#34
The Space Age
By Steve Lyons
Right then. Time for another exciting instalment of “the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion run away from the Time Lords.” We’re three books in. Maybe they’ve figured out what to do with this plot arc.
Turns out, no. The Space Age is another one where our heroes land somewhere awful (but at least there aren’t any Time Lords!) and then a thoroughly normal book happens. There’s still no attempt by the characters to work towards something, still no sense of progress being made. They’re not even having an especially nice time that they wish would never end. What are we meant to do here except hope that there are Time Lords in the next one?
Still, I suppose plot arcs aren’t everything. These are novels first and foremost, they only need to be captivating in that sense to be worth your time. And… no, The Space Age can’t quite manage that either, unfortunately.
There’s some early promise. A strange encounter on a beach in 1965 between a couple of teenagers and a crashed alien spaceship carries hints of time being rewritten. Then all of a sudden there’s a new world where everyone’s a bit older and the technology is marvellous, but some of the prejudices of their era have been magnified. (Well, one prejudice. No not that one.)
Into this arrive the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion, only their erstwhile friend/TARDIS is suddenly uncommunicative. Stuck for something to do, the Doctor and Fitz head for a nearby city, encountering a band of outsiders living in a shanty town and then the people living inside the city. These are, unusually for an alien world with futuristic tech such as hover bikes, two warring clans of mods and rockers. And that’s the gist of The Space Age. Mods. Rockers. Rockers. Mods. But in space.
Reviewers love to point out that the blurb is, well, wrong. It emphasises the futurism of the city, the enlightenment of its citizens, the interstellar travel with aliens coming and going for the betterment of all. None of that matches the content of the book, which pays lip service to the marvellousness of the tech but is set at a time when it’s all in such disrepair, and its people are so ignorantly entrenched in war that they barely engage with it anyway. I wonder if the blurb was based on an earlier draft. It might be an attempt to wrong-foot us when we actually see the place — but since we do that very early in the book, that would seem like a wasted effort. The city anyway, as we see it, more closely resembles an even more run down Mos Eisley. There seem to be three or four inhabited buildings and around twenty people dotted about. I mostly pictured sand. You wouldn’t want to live there.
And then we have the mods and rockers. “Ah,” you say to yourself early on, “this will just be one symptom of what’s wrong here. There will be more to discover once you get past them.” Sadly not. You’ve got this one bunch of people who are rockers, yeah? And then there’s this other bunch of people who are mods. And they don’t like each other, right? Stop me if I’m going too fast.
And look, it’s not as if a conflict between mods and rockers can’t be interesting. Steve Lyons is as good a writer as anybody to make something out of that: he’s done bitter historical prejudice (The Witch Hunters) as well as the horrors of war (The Final Sanction) bizarre new worlds with their own rules (Salvation) and even uninhabitable dumps on alien planets (Time Of Your Life). But there just isn’t anything interesting being said here. The mods are fighty people. The rockers are fighty people. They’re all in the wrong, they all act like kids and hang around in milk bars but they dress differently. Rinse, repeat. It’s like one of those early Star Trek episodes where the budget was looking a bit peaky so they’d visit another Planet Of The 20th Century Dress-Up People. The fact that the Doctor and Fitz are so consistently held captive by these goofballs, with their much more boring space version of West Side Story, reflects somewhat embarrassingly on them both.
Individually they’re not much better. Rockers: there’s single-minded leader Alec and his wife Sandra. They’re the ones who found that alien at the start. They’re not very happy any more and all of Sandra’s older brothers (mods) died in the conflict. Sandra used to be a mod. Is that anything? There’s Gillian, a Technician who ends up paired with the Doctor for some of this, and gets to trade barbs with him. (Well, send them his way. Obviously he’s nice to her.) The others are so nondescript that it’s almost a parody when they’re harmed or killed. No, not Jimmy! Or possibly Johnny!
Mods: their leader is Rick, formerly Ricky, Sandra’s kid brother. He is large and in charge, for some reason; a shouty fanatic who hates rockers because (hang on, lemme check) they are rockers. Fascinating. There’s Davey, his second in command who might as well be the same guy, and Davey’s parents Vince and Deborah. This setup is an obvious parallel to Alec/Sandra/Rick, but I’m not sure to what end, as unfortunately my brain skipped a track whenever I needed to remember that they’re separate people.
None of them can quite articulate what’s so worthwhile about this conflict, which of course might be the point, war being a sort of hell thing, but that doesn’t help the book along when it all just feels like something to do in a boring place. The best we can get for a plot is the rockers trying to convince the Doctor to make weapons, the mods trying to get future tech out of Fitz, and various intermittent escapes/recaptures/fights along the way. The accelerating death of the city would be more interesting if we’d ever seen it in a state of repair, or if we were particularly concerned about its inhabitants. Sadly the same rules as Coldheart apply here: I’ll take option “can we just get in the TARDIS and bugger off,” please. (Before you ask if the time-altering alien has something to do with the plot arc, since that involves the Time Lords and an unspoken Enemy who presumably could do that sort of thing… no. To me these seem like two entirely sensible wires to cross, but what do I know.)
You can normally rely on Steve Lyons to capture the regular characters’ voices, and he mostly does that here. (Working for the first time with a non-televised roster.) The Doctor is a delightful nuisance to the rockers, refusing to make weapons but at one point fashioning a giant sleep-inducing record player. It’s believable that he’d try to mediate between the two sides and his scenes with Gillian the ersatz-companion are quite enjoyable.
In terms of ongoing character work we are mostly doing that “someone else makes an observation” thing that I don’t love. Fitz notes that “the Doctor seemed to be rallying — he hadn’t mentioned the loss of his TARDIS in days — but of late he had been a little too eager to plunge himself into each new experience. He had become almost reckless, as if he were trying to immerse himself in other people’s problems to keep him from dwelling on his own.” It’s not great when you have to pause and tell us that a character’s otherwise normal behaviour is actually informed by subtext, but he briefly addresses this himself, and the arc in general, towards the end. Compassion (once again an external observer) notes that “You don’t want the Faction gaining another foothold” on this planet; while discussing the near-magical solution being offered by the aliens at the end, she says “‘You wouldn’t be tempted to hit the reset switch? Even if it meant, say, getting the TARDIS back or getting Faction Paradox out of your life?’ ‘You don’t learn anything that way.’” Again, it’s nice to know he’s thinking about this stuff.
Fitz is fairly dead on here, letting his imagination get him out of trouble (or at least delay it) when he’s stuck with the mods. There’s at least a whiff of characterisation when it comes to the conflict, as “[Rockers] had always made Fitz nervous: he had thought them one dangerous step away from a different kind of uniform.” He doesn’t have a Gillian analog, sadly, so the book is mostly a case of him having a miserable time with leader Rick until it’s over. Fitz also breaks his streak and doesn’t cop off with anyone here. Some readers might consider that akin to casting Sean Bean in something and then not killing him off.
Compassion is the odd one out. Not quite herself from the beginning, she has very little physically to do in the novel, and when we do encounter her she’s on a sort of loftier plane because she’s been in contact with the fifth-dimensional “Makers” who shaped this world. I don’t know if this is an earnest attempt to do something new with the character or just an admission that she’s difficult to write for, but it doesn’t feel right, and considering that Compassion is the crux of the ongoing plot arc you’d be forgiven for wanting more. She does at least announce that “I’m not lonely, and I’m not unhappy with what I’ve become. I want to stay with you.” Which is nice.
The Space Age is more or less competent, it just doesn’t have enough depth. The city could be any dilapidated space outpost, the mods and rockers could be any two groups. Yes that’s the point, triviality is an irony of war, but extrapolating it so far from any real context and using these particular (mostly very thin) characters just hasn’t lead to a very interesting situation. And anyway, Lyons already made his war points more succinctly in The Final Sanction. It’s one of those books where I don’t hate it, but I do sort of wonder if it was worth putting out there.
4/10
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