#34
Imperial Moon
By Christopher Bulis
There’s something almost endearing about the Past Doctor Adventures at this point. Their sister series had gone through a significant reboot to keep readers engaged, but if you’re writing about one of those previous fellas instead? Crack on mate, it’s all good.
Imperial Moon isn’t without its personality or quirks but it’s undeniably another Christopher Bulis book, looking at Doctor Who through the lens of whatever genre has grabbed him this week. It’s along the lines of his SF/fantasy mash-up The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or the stripped back adventure The Ultimate Treasure. This time it’s a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells-style space adventure featuring Victorians on the moon, which is found to contain a forest, monsters and robots.
Right away that’s a very striking premise, and a tremendously visual one. I often wondered if Imperial Moon would have been happier in a visual medium; the steampunk spaceships, the heightened action and violence, not to mention the (ahem) less than introspective character writing would all have suited a comic. The Doctor riding around the moon on a miniature flying saucer practically screams TV Action.
But we’ve got a novel to fill instead, so Bulis introduces a few complications to his old timey SF setup. The whole “Victorian spaceship” idea is as surprising to the Doctor as it is to us, so he’s got to find out how this happened, and more importantly whether this is the “true” timeline or not. (If it isn’t, he needs to get things back on track.) He also, for whatever reason, finds himself with a copy of a diary to be written by one of the astronauts later on. This was then placed in the TARDIS’s “time safe,” a box that apparently sends objects to different points in the ship’s history. The diary gives him and Turlough some useful background on the moon mission — as well as allowing Bulis to write some honest-to-god Victorian adventure prose for a bit.
The Doctor’s sense of agency is debatable in this one, as he’s just following the crumbs left by (presumably) his future self, and working to keep time on track. There’s a prim, almost patrician attitude to the character as he uncomplainingly insists on completing his mission, that doesn’t quite allow for Peter Davison’s natural light and shade. He only gets flatter when dispensing useful exposition, such as a truly indulgent info-dump on page 256.
This incarnation nevertheless is a good fit for this sort of historical action-adventure. He made just as much sense reacting with gentlemanly horror to the supernatural in Goth Opera and The Sands Of Time. The character’s wheels only really come off at the end when Bulis needs to get rid of the monsters, so he has the Doctor, Turlough and Kamelion laser-gun them all to death. No, really. Forget “Have I the right?”, this is more like “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”
Turlough at least makes some sense reaching that violent conclusion, since a) he’s always been a shifty type and b) the story gives him some trust issues that he then needs to work out. You can see Bulis trying to work with the character at this point in the series, aka just before his departure, noting that he has “something missing in my life but I don’t know what it is.” This fondness for continuity has its ups and downs, however, such as the unasked for explanation for Turlough’s limited wardrobe, and the particularly clunky lead-in to Planet Of Fire at the end.
Bulis credits Turlough with an almost meta intelligence, but it’s debatable to what end. He goes around lampshading things like the the obvious Verne/Wells connection and the evident cliché of a Victorian explorer group containing a token female love interest, and a spunky feminist one at that. These ideas aren’t subverted — there is no “Land of Fiction”-style explanation at the end, it just IS quite familiar stuff — which creates the dubious benefit of Turlough apparently knowing he’s in a hokey book. The Doctor at least disputes his view on female explorers, suggesting that Bulis is really just trying to get ahead of his critics here, but there is no rebuttal for the plainly obvious love-story-to-be. (Even Turlough can’t know everything however. At one point he delivers “a line from some B-movie he’d seen, art supplementing a momentary deficiency of imagination.” Is that Turlough or the author telling on himself?)
It’s difficult to believe there’s anything really meta going on here. Even apart from the gleefully pop art setting and storyline there are clunky moments like Turlough, who keeps reading ahead in the diary to get useful tips and appear knowledgeable, somehow noting that this “was another means of holding a mirror up to his soul.” Surely an insight for the novel rather than the character? The Doctor similarly breaks down the themes of class evident among the various moon characters in a way that feels uncannily like Bulis giving book club discussions a leg up.
The useful point here is presumably Turlough sneaking the diary even though the Doctor has asked him not to — that’s a fairly typical bit of Turlough shiftiness that ultimately means he’s desperate to do the correct thing because he’s read about it, which is quite neat, also suggesting a burgeoning sense of doing-the-right-thing that might lead into his TV departure. Less impressive is his insistence on dazzling one of the female Phiadorans he meets on the moon. He’s desperately lovesick for much of the book, which isn’t exactly an established look for the character. (Can you really see Turlough wanting someone to “think [he’s] special whatever the reason”?) This is politely explained away as not his fault during one of the Doctor’s later info dumps, but by then you’ve read the book and reacted to the character.
Perhaps the most accurate character portrayal in the book is Kamelion, a mechanical character that was completely unworkable on screen and yet remains curiously under-represented in print. (Where annoying questions such as “does the robot work” do not apply.) Kamelion in this displays a “permanent expression of mild interest” and is easily prevented from taking part in the action by external factors — so far, dead on, if a bit disappointing re the latter. He eventually gets to muck in, turning into a giant spider to more easily traverse the moon’s diminishing gravity and rescue the Doctor, which is a nice use of his powers. If it feels at all incongruous that he’s joining in with a brutal assault rifle rampage at the end (seriously Chris, wtf) at least you can explain that away as Kamelion being canonically the most suggestible person the Doctor has ever met. “Hey pal, want to zap some monsters?” “Do I!”
I’ve left the overall story til last, perhaps for obvious reasons: it’s tissue thin, a sequence of action adventure stop-starts that captivates the imagination well enough but doesn’t really progress. The forest, it turns out, is a hunting ground for the rich and corrupt; prisoners are their targets. One of the Victorian ships crashes. The captain of another, and the daughter of the ship’s inventor are captured by mechanical guards and taken to a citadel to be prepared for combat. The Doctor and co. must make their way to rescue them — Turlough reading ahead for progress updates, as it was the captured man that wrote the diary — and along the way they encounter the all-female Phiadorans, fellow prisoners and expert warriors. (This feels like another concession to old-timey lit. Close enough, welcome back H. Rider Haggard.) Problems include automated flying saucers, robots, all manner of beasts, body-snatching predators and, closer to home, mutineers.
It’s easy to criticise Imperial Moon for a lack of depth, but it’s got excitement and incident in spades. Plot, not so much, although Bulis does tie everything up by the end. Sometimes too efficiently: he wraps up the troublesome citadel with a hundred pages still to go (whoops) so to keep us going a minor character has to be retooled into a murderous maniac, we repeat the last act of Alien on a budget, a betrayal flips a sympathetic character into a two-dimensional baddie (instead of, to be fair, the equally two-dimensional goodie they were before), and that’s before we pop back to Earth for tea and laser gun battles. I haven’t seen a story vamp this much since Dracula decided that England sounded like a nice place to visit.
As often happens with these genre exercises, you get the impression that the author might be just as happy spinning off into their own non-Doctor Who book. Imperial Moon often itches to write about the side characters instead, particularly Haliwell and Emily, the uneasy couple trapped in the gauntlet. Their courtship is so prim and proper it almost ducks behind a curtain with embarrassment, but it makes for a nice undercurrent to the action, and puts a button on the story at the end. Emily’s deference to social issues and women’s suffrage is laudable, as is the ideological friction with Haliwell, but as themes go it’s as subtle as a brick through a window — another instance of that in the book.
I doubt anyone is rocking up to Christopher Bulis’s Victorians-on-the-moon novel for reasons of subtlety. What you do get with Imperial Moon is a constantly moving, easy-to-visualise adventure that probably works well even if you’re only a bit familiar with Doctor Who. Once we get past the nifty iconography I’d put it closer to Terry Nation than Wells or Verne, but it’s not like he couldn’t keep people reasonably entertained for weeks on end.
6/10
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