Doctor Who: The BBC Books #28 – Vanderdeken's Children by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#14
Vanderdeken's Children
By Christopher Bulis

Right. Think positive. Let’s say something nice about Vanderdeken’s Children.

There’s a good idea in it. This is generally the saving grace in its reviews, and in principle I have to agree: when we find out what’s really going on here, it’s clever. A lot of work has clearly gone into it, evidenced by a bit near the end where the Doctor looks at a visualisation of what’s happening — as per Bulis on Pieces Of Eighth, this is a close to literal representation of actual diagrams the author drew to keep it all in check. Tricky stuff.

The setup isn’t bad either. A mysterious ship is found floating in space and representatives from two opposing societies, on a luxury cruise liner and a warship, want to claim salvage. The Doctor and Sam end up in the middle and, posing as neutral Federation Moderators, they lead the expedition. Naturally the Doctor has a bad feeling about this and he’s hoping to talk everybody out of taking this dangerous spaceship home. There’s plenty of familiarity to all this, some whiffs of Event Horizon, Alien, Rendezvous With Rama, not to mention the Doctor Who cruise ship shenanigans in Terror Of The Vervoids and hey, The Flying Dutchman and all that. But there’s nothing wrong with borrowing a setup. It’s what you do with it.

Next good thing: the role of the Doctor. This is more personal pet peeve than objective Thing What Is Bad, but I think the original series severely overplayed the idea of the Doctor arriving at the scene of some difficulty and automatically being blamed for it. Zeta Major memorably skipped this and so does Vanderdeken’s Children: the Doctor is able to swan about investigating without raising any red flags, and that’s despite his first impression being that everybody thinks the TARDIS is an offensive missile, and as far as they know they’ve already blown it up. Nobody ever twigs that the Doctor was behind that, despite an amusing “Hang on…” moment later on when the various parties see the police box again. I think it’s a sign of some confidence in your narrative when you can let the Doctor just tear through it and focus on the bigger issues, rather than waste time on easy fodder like “Surely you don’t expect me to believe you’re a time traveller.” His personality should generally win people over and it does so here.

But we’re clearly in a cagey, caveat-ey sort of review here, so off comes the plaster. I still did not like Vanderdeken’s Children. Sorry, Chris.

I think a lot of it comes down to how that clever central idea is executed. I won’t go into detail on what it is (yes I know the book’s really old, I just think you’d benefit from the surprise if you read it) but suffice to say, I was already aware of the general gist of it, and I was looking for signs of what was happening. If anything I had a leg up. Somehow, that didn’t help.

I spent most of the book trying to piece together quite abstract visual concepts while leap-frogging from one group of characters to another. There’s the crew of the cruise liner, the crew of the warship, splinter factions from both, the Doctor and/or Sam mixed in with some of the above, other life forms who come into it later, other crews of other ships, all running through settings that include the cruise liner, the warship, a shuttle from each, other ships, the alien ship and another location near the end. It’s an overpopulated book that rarely sits still, which is a problem when there’s not much to hang it all on. (And quite frankly, also a problem when you have my attention span.)

The characters certainly have personalities, but they rarely exceed two dimensions. There’s an ageing military figure turned politician who yearns for relevance and glory. A youthful officer who believes in the cause. A married couple where the bullying wife controls everything. An actor who wishes he was as brave as his characters. A young photographer who… likes photography, I guess. The captains of both vessels have distinct enough flavours, but that only goes so far when there’s ultimately very little separating the Emindians (cruise liner) and Nimosians (warship) other than a certain fanaticism in most of the latter and only some of the former. (Maybe that’s a commentary on how we’re all the same in war, but if so then it still doesn’t help the book along.) The main thing at stake here is this collection of characters; it matters when you either don’t care about them beyond obvious points of reference, or can’t tell them apart.

All of that sort of go-to characterisation is as nothing compared to the monsters in Vanderdeken’s Children which are, as per the Flying Dutchman nod in the title (which only becomes apparent at the very end if you’re not well up on the myth already), ghosts. More specifically we’re talking vague, misty grey figures who shape-shift into all manner of monstrous appendages and random adjectives. Bulis is like a kid in a candy store with these guys, throwing in whatever visualisations come to mind from minute to minute. They did nothing for me as a concept. I couldn’t get a handle on them, as the book doesn’t devote much time to getting in their heads (and most of them are “insane” anyway — fascinating) and I never felt a consistent sense of threat: just, if you go over there, maybe something-something-misty-crab-pincers will wibble-wibble-spooky-tentacle. In a book that clearly has its sights on weird world-building in space, this kind of loosey-goosey expressionism just made me lose interest. And that’s before we start trying to fit these ethereal whatevers into the complicated plot he’s worked out.

The best actual “What’s going on?” stuff is on the alien ship, the simple stuff. There’s an unusual key pad (pictured at the front of the book — a rare BBC Books illustration!) and a room where all the alien buttons inexplicably have labels in English. Good brain-teasing fodder there, and both get a neat payoff. Too often in Vanderdeken’s Children I wasn’t being presented with clear mysteries so much as word jumbles with a vague sense of unease. Maybe it’s just me (and to be fair to the book, I have had a very distracting week), but at times reading this I had my worst Doctor Who brain fog since Time’s Crucible.

When it eventually becomes time to drop the penny the book has to grind to a halt to explain itself. Not what I’d call an elegant solution, plus it’s being delivered by characters who don’t remember key elements of the plot. We’re then into the finale, when there is at least a palpable sense of what we want to achieve (or more importantly, prevent from happening), but the sheer number of characters and spaceships in the mix ended up confusing me further. I pretty much coasted through the last act, grateful for the Doctor’s eventual summing up to Sam. But then even that turns on a dime, either because Bulis thought of another interesting wrinkle or the editor asked him to not go quite so bleak with it. Either way, if leaves the book’s final statement as something of a rush job, tossing out a conclusion that we really don’t have time to feel. I sort of felt that way about the main Clever Idea in the plot; if it had been expanded into the general premise of the book, and not a twist that puts things in a new context, we could have really got into what it can do instead of being all with the oblique hints.

Hey ho: plot isn’t everything. What about the main characters, our guides through whatever funhouse stuff the author of the week comes up with? Well I’ll say this for Sam: she’s fine in this. Not hugely interesting, but Bulis is another author happy to tick off salient continuity points and underline the basic pattern of growth that’s occurred since Seeing I. (I’m beginning to wonder if this boils down to “she does NOT fancy the Doctor any more, okay!” but to be honest if you keep bringing it up then it just feels like she’s protesting too much.) There’s a scene where Sam is literally de-aged to a child, where Bulis has a lot of fun explaining the physics of losing all your memories after that point, that made me wonder if it was a witty comment on her character reset. But they resolve it and move on, never repeating a similar stunt with another character, so I’m not sure why it’s there at all. The best thing about Sam in this is that she’s fine. The worst thing is that she ends up feeling a bit interchangeable with the plight of the young female photographer. (Honourable mention to Sam’s random bursts of technical expertise that could indicate character growth but are never underlined as such. “But why would anybody want to stack a ship full of neutronium?” and “[was this caused by] some sort of hyperdrive motor accident?” are not natural phrases for a girl from late 90s Shoreditch.)

But then we have the Doctor. Now, I’ve already said that I think Bulis handles his role very well here. By 1998 he was certainly expert enough to write the Doctor — becoming I think, in Vanderdeken’s Children, the first Who novelist to write a book for every incumbent. But getting the individual Doctor’s voice right is another matter. This, also, is something Bulis has had success with: I think all his previous Who books get it right, with the arguable exception of The Ultimate Treasure, and I really think that one is arguable. But his Eighth Doctor is a complete miss. The dialogue is fustery, formal and aged. He says bewildering things like “Of course, this is only a four-dimensional approximation of a fifth-dimensional cross section of a multidimensional phenomenon” in that tedious Data-from-Star Trek way that only prompts other character to ask what the hell he’s on about or comedically beg him to stop. If I didn’t know better (and I do, see Pieces Of Eighth again) I might have assumed Bulis had missed the TV Movie altogether, because I cannot imagine Paul McGann turning to his companion and saying things like “It did occur to me that their proposed participation might influence matters somewhat.” This stuff isn’t just unnaturally clunky and boring: it misses the intrinsic charm of the performance that you would sort of assume was key to his success at winning people over in, for example, this novel. Ultimately Vanderdeken’s Children becomes another example, like Placebo Effect, of the BBC Books authors having other things to worry about besides getting Sam right. (Last thought on this: I really think Bulis benefits from available screen time, as a popular complaint about Tempest is that he also didn’t get Bernice Summerfield right. My personal jury’s out on that one.)

I’ve seen it said that Vanderdeken’s Children benefits from a second reading. Plot wise that makes sense, it is definitely that kind of story. But on the one hand I was already looking for these little hints and still didn’t benefit from them, so I’m not sure what else there is to gain. And on the other hand it’s all so intangible and jumbled that I just can’t recommend the experience of reading it once — never mind twice. I wanted to like what Bulis was doing here, and I still think he’s an author who can deliver a decent jaunt through time and space, but I have to be honest and say this whole thing just didn’t come off.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #27 – Zeta Major by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#13
Zeta Major
By Simon Messingham

I was a bit apprehensive about this one. There are a couple of reasons why.

First: it’s a sequel to Planet Of Evil, which despite featuring Tom Baker and Lis Sladen at the peak of their powers always manages to bore me to distraction. Second: it’s by Simon Messingham. Nothing personal there, it’s just that the only previous Who novel I’d read of his was Strange England, which was by some distance my least favourite book of the entire Virgin run. In hype terms I’d say Zeta Major was sitting somewhere around “oh no.”

Maybe that sense of dread helped, or maybe this is just a significantly better book. Either way, Zeta Major will not be taking the “least favourite book of the entire BBC run” trophy. Hooray!

For starters, despite what you might think from the word “sequel”* there is no low hanging fruit here. We’re not returning to a spooky space jungle to relive the scary (read: awake) bits of Planet Of Evil. Zeta Major takes place two thousand years after those events, and although the setting and substance of the previous story do figure significantly in the plot, they’re not the driving force of the book. Messingham is far more interested in the Morestran Empire and how they responded to the earlier crisis.

(*Let’s just take a moment to note that he’s done a sequel and set it in Season 20, a season deliberately filled with references to the past because of the then-anniversary. Neat!)

This includes their, shall we say, dramatic reaction to a throwaway comment from the Doctor, who casually suggested that they pivot away from the study of anti-matter and consider mining the kinetic energy of planets instead. This triggered two millennia of simultaneous scientific advancement and stagnation, plus a schism in their society that inevitably sewed seeds for war. Heck, I’ll just come right out and say it: oops. (But seriously, it’s quite an achievement to get a whole novel out of one line of dialogue, and a joke at that.)

The Doctor’s inherent fallibility is not quite the focus that it could have been here — perhaps surprising given it’s something that obviously interested Messingham in Strange England, and was generally running through the New Adventures at the time. (See also, Falls The Shadow.) Zeta Major nonetheless finds the Doctor in a weakened state, tormented by visions of a black wave and needing to visit this place in order to put them to rest. Nyssa and Tegan go off to find help since he’s unconscious — not a new experience for either of them and it won’t be their last — only to discover that they are on a colossal tower on an otherwise barren planet. The tower is largely deserted apart from the occasional shambling anti-matter-infested beast. (Or “anti-man”. Slightly silly sounding I know but I’m pretty sure it’s a carry-over from Planet.) The atmosphere is creepy, to put it mildly.

When help arrives, if it can be called that, the trio are not exactly welcomed. This sounds like some of that low hanging fruit at last — of course people are going to immediately suspect the Doctor and co. of causing trouble — but we don’t quite go there, with the TARDIS crew taken advantage of and then trusted to a surprising (and ever-fluctuating) degree. The story spans multiple planets and gives everyone plenty to do, in ways that explore aspects of Morestran society. Most of which is, to be honest, pretty grim, but you still get the sense that Messingham has thought about it.

Technology is no longer freely available, but it is still visible, with grand sights like hovering spaceship graveyards and small oddities like horse-drawn hover cars. Tech is the strict purview of the church: they pump it all into the construction of a tower two thousand years in the making, all due to an empire-wide power shortage that might have been a power grab exercise in the first place. Royalty and religion are meshed together like the two giant legs of the tower, and they are similarly likely to explode. Everyone involved is spoiling for a fight. Some, however, aren’t even that lucky: cruel experiments are being run in secret on a mysterious asteroid, and women are mistreated the entire empire over, a fact that becomes grimly apparent to Nyssa and Tegan. Things get quite unpleasant at points.

Nastiness is not new to Messingham’s writing. It was what mainly turned me off Strange England; the kind of go-for-broke violence on display was not unique to that book by any means, but it still seemed to exist just for the sake of it, coupled with a “how weird can you get” fixation with dream imagery that made the whole thing seem nastily obscure. It wasn’t for me, but Zeta Major has more of a handle on its impulses, while still indulging them. Dream logic is here in spades, especially for the Doctor; it sits behind his entire plot. Violence is plentiful too, but it is often only suggested. Deaths carry a meaningful impact, even when the people dying aren’t much more sympathetic than their enemies. There’s a degree of subtlety here, in other words.

Peaceful people are also driven to extremes, such as Tegan, who at one point is hypnotised into an assassination attempt, then at another tries to shoot an enemy yet finds herself unable to kill him. And then there’s Nyssa, who contemplates her lifelong interest in peace yet finds she can play a different part if it’s for a greater good — something she may not want to think too much about afterwards. There’s a duality inherent to stories about anti-matter, and Zeta Major scratches at it using its leads.

The guest characters also wobble back and forth. There’s Ferdinand, a somewhat good man whose quest for revenge leaves him disappointingly open to atrocity. And there’s his opposite, the suggestively-named Krystian Fall, a black ops monster with virtually no limits who can somehow make time to understand and believe the Doctor. Both form some connection to Tegan, which helps to enhance her comparatively small part in events. (She seems to spend longer talking about her peaceful time spent with Ferdinand than there was actual time with him.) Neither ever exactly covers themselves in glory, but this goes for the empire as a whole, a teeming mass of awful bastards who do sometimes run the risk of being confused for one another.

That’s perhaps the book’s biggest hang up. What we’ve got here is a sort of space opera, surprisingly grand in ambition with different kinds of society working together (or jarring against each other) and an eventual drawing together of threads and exploding of tensions that really feels like a pay-off. And yet, you’ve got so little reason to actually like or care about the Morestrans themselves that their inevitable ruin comes mostly as an academic tick-box. I mean, of course it all went to pot, they started off horrible and then got worse for two thousand years.

It’s perhaps for this reason that the book has some extra flourishes, such as suddenly dropping the narrative voice to give us a diary entry, or a mission log, or the minutes of a secret meeting, or an edition of paranoid student rag The Watchtower — the latter being a good source of winking amusement in a book that is often surprisingly funny, albeit in a wicked and satirical way. This stuff can make the book seem rather dense as you’re using multiple sources to stick it all together, but it also suggests a more colourful palette, and maybe insinuates some reason to find these disparate groups interesting. It could just as easily point to a book that has been somewhat over-engineered, and I would have a hard time entirely dismissing that notion. But I do think it’s more interesting for it.

Anti-matter’s weird, isn’t it? I always get confused when people start explaining it and, perhaps for that reason, I tend to find stories about it all rather dull. Zeta Major keeps it firmly in the background and, when employing it, does so as something either mythically overwhelming (such as a black ocean that becomes an enormous impossible-to-imagine creature) or viscerally upsetting (such as chunks of anti-matter sewn into people’s stomachs) — either way, not boring. People are by far the major problem in Zeta Major, with anti-matter (and Anti-Men, lol) more of an environmental hazard. I think that’s a good mix, and it keeps the book’s real interest — the awfulness of powerful figures when they find a really good excuse to control an empire — at the forefront.

Messingham’s writing has improved a lot, nailing little character insights (like the Fifth Doctor’s “little dodges”), big character insights (like Nyssa’s intensity and Tegan’s temper), and deploying prose that can be quite witty, or otherwise pretty without becoming purple. On psychic visions: “[The Doctor] had the comic notion of a telegraph operator somewhere at the other end of the line becoming increasingly exasperated with him and continually being forced to repeat the message, making it simpler and simpler with fewer and fewer words.” On a dreadful sight: “Skeletons ringed this lake like obscene jewellery.” It’s a good mix.

There’s a lot here, possibly too much at points, but I was impressed by the overall scale of it, both as a planet-hopping bit of sci-fi and as an occasionally unusual approach to a Doctor Who book. I’d check out more from the author, which isn’t something I thought I’d say.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #26 – Placebo Effect by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#13
Placebo Effect
By Gary Russell

This one sounds like a good time if you sum it up fast enough. You’ve got those fearsome parasitic space dwellers, the Wirrrn [sic: we’re doing three r’s to follow the Ark In Space novelisation]; you’ve got the Foamasi, oddly good-humoured space criminals known for squeezing their bulky frames into human disguises (they should totally sue the Slitheen); and you’ve got the Space Olympics as a backdrop. Two random green monsters getting into it at a jolly celebration? Sounds mad, I’m all for it.

Sadly that germ never blossoms. There’s a lot going on in Placebo Effect and fun doesn’t make it to the top of the list.

For starters it’s one of those Doctor Who novels with an oversaturated cast of characters, which can make it difficult to settle down and/or get invested and/or even follow what’s going on. At one point we’re introduced to a man named Carrington whom I fully assumed we’d met before, but it turned out I was confusing him with Cartwright and/or Carruthers. (See also Ethelredd and Eldritch. Maybe keep an eye on the alliteration?) Or perhaps I was mixing him up with the three other businessmen who, by page 39 when Carrington first shows up, had all (like Carrington) been introduced to us while talking to their secretaries.

Besides these kinds of awkward pile-ups there are separate gangs of Foamasi working independently, there’s a religious order with a large membership most of whom don’t do very much, there’s a whole contingent of royal aides with their own simmering office politics, and a race of actual clones working for several of the aforementioned slightly identikit businessmen. This is a story in which identities are often in question, because anyone might turn out to be a Foamasi or a Wirrrn. It seems counter-productive to need reminding who the hell people are in the first place.

You might think all of this uncertainty would elicit some paranoia, The Thing-style, but that’s another (ahem) thing: the plot doesn’t integrate the Wirrrn well enough to build momentum. Let’s forget for a moment that we can see one on the cover and read their name in the blurb: it’s still the book’s job to sell the threat. A short Chapter 1 (really more of a prologue) tells us what a galactic threat the Wirrrn are. Then some mysterious things happen — mostly people being attacked underground — accompanied by no overt hint that this is because of the Wirrrn. The Doctor arrives and has no idea there’s even a problem here, let alone who’s behind it. There is much muchness with businessmen, Foamasi and social events we’ll get to in a bit. Then, on Page 95, the passive-voice narrator just up and tells us that “The Wirrrn had a plan, and so far, it was progressing very satisfactorily.” I mean, come on. You can’t just poke your head out from behind the curtain like that. Work it in! Make it a discovery, a moment of drama! Instead it feels like we’re reading the author’s pasted-in plot synopsis after the editor stepped in and said oi, Gary, where’s me Wirrrn? (The Doctor twigs whodunit on Page 250, with all of 30 pages left to enjoy it.)

This clumsy reminder does at least lead into a bit of character realisation (put them the other way around ferchristssakes) in order to highlight Gary’s thesis statement from the Introduction: the Borg, he reckons, have more in common with the Wirrrn than they do with the Cybermen. It’s technically a take, I suppose? Not an actual germ of a story, but let’s see what he does with it. The Wirrrn do indeed take over the minds of their victims and learn what they know, adding to a group consciousness. The Wirrrn do indeed convert their victims’ bodies into their own material. And… yeah. Done. Is there a great deal else to say about their modus operandi that wasn’t already said in The Ark In Space?

As Placebo Effect went on I rather doubted it, since there are also little dollops of the Cybermen (“You will become like us”), xenomorphs (a straight up Alien Queen rip-off) and ah what the hell, the actual Borg to help pad out the Wirrrn identity. (Refusing to attack when interlopers are not a threat is specifically a Borg thing! It doesn’t enrich the Wirrrn to staple that on.) The general concept of a malevolent hive mind is interesting, but as well as being presented as a thoroughly surface-level idea in Placebo Effect (there being hardly anyone interesting enough to care about them being taken over) the idea was done quite well and quite creatively in the previous book. Those guys were even insectoid to boot. They’re even mentioned here!

While we’re reminiscing about Seeing I, it’s worth mentioning that this is Sam’s first appearance following her big reset. I had some reservations about that being the purview of Gary Russell — big fan of continuity links, tends not to analyse the regulars much — and sure enough, it’s a mixed bag.

A good effort is made to acknowledge those events and the change that has occurred — principally, Sam being older now. Some of this is essentially box-ticking, but as easy as it is to kick continuity of that sort, it can be useful to highlight ongoing character beats. (I think a few of them miss the mark. Russell seems oblivious to Sam’s activism being a family trait, and he doesn’t seem aware that Sam doesn’t remember her possession in Kursaal.) He keeps an eye on the ongoing development too: “Sam had been forced to grow up … This was the first time she’d ever had to deal with a crisis of faith.” / “The Doctor looked at her, as if he was seeing for the first time just how much she had grown up in the last few years. … ‘I’ve rather neglected you, haven’t I?’” A good amount of this is throwing the ball to the next writer, but hey, at least it’s moving.

As an actual character in the story, though, Sam reads much the same as ever. The voice is sarcastic with that little edge of neediness — check. She can’t seem to help kindling a bit of romance with a young guy — check. She wonders about her parents and how she’ll handle that — check. (At this point I’m dead curious where, if anywhere, this is going.) She quickly notes her attraction to the Doctor, but doesn’t go on about it. (New check/character development.) The more seasoned activist and traveller of Seeing I doesn’t really come across here. Perhaps that’s fair since it might be a complex thing to outsource to other writers, but then, wasn’t that the whole point of the Sam-leaving exercise? Write a style guide if it’s tricky. “Her hair is longer and she often makes note of the fact she is now twenty-one” is pretty thin gruel if we’re saying she legit wasn’t working as a character before and should work better now.

Sam still fares better than the Doctor. I will say there’s a dollop of interest here: I was intrigued to find out he’d made friends during that break from Sam mentioned in Vampire Science, and thrilled to be digging into that gap at all. I was perhaps a bit deflated to learn that Stacy and Ssard (a human and Ice Warrior who fell in love) were introduced in the Radio Times Doctor Who comic strip, and not invented here after all — not to mention that said gap was seemingly there to facilitate a few multimedia adventures, and not to suggest ominous things about the Doctor and Sam’s closeness after all. But hey, I still like the “gap companions” thing, and rushing to attend their wedding is a lovely way to get us into the story. (Said wedding goes awry due to a local religious movement, The Church Of The Way Forward, who object to inter-species bonding. Any dramatic fallout from this is denied to Stacy and Ssard who effectively leave the story at that point, their cameo achieved, but it gives Sam something to carp about. She gets into a tedious religion vs evolution tangent with the religious leader in the middle of the book. Gotta make 280 pages somehow, I guess.)

As to the Doctor’s behaviour, well, I’ve got issues with it. He seems awfully at ease with wandering off and leaving Sam to her own devices. Really, after all that? Placebo Effect is set three months after Seeing I, which perhaps gives him the excuse of getting all that development out of the way first. (If that was the intention, yuck. Do the work guys. It’s an ongoing series — you should want to grow the characters.) In any event, we missed those months, so the Doctor sending Sam off on her own, or disappearing for a few weeks (his time) to fetch Stacy’s parents for the wedding feels jarring in context. Their relationship was supposed to have evolved on two fronts.

He just hasn’t got it in general though. The Doctor in Placebo Effect defaults to a certain off-putting weirdness that is possibly emblematic of the Doctor, but doesn’t represent this more (deceptively?) charming incarnation, despite some typically Gary Russell-ish nods to his clairvoyance and his half-human biology. He’s not terribly charming. At one point he mutters under his breath that a person he’s speaking to is a “useless oaf”, which seems unusually aggressive. Apparently (see Pieces Of Eighth) Russell struggled to characterise him, feeling that most of the books up to now were too mercurial to hit on anything consistent about the character. I don’t agree, but in any case, his default characterisation here is based on Columbo, which um, yeah, is not it either, obviously.

It’s difficult to find the Doctor interesting when he drifts through hundreds of pages oblivious to the threat. (Which incidentally is the opposite of how Columbo rolls.) The blurb almost has to tell fibs to suggest more momentum than there is: “The Doctor finds himself drafted in to examine some bizarre new drugs that are said to enhance the natural potential of the competing athletes.” Sure, on Page 207. Traditionally we are past blurb setups at that point! Meanwhile, we hopscotch between factions and hold on for religious debates and no one, it seems, has all that much interest in the Olympics.

I was expecting a bit more effort and world-building there. Is that wrong? Shouldn’t the Olympics be colourful and exciting and central to the drama? Especially spacey, futurey, aliens-competing-ey Olympics? But Russell reserves his serious construction work for (of course) continuity, plumbing in a general Dalek Masterplan-era backdrop (the SSS, the Teknix, the Guardian of the Solar System, the planet Desperus all get a mention), while also generously nodding towards New Adventures continuity, especially his own. (Hey did you guys know he wrote Peladon out of the Galactic Federation? GUYS? GUYS DID YOU KNOW THAT?) He also makes sure we know where Placebo Effect sits vis a vis The Ark In Space, which is perhaps helpful, but also can’t help but pause the flow for us. (It might not feel so jarring if the Doctor got with the program a little earlier.) On the plus side this is by no means his most continuity-sodden book, just as many of his less flattering writing tics are perhaps not at full blast here — thinking of unnecessary usage of names in dialogue, and strangely pronounced enjoyment of his character deaths. All of that is still here, but it’s arguably less noticeable than it was in, for example, Deadfall.

Honestly though, Placebo Effect still ranks low among the Gary Russell books I’ve read. It doesn’t apply continuity in particularly insightful ways (which can be done, and has been done, by Russell), and nor is it even memorably irritating. The central characters struggle to be heard above the din; when they are, there’s little worth saying. There’s potential in the premise for an all out farce and that peeks through at times, such as a man realising he’s had an affair with a Foamasi and not his secretary after all, but the book doesn’t seem very focussed on comedy. It just mixes high camp with body horror, which jars exactly as you might expect.

The absence of a clear and compelling through-line is the real problem though, and there’s really no coming back from that. Just like when it happened in Longest Day, I had to fight to focus, and again the only real momentum was a gradual excitement to not be reading it any more. 

3/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #25 – Mission: Impractical by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#12
Mission: Impractical
By David A. McIntee

In his customary introduction David A. McIntee calls Mission: Impractical “something to cheer [him] up” following several much heavier books. He also announces that it is “shallow” (“damn right”) and that you can “check your brains at the door.” Boy, I hope he saved space on his shelf for that Salesman Of The Year trophy.

Is he wrong? Well, no, it’s most definitely a romp. There’s not much in it you need to think about and now that I’ve finished it I can already feel chunks of it floating away like candyfloss in a puddle. Is that bad? I think not. I wouldn’t want every book to be all icing and no cake, but once in a while is fine.

The plot is pretty straightforward. (“So straightforward!” screams McIntee through your letterbox. “A buffoon could read it!”) Ten years ago an item was stolen from the Veltrochni. They know it found its way to Vandor Prime and they are threatening war (really more just slaughter) if it is not returned to them. The current owner, a Vandorian who works for the President, discretely arranges for the original thieves to steal it again and take it to its rightful home. The scheme also ensnares our larcenous friends from The Trial Of A Timelord, Glitz and Dibber, as well as the Doctor and his shapeshifting friend Frobisher. (Mostly to be found as a talking penguin.) The Doctor, meanwhile, has a contract out on his life; two bounty hunters/assassins are making unnaturally fast progress in tracking him down, so the TARDIS goes on a random jump right into Mandell’s path. What follows is a “get the gang back together” story, then a heist, and then hopefully not all out war.

I didn’t make a lot of notes on this one, which probably means there’s not a lot to say about it. (“No wonder!” booms McIntee, squinting through the window. “Surprised you finished it!”) But let me see… The gang are likeable enough. There’s Jack Chance, a thrill-seeker who went into (semi) legitimate business running a café. Chat and Liang, twins with incredible acrobatic skills who ended up working for the circus. Monty, an older gent who gripes a lot but probably prefers a life of crime to his mechanic day job. And Oskar, a master of disguise with surprising insecurities, who sits most of it out for various reasons. This kind of thing is familiar territory, and then some, but there are enough little quirks for it not to feel like Terrance Dicks dutifully transcribing a favourite movie. I would say I cared about them the right amount.

Best of the bunch is Glitz, of course, the most developed one by simple virtue of being off the telly, and still sporting that charming Holmesian wit. He bounces off the page and remains one of those characters you wish they’d made more of in the series. (What a shame he never fancied doing any Big Finish.) McIntee is no stranger to continuity, and he has a few things to set in motion in order to get Glitz from his apparent doom at the end of Trial to his carefree arrival in the ship Nosferatu II in Dragonfire. I’m not sure that journey from A to B has ever even occurred to me, but it’s safe to say that if you have any questions about it, McIntee has answered them. (Dibber’s good too, by the way. His was always the more thankless part, but there’s a charming loyalty to him that comes through here, like a Sgt. Benton from the wrong side of the tracks.)

What else, what else. Well, I like the Veltrochni. Introduced in McIntee’s The Dark Path — indeed a heavier book than this one, and not nearly as enjoyable — they feel like a more rounded species here without needing McIntee to do his frequent tic of spending far too long describing everything about them. (Maybe it’s easier because it’s not their first appearance. Also: that’s Virgin continuity, baby!)

It helps that one of the bounty hunters, Karthakh, is a Veltrochni: we’re frequently seeing his point of view and there’s a good amount of pathos to him despite his stoic professionalism. He’s still on some level reeling from a family tragedy, which makes him sufficiently unlike his people that he can partner up with a Tzun — another species from Virgin canon (First Frontier, also by McIntee) and one that the Veltrochni all but wiped out. He and Sha’ol have an unconventional working relationship/friendship; you sense that they are each all that the other has, and time spent in their company isn’t wasted. (Sha’ol, too, has some depths. He’d have to being a Tzun working with a Veltrochni.)

There’s also a ship full of Ogrons led by the ambitious Gorrak. They don’t entirely need to be here, plot-wise, but Ogrons make good comedic fodder, and there is some substance to them if you squint. McIntee takes a page out of the Space War novelisation and highlights their determined, rock-oriented culture. Gorrak’s desire to break his people away from servitude is admirable, even if he is horrible. Before long the Ogrons end up working for Karthakh and Sha’ol anyway, but the arrangement feels equitable enough to put up with.

Ogrons still trigger pretty guttural laughs at the best of times, like a moment where they’re all arming their guns and one Ogron explodes, prompting another to say that his gun works. There’s also the moment Gorrak orders his men to “stun any creature who is alone,” not realising that he has walked into the hall alone “until seven different stun blasts hit him.” (“When he woke up, he knew that at least his men had understood their instructions.”) Is it high art? No. Did I chuckle? Like a drain.

The action has, dare I say it, a whiff of Pratchett with its gung ho bunch of scumbags just trying to get by at the whim of a sinister smart guy. (Mandell, not the Doctor.) The heist itself is reasonably clever, with some neat disguises and enough rational preparation that it genuinely seems to have helped having the Doctor along. For his part, he injects warmth and sense into their machinations wherever possible. You get the sense Colin Baker would have enjoyed his slightly uncouth but-not-outright-horrible storyline here.

Some of the complications don’t really blossom into anything. The whole bit about bounty hunters and who really wants the Doctor dead is paid off, but only in an academic sense where the Doctor knows who did it, beats them at their own game and then that’s enough of that apparently. We don’t, like, go and bring the fight to them. This probably makes more sense when you consider that we’re going more comic book than usual here. Mission: Impractical seems more invested in pay-offs that you can have right this second with whatever’s in front of you, like the machinations of Mandell and how that ultimately impacts on his family. Surprising depth for a somewhat cartoonish baddie.

And I mean, speaking of comics and cartoons, I haven’t even talked about Frobisher! I’ve never read the comics he appeared in but I’m a fan of The Holy Terror, the brilliant and creepy-funny audio from Robert Shearman. This Frobisher seems consistent with that impish character: a loyal friend of the Doctor, clearly with some insecurities but balanced against incredible shapeshifting powers. He isn’t so overpowered that you feel he’s never in danger, and he needs to use some ingenuity to put his powers to the right use. I’m glad we got a novel with him, and I’d read more. (That said, there is a development late in the book that should give Frobisher some serious conflict to work with, but the book seemingly isn’t interested. Oh well, it’s a romp etc. But then why introduce something like that if you’re just going to fire a blank? Okay, it’s a pretty good surprise. Which I suppose answers that.)

McIntee peppers the thing with a decent amount of jokes, and that’s not even including Frobisher’s amusing shape choices. He spends some time laboriously arranging for a character to say “four-sprung duck technique”, sort of like those car adverts innit, boom boom. Perhaps more ambitious is a bit where he both leans into the comic feel and (unintentionally?) rips the piss out of his own writing style: “Wreckage was torn from the hull and scattered far and wide, while the fuel and atmosphere ignited in the sort of explosion that was usually only created by firework specialists on drugs, and would have needed a dictionary full of adjectives to describe properly.” McIntee of old would probably just find the adjectives.

Then there’s his usual intertextuality, with adjustable levels of on-the-nose. The Doctor, watching Star Wars on opening night, observes that Peter Cushing looks familiar and he might once have met his granddaughter. Even better is the moment just before when I thought for sure McIntee had gone the whole hog and sent the Doctor and Frobisher to Tatooine. He definitely got me!

Showing our heroes at the movies seems an appropriate way to start. Mission: Impractical certainly ain’t Star Wars, but it feels more like a trip to the flicks than a novel, flashing before you in a way that doesn’t seem like a wasted ticket but is also, as sometimes happens, mostly just a nice time in a comfy seat with popcorn. Possibly helped by the author’s cautionary lamp-shading, it still sent me away in a good mood. Shallow be damned.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #24 – Seeing I by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#12
Seeing I
By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

One of the unique but, to be honest, difficult things about Doctor Who is its constant need for redefinition. It’s an easy show to “get” overall, that’s its appeal, but the characters have an in-built turnover that means having to re-learn the same truths, preferably in new and interesting ways every time. When the Doctor changes, who is he now? (Or she.) When a new companion comes along, who are they? But hold up, now there’s follow up questions: why do they want to travel with the Doctor? What about them makes that an attractive proposition, to them and to the Doctor? You can’t just pop another bright young thing out of the fridge and call it a day.

That, I think we can all agree now, is what happened here. Sam Jones comfortably meets the criteria for what a Doctor Who companion might look like in the late 90s. Young. A bit radical. Not immune to the Doctor’s McGann-ish charms. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what is, when you boil it down, Ace minus the explosives and Fenric, plus a teenage crush. (Apart from perhaps a general lack of imagination.) But it’s also how you introduce the character, and The Eight Doctors had far too much on its plate to worry about that as well. By the time Vampire Science rolled around, despite valiant effort from Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, a critical moment had passed, and all the novels afterwards have felt its absence. If I can affix my Coulda Shoulda Woulda hat for a second: there should have been a Sam Begins novel after The Eight Doctors. Introduce him, then her, with a whole book devoted to who she is and how this makes sense, actually. Write Sam’s Love And War. Instead, we were more or less just told this is the right sort of person so let’s all just get on with it, shall we, and it has felt like varying shades of going through the motions since.

Cue a major course correction. Sam left in Longest Day, convinced that the Doctor was dead, and even if he wasn’t, beginning to doubt whether her juvenile feelings were justification enough for this kind of life. It felt a bit left-field coming in at the end of that book (Longest Day sadly isn’t very good) but it set up an intriguing pause. I don’t think that was very well handled either, with the Doctor more or less making “find Sam” a side mission in Legacy Of The Daleks and, to an extent, in Dreamstone Moon as well. But at least the latter gave Sam the time of day. How does she cope without the Doctor? Who is she without him? Taking things away is a useful route to redefinition. I think Paul Leonard did a good job there.

That book wasn’t allowed to reunite them, but to be honest, maybe that was for the best. Blum and Orman are back now and Seeing I gives it the full works. Who is Sam without the Doctor? Who — blessed relief to hear this — is the Doctor without Sam? Should they reunite? This is no side mission. It’s a character-based story with plot galore, albeit further down the pecking order than usual. I’m betting this ratio of plot to character is hit and miss with some readers, but I can’t complain. The questions and answers about Sam undeniably hit harder in this one.

The main and most shocking thing Seeing I does is take its time. Sam is on a new world, having been dragged away from the Doctor all over again in Dreamstone Moon and once again having no direct path to seeing him again. (And a dwindling certainty that she would even want to. She feels a lot of guilt about giving him the kiss of life, and the boundary she pushed.) She has nothing but her core interests, all the time in the world and occasionally a cat for company.

She volunteers at a soup kitchen and begins making friends. When she needs more from life she gets an unrewarding job with INC, a vaguely sinister company in control of everything, thanks to some spiffy eye tech. When that doesn’t get her anywhere — and when she begins having suspicions about INC — she returns to the soup kitchen, and from there joins a group of ex-INC biologists living in a commune. For a while she just lives, having boyfriends and broadening her horizons. But her commitment to helping others is always there, and she slowly begins taking charge of the fight against INC, which explodes when the company (for no apparent reason) comes to knock down the commune. This, as another central character will later impishly observe, means war. But the more important bit is everything else.

She has grown. She is more certain of who she is, because these values have been tested and they have stuck. By the end of Seeing I Sam is at least twenty-one years old, and could comfortably pass for her own older, wiser sister. There’s been no radical reinvention here; merely a chance to examine what we have, test it, and finally be sure of it. They find the best version of Sam here.

It’s so rare that a character can just percolate like this. A break is not unheard of, as Blum and Orman are only too aware, making a direct reference to Ace leaving and then coming back in the New Adventures. Trying not to squee too loudly that this is apparently all the same universe (!), we probably have Deceit to thank for showing how not to do it: don’t just send a character away and bring back their Version 2.0. We need to see them grow. It’s a promising development for Doctor Who print fiction to realise this, even if it’s only occurring because things didn’t exactly go smoothly at launch.

But as I’ve observed/moaned about before, The Sam Problem isn’t all on Sam Jones. She was thrust upon the Doctor because (as Seeing I says, staring right at the elephant in the room) “maybe someone out there had figured it was a good idea to pair him up with a nice non-threatening little kid. Someone who'd keep him busy and distracted by getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. Someone they'd arranged to be the perfect safe companion for him.” Which, okay, fine (also mee-ow, guys!), but all of that detracts from the Doctor as well, because the situation is contrived so that he doesn’t get, or even need a say in it. (“It wasn’t me who guided the TARDIS to her, come to think of it. It was all an astounding coincidence that I should arrive at precisely the moment in time and space where Sam needed rescuing, wasn’t it?” BAD ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. WHO LET YOU IN?) We don’t know that he really needs Sam, or anyone, beyond the surface level need for the Doctor always to have someone around.

Well, Seeing I puts that to the test as well. The Doctor is actively looking for Sam in this, which is a good idea, isn’t it? Sort of helps the urgency along? (Sorry, Legacy and Dreamstone — I don’t think he was trying hard enough there.) He is politely thwarted by a receptionist when trying to make information requests, which goes on for a very amusing few weeks. It’s fun seeing the Doctor struggle with a problem on such a small level. When he inevitably retaliates and hooks into the INC system to steal the info he needs — having by this point also worked up a cautious curiosity about INC and the technology they possess — things backfire spectacularly and he ends up in prison. No big deal, you’re probably thinking, and that’s certainly his view, insisting he will leave as soon as he learns what he needs. But something about this prison makes it very difficult to escape. And before you know it, Sam isn’t the only one spending three years in this novel.

I think there are reservations to be had here. There are good reasons for the Doctor’s difficulty in escaping: he is unwittingly under closer surveillance than he’d ever imagine, and there is a very clever computer at work that can predict his actions. It also serves a vital character point to show him diminished and unable to flourish without a companion — indeed, when he finally escapes it’s because Sam rescues him, because that dynamic has at last been restored, and because she has help. All good stuff and I see what they did there, but I’d be lying if I said this genuinely seemed like an impenetrable fortress that even the Doctor can’t handle. When you stand back from it, it seems like a series of technically solvable problems.

I think the argument here is institutionalisation: they keep keeping him here, which he hates, and an escape attempt costs the life of another inmate/recognisable type of Bright Young Thing, which inevitably strikes a nerve. There is no dramatic evil for him to fight (at one point he asks to be transferred to another, famously more brutal prison just so he can retaliate), and the psychiatrist working with him genuinely seems to want to help him. (This is borne out after the Doctor escapes, and Dr Akalu observes “at least the Doctor seemed so much more alive now. That could only be good for him.” Nothing but love for Dr Akalu, even though he’s wrong about stuff.)

On a deeper character level, the Doctor is alone. What is he doing? What’s it for? He seems rudderless and begins to diminish, becoming childlike and defeatist. Bleak it might be, but it very well makes the point that Sam not being here is a problem for him. And inevitably it puts INC on something of a pedestal, suggesting they are a force to be reckoned with if they can stop the Doctor.

As with the prison I don’t think that bit’s entirely earned, especially as the book nears the end. We find out that INC have indeed got hold of alien technology. Suggested lore-heavy links to other organisations (such as TTC in Longest Day) are eventually shot down, as it turns out INC’s controlling interest isn’t particularly interested in the minutiae. There’s even an external force that orchestrated the alien tech and wants it back — who, in turn, aren’t what you’d call evil and are eventually rendered harmless. Does the planet have systemic problems? Aplenty. Is INC good? Broadly nah. But there’s no profound evil working against the Doctor, which might be a problem for some readers since it’s so pivotal that the immovable object meeting the Doctor’s unstoppable force is, y’know, immoveable.

Hey ho, though. I think Blum and Orman are Doing A Thing by not having an easily defined bad guy (or, bearing in mind the dodgy stuff that INC is doing, not having a bad guy be behind it all), as it takes the focus away from that black and white conflict and redirects it — you guessed it — towards the Doctor and Sam.

When the time comes for them to hang out again (and the rescue itself is awfully quick, isn’t it, almost an anti-climax really but okay, shutting up now!) the Doctor has been through so much that Sam must take the lead. He doesn’t even have his costume — a fun bit of symbolism to show that he’s not quite right — and Sam’s gang don’t trust him, neither seeing him at his best nor knowing anything about him besides Sam’s maybe-apocryphal stories. She is disturbed that people could not be in awe of him, but that is perhaps another little learning curve for her, and a diminishing of those romantic feelings.

She goes back and forth on their reunion. (And so does the Doctor, but it takes a long time, and a connection to Susan, for him to consider that this might be a no.) There is a definite yes-or-no conversation right at the end, but I think her decision was already made by then. She knows herself and her boundaries better than before. She fully believes in her ideals, knows that they’re not just shrapnel from her upbringing, and being in the TARDIS will let her be her best self. She understands that she’s not a monster for being attracted to an unattainable guy. She kisses him — just once, seemingly that’s enough — and away they go. (Sidebar: the Doctor has his costume remade, and then some: “Every last detail of the design was right, but so much more care and workmanship had gone into this outfit than the original.” Implication being that he, too, has grown into something more now. Blum and Ormannn!)

For a characterisation rescue mission, Seeing I is more subtle than I expected. While I agree with the need to do it, I think Steve Cole’s reservations about Sam in those early books was a tad over-cautious — and I think that’s borne out by the fact that what we see of her in this rings true with what we already know. She just needed to pause and work at it. Not to spoil the party, but it’s not as if we’re suddenly immune from authors taking a swing in the wrong direction. (It’ll be interesting to see what happens; can they stay the course?) But as with the first couple of novels, it will be a help to point at Blum and Orman and say, “like that please.”

Seeing I has the patience to sit with things, making those core elements better for it, but there’s a decent plot here too. For all my niggles about immoveable objects, I like that INC has its good apples such as Dr Akalu, and that the beings at the root of INC’s problems are doing what they do because of an absence of clear intentions. Most of Sam’s gang are, to be honest, somewhat interchangeable, but there are little gems strewn through the book that caught my eye, such as the Doctor’s increasingly childlike outrage in prison. (“‘He shouldn’t have taken my bear away,’ the Doctor said grimly. ‘He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.’”) There’s a very satisfying reveal about the cat Sam has been hanging around with, which I’m thrilled to reveal I guessed several pages early, and of course I adored the other little New Adventures nods. (An apparent sequel to Bernice Summerfield’s book is mentioned, as is a sentient computer program from Transit and SLEEPY.)

I’m not sure what a reader who wasn’t following the series would make of Seeing I, whether it would work alone. If you squint, though, Seeing I could be that introductory Sam novel I wanted in the first place, just showing up fashionably late. I would hope any passing newbies would find Sam as successful as the rest of us, and climb aboard with her.

8/10