#36
Independence Day
By Peter Darvill-Evans
The prodigal editor returns!
As you probably know, Peter Darvill-Evans helped launch the New Adventures and then edited them for years. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have EDAs or PDAs without him, so it makes a degree of sense to get him in to write something for BBC Books.
Of course the concern here is that his only prior Doctor Who book was Deceit: a plot-relevant but otherwise long, stodgy, vaguely unpleasant and action-heavy entry that introduced the controversial New Ace. (An older, gun-toting Ace who ran away and joined the space army for a bit.) It existed in service of a plot arc and what little you could glean about the author’s creativity was not hugely encouraging.
Independence Day* is at least a more measured effort — albeit not in terms of chapters, of which there are only six plus a prologue across 280 pages. Darvill-Evans is no longer saving up all the important bits for 50 page intervals (a weird Deceit tic), and although this one dips a toe in creepiness there’s nothing to rival the Stockholm Syndrome relationship in his last book — although the concept of messed up attraction shows up again. It is, if nothing else, an easy to follow book.
If I seem cagey it’s because I spent most of Independence Day convinced that it was Doing A Thing that would eventually pay off. On the surface it looks like the most, well, surface kind of story imaginable: the Doctor and Ace become embroiled in a slave revolt. They’ll light the blue touch paper and then down will come the terrible tyrant. It’s not exactly new ground but it could be satisfying if done well. The way Darvill-Evans positions his players, though, suggests a much murkier story.
Straight off the bat, the Doctor’s past actions have played a part in all this. While travelling with Jamie he landed on Mendeb Two for no apparent reason — rationalising that he always arrives somewhere “for a reason” — so he asked Jamie to pick up a souvenir to remind him to come back. Jamie picked a vital part of the planet’s communication relay, which ultimately caused a critical imbalance between planets Two and Three. (Maybe tie a knot in your hanky next time.) Fast forward to the Doctor’s return with Ace and Mendeb Two is now easy pickings for its sister world; the populace are being used for slave labour. So you have a story about the Doctor fixing his own mistake.
Sat on the ancient space station between the two worlds is Kedin Ashar, a Duke of Mendeb Three who is apparently loyal to King Vethran, whose kingdom relies upon brainwashed slaves. However, he is secretly working against the King. However (part 2) he is also facilitating the King’s slave trade using his own skill as an inventor/chemist. His plan is to invent a new mind-altering slave drug which wears off sooner, and supplant the original without Vethran noticing. Which is… good, but he’s still actively trading in slaves, and has dosed who knows how many people with the permanent version of the drug already. So he’s not exactly the white knight he appears to be, at least to his followers. The question inevitably occurs of whether he’s really any better than Vethran, and his answer isn’t all that compelling: “I can’t claim that I have a grand new vision for my planet, nor that I’m acting from long-held principles. I’m a soldier and a scientist, not a politician.” So there’s a question of whether this coup d'état will turn out to be anything more than a redistribution.
Then you have the slave revolt, which is happening independently of Kedin/coincidentally with the Doctor’s help. Landing on Mendeb Two he finds the slave operation in full swing and meets Bep-Wor, a depressed fisherman whose wife is a slave on the other world. Soon they’re working together on Mendeb Three, with the Doctor hoping to find Ace and Bep-Wor hoping to find his wife. This mini-revolution soon becomes worryingly messianic, with the brainwashed and free slaves alike chanting “Doctor!” Bep-Wor is hugely swept along by this and he begins steering the group away from the Doctor’s plan of finding the King to negotiate; instead they go from place to place freeing slaves, and doing so violently against the Doctor’s wishes. (For a while he lies to keep this secret from the Doctor.) So this revolution isn’t spotless — there are questions to be asked about their methods, whether Bep-Wor is really better than the villains he’s killed, and how the Doctor squares that with his own moral code.
Then you have Ace. Free of her New Adventures continuity, she nonetheless wants to grow and be independent (geddit), and insists that the Doctor set her down on the space station to fend for herself. Soon she’s breaking up a fight to rescue Kedin, sleeping with him, winding up a slave herself and then eventually breaking her conditioning, assisting the revolution and intending to stay behind and make a life for herself. So you have a story about Ace’s independence and burgeoning adulthood, and the difficulties within that.
Even some bits you’d normally take for granted are presented with a little extra ambiguity. Vethran, our oogly-boogly bad guy, hardly appears in the book at all; he’s such a background figure that I couldn’t help focussing on Kedin’s grey areas instead. Is Darvill-Evans using this to tip the story the other way? Is Vethran’s reputation exaggerated perhaps, and Kedin’s muted? And we have the slaves. Now, obviously they’re not happy. They’re slaves! They’re drugged into forced contentment! But then we meet a slave/master couple who seem sort of genuinely functional, the one filling in the deficiencies of the other. Bep-Wor’s half-crazed army can’t cope with this idea so they kill the owner and liberate the slave; it’s strongly suggested that we shouldn’t cheer them on, which suggests that maybe, I dunno, there’s a grey area in all this.
Maybe I’ve got my charitable hat on but I think there’s genuine promise here. Sadly Independence Day doesn’t follow through on any of it. Which suggests worrying things about my choice of hat.
For starters there’s the Doctor. Yes, it’s interesting that his actions may have doomed Mendeb Two. But you ideally need to do something with that other than have the Doctor go “oh, whoops” and then proceed to get exactly as involved in the anti-villainy plot as he would have done on any other planet. His complicity doesn’t make much difference to the story since at no point does anyone find out or care about the Doctor’s little mistake, and beyond a little early encouragement he barely contributes to their victory anyway, instead spending a fair chunk of the finale dead. (He got better.)
Then there’s Kedin, our distractingly handsome hero/slave trader — you know, that old combo. Kedin is anything but lily white politically, but he seems sure that he can fix the slave problem. Based on what, though? There’s zero actual plan to restore the slaves to who they were before, since at the time he planned all this he didn’t know the Doctor would turn up to at least have a credible go at it. Did he think setting a load of servile zombies free on their old stomping ground was a win? All his new drug does is confirm that some new slaves will revert back. Some plan!
His personality isn’t much better; we’re meant to believe he’s pining for his kidnapped love, Tevana. It’s a key motivator for him. That doesn’t seem to get in the way of his taking Ace to bed though, does it? Not to get all prudish about it, but that’s some very messy motivation for a guy already dabbling in straight up villainy, and yet by the time the dust settles at the end you’d think Aragorn had returned to Gondor. So I guess just don’t worry about all of that.
It’s clear that we’re meant to pity Bep-Wor, who gets a downbeat ending after hearing some unencouraging news. I nevertheless kept waiting for his bloody revolution and occasional lies to come back on him, but they didn’t. Shouldn’t it make a difference that he goes against the Doctor’s wishes, uses him as a figurehead and eventually (unconvincingly) feigns helplessness when his mob kills somebody harmless? Instead it’s just one of those things the book throws at us as if to go, well, it’s more colourful that way. And it is, but you really ought to put a button on it as well. Like Kedin, Bep-Wor is lauded at the end. His unhappy postscript might be seen as penance — I dunno, he mostly seems unhappy about one very specific thing there. The best I can come up with is that Bep-Wor’s decay is because the Doctor felt he deserved it for making his earlier mistake, and that’s why he doesn’t do anything to stop it. I know, I know, it’s probably just (debatably) interesting colour.
You can see that Ace’s story is meant to be meaningful, a sort of New Adventures character arc speed run, but it just doesn’t work. For starters, she gets it all wrong: she completely misreads the initial attack on Kedin (she thinks the fancy rich guy is blameless, not the band of angry peasants? Ace thinks that?) and she puts a fatal amount of trust in him, even after he seemingly ejects her into space. The “mindless slave” section is then a very curious choice for the character, effectively writing her out for half of it. (That may be for the best as it’s strongly hinted that she did more than serve drinks on Mendeb Three. A reference to her being “fit for the arena” due to her fight skills is promising but that goes nowhere — perhaps it was from an old draft.)
Although her recovery and rush into action at the end is some of the most direct and enjoyable stuff in the book, her moral flip-flopping over Kedin is laughable. He drugged you and sent you into slavery! He boffed you while supposedly pining for his missus! But because he’s sad about it, Ace reckons she’s all grown up now and ready to go and serve Kedin instead of travelling in the TARDIS. No way: you, sir, are having a laugh. And so Darvill-Evans appears to be with Kedin’s wince-inducing Casablanca kiss-off at the end. At least we can find some amusement in the Doctor failing to entertain her plan for even a second.
Lastly we have the “take for granted” stuff, and no prizes for guessing how much that leaves in the bank. Vethran is described with, of course, thwarted ambiguity: “Bep-Wor had expected — he didn’t know what he had expected. Someone more remarkable, perhaps: a man whose face betrayed an inner evil. Vethran was tall, imposing, with keen, intelligent eyes and a full beard. And that was all.” But he’s clearly studied at the Ming The Merciless school as there’s no doubt of his total nastiness based on his actions; he even does the “try to kill the goodie when he’s not looking” trick! So yes, he really is worse than Kedin after all, because he just is, so there. (And to now put on my nitpick hat: why did he wait so long before brainwashing his hostage? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he just brainwash the world? Seriously, just poison the water supply and bam, no more wars. Why all the faff?) As for the apparent ambiguity around slaves — which I’m not exactly hopping up and down about as a concept — there’s only one scene of it. Another example of our “whew, that was weird, anyway” approach to moral complexity.
I’ve clearly got a bit sidetracked by all the ambiguity or-lack-thereof, so to get back to the book: yeah, I guess it is just a surface level slave revolt thing after all, despite appearances. And to be fair it can be enjoyed on that level. Darvill-Evans has clearly thought a lot about Mendeb Three and its strangely anachronistic society, with dukes and peasants somehow flying rickety rockets to a space station with much better tech. (5 years to get from radio sets to orbit? Yeah, okay.) Independence Day has an ungainly way of unspooling the planet’s lore at us, occasionally pausing just to “as you know, Bob” directly in the prose for no reason, but some of the added colour isn’t bad. Sue me, I got somewhat invested. (Sadly though it’s not just the prose that gets a bad case of the talkies. Ace, seemingly possessed with the soliloquy powers of Spider-Man, at one point announces to herself: “Now then … what was all that about? That Kedin’s a crafty old sod. Charming and very horny, but definitely crafty with it. I suppose he’s trying to find out how much I know about all this futuristic technology. It’s obvious he hasn’t got the hang of it at all. I just wish I knew what he was up to on this godforsaken space station.” Smooth!)
It’s not, without wishing to be mean, the most memorably written book. This is the sort of SF/fantasy plodder to throw out lines like “‘The signal, Tevana Roslod,’ Madok said”, and where “flirting” manifests as “I think you’d better say a prayer to your own deity, young lady. You’re about to sin.” (Oh, Pete.) We’ve established that virtually no one in this is someone you’ll want to root for, and there’s little in the way of interesting interior lives; nonetheless, the simple march of Darvill-Evans’s revolution keeps the pace up pretty well. The finale is exciting, and there are moments of wit along the way, like how Ace’s brainwashed speech and thoughts aren’t quite as flat as everyone else’s: “It’s a good job I’ve been told that I’m happy doing this, [Ace] said to herself, because otherwise I think I’d be quite pissed off.” If nothing else it’s unchallenging on a plot level and quite easy to get through.
I think I liked it better than Deceit. That’s not a very high bar, and it’s difficult to tell how much of my generally-finding-it-sort-of-okay was because I’d tricked myself into expecting a more complex book. I still think Independence Day has the germ of something with all that moral ambiguity, though equally that might just be a tonal leftover from the New Adventures. With a book this eager to comment on the action and tell us about the surroundings, however, I have to doubt there’s all that much hidden under the surface.
5/10
*Not a great title is it? This is a coup, they depose the guy. They’re not becoming an independent anything, they’re just getting rid of their ruler.
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