Doctor Who: The BBC Books #72 – Heart Of TARDIS by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#32

Heart of TARDIS

By Dave Stone

Look up there — what’s that light in the sky, above Gotham Police Headquarters? Is that…? Yes, it’s the Silly Goose Signal. And if you look down into the street you’ll see him haring towards us now in his polka-dotted cape and squeaky slippers, blowing raspberries as he goes. Dave Stone approacheth.

Heart Of TARDIS is odd, perhaps even by Stone’s standards. It has multiple story strands, heaps of characters, two Doctors with companions in tow, magic, surrealism, jokes, horrible murders and a preoccupation with TV and movies. (Cheese also crops up a lot.) It’s not for the casual reader.

I don’t know if the book specifically or my attention span was the reason that I got 100 pages in, realised I wasn’t quite following it and started again, this time writing out the different plot strands to keep them straight. This mostly helped, but even then there were important moments I struggled to comprehend simply because they were couched in strangeness or silliness; with this one it can be hard to grab onto the genuine activity of a scene, or even a sentence. (Dave Stone newbies would do well to know that some of his sentences are sort of, optional.)

Stone has always been one for silliness, which is a good thing really: Sky Pirates! is hilarious. He loves a comedic diversion and there are plenty of those here, such as a page or two on the history of the obsessive alien Collectors, or a character considering how Romana would fit into her own class upbringing. But there’s somewhat of a sliding scale when it comes to just how firm a grip he has on the story, vs how much fun he’s having. Pirates! and Death And Diplomacy knew just what they were about — a quest narrative and a romcom respectively — whereas, say, Oblivion is really interested in alternative timelines, but it just sort of paddles around in that idea. I’m not sure what it is that drives Heart Of TARDIS as a story. A collision between magic and science, I suppose, since it’s about a literal nexus point of the two, but then no one in it really engages with the difference. There’s no “Science, Miss Hawthorne!” debate this week; magic is just a thing that demonstrably works.

If that feels incongruous to you within the bounds of Doctor Who, well, it’s just that sort of book: unreality is baked into it on a story level and on a meta one. Literally we have characters losing their faculties and doing strange, horrible things to each other: an American town, Lychburg, has stopped following the normal rules of cause and effect and it is no longer possible to leave. (Think Pleasantville. Just add murders.) Beyond that we have weird attack squads who are, in some undefined way, horrifying to behold, and they use black magic. There are diversions (Stone gonna Stone) where characters compare real life to movies and television, which feels like it’s going somewhere but doesn’t really; we even have quasi-cameos from The Simpsons and Cheers characters, as well as two recurring characters who are a very transparent piss-take of The Professionals. Then there’s what happens to the TARDIS at the end — as in, the Fourth Doctor’s one — being transmogrified room by room and filled with random sights, a sequence that would maybe have more cachet if we hadn’t already been on that sort of toboggan ride for 200+ pages.

We also have some fun and games around canon and continuity. (I think we can infer some deliberateness here, given that one of the villains is literally named “Continuity.”) The Second Doctor’s story kicks off because he’s found a way to undo the security controls on his TARDIS, which are the things preventing him from piloting it properly; this is a retcon new to the book. (To be fair, it’s not a bad one.) The Fourth Doctor and Romana are in the middle of a somewhat breathless search for the Key to Time, but they seem completely happy to put that on pause this week; this is fairly unheard of. (Hard to be mad at this as a concept though, as Romana I deserves more stories, and they can’t all involve the Key.) There’s a gag about the (Fourth) Doctor always leaving K9 behind on adventures and needing to go back and rescue him, sometimes centuries later; that’s hilarious, but again, this is the first we’re hearing about it. The Doctor — both — has a strange inability to be photographed, and cannot provide fingerprint samples unless he concentrates; all very magical, and all new here. There’s even a possible blooper to confuse matters, with Benton still being a Sergeant in the late 1980s; he was a Warrant Officer in his last TV appearance. (Perhaps he got demoted…?)

None of this really matters as such, and by all means other authors can pick them up again, but taken together, in the context of the series so far and combined with the quasi-reality of the plot, it does all sort of push the whole thing into the realm of “is any of this real.” And, pure personal taste here, my investment in a story is somewhat tied to how much the characters are invested in it. If it could all have been a dream then, no offence, but why should I care? It’s a tricky balance.

There are subtler weirdnesses as well — let’s call them, takes. Stone characterises the Fourth Doctor and Romana perfectly, capturing their lofty brilliance, Romana’s indomitability, this Doctor’s irreverence that can turn on a sixpence into grave fury.

The Second Doctor and co are more bespoke. This Doctor he characterises as a chaos demon, utterly impulsive and incapable of listening to anybody before he takes action. This is a bit of a stretch, but at least it’s along the right lines. (His predilection for technobabble is definitely a Dave Stone thing, however. I can’t picture Troughton rattling off some of the convoluted stuff he comes out with here.) Jamie seems to dip below Stone’s interest altogether, although he does get a critical plot moment near the end.

Victoria is where he really goes for broke. Pushed into the centre as the rational protagonist of the trio, this Victoria is no frightened girl: she’s well travelled (after dozens of off-screen adventures) and has become downright cosmopolitan. She has got used to futuristic forms of travel, even been “spoilt” by them; she screams only once, and then it feels like a surprise; seemingly no longer a retiring violet, she recognises and even makes innuendos. It’s also through Victoria — now apparently a keen observer — that we get some of the best Second Doctor writing: “[The Doctor had] a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.” / “Ordinarily, he took the part — was the part — of a silly little hobo (as she believed the Americans called it) drifting wherever the fancy took him and amiably allowing himself to be taken along with the circumstances in which he found himself. Indeed, he seemed to be most happy in that persona and took pains to preserve it even at all possible. When danger threatened, however — being trapped in a town elided from the universe of space and time and with a killer on the loose, for example — it was as if he put the clown aside and transformed himself into a man of action, fearlessly hunting down the particulars of the case like a bantam-sized Sherlock Holmes… a man whom, in the face of all probability, he claimed to have met.” NB: Typical Dave Stone sentence lengths there.

Stone justifies his sharper, less frightened take on Victoria: “given the tenor of her original times, [she] was not exactly a shrinking violet even in terms of that era. Time and again, on her travels with Jamie and the Doctor, in any number of perilous situations, she had found reserves of courage and fortitude even she had not known she had.” And honestly, she’s an improvement on the person we see in the actual episodes (although the apparently sexual worldliness is a bit odd), but it’s another thing that makes Heart Of TARDIS feel like a self-contained stopover, where this particular author is god and he makes all the rules.

I suppose that only really matters if you need all of these books to feel like they’re part of the same series. I think it’s fine to step outside sometimes. (Look at Campaign.) I’m just surprised that the editorial team were on board with a book that takes so many weird little swings. (Look at Campaign. Okay, that’s unfair: Campaign finally died because it kept missing deadlines, not because it was weird. But there was some resistance from Richards, and I can’t help but wonder what notes he gave for this one. If, indeed, he had time to give any.)

It’s easy to discuss Heart Of TARDIS in terms of ideas — it’s got oodles. (Some, like the K9 rescue, go nowhere beyond “funny bit”. K9 doesn’t return once he’s safe and sound.) It’s harder to crunch it into shape as a story with a point. Or two, really, since this is being sold as a multi-Doctor adventure. (More on that in a moment.) The situation in Lychburg is creepy, often to an extent that seems to be from another book altogether (the woman building a homunculus out of victims’ body parts), but the basic concept of cause and effect going haywire is very interesting. It’s hard to articulate, however, particularly for a word-wanderer like Dave Stone. You soon get the sense that this plot (the Second Doctor one) will be isolated until the Fourth Doctor gets involved. Nothing much really progresses here until it’s nearly over, at which point the grand finale happens virtually off-screen.

Then we have the Fourth Doctor stuff, visiting UNIT HQ to recover a missing Brigadier. This involves the aforementioned black magic practitioners, but again there isn’t much proactively to do for most of it. The weird and wacky characters operate with abandon and eventually, when it’s time to resolve the crisis, the Doctor(s) is only of secondary help. Things are decided by a sort of wizard battle between secondary characters, with the Brigadier (under-written, almost wasn’t worth including him) intervening at a crucial moment.

Heart Of TARDIS gets very close to edging out the Doctor(s) altogether, although it certainly relies on TARDISes for its plot. This is at least themed, although that isn’t articulated until the Epilogue: “We can’t always expect to take what you might call a proactive role. Sometimes, in this life, we’re lucky if we can do as much as work out what’s going on, much less whether what we do has an effect … Great events are the result of the interactions of people who are largely indifferent to each other.” Which is a decent theme for a book… just an odd fit for Doctor Who, and thus, it’s another one-shot Dave Stone “take”. As a reader, as it must have been for the Doctors, most of this becomes an exercise in patiently waiting through each section until the summing up starts, or somebody else does something.

Looking at it as a multi-Doctor story, we must remember that Dave Stone is a silly goose. So, it isn’t one in the traditional sense. I don’t mind that: it’s always difficult to come up with a big enough threat for more than one Doctor to deal with, and it’s equally hard to give each of them something to do. Stone’s approach is more like Cold Fusion, where separate Doctors’ plot lines eventually dovetail. Where this gets really Dave Stone, however, is that they don’t even meet. The Second Doctor is never aware of the other one; the Fourth Doctor twigs fairly late in the story, and then there is a knowingly short scene where the one secretly assists the other.

As you can probably guess, this has all been setup for a funny line, in this case Romana’s: “So that’s it, is it? We get through all this, and our function is to simply open the door to let you in for a grand total of two minutes before you run straight out again?” In other words: you all expected a multi-Doctor story, tee hee hee. And honestly, a 280 page setup-punchline is a fairly impressive thing to pull off. But it is quite likely to annoy a few readers. (I think by that point I’d given up any hope/forgotten the possibility of the two interacting anyway.)

I was never exactly mad at Heart Of TARDIS, and I don’t know if I’d describe it as confusing, although admittedly I did put some work in there. (And it’s still pretty convoluted.) It’s more structured than The Blue Angel and less abstract than Campaign; it’s just weird on every other level and very, very busy. It’s hard to say whether I actually enjoyed it. Stone’s rapid-fire ideas can be very interesting, but that dreamlike strangeness makes it difficult to care on any deeper level. This is where comedy usually helps, and to be fair it’s often very funny, but being tinged with the grotesque sort of undermines that aspect for me.

It’s one of those books where, if nothing else, The Author Definitely Meant To Do That, and I think that deserves some respect. But I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out than an editor had replied with, “Dave, what the hell is this?”

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #71 – The Banquo Legacy by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#35

The Banquo Legacy

By Andy Lane & Justin Richards

At last, we’re getting somewhere. After several books where the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion elude the Time Lords so successfully that you have to wonder if anyone’s even looking for them, The Banquo Legacy introduces the radical idea that the bad guys could put some effort into it.

All of which feels like a spoiler, and indeed I was quite worried that I’d ruined it for myself by listening to a podcast about an earlier book. (It’s been 20+ years, inevitably that sort of thing is a minefield.) But no, The Banquo Legacy makes it clear early on that a Time Lord presence has caused the TARDIS to land in 1898, so it follows that a Time Lord will be lurking nearby. See also the blurb, which straight up tells you that the Doctor is “desperate to uncover the Time Lord agent who has him trapped.” Frankly it would be amazing if you got to the big reveal near the end of the book and didn’t already know.

Too much foreknowledge is unlikely to hurt The Banquo Legacy, since it didn’t begin life as anything Time Lordy or arc-plotty anyway. It turns out that BBC Books had yet another gap to fill, with Rebecca Levene’s novel Freaks sadly disappearing due to work commitments. Enter Justin Richards who — somewhat typically for Justin Richards — had a completed novel just lying around. A non-Who murder mystery co-written years earlier with Andy Lane, it was an epistolary, intended to evoke Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. (Lane wrote one character, Richards the other.) As well as it being terribly nice to get their old manuscript onto shelves, it was simply more expedient to insert Doctor Who elements into this than to write a whole new thing from scratch — especially where Richards had just done so with Grave Matter.

It’s debatable how obvious all of this behind the scenes stuff is when reading the book. It’s not as if epistolaries are unheard of in Doctor Who — Lane’s All-Consuming Fire was a very good one. As that author notes on Pieces Of Eighth, the original book had Who-ey overtones simply because that stuff was baked into its authors; where it is overtly horror, it is arguably by way of things like The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. And Richards, ever the editor, does a convincing enough job of weaving not just the Doctor and co. into this, but the ongoing Time Lord plot as well. It is relevant that this particular murder plot has ensnared these particular characters at this particular point in the run.

While it’s a bit coincidental that we ended up here, it makes for a fun experiment to tell a Doctor Who story from someone else’s perspective, or multiple someone elses. It also allows for an unusual take* on a mystery plot, with one character seeking answers that the other possesses, one character’s scenes filling in gaps from the other’s, and action overlapping. (*I haven’t read any Agatha Christie. Forgive me.) It pays particular dividends about halfway through after a couple of murders in close succession, with the two narrators hurriedly jumping to and fro in a way that satisfyingly speeds up the pace.

There is a downside to this, however, in that the two narrators are not hugely dissimilar. This is awkward to note since it was apparently two separate authors writing them, but Inspector Ian Stratford (Lane) and lawyer John Hopkinson (Richards) are both upstanding chaps of more or less the same type. Neither sounds especially Victorian or egregiously different from one another; if there weren’t two different fonts at work I’d be unlikely to pick either one out of a paragraph.

There is a whiff of cop and criminal about them, Hopkinson having numerous secrets to impart, but — in an admittedly very “Victorian epistolary” way, see Dracula — they end up full of camaraderie anyway, united by chivalry and whatnot. Before long I was wishing that there were more perspectives in the mix. You could even sneak in the Time Lord agent as one of them, and drop hints that way. Agatha Christie did that sort of hide-in-plain-sight thing, or so I hear. (It bears repeating that this book was the work of two quite young writers, and All-Consuming Fire, for example, showed a more pronounced difference between its narrators some years later. Practice makes perfect.)

The murder mystery has enough horror elements to tickle a Whovian’s fancy. The main thrust is a psychic experiment in an old country house which immediately goes wrong, killing the scientist and raising the question of accident or murder. More deaths follow, along with disappearing and reappearing bodies, a gun-toting maniac and — heck, why not — the walking dead. Sprinkle in a fake-out death for the Doctor and the ongoing question of a Time Lord agent and you’re unlikely, all in all, to sit there wondering how this novel ever got stitched together in the edit.

That said, it’s not exactly groaning with plot. Once it is confirmed whodunit and what, for that matter, they dun, The Banquo Legacy becomes a slightly lumbering zombie vehicle, alternating between a really quite amazingly durable killer corpse and a single deranged woman with a gun. I wondered how this presented such an insurmountable problem for the Doctor and friends, but then Richards has done some homework to ensure that regeneration will not work in the vicinity of the house, so dead means dead. (A threat that perhaps loses some meaning in a story that features a zombie.)

The mystery itself is reasonably good, though it’s not without its loose ends. The book opens with a couple of century-old murders that, in the long run, Richards uses to inform the Time Lord plot. I was never clear on why there needed to be two murders in close succession, or why one of them seems distractingly to be the work of a vampire. We never circle back to the details. And the Doctor’s fake-out death leads to a very exciting reveal later on — clearly a nod to The Hound Of The Baskervilles — but his laying low/information gathering doesn’t end up being anything worth hanging around for. These sorts of things tend to suggest the ragged edges of one novel brushing up against another.

For more on that, take a look at Compassion. On the surface this is another neat little solve: there would have only been so much room in the book for new characters (the Doctor replaces one who would otherwise have been killed off), so what do you do with someone as complicated as a human TARDIS? Answer, amalgamate them with someone nearby, and thus create an identity crisis. It gives you an element of danger, not wanting Compassion to be identified to the Time Lord agent, and theoretically it gives Compassion some interesting stuff to work on as she juggles two selves. You can blame it all on chameleon circuits or something.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, Compassion has simply been subsumed by another, markedly less interesting character. Her inner Compassion-ness rarely rises to the surface, and when it does an occasional aloofness or a sarcastic “obviously” will have to do. There’s no especially dramatic conflict at work between the two characters, and no meaningful sense that one of them is diminishing. (It’s not even hugely clear what’s happening.) Yes, the situation has rendered her mortal, but the human being she inhabits was already mortal anyway. Which is certainly handy for the rewrite.

Knowing that she had to be shoe-horned into a pre-existing novel casts a suggestive pall over all this, but even if you don’t know that, where the previous EDA was The Space Age — which had Compassion mentally out-of-it for most of the story — this just looks like another author(s) not wanting to engage with Compassion. Given how many EDA writers would clearly rather dive out of a window than write for Sam Jones, it’s not as if they don’t have form. Honestly, I can see the legwork that has gone into justifying these choices, but the end result still bears an uncanny resemblance to just not knowing what to do with her. Again. It’s disappointing to still be in this position with so little time left.

The Doctor and Fitz are perhaps easier to handle, and sure enough both are creditably written/inserted, with Fitz throwing a very ill-advised (and very Fitz) German accent into a tense situation, then forgetting it; at all times he believably fails to convince. (Stratford notes that he is “about five sentences behind everyone else and struggling to keep up.” That’s him, Officer.) I suspect that the Doctor’s role may have been very loosely Doctorish even in Lane and Richards’ student days, but there’s enough of a whiff of Sherlock Holmes about him to maintain the murder mystery ethos and all at once keep it convincingly Who. He’s very commanding, when he isn’t being (perhaps a little too easily) terrorised.

At least we’re moving the whole Time Lord thing along. The mystery of who the Time Lord agent is, or I suppose if there even is one, might have seemed pretty obvious to me (see second paragraph) but it’s still exciting when the Doctor and [redacted] have a sudden stand-off with a shotgun, all pretence now dropped. It’s interesting to have someone reinforce the Time Lords’ morally suspect argument for capturing Compassion, and for a moment there it did feel like the stakes were higher because her TARDIS capabilities had gone away — even at the potential cost of the agent’s life, since they can’t regenerate either. I especially enjoyed the idea that Time Lord agents had been sprinkled all over the galaxy and are, understandably, running out of patience. (Wouldn’t it be nice if this wasn’t the first we were hearing about it?) The stakes have certainly been raised — or at the very least, reintroduced — for the upcoming grand finale.

Looking at other reviews, I’m clearly less enamoured than most readers, but I didn’t have a bad time with The Banquo Legacy. The epistolary could be better but it’s still fun to read, especially where it’s so ghoulish, and hey, I’m only human — I like zombies too. (NB: I didn’t feel like this was a retread of Grave Matter. Mind you, this one came first.) It’s a good, if patchy example of rewriting something for a new brief, and it inevitably re-energises the EDAs — especially since all the other books have slept on the arc plot. The Time Lords aren’t the only ones tapping their watches.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #70 – Grave Matter by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#31

Grave Matter

By Justin Richards

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Write Novels Quickly Man!

Whilst I can’t exactly prove it, I’m confident that Grave Matter was a last minute replacement for something else. A few things point that way. Justin Richards was clearly very busy around this time, gearing up as range editor, co-writing the next book in the schedule and then fully writing an EDA two books later to soft-reboot the range. I doubt he had time to write another manuscript voluntarily. Then there are the behind the scenes materials in Campaign, which point to the PDA slot after Verdigris being vacant after Jim Mortimore’s book fell through. That was in October 1999, and they needed the next (now non-existent) book at the printers within 2 months. Enter a very frantic Justin Richards, perhaps? (We know he can do it. Look at The Joy Device and Millennium Shock.)

I suppose the other little clue is the book itself. It lacks the sense of a special interest that you get in some of Richards’s books like Theatre Of War or System Shock. For Grave Matter he’s doing a sort of Hinchcliffe-era pastiche which, while very entertaining, could have been assigned to anybody. The pacing also suggests a certain degree of, if not rushing exactly, perhaps not finessing as much as might be preferable. It takes some time to get a real sense of the threat here, and once we’re into the climax there’s a sense of throwing one thing after another just to keep it going for 240 pages.

Not that I mind, of course. The thing to remember about those last-minute Richards novels is that they tend to be very entertaining, almost as if that sense of urgency got baked into the product. If Grave Matter is another one of those then something like that has happened again.

We get some Gothic imagery right away as a strangely corpse-like man flees captivity on an island, then is (literally) hounded off a cliff. Once the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on the island of Dorsill they meet the man, who is frightful to behold, and he prevents Peri from falling to her doom. Once the duo then make it to the town they find a funeral procession by lamp light, which promptly collapses showing Peri the corpse. Even after all that high-level spookery there is Dorsill itself to consider: a strangely old-world place that holds modern day anachronisms.

It’s an arresting start full of memorable visuals, and there’s a lot of that still to come as Dorsill reveals its odd little quirks and — as I mentioned above — its problems, albeit slowly. There have been deaths recently, but nothing in particular links them. Animals have peculiar habits, with the sheep seeming more organised than the sheep dogs. Even the school children have developed odd aptitudes for things in a way that only makes sense if they are somehow psychic. The fact that Dorsill is a modern day (albeit undated) community willingly cut off from technology is the least odd thing about it.

You get the sense though that the Doctor and Peri are investigating a general vague air of mystery rather than anything specific. For instance, the Doctor wants to find out what year it is. (You might think the strange-looking man they meet at the start would be an inciting incident, but they seem to forget about him instantly. Rather odd. He crops up again later.) They are made quite welcome, for once, and this adds an air of comfort to proceedings. Dorsill is very well defined visually and it’s quite pleasurable to follow the characters around it. Not exactly a page-turner in the same sense as Millennium Shock, then, but it’s compelling enough all the same.

Eventually the title starts paying dividends. There’s a marvellous sequence that begins with Peri witnessing an apparent grave robbing-cum-zombie resurrection, which then turns out just to have been grave robbing. (For medical curiosity purposes only.) This is followed by the same corpse actually rising from the grave in the same spot, which is very neat work and would have been horrifying/hilarious if televised. It turns out there are shady experiments originating on Dorsill’s sister island, Sheldon’s Folly, and these connect all the unusual happenings on Dorsill. Suffice to say, the local mad scientists have slightly overstepped, hence the minor problem of the zombies.

Once we find out what’s happening the action re-centres around the Gothic house/laboratory on Sheldon’s Folly, giving us a bit more Hinchcliffian bang for our buck as zombies attack and allies become enemies. This is where the previously mentioned fodder comes into it, particularly in a sequence where Peri runs to fetch help and is variously attacked by possessed seagulls, owls, foxes and (ah why the hell not) a shark. It’s nevertheless fun to watch the Doctor try to figure things out on the fly here, especially when he has to translate the only-brainwashed-a-bit messages of a colleague; everything she says is a deliberate lie to fool the ruling intelligence so he must always infer the opposite. (This feels like a suitably Justin Richards bit of cleverness.)

It’s the kind of story where, once you’ve finished it, there isn’t a lot of substance to mull over. It’s a vibes thing, as da kidz say, coasting along pleasantly enough on spookiness and peril. It does occasionally overstep, in my view. There’s a character who is understandably upset about his brother’s death, who then becomes an antagonist towards Peri for no particular reason beyond presumably being an aspiring rapist. (Which is a very tropey way to treat Peri, on top of everything else.) And there’s a character inveigled in the conspiracy who wants out in the most final way possible, being moved to attempt suicide three times, with a great deal of detail provided in each instance. Got to wonder if anyone other than the range editor could have squeaked that through unedited.

Character voices are otherwise quite strong, with Sir Edward making a memorable accomplice for the Doctor and Peri, and local farmer Hilly feeling like a real-enough person. The two regulars are very well drawn also, particularly a Sixth Doctor still early in his tenure. He’s brash, alliterative and single-minded, but sensitive underneath it all. A moment where he appears to have been taken over by a malign intelligence feels alarmingly plausible when it’s a guy fresh from being in The Twin Dilemma. Peri’s lot in life here is mostly to grouse and try not to be upset when the Doctor is rude, but all of that feels true to where she was at in the series. Although she does experience a brush with the malign influence on Dorsill, at least she’s spared being transformed into something else entirely, which was very much her thing on television.

There’s not a heap more to say about Grave Matter, perhaps for reasons I’ve already speculated about, but the overall concoction is a successful one. Richards kept my interest even when it felt like he was still figuring things out, and he applies memorable little flourishes whenever he can, such as describing a possession as “Her mouth was twisted into a smile, but her mind was in tears.” Spooky, colourful and (perhaps excessively at times) action-packed, it’s a decent enough fusion of the grimdark Season 22 with its similarly nasty ancestors. I’m sure Mary Whitehouse would not have approved.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #69 – The Space Age by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#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

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #68 – Campaign by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who

Campaign

By Jim Mortimore

NB: This isn’t a BBC Book, but it might have been. Commissioned and then rejected as it wasn’t quite what they’d asked for (NB: was that really the case? Read to the end of the review…), Campaign has been published a few times over the years, generally by Jim Mortimore. I think it counts as part of the overall BBC Books story. I’ve taken the original publication date (and hence the marathon slot, May 2000) from the publication history in the book.

You can reach Jim Mortimore to purchase a physical copy of Campaign here: jimbo-original-who@hotmail.com

An older PDF version is available for free here: https://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/campaign/

Right then. Book review. Yes. Review the book. Should be easy. Introduction — try to be a bit pithy about it, for God’s sake — and then set up your premise. Was the book something you basically enjoyed or wasn’t it? Oh for— Don’t give me “but it’s hard,” you’ve done this more times than either of us cares to remember. Good grief! Look, if you get stuck you can always go back to old faithful: summarise the book. The summary shall lead the way! Besides which, summarising the thing for posterity is to a large extent why you even bother reviewing these books. So. All sorted then? Good. Off you go.

What’s that? Sorry, didn’t quite catch that. It’s…? Oh. You’re on Campaign. Right. Well, that’s different isn’t it. Um. Probably a bit screwed in that case. Biscuit?

Campaign is famously odd, and — as very occasionally happens — its slightly bewildering reputation is earned. I don’t know exactly what BBC Books were expecting but you don’t need a world class imagination to surmise that whatever Campaign is is not what they asked for. It’s like Jim Mortimore read every confounded reaction to his books over the years, stored them all up and then came back with: “Oh YEEEEAAAAAHHH?!!?”

For what it’s worth, you can see traces of Campaign in his earlier books. As far back as Blood Heat he’s been interested in “What if?” alternate realities, not to mention casually-as-you-like killing off major characters within them. He played in similar sandpits for The Sword Of Forever and, in typical Ouroboros fashion, he came back with an alternate version of his own alternate history for Blood Heat Redux.

Also in his rap sheet: playing around with narrative convention. You’d mostly look to Eye Of Heaven for this one, a story told from multiple perspectives. (And out of sequence, just to keep you on your toes.) It worked like gangbusters.

Campaign is like if the alternate reality thing and the chopped up narrative thing climbed into a blender at a nuclear test site. What if those ideas… but in all directions, and also forever?

Nominally this is a First Doctor story with Ian, Barbara and Susan. They discover (to their understandable surprise) that the universe outside the TARDIS has ceased to exist. (!) This is after we learn that Barbara has died. (!!) Then, she comes back somehow. (!!!) And from her perspective, it’s Ian who has died. (!!!!)

Something very odd is going on. And for some reason, the name of the ship keeps changing. It’s the TARDIS. Tardis. T.A.R.D.I.S. The Ship. This on some level must be disturbing to Cliff and Lola — sorry, Ian and Barbara, as well as Mandy. Biddy. Jill. Janet! God dammit, Susan. Susan English! FOREMAN! You know, it’s a wonder that Doctor Who can keep his head on straight. Er… the Doctor.

Chapter to chapter, it becomes creepingly apparent that we are shifting realities. At first there is a nerdish glee to identifying each one. There’s one that follows on from David Whitaker’s Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks novel, which gave the crew a very different meeting. There’s one where unproduced stories such as The Masters Of Luxor or Farewell, Great Macedon took place. There’s one that follows the unproduced pilot script Nothing At The End Of The Lane, which we can think for Cliff and co.

It soon becomes clear however that there are endless variations. Besides which, there are realities that skip a groove part way through. They begin to bleed through consciously from one to another, with characters remembering each other’s deaths — as well as their own. You’d be much harder pressed to keep track of all this than, for instance, the modest shell games in Eye Of Heaven, although I’m sure someone has done it. (I didn’t even try this time. It felt like it would defeat the point.)

The plot is surprisingly simple: the TARDIS crew knows that the universe has gone wrong, and they suspect it’s the result of their own actions. Could they have changed history? They think it has something to do with Alexander the Great. They met him in some unspecified capacity at a young age, and possibly changed the course of his destiny. The Doctor urges them all to search their memories and see if they can identify what they did, and/or who did it. Then maybe they can see what they can do to fix it.

But it’s not that easy. Not only are they — and for that matter, us along with them — flitting through different realities, but it seems that an attempt to set history back on course has already been made. Ian, for one, spent time with a grown Alexander “to get closer to [him], to gain his trust and to assess the damage [they] might have caused by interfering in his childhood.” By all accounts this went poorly: Ian (or Cliff, etc) either went on a murderous rampage for his beloved leader, or committed regicide for him, or was run down by a chariot, or killed in battle, or assassinated, or all of the above. Susan at various points bore Alexander’s child — little ’Xander, or little Philip — and in most versions anyway, she lived to raise him. TL;DR, of helping to set time back on track, Quantum Leap-style, no one recalls very much. And the fact of its obvious failure suggests that this is not going to be their salvation anyway.

The quest to figure it all out is a compelling one, and the fact that it’s infuriatingly slippery somehow only makes it more so; the constant shifting sands demand that you re-orient yourself. We never gain a clear understanding of the original incident, but somehow that’s okay, it just feels like we’re watching a sequel to a story that got wiped. The resolution however is much more abstract. As with The Sword Of Forever, it involves bloodshed and horror… but maybe everything will be hunky dory afterwards?

The journey to this point involves ever-switching narrators (Eye Of Heaven again, you old rascal!) which is then compounded by not knowing who’s speaking, even when ostensibly we know who is speaking. (There’s a great chapter that doesn’t tell us it’s Cliff and Lola, rather than Ian and Barbara, until the very end.) It’s a mostly linear path however in terms of “what’s the most recent thing that happened”, although it occasionally jumps overboard entirely for a chapter, such as when we turn away to look at an incident in the Great Fire Of London happening in different ways.

We often switch formats as well. Mostly it’s your common-or-garden book of course, wiv the words and everyfink, but sometimes it’s (faux) handwritten diary entries, or giant overlapping text for added emphasis, or a comic book, or a board game or diagrams. It does not sit still. Is Jim Mortimore just a kid in a candy store with all this? I don’t think it’s uncharitable to say yes, a bit: Campaign is obviously an experiment and, equally obviously, nothing is off limits. The kaleidoscopic style pays off though, even when it’s incomprehensible, because (in my case anyway) the urge to understand what the hell this is all about adds momentum. It was a quick read, which seems an insane thing to admit. I guess I just wanted to know badly enough to get on with it? (I have read other books recently that were incomprehensible to me, and they never seemed particularly interested in getting to the bottom of it, which is maybe why I didn’t enjoy them. But this is all subjective: one person’s “this is needlessly confusing” is another person’s “ah but that’s the point y’see.” Campaign, for me, was clearly the “good” version of what-the-hell-was-all-that-about.)

When describing Campaign, in all its narrator/reality/format ping-ponging glory/horror, it’s easy to forget that there are characters at the centre of it. The splintering realities allow Mortimore to explore extremes in characterisation. Susan gets to wear different guises to her usual upset schoolgirl who’s prone to odd moods; as a mother, or a particularly surly teen, or an equal debater with the Doctor on all things universal destruction, she feels like more. Then we have Ian and Barbara, who both must reckon with the deaths of one another. Feelings which aren’t always as straightforward as loss where Ian is concerned, with him apparently having gone murderously native on a few occasions. Barbara must contend with her romantic feelings for him — in some strands at least — although in more than a few cases his heart still belongs to a long dead queen instead. Sometimes he barely knows Barbara at all.

Ian is torn apart here. He knows he’s done terrible things for Alexander, at times being deliberately hazy about them. Before arriving at a horrifying realisation that might end the whole crisis, he remembers his various violent deaths in agonising detail; he also engineers the deaths of the TARDIS crew just to end their purgatory; and he murders the Doctor over and over again because he’s been stuck in the TARDIS for so long that he’s forgotten how doors work and has simply run out of patience. A generally heroic character, it feels significant to push and dismantle him in this way. The Doctor, for reasons that perhaps become obvious right at the end, mostly remains in the background, occasionally biting back at perceived disrespect to his Ship. But unsurprisingly Mortimore captures him ruthlessly as well.

Now back up a bit: oh, yes. This novel is also set entirely within the TARDIS. With no universe to visit any more the TARDIS has no choice but to put them up, engineering animals, landscapes and whole worlds to support them while they work things out — or more likely, live out their lives and die. “Story set entirely within the TARDIS” is a bit of a white whale in fandom, even though there have been a few cracks at it. (Time’s Crucible qualifies, and wouldn’t you know it, I found that one to be “bad” incomprehensible.) Campaign is a compelling case for being careful what you wish for with this, very much showcasing the cabin fever and desolation that would come of being trapped in the TARDIS for decades, or even lifetimes. It’s an amazing and almost infinitely possible place, but it isn’t as real as a world. On some level, you’d notice.

What does Campaign actually mean? Well, there’s a very clear conclusion, which in itself might come as a surprise. A rug pull straight out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror redefines the whole crisis, providing a solid case for reading it again. Has it answered my questions? Not entirely. The opening with Alexander, though beautifully written, still seems a bit of an anomaly. I’m not sure how the Great Fire Of London fits into it. And obviously, after a solid answer is given at the end, there’s still a crafty question mark over whether that’s really the answer after all. So who knows, as a curator once said.

You can tell early on that definitive answers are not what Campaign is going for, so I don’t mind that there’s some ambiguity left over. I think it’s one of those where the journey, or the experiment, is its own reward. This is summed up neatly in the midst of the characters struggling and beating themselves up about their different lives when they get a visual sense of all those crossed paths. “‘A symphony of time and space.’ Barbara’s voice was dreamy. ‘What a beautiful idea.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Even if we can’t fully appreciate the music.’ ‘My child, I think you misspeak yourself. Look at it. Look deep into its heart. You see it as a thing of beauty to be experienced. I say it is experience. The life experience of ourselves and an entire universe of others. I think you will find that we are the music!’”

It’s bold, bananas and baffling. I think Campaign stands as one of the stronger examples of what you can do with Doctor Who in novels. Although it’s completely fair that it got cancelled for the simple fact of not being what was commissioned (EDIT: see below), I wish they’d set up a new commission for it, as it’s really not so much more nuts than some of the EDAs of the time. Also, being a Past Doctor Adventure it’s more proof, if any were needed, that you can tell interesting stories at any point in the series and with any characters. Continuity is a nice place to visit, but you don’t have to live there.

8/10

***

Extras

In the hardback edition of Campaign the novel ends after 245 hair-raising pages. Then there’s 200 more pages. What’s all that about? (Foolish of me to ask really. I mean, this is Campaign we’re talking about.)

First there’s something called Me & My Monkey: An Author’s Confession — Part 1. This is a commentary from Mortimore covering almost every chapter. Yes, he’s going to breeze through the entire book again, bit by bit. You can’t say he didn’t try to help.

It’s largely interested in the anthropomorphised (writing) monkey on Mortimore’s back, and it reads like Martin Sheen’s diary in Apocalypse Now. Eventually this commentary becomes its own pseudo-fiction about how he’s awaiting execution for the murder of another, distinct muse/monkey. Look, I think if you leave Jim Mortimore alone for long enough these things just happen.

As well as being characteristically bonzo there’s a lot of insight here, which shows you that Campaign contains much that is either autobiographical or inspired by his life or inspired by his other work or accidentally (and then deliberately) purloined from someone else’s. He confirms that he tried to write Susan in more dimensions than she typically received (“not quite the groovy teenager after all”) and he underlines a few plot specifics, such as how the Alexander prologue and Aristotle fit into things, which all helped my understanding. That said, Mortimore acknowledges that this isn’t a “plot novel”, since “a good book, like any good idea, is one whose contextual interpretation is forever open to change.” Perhaps for that reason he’s, IMO, a bit harsh on his choice of ending, calling it cliche, torpid and unsatisfactory. I’d say no to all of that: it is a little bit pat, the sort of ending that allows you to quickly tidy everything away… but I found that it so grossly undercut the emotion of what had come before that it added a fresh layer of discomfort and reflection. And anyway, it doesn’t even stick.

Mortimore offers hints about why the book fell through (this is mostly the purview of the next bit…), admitting that “Campaign never hit the minimum word count. Never even got close.” Then we un-redact history a little further: “Though he didn’t mind the prose-experiments and the wilder flights of fancy at all, Justin Richards felt unable to recommend Ben Dunn accept the manuscript for Campaign until I’d either a) removed the TARDIS scenes and replaced them with ‘proper’ historical scenes or b) removed the historical scenes and replaced them with TARDIS scenes. Either would do. He felt the story was ‘unbalanced’ as it was.”

Intriguing stuff then, and another wild journey into what a peculiar duck Jim Mortimore can be. I think it’s a valuable companion to the book.

Next there’s Getting Your Head Stuck In The Tar-Baby: An Author’s Confession — Part 2. This is everything you could possibly want to know about the publishing woes of Campaign, and a good deal more besides.

To be clear, this is fascinating. I always want to know how a book came about and there’s never enough information available — especially for the oft-neglected Past Doctor books. And all of a sudden, there’s this: not so much a peek behind the curtain as full access to the wizard’s private bathroom.

There’s an article from the time giving the scuttlebutt version of the book’s demise. There are several pitches for Burning Artemis, later retitled Campaign, and having just read the finished novel these tell us everything we missed about Alexander and Aristotle. It turns out that Campaign, as in the novel anyone has actually read, is not merely an evolution of an original idea but one that incorporates it literally. (I said it felt like a sequel to a lost story. AHEM.) This is like what Kurt Vonnegut did with Timequake: take an aborted story and write something new around it, and also about it. The pitches also give a window into the editing process, with at least one Steve Cole change — paring back a reveal of Alexander’s history changing/not changing to just one instance, reducing repetition — suggesting itself to me when I read the first version. Good change! They do happen.

I might as well say that Burning Artemis/Campaign 1.0 also sounds brilliant. It’s an entirely different beast, a full-blooded historical with tons of well-researched ideas and a fresh take on the “changing history” conundrum. I wish Mortimore had written it somehow, but since I also liked Campaign 2.0, and since neither book would work if the other had also been published, I guess we can only have one or the other. It’s like the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question being mutually exclusive in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Again, it’s fascinating to track the progress of the story. But that’s not all. Mortimore provides heaps of correspondence with Steve Cole and Justin Richards (editors passing in the night) to explain the process of the book’s commission, then delay(s), then cancellation(s). And nothing is held back. The word you’re looking for is “unexpurgated”. It could only have appeared in an unofficial publication. I went bright red reading some of it; I cringed, involuntarily uttered “oh god” on several occasions. It’s still fascinating — I can’t help it! — because we never normally get this kind of tea about why a book happened or didn’t happen. But the level of awkwardness as these conversations blossom into full-on arguments is like listening to your parents fight. It’s seriously toe-curling, bridge-toasting stuff.

It’s worth saying that the key point of contention is not that the finished novel didn’t resemble the one they commissioned — although that is certainly true. The death knell is a series of requests for edits from Richards which generally revolve around his not “getting” the book, and feeling therefore that readers wouldn’t. To which I would say, well horses for courses and everything, but you guys published The Blue Angel — which is arguably just as odd as Campaign but with an added heaping of whimsy and no ending. I didn’t get it! Even the people who liked it didn’t get it, going by most reviews. But you still had Paul Magrs back, so it can’t have done any harm, surely? Some books are weird. With the release schedule of BBC Books at the time, it’s not as if another “normal” one wouldn’t be along shortly. It seems a curious hill to let a book die on when the range was so consciously getting a bit weird around now. But that might be a sign of what’s to come with Richards as editor.

It’s difficult to describe the rest of these conversations without feeling like I’m just contributing to gossip (it really is that personal, like a work spat that has somehow CCed the entire company), so suffice to say it gets a bit ugly and I’m not surprised it ended badly. By the end you’ve gone behind the curtain, into the wizard’s bathroom and spent what feels like several lifetimes at the bottom of his laundry basket. I think everyone involved had some semblance of a valid point, everyone involved was also a flawed human being, and BBC Books should probably pay people on time.

Anyway! That’s what happened. Book publishing, eh. Who’d do it?

Lastly we have Born in the Briar Patch: An Author’s Confession — Part 3. This is a collection of reviews for Campaign. And look, I’m not gonna review reviews, but they raise some interesting points. There’s a general feeling that people didn’t get The Sword Of Forever, perhaps lending some support to Justin Richards’s thesis. (I didn’t get it either, FWIW.) There’s an oft repeated refrain of “you’ll need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Doctor Who ephemera to understand this book,” which I don’t agree with — you don’t need to know where Cliff and Lola originated, you just need to know that they are alternate versions of Ian and Barbara. There’s the surprising breadth of reviews which includes negativity, either around the ending (contentious) or the book as a whole (didn’t get it). I think my favourite thing though is the reference to something said in Part 2, a Richards criticism that Mortimore won’t be available to write back to every reader with explanations if they need them — because in the first chunk of the book’s extras, that’s exactly what he does. I like to think this means he sees the sense in (some) criticism once he gets past the initial outrage — and really, what creative hasn’t felt that way? (See also, the book’s ending. Jim defends it passionately in his comms to Justin. Yet years later in this edition’s extras, he thinks it’s “torpid.” Clearly people change — a major thesis of Campaign, as it happens.)

The book’s final, definite, this-time-we’re-serious ending is Jim acknowledging his flaws, which then perhaps recontextualises the agonising dirty laundry on display. Perhaps this edition of Campaign is, among infinite other things, an attempt by a complicated guy to recognise when he might get in his own way. But anyway. The book’s still good.

This, for realsies, is the end of the review. Only now you’re reading an entirely different review of another book altogether, and my name by this point is, oh, let’s say Bert.

Rhubarb/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #67 – Verdigris by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#30

Verdigris

By Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs returns. Can a time-travelling double decker bus be far behind?

Verdigris continues along similar lines to The Scarlet Empress and The Blue Angel, picking up the thread of meta-textual silliness (not just limited to Doctor Who) and indulging in a more knowing sort of comedy than we’re used to seeing in these books. Magrs is clearly a confident and seasoned writer so, where Verdigris is daft as a brush — which would be pretty much all of it — there is always the sense of a deliberate intention at work.

All of that said, after three of his novels I’m wondering if I’m really a Magrs guy. I found Empress a delight for the most part, but the Arabian Nights/shaggy dog style isn’t my favourite. The Blue Angel was clearly a creative attempt at something, but the actual intention eluded me and in that context Magrs’s inimitable silliness just got on my nerves. Verdigris is at the same time a simpler affair than Angel and a more meta one than Empress. I think my enjoyment also fell somewhere between the two.

Iris Wildthyme is travelling with Tom, a young man from the year 2000, but he just wants to go home. Clinging to the idea of a Doctor/companion relationship Iris instead takes him to see the Doctor in 1973, with the intention of just spending a nice Christmas somewhere. (Naturally she gets the season wrong and it’s actually summer.) A relaxing trip to the Doctor’s cottage soon spirals into an adventure with strange telepathic children, conspiracies, UNIT in disarray, killer robotic sheep, rampaging fictional characters and objects brought to life.

There are a couple of big ideas squirrelled away in there. For starters, the Doctor has homes on Earth — plural! — thanks to “a rather good deal with the British government.” This makes a degree of sense what with him doing a job despite not needing any money, but obviously it’s not something that was ever evidenced on screen. Like the old joke about schoolteachers, I think we all just assumed that the Doctor lives at work. (If push comes to shove he can always sleep in the TARDIS.)

I can just about stretch to the Doctor having homes-away-from-home, including a caravan. (The Seventh Doctor had a House On Allen Road so it’s a bit late to quibble about that now.) I struggle though to believe he’d commission portraits of himself for decoration. I know he’s vain, but really? More significantly, when we find the Doctor all he wants is “to have dinner parties and enlightened conversations. [He’s] going to invite some very interesting people down to stay, and it’s all going to be remarkably civilised.” That kind of domesticity is very rare for him, although it’s at least framed as a way to avoid UNIT for a while. This serves a character point: the Doctor is trapped on Earth, but also (to an extent) trapped as their go-to guy for Earth’s defence. That must be a bit wearying after a while. (The thought however of the Doctor putting his feet up for a night in with some groovy laid-back types is still a stretch.)

Verdigris seems interested in the Third Doctor’s exile and what that means to him, so perhaps weird little swings like this are to be expected. He more than once laments being stuck on Earth, and naturally his eyes light up at the thought of Iris bringing a functioning TARDIS within reach. However that idea mostly seems to exist in Iris’s imagination, as outside of a slight mood shift early on he really makes no serious effort to high tail it away with the thing.

On a grander note, the entire plot eventually turns on the fact of his exile: a simple misunderstanding on an alien world has led a powerful being to create havoc specifically to encourage the Doctor to be free. It’s a nice idea but it’s a bit difficult to square it with the aforementioned groups of fictional characters — actually an alien race confusedly disguised as people in novels — even though the one idea is responsible for the other. They seem like a very Paul Magrs idea anyway, appealing to storytelling itself for inspiration, but there’s not a lot to them besides the amusing thrill of Miss Havisham making a mad dash through a fun fair. The idea soon retires to the background. The book at times feels like a box of chocolates: varied but all a bit too sweet and disposable.

Sometimes it seems like it’ll do something significant, like disbanding UNIT — sort of. The Brigadier, Benton and Liz Shaw are all out of their minds and running a supermarket instead of an army, while UNIT headquarters has been taken over by, among other things, robot sheep. And Mike Yates has been turned into a piece of paper! If you wade through all the whimsical bells and whistles there’s an interesting idea here about the Doctor and UNIT doing something different for a change — but sadly the UNIT bit of the equation doesn’t occur until very late in the book, and then it’s just for a cutaway gag. What a pity; I might have enjoyed digging into the gang’s ersatz existence.

The state of UNIT Headquarters, meanwhile, is cause for some trippy meta stuff where Jo is (unsuccessfully) convinced that her time here has been a fabrication, that all her colleagues are actors and the monsters are guys in costumes, drawing particular attention to the coloured lines around them in certain shots. All of which is quite jolly and fan-baiting, if rather unlikely to convince Jo or the reader. It’s at least a fun excuse to shift storytelling formats for a bit into annotations of security footage, with Iris’s diary also appearing throughout the book.

That’s the other big idea in Verdigris: Iris for all intents and purposes is the protagonist. We mostly view the Doctor and Jo as side characters; it’s Iris who brings us into the story, Tom who connects us to the weirdly powerful (and strangely attired) Children Of Destiny, and when the penny drops about what’s really going on and whose fault it all is, well… have a guess.

It’s quite a good story for Iris. (Likely the scraggly version we met in Empress, before she regenerated.) Her longing to have a lasting friendship with Tom is not so unlike her apparently one-way attraction to the Doctor; as well as being a source of bawdy fun there’s some real pathos in that, particularly when she pleads with him to recognise that they make a good team. There’s a surprising amount of Iris back story in this, explaining that she was of a lower class than the Doctor on Gallifrey and she rescued her TARDIS in a desert; it turns out her obsolescence to the Time Lords is less a collective memory gap than sheer social embarrassment. (Her very similar Five Doctors-esque adventure was apparently just a coincidence.)

The sheer focus on Iris in a story barely holding itself together logically does sometimes threaten to squeeze it out of Doctor Who altogether — but then there’ll be some incredibly nerdy reference to remind you of Magrs’s pedigree in that area, such as the string of continuity beats that makes Verdigris impossible to place. (It’s after The Sea Devils but before The Curse Of Peladon. Best of luck, list-makers.) There are meta references to the Green Cross Code (aka that advert with Jon Pertwee in it), The Avengers is canon in this universe, and there are even meta references to meta references when it comes to those faux-fictional characters, the point being that you shouldn’t show off like that. (At which point Verdigris threatens to create a paradox involving its head and its bottom.) It’s so busy being clever that little things like trees and unicorns coming to life feel like footnotes. Did I mention that Mike Yates is a piece of paper?

I very much got the impression that Verdigris wasn’t going for anything serious (I’m sure you’re dying to say, “What tipped you off?”) but there are still some moments that matter. The Doctor’s desperation to get away from Earth breaks through occasionally, and pityingly. Iris hints at his bleak retcon-future from Interference (about time someone did!) and she eventually takes pity and assures him that he will leave Earth eventually. Jo has her little reckoning with reality, although it doesn’t define anything about her that didn’t already seem solid. Tom has some pathos, feeling out of his element and hinting at a relationship with one of the Children Of Destiny, while also believing one of them might be his mother from an earlier period in her life. Neither idea comes to much though. (The Children Of Destiny are about three layers of icing too many for this story.) Otherwise when characters get killed, which happens quite a bit, it was a struggle to remember they’d been there.

Reading this I was occasionally reminded with a bump that Doctor Who is best aimed at kids. I suspect the free flow of ideas in Verdigris works better for them. But the novel also seems aware of the more, shall we say, particular kind of Who fan, not just with those cheeky continuity misdirects but in this oblique comment about time travel: “I don’t think human beings were meant to travel in time. We care too much about the order of things. About being sure of what has really happened and what hasn’t. We get insecure if someone shows us other alternatives.” I mean, now that you mention it…

Like The Blue Angel, Verdigris seems apart from reality, or even just reality as represented in Doctor Who books, and as with Angel it seems to have a more fluid footing than I’m personally used to in books, so I struggled to connect with any of it. Chunks of it are already making their excuses to leave my head early, like the alien delegates who for some reason have been duped into living inside a mountain in Wales, or the weird little Rumplestiltskin figure misleading Jo in UNIT HQ. As that time travel line suggests, some people like to get the measure of a thing, and I couldn’t quite do that with Verdigris, although I had a nice enough time leafing through whatever it was.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #66 – Coldheart by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#33

Coldheart

By Trevor Baxendale

The last time we saw Trevor Baxendale he was injecting some very trad (though still quite effective) elements into the EDAs. The series had, to be fair, settled into quite a trad pattern by then, all “the Doctor and Sam visit a colony world” this and “ancient doomsday device” that.

Now things have changed. Sam’s gone, the gang’s different, they’re on the run in a TARDIS that is also one of them, and in the previous adventure said TARDIS was so upset she killed a guy. What a strange new world Baxendale has stepped into! But for all the difference it makes we might as well still be in the Sam era, because with a few honourable exceptions Coldheart is just another EDA.

That’s not always a bad thing. Baxendale’s The Janus Conjunction didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it did its thing sufficiently well that several later books felt like they were treading on its toes. And Coldheart finds some of the same things interesting: once again we have a largely inhospitable planet that’s killing its people, there’s a schism between two groups which means one of them is visibly decaying to death, and the leader of the mutants wants wholesale destruction for everybody out of sheer spite. Missing this time is a sense of intergalactic doom, with only the people living on the desert planet Eskon in immediate danger. That’s no problem though, as long as they’re quite compelling and/or sympathetic.

So, yeah, about that.

What I will say is that Baxendale once again sells the physical details of his world very well. From the underground ice caves to the blistering heat on the surface (already a memorable juxtaposition there) we soon discover vast caterpillar-like “sand-cars” that work like wagon trains. Then there are the native Eskonians who look a bit like camels, and their city Baktan which is a giant hollowed-out rock. Water is at a premium on this world so it’s the basis of their economy, itself a free albeit rationed resource that you can sell on in other forms once you have it. Eskon and its society are very easy to picture. Mind you, I read most of this during a heatwave, which added a certain horrible verisimilitude. (Yuck. Eff off, heatwave.)

The Eskonians have a few problems besides the heat however, which recently has increased causing their previously not-that-bad climate to worsen. (Gee, what must that be like?) Their society looks down on women, frequently denying them identity or even speech. Then there are the “slimers,” a subset of society with an unexplained degenerative disease; they are literally losing their shape and when they die, an event somewhat unfortunately called “the Squirming,” they dissolve into a pool of slithering leeches. Needless to say, the slimers have been ostracised, but rather than politely go out into the desert and die they’ve blockaded Baktan, causing even more friction with the non-infected Eskonians who hate them as their presence has halted trade between Baktan and neighbouring cities. What few aliens come to their city tend to take advantage of their desperation.

It’s an interesting and heated dynamic. There’s an obvious question of who are the real monsters here, with the less unpleasant-looking Eskonians behaving inhumanely towards the more mutant-looking slimers who live in squalor. Baxendale complicates this however by making the slimers unlikeable as well: they’re justifiably angry about their situation, but their leader Revan is just another fanatical nutjob who delights in arranging murder and havoc. If any of his lieutenants feel differently, they’re awfully quiet about it.

The slimers even reject Ckeho (rhymes with “keyhole”, which we are told and then I thought of it every time I read his name) because he is the son of an Eskonian elder. That elder also rejected him, however, locking him in his bedroom because his position prevents him from having kids and a slimer in the family would bring great shame. When Fitz releases Ckeho his first impulse is to strangle his rescuer. In the end however, Ckeho is our token likeable slimer.

The non-slimer Eskonians don’t have such good representation. There’s Brevan, an ice-miner who meets the Doctor and co. early in the story and then lingers beigely in the background. Not memorable, but at least he isn’t outwardly horrible. Two of the ruling Forum members, Krumm and Anavolus, seem alternately harmless and perhaps even kind, but they’re still complicit in the living conditions of slimers and the mistreatment of women, as well as the political cover-up surrounding Tor Grymna. (Ckeho’s shamefaced father.) Grymna is a dubious and troubled figure, whom we’re obviously supposed to hate because of his treatment of Ckeho, but he wobbles back and forth in a way that suggests character growth. I say “suggests” because in his final scene he’s definitely a baddie again, even getting dispatched with a one-liner. Presumably we’re not meant to weep.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about a society with problems. It would be boring if they didn’t have any! But Coldheart isn’t here to fix anything. (A fact it’s well aware of, with Fitz noting “They’ve still got problems here, Doctor. Big problems” after it all wraps up.) The treatment of the slimers reverses, to the paltry extent of allowing Ckeho to represent them on the Forum, and only because the Doctor and co. find a scientific basis for what’s happened to them which proves that they are blameless. The Eskonians don’t use empathy to get there, they just get more information.

The subjugation of women is even worse. There’s only one woman in the story apart from Compassion; she only gets one line and her death isn’t used as a direct motivator for change. It’s still up to Fitz to make the case — off screen! — that maybe they ought to stop being so awful to women like her. This is also right at the end, and there’s no Ckeho-like rep in the Forum, so good luck with that, I guess.

If you cram all of your societal change into the epilogue then what is the rest of the story about, and who are we rooting for in the meantime? The Doctor is “not very impressed with a lot of things about these people” and Fitz more than once expresses the view that he could take or leave everyone here (“As far as I’m concerned, you can all bloody well starve to death, dry up and blow away or mutate into who cares what. To hell with the lot of you”) and it’s hard to disagree with either of them. All that’s left when you take out emotional progress is a load of plot and action, most of which we’ve either heard before or just plain isn’t going to set the world alight. 

Coldheart does a pretty good job of upping the stakes at least, especially near the end with the delirious one-two punch of “your people are all going to turn into slimers and die out” BUT ALSO “the slimers exist because of a giant terrifying alien worm lurking underground” BUT ALSO “Revan’s actions will cause tectonic disasters that will destroy your city” BUT ALSO “the big worm had babies and they’re gonna eat everybody before any of that even happens.” I actually laughed (not entirely derisively) when Fitz, then the Doctor, then Compassion all walked into a dramatic summation to contribute one bombshell each, although obviously we are kind of playing silly buggers at this point. You reach a point when you genuinely think, wow, they’re screwed! Which at least adds a certain excitement to the final act.

That sense of peril is shared by the main trio, who are continuing their randomised flight from the Time Lords. I was cautiously optimistic about the randomiser (hold that thought) because although it takes away Compassion’s agency as a TARDIS it can still land them in interesting places. To the device’s credit, it means that they can’t rely on Compassion to spirit them away from danger, as she won’t be able to control her landing. Given that Compassion is otherwise invincible and could, in theory, shield the Doctor and Fitz from all harm, anything we can do to introduce an element of danger is a good thing.

It’s hard not to be a little sceptical about where this new TARDIS will take them, however, based on current evidence. They’re not really achieving anything with their random hops since “go somewhere the Time Lords aren’t” is the single stated goal at this point. What does progress even look like in this arc? Not a string of Coldhearts, surely. I hope some sort of progress is made soon. Even The Chase had the Doctor working on an anti-Dalek weapon between landings.

Coldheart is not, as you might have guessed, very big on the arc stuff. (Inasmuch as there can be arc stuff once you land and there are definitely no Time Lords about.) Some effort is made to ask questions about Compassion in a way that is in conversation with the previous book. There’s the curious development about the randomiser. (You can release that thought you were holding.) “She hadn’t liked the idea at first. It still rankled … But she had found that travelling through the vortex, feeling the passage of space-time around her and through her, was a glory in itself. She didn’t actually care much about destinations. It was the journeying she craved.”

I wouldn’t call this a complete back-pedal, she’s entitled to change her mind after all and the thrill of travel probably is a big factor… but it’s still rather abrupt after the previous novel had her, not to go on about it, killing or attempting to kill people over it. For good measure she considers abandoning her fellow travellers (“What was to stop her just leaving?”), something the Doctor appears to sense during the final crisis. This stuff is interesting, although to be honest if Compassion was still willing to stick with these guys after The Fall Of Yquatine then I don’t see why she’d wobble about it now.

There’s a bit more wobbling with Compassion apparently tuning into the Doctor’s telepathy and mourning her inability to save a man from a great fall, which of course she survives. (Not to get all “I hope someone was fired for that blunder” but could she not have popped him safely indoors before they hit the ground?) Both things suggest an increasing sense of empathy, which would be an ironic character shift after she became less and less personified before. This is somewhat at odds with the way Compassion is actually written, however, which is robotic at times. I know she’s a machine of great power now and she was specifically never personable, but having her rattle off lines like “I’m still not certain how my own position in the space-time continuum is defined. As a temporally annexed life-form I am irrevocably linked to the space-time vortex too” brings to mind a Star Trek science officer, not the surly cyborg from Yquatine. I guess ongoing characters + rotating writers is a lucky dip.

There’s some interesting stuff around the Doctor, although Baxendale doesn’t fully integrate it into the story. We have a moment where Fitz, for some reason, intuits that “the Doctor was [possibly] trying to distract himself … from the sudden loss of his TARDIS.” I would have no problem at all with that: if anything, we’ve been severely undersold the impact of that event since (and during) The Shadows Of Avalon. But there’s not much actual evidence of it here, and it doesn’t come up again. Then we have Compassion observing (so it’s external, again) that “there was something nagging at her subconscious. Something about the Doctor’s whole demeanour.”

Possibly this is the same “something” that allows the Doctor to cheerfully orchestrate Grymna’s death, in a way that will also resolve the planet’s giant worm problems. The Doctor is generally anti-killing, although it would be unhelpful to storytelling to never consider going there; this time, however, he seems a bit blasé about it. Is this what Compassion was talking about? Are we Doing A Thing? Could we be hinting at the Doctor’s still-percolating time bomb disease from Interference? No idea. But it’s among his more notable moments in an otherwise pretty standard performance, all “I like meeting new people!” and “Wow, things!”

Shockingly, Fitz is not left to fend for himself this week, or not to the extent where he has to consider a new lifestyle. He has a likeable enough dynamic with Ckeho (once they’re past the whole “sorry I strangled you” business) and he manages to find and get attached to the only woman in the book, because of course he does. I’m not sure if we’re meant to infer more than just companionship here — Compassion seems to raise an eyebrow when she interrupts them indoors — but I hope not, since her mute slave status would render a relationship with a passing white saviour a little on the iffy side. Fitz’s capacity for fancying is so far beyond parody at this point, but it does at least speak to empathy of a sort. The Doctor’s suggestion that Fitz stay behind and mediate is, however, laughable. (Anyway, isn’t he still planning to go and live with Filippa some day? Is he going on tour?)

Fitz is not especially well written when it comes to dialogue, steering clear of bad language in a way that recalls some of Ace’s less natural moments; see “I don’t give a cuss about him or anyone else here” and “What in the name of muck happened to you?” Dialogue isn’t really the book’s strong-point, however, often gravitating towards hoary SF/fantasy-speak like “‘Revan! Manag! Come quick! Ibres is ill!’ ‘Is it the Squirming, Hefeg?’” (There’s a lot of “good morrow, character A” followed by “indeed so, character B”, which is a pet hate of mine. People know who they’re speaking to! You can make this apparent to others by making them sound different!) There’s the odd good bit of prose, such as “Dawn struck like an ironmonger’s hammer,” but the book mostly just trundles along between shouty bits — to be fair, often at quite a lick.

Coldheart is meat and potatoes stuff. The characters arrive, there’s a problem to resolve, action, escalation, sigh of relief, wheezing groaning sound. Some of the visual ideas are well established — none of the nitty-gritty ones fare that well. There’s perhaps a subtext here about empathy (which snuck into my review more than I intended), with a generally unlikeable group challenging the notion of who you should care about, an idea that maybe includes Compassion as well? Your guess is as good as mine. Really though it’s a sharp reminder of how quickly an interesting arc can level out; like Compassion, you’ll wonder if there’s any compelling reason not to just leave.

5/10