marauding spiders. (The aforementioned graffiti artists.) It has tons of ideas, including an in-universe explanation for Peri’s sometimes questionable wardrobe choices. In his rather pitiable status quo for humanity Stone inadvertently hits on imagery that would be used in The Matrix. (No, not the Doctor Who one.) The Sixth Doctor, needless to say, feasts upon Stone’s verbiage.

*

One Bad Apple

By Simon Forward

Here’s a name we’ll be seeing on novels at some point, and One Bad Apple is an excellent first impression. The Fourth Doctor and Leela are on a jungle world inhabited by large plate-covered animals while a platoon of Cyber-enhanced soldiers skulk about. The story posits an interesting future for those who have been partially converted into Cybermen, and it does clever things with biblical allusions such as knowledge from apples. The characters seem to ring with hidden intelligence. I’m keen to hear more from this writer.

*

64 Carlysle Street

By Gary Russell

Gary Russell gets creative here, telling a story from various viewpoints, all of them working in a country house. The First Doctor, Steven and Dodo have ingratiated themselves in order to investigate and deal with an alien visitor. They’re all well captured and the story ticks along nicely, quietly (for Gary Russell anyway) sequelising an obscure piece of lore.

*

The Eternity Contract

By Steve Lyons

A bit of metaphysical Gothic horror awaits the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa as they fight to escape a house that seemingly serves as a gateway to the afterlife. This is creepy stuff and it plays confidently with the level of the supernatural involved. It also constructs a likeable side-character, Patricia, in whom I invested pretty quickly. I tend to think this sort of thing suits the Fifth Doctor, a character with the sort of good-boy puritanical streak you’d expect to get the vapours when a vampire shows up. (Indeed, see Goth Opera.)

*

The Sow in Rut

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

We’re straight back to the supernatural with this one: Sarah Jane’s stay in a cottage is cut short by what appears to be a spectral force. Perry and Tucker have their cake and eat it with both kinds of explanation catered for in the end. For better or worse, this is something that would fit neatly into an ongoing series of K9 & Company.

*

Special Weapons

By Paul Leonard

This would be a great idea for a TV episode or even a novel: during the Second World War some German troops have got hold of an alien being that can separate a place from its surroundings, cutting off all light and eventually killing everything inside. They have done this to a small English village and they naturally have plans to expand — but the Seventh Doctor, here with Mel, knows this will backfire and kill the planet, to say nothing of the creature.

Apart from the terrifying image of unnatural night, this is a dark (ahem) piece with the requisite Paul Leonard-ish moral toing and froing of supposedly bad characters, here one of the German officers, and a supposedly good one named Oliver. The Doctor and Mel display unusual grit for Season 24 (the adventure happens not long after Paradise Towers) but this kind of gung ho action suits Mel surprisingly well. Excellent stuff.

*

Honest Living

By Jason Loborik

An offbeat sequel to Day Of The Daleks featuring some more time travelling guerrillas with a resulting mess of paradoxes. There’s some pathos in the bookended story of a man who should have died, and there’s an unusually anthropomorphic approach to time taking its revenge against paradoxes. However this one suffers from the problem stories about the mechanics of time travel usually face, in that it’s hard to understand so it needs explaining. I think the general pathos just about carries it.

*

Dead Time

By Andrew Miller

This is a rather excitable and talky bit of fan service with the Eighth Doctor trapped in a mental prison, for a while talking to a future (still McGann) version of himself, then having to battle through all his past lives. It’s one of those stories that needs to constantly explain itself, and although the idea of the Forgotten (beings that “time travel” back through someone’s life) is quite good, we don’t really get any mileage out of it here. Sam features and is not exactly a joy to be around, so at least that’s accurate.

*

Romans Cutaway

By David A. McIntee

I’ve ended up reading this at the perfect time, as I’m currently halfway through a rewatch of The Romans. McIntee — RIP — seizes on the gap in the story between the TARDIS crash landing and the gang all relaxing in the Roman villa; he relates how they found out about its original occupants and he puts Ian and Barbara in a life or death situation. (Their first of several during their stay.) The latter leads to a bit of soul searching from the pair. It’s a nice little pause within a generally restful story, with Ian reacting thoughtfully to his defensive act of violence towards the end.

*

Return of the Spiders

By Gareth Roberts

A romp (what else) from Gareth Roberts featuring (who else) the Fourth Doctor and Romana, here encountering giant spiders in High Wycombe. Roberts is as fond as ever of the banter between these characters and of satirising British society, and although it gets a little too arch for its own good in places it’s still a decently amusing jaunt.

*

Hot Ice

By Christopher Bulis

We’re back with the Fifth Doctor and Peri for the first time since The Ultimate Treasure, so it’s little surprise who wrote this one. It’s a pretty good tale of thieves chasing thieves and then ensnaring the TARDIS crew. I’m not completely convinced by the Fifth Doctor in this — he seems unusually clinical — but various parties do manage to hoodwink him, so it’s pretty close.

*

uPVC

By Paul Farnsworth

This one is in two parts and it has two distinct tones. First we find the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe noticing a strange knock from outside the TARDIS, only to end up facing a double glazing salesman who somehow travels in the vortex. It’s an absurd bit of farce, but when he expounds on his services the Doctor is suddenly interested. We then jump ahead to the Seventh Doctor and Ace for a more melancholy moment concerning the window that was built, and what it means to the Doctor.

It’s a lot to pack into a short story (set entirely within the TARDIS) and it’s inevitably a bit discordant, but it’s an interesting one, drawing a line between these very different Doctors and where they were in their lives.

*

Good Companions

By Peter Anghelides

Ooh. This one features a future Doctor (with ginger hair, I mean can you imagine?!) running into a much older Tegan. Sadly Tegan’s life took a turn after she left the TARDIS and her adventures have now been designated as a mental breakdown; she doesn’t believe in or fully remember them, or the Doctor for that matter. Bumping into “Dr Smith” and his companion Anna leads to an encounter with a strange theatre troupe. Everything that happens is more organised than it first appears, and Anghelides’ future Doctor is a lot more invested than he seems. This is deeply melancholy by the end, but — as much as I wish we’d avoid saying that characters’ lives took nasty turns, and in any case Tegan clearly did find some happiness too — I think this approaches its ideas with sensitivity. I’m guessing it’s the story people talked about most in this collection.

*

Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

At two pages long this is the shortest thing in More Short Trips, pipping Part One to the post. It describes, briefly, a message Mel left floating in space hoping that the Doctor would get it. (Paying off the last thing she said to him on screen.) But he didn’t and now he won’t, and we don’t actually know what the message was. It’s all quite melancholy.

I’m a bit at a loss with these Missing vignettes. Mel was broadly unhappy about her travels apparently (gee, thanks) and wishes she could say something to the Doctor (so perhaps it wasn’t all bad?), but these bits are so brief that they don’t really earn it. As I’ve said before, I don’t object on principle to companions having downbeat lives post-Doctor Who, although I do consider it the most obvious route to go down if we’re seeing them again. I just want it to be something. I was just saying how much effort Peter Anghelides had put into Tegan’s troubled future. The presence of both invites the comparison and it leaves this one wanting. What’s going on with Mel? Why ask if you won’t tell?

*

Femme Fatale

By Paul Magrs

Magrs is in typical madcap mode here with the Eighth Doctor, Sam and Iris orbiting Andy Warhol at the time of his attempted assassination. The Doctor’s feelings about Iris’ plagiarism of his life, multiple time zones with different written perspectives, at least one section that seems to repeat word for word presumably for reasons and a running Avengers parody all occupy the same lift in this jolly, if rather overcooked follow-up to The Scarlet Empress. My poor brain wishes that the most complicated one wasn’t last in the set, but characteristically for Magrs there’s plenty of fun to pick up even if just by osmosis.

*

And that’s More Short Trips. Cole’s theme-but-not-a-theme seems a decent enough excuse for authors simply to have at it, and quite frankly it doesn’t hurt the book at all. There are brilliant ideas in here and only a few swings and misses — with the increased story count, the odds tend to improve. Melancholy seems quite popular among the authors but there’s also a focus on creativity and fun. A breadth of scope is what you want here and the result is worth seeking out.

8/10