#23
Storm Harvest
By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry
The latest effort from Robert Perry & Mike Tucker opens with a dedication to Mark Morris: “for making us find a title without ‘deep’ or ‘blue’ in it.” This is rather apt as their book has some things in common with Deep Blue. Storm Harvest is another grisly, but otherwise traditional-as-all-heck monster mash. It’s another one that features bloodthirsty creatures from the deep. It’s another one that I read and enjoyed when it was first published and — happily — it’s another one that has more or less held up.
We’re following on directly from Matrix, so it’s understandable that the Doctor and Ace are in dire need of a holiday. They pick the ocean world of Coralee, which unbeknownst to them is not having its best summer ever. Ships are sinking without warning. A strange creature has been sighted around the colony’s control centre. A spaceship lurks nearby and its crew are itching to come and cause trouble and before long, everyone on Coralee will be at risk from the Krill — ravenous monsters that make the Daleks seem open to negotiations. Oh, and they’re due for a hurricane.
There’s bags of grisly incident to be getting on with. One area that distinguishes it however from Mark Morris’s latest is the characterisation. Perry & Tucker wrote their own potted Season 27 within the Past Doctor Adventures, with all their books following on from each other and several even having started life as scripts. That added continuity between novels means that we don’t have so much of the disposability that comes with a storytelling chocolate box like the PDAs. We can — hooray! — pick up on some of the trauma from earlier books.
But only some. There are references to how guilty the Doctor feels about almost murdering Ace before, and to what he almost became in that book. Ace, in turn, has a bit of mental processing to do about all this. We politely sidestep the possibility that he was the one actually committing the Ripper murders, which I suppose means that he definitively wasn’t; meanwhile, I couldn’t see any mention of the murder definitely committed by Ace, which seems to me like money on the table. Why write things like that and then drop them?
Her main drive in the novel is to support the Doctor and “to prove to [him] that he could rely on her.” She even gives him a pep talk, although she later has a brief unconvincing wobble with “Once again the Time Lord had arrived and taken control of people’s lives” before flipping back the other way because, somewhat implausibly, she believes she’s manipulating people too. I wonder if she’s just compartmentalising her feelings the way the Doctor does with necessary evils: when things get dangerous he creates “a space in his subconscious, a place into which he would push all the guilt when the time and opportunity came to destroy [the Krill].” Could Ace be parking her concerns because she feels sorry for his struggles in Matrix, and wants to give him the benefit of the doubt? (Let’s call that one headcanon, shall we? These books might be ersatz New Adventures in terms of when the stories take place, but that’s about as far as the parallel goes. Storm Harvest, while we’re on the subject, lacks the vintage NA weirdness of Matrix, being a lot more in line with their earlier gore-fest Illegal Alien.)
It’s tempting to say this is an interesting one for the Doctor. Still reeling from his identity crisis in Matrix, he’s immediately placed into danger here, but he has that moment of consideration (or at least compartmentalisation) for the Krill, and when he’s in the middle of a humans-vs-(not Krill) aliens uprising he’s forced to not pick sides, watching various humans die as a result. He escapes certain death by the skin of his teeth at least twice. Overall, he somewhat lacks his usual power and self-assurance, and because these books are a series within a series, it’s at least possible that they are Doing A Thing.
There’s some decent characterisation in the supporting cast, mostly in the (I use the term loosely) Malcolm Hulke-ian sense that members of a group or a species can act in individual ways. The aforementioned spaceship is controlled by the Cythosi, a group of hulking marauders who use humans as slaves and want to use the Krill as a biological weapon. Their leader Mottrack is as unpleasant as you could imagine, but second in command Bisoncawl has some layers, rejecting cruelty against the slaves and having an appreciation for art. The slaves are on the brink of a revolution but there are different views held within that, some (like Peck) being absolutely bloodthirsty and others (like Bavril) being more interested in a measured peace. One critical character is an undercover Cythosi, losing his physical shape and his mind flipping between one species and another — his loyalties fluctuate too, throwing multiple plans into chaos. There are also “cetaceans”, aka sentient dolphins that travel over land in a mechanical apparatus: two friendly ones can be found on Coralee helping various parties, while another is aboard the Cythosi ship aiding their attack out of a passionate hatred for land dwellers. (If you think that sounds like the Selachians, you’re right, it does. Given that the original angry underwater guys return in the next PDA, I’m surprised that the editors didn’t call attention to the similarities.)
The characterisation has its downsides — namely, a few too many characters, perhaps to better facilitate the differences between them. (Not to mention, a body count.) There are two experts on all things Coralee, who go on separate undersea expeditions at the same time, each with their own cetacean on board; I got confused flipping between boats. There are two female authority figures, both with a weight of responsibility that is tested by tragedy. (Helpfully, they are friends.) And there is Rajiid, someone Ace meets and — hey, we’re all grown ups — sleeps with. I like that Ace has reached a point where she’s confident enough to hook up with someone on her travels, but Rajiid really seems to be here just so her subplot (trying to retrieve a weapon that will stop the Krill) includes someone to talk to. I never learned anything substantive about Rajiid (or Greg, his partner in the boat tour business who until I checked just now I could swear was called Guy); Ace’s momentary consideration of inviting him about the TARDIS feels generous to say the least.
It’s perhaps fair to assume that people aren’t reading Storm Harvest for the characterisation. If they are then good, because there is some, but much more importantly: this is a novel where all involved were so excited about the monster that it was built and photographed for the cover. (The perks of commissioning a prop guru to write it!) I have no idea how the Krill might have been realised on screen, at least once you get past seeing the things; their sheer bloodthirsty frenzy would test a BBC budget as much as it would the censors. They work great in a novel though, initially as an unseen menace similar to the Sea Devils, then later as a relentless force that effectively puts any obstacle into a blender. They make for an excellent we’re-all-gonna-die level threat and there are some marvellous set pieces built around them, particularly a couple of tense submarine encounters and a horrible penny-drop moment involving an underwater tunnel.
I think Perry & Tucker realised that you can’t have all Krill all the time, however — they can’t be reasoned with so you either stop them, or you escape, or everybody’s dead and your story’s over. So we have some added machinations involving the Cythosi (an interesting but physically less clearly-defined menace) and the Dreekans (four arms and uh, not many other characteristics — look, the Krill are great). The plot is neatly worked out so that it makes sense we’re spinning more plates than just “look out, Krill”, but it must be said that if there is a weapon that will kill only Krill then potential modification of said weapon to kill whoever you like seems far more useful than the Krill themselves.
Ah well. Perry & Tucker moderate the Krill and thus leave room for suspense, as a threat like that means you always know what’s at stake. The setting makes for a very appealing base under siege: the colony is one of the rare pieces of land on this ocean world, making it uniquely vulnerable to aquatic attack. Scenes of them literally battening down the hatches in anticipation of a Krill attack and/or a hurricane practically ooze atmosphere, and made me wish there was an audiobook version of this with sound effects. The various ebbs and flows of violence are generally well apportioned; the authors do a good job of pulling back before the various onslaughts become monotonous, and — in figures like Ace and Holly — they make the chaos feel personal. It only occasionally goes a bit too far, such as a ritual killing that mostly just serves to thin the character roster and depress Ace.
Storm Harvest is unashamedly a giddy monstrous onslaught, and if you have the slightest inclination towards that sort of thing then you’ll want to batten down the hatches and ride it out.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment