Doctor Who: The BBC Books #82 – The King Of Terror by Keith Topping

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#37

The King of Terror

By Keith Topping

One of the things I look for in these reviews is context. How did each writer begin? How have they evolved? What interests them? When it comes to writer duos, however — say, Mike Tucker and Robert Perry — it’s not really possible to parse that about either of them until they go their separate ways.

We now have such an example from Keith Topping, of “and Martin Day” fame, and therefore we know what would happen if you subtracted Martin Day. The answer, apparently, is: aaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!

Okay, think positive, benefit of the doubt, be nice to him in case it’s his birthday... I think The King Of Terror is just supposed to be a bit of fun, a spirited action adventure that leans silly. It’s quite meta at points, which makes sense as Topping has co-written several irreverent (and very good) TV reference guides. There's nowt wrong with meta if it's applied with the right level of care. That’s Dave Stone and Paul Magrs 101, that is, and they do all right.

Where The King Of Terror goes wrong is in the execution. And, to be honest, the subject matter. Also the meta stuff which is bad actually. The new characters are a problem. So are the pre-existing ones. Somehow just... all of it is bad. This is a "you know what, no thank you" situation. A where-do-we-even-begin-a-palooza. Good. Absolute. Lord.

Okay, okay, I'm getting hysterical now so let's go into review crisis mode: summarise it! The King Of Terror is an alien invasion story set in the modern day. (1999.) The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are brought into an investigation by the Brigadier. A shady billionaire is stockpiling plutonium – what's all that about? Meanwhile a couple of UNIT operatives, Paynter and Barrington, are also on the trail. The aforementioned shady people are congregating in boardrooms and various spy shenanigans are had, all of them a prelude to said alien invasion. (Of which there may be more than one.) More locally, a group of Nostradamus-worshipping terrorists are making trouble. Then Turlough goes missing. It's mostly set in Hollywood by the way.

The story is hard to get a hold of. It should be quite exciting. Aliens have infiltrated corporate America! Shades of They Live there, with much opportunity for satire. But the aliens aren't particularly satirical. They're just your typical Bad Guys with an alien garnish – moody, ordering-executions-on-a-whim-type gangsters who occasionally rip their faces off in private. (And presumably attach new ones afterwards?) It’s oddly reminiscent of Endgame, with aliens that we can barely be bothered to manifest and conspiracies that never amount to much. Also for a guy this interested in pop culture it’s bizarre that the “controlling people via the internet” angle fails to catch on outside of a few references to it.

There are next to no opportunities for the Doctor to face off against them, which let's face it is where baddies get most of their best material, but it's also a useful means to advance the plot. As it is, heavy exposition just has to unfold itself via sheer willpower. There's a bit where Turlough, who has been in prison for most of the book (and so we can assume was not invited to any planning meetings) somehow intuits that the aliens are going to use plutonium to poison Earth's atmosphere. The Doctor knows all about the aliens already of course, in that particularly trite-end-of-Doctor Who way, so he's able to just reel off gobs of their back story at will – but only once he's reached the point in the book where Keith Topping decides that it’s okay to remember who they are now, so as to preserve all that precious buggering-about-not-being-of-any-use time for him earlier. There's a bit, incidentally, where he does his "as you know, Bob" routine in a boardroom, to the aliens, while they all just sit there. When we get to the finale – in theory a spectacular bit that rivals Independence Day for scale – it's for some reason done entirely as reported events, with the main characters sitting around for days while it happens. The phrase "mind-numbingly mundane" is thrown around. By the actual book! (Maybe don't do that?!)

For a spy story/alien invasion actioner it's surprisingly torpid. That lack of involvement from the Doctor sure doesn't help. Step back, though – why even bring him in? Yes, it turns out there's a major alien crisis on the way, but all the Brigadier knows at this point is that a rich guy is stockpiling a sensitive material. He's already got people on the job! What does the Doctor accomplish on top of that? Various meetings, as far as I can tell, including a critical one at the end where he incites a conflict between two groups of aliens that was going to bubble over anyway; ah well, at least it gets the climax underway. It's around here that Topping has the Doctor wonder "Would all of this still have happened if I hadn’t been here?” There's an equal chance that this is a real attempt at self-reflection or just lamp-shading, but either way, yes, it clearly would have, as we have the CIA to thank for much of the solution. Thanks so much for underlining it.

If you're wondering how the book can function without the Doctor front and centre, first of all it's fine not to do it that way. Of course it is! Do whatever crazy version of a Doctor Who story you like, as long as you believe in it. Second of all though, the way Keith Topping does this is by frontloading The King Of Terror with a pseudo-protagonist, Geoff Paynter. He's a UNIT operative, albeit in name only since his behaviour is more along the lines of a roided-out The Sweeney. Paynter receives gobs of coverage and since (as mentioned earlier) the plot is rarely dynamic, that means he's got time to sit around and chat. He mostly does this with his similarly laddish partner Barrington, occasionally pausing the book for cod-Porridge/Red Dwarf bunk-bed scenes. These guys enjoy pop culture, which I mean, Topping writes reference guides so that checks out. But Paynter, as well as sounding absolutely nothing like a person that works for UNIT or a military organisation of any kind, just isn't an interesting guy to listen to. He's the sort of bore who says things like "Rumours of our demise were greatly exaggerated," and who looks at a dangerous situation and says in a long-suffering way, "Another day in paradise." He's coarse and colloquial in a way that's clearly meant to be funny (when riling up Barrington he says "Nah, just pulling your tiddler") but occasionally it just comes off as puzzling. (He says "effing" a lot. Is that the book bleeping him out, or is he just whimsical? Given some of the book's other contents I'm surprised they didn't throw in the F word.)

He's violent to an extent that would even make the Brigadier blush, happily executing an enemy after blowing out his kneecaps, and lucky us: he's a rampaging misogynist as well! Now, I'm not silly enough to think that a fictional character's actions are automatically an endorsement. But Paynter's sheer page-count, combined with a moment where he somehow out-philosophises the Doctor (he fails to grasp the concept of underlying pacifism in wartime until good ol' Paynter explains about Dunkirk and the Charge Of The Light Brigade movie – thanks mate, now I've got it!) suggests that we're supposed to think this guy's pretty great actually. And if you're struggling to make sense of that, take it up with Tegan, with whom Topping somehow conspires to create a romance.

The way it's done would be a terrible, bottom-of-the-barrel cliché regardless of the dialogue. It's two characters forced together by circumstance, who yell at each other and fight (he hits her!) until they give in and kiss. This is a misunderstanding of correlation that many bad rom-coms make. (Never to be outdone for self-awareness, Topping lamp-shades this: "It’s a crass romantic comedy subplot that’s impressing precisely no one." All together now: well, that's all right then!) But the dialogue is howlingly dreadful as well. Paynter, annoyed with Tegan, calls her a lesbian. (Phwoar!) Then he manages to get a kiss following the sentiment – I swear this is in the book – "Smoke my cornet, big arse!” Even Alan Partridge wouldn't attempt that one.

The general suggestion here, divorced from the actual content, is that Paynter is a bon-mot-dispensing machine. ("He was winning the argument through humour.") Tegan is quite up front calling him misogynistic names, and that stuff’s all accurate, but she just... fancies him anyway, no doubt tipped over the edge by a teeth-aching bit of sympathy when he winds up in hospital: "[Tegan] saw another side of Paynter, briefly. A deeply hidden side. ‘It’s like having a part of you ripped away,’ he said softly. The shattering loss was clearly there, inches beneath the surface. He hid his feelings well, she gave him credit for that much, but the veneer was in danger of peeling away and allowing the world to look at the vulnerable, confused, hurt man beneath. She could almost have hugged Paynter at that moment. Almost, but not quite." He said like… one thing there.

Trying to skip over the appalling misreading of Tegan, we've now stumbled across one of the book's major flaws. The King Of Terror is not well written. A recurring nuisance is Topping's fondness for over-description of characters, usually out of nowhere and after a line of dialogue. "‘Sure,’ said Ryman. He was powerfully built with a thick, bullish neck and short cropped hair. He had a livid red scar on his left cheek and a prizefighter’s nose that had taken one punch too many, yet his movements were light and graceful, almost balletic." / "She was a small woman in her late twenties, slightly overweight around the hips and thighs, and power-dressed in a tightly fitting, dark blue jacket and skirt combination that emphasised rather than hid her weight. The cut of her ash-blonde hair was as severe as her clothes and her eyes looked like two chips of ice in the dull lighting of the conference room." / "‘The information that we have from our sources in LA,’ said Frank Greaves, ‘is that there’s a UNIT presence in the city.’ Greaves was a gnomish, tired-looking man with thinning blond hair and a sickly pale complexion that suggested far too many sleepless nights. He cast a nervous glance at his CIA superior who was small, completely inconspicuous and in his early fifties."

There's a nugget of actual characterisation in each of these, but it's still an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach. Good lord, get to the point – and if the character's looks aren't remotely important later on, then you needn't bother. There are heaps of characters in this, a lot of them sound the same, and once they're past the initial description-fest they don't get described again. It doesn't really help to have been told 200 pages ago that one of them moves balletically sometimes. (Strangely Topping doesn't go to town describing the aliens, who just look sort of horrible, really. Their back story, relayed in great dollops by the Doctor, isn’t particularly original either; one lot are compared to the Daleks. Ooh.)

The prose has a tendency to waffle on, often with a comedic bent. I get it – Topping's irreverent, see the original Discontinuity Guide – but it's not well integrated here. Omniscient sentences like "Those who believe that, in a world of infinite variety, an improbable amount of duplication occurs naturally would have just loved the coincidence" will just make you go, hang on, I guess that was a bit of a coincidence wasn't it? Stuff like "Newton turned with a quizzical look on his face. ‘I don’t follow?’" is redundant – you just described the feeling he's having, then signified it with dialogue, you can just pick one. Descriptions like "Milligan had the look of whomsoever it was that had been assigned the tough job of converting Saul on the road to Damascus" are disappearing off into their own little world altogether. Huh?

There's a general uncertainty here about what to do with all the bits that aren't dialogue – but much of the actual dialogue is either first-pass obvious or just embarrassing, like an Irish character who says “He saved my life once, so he did” and “We’re supposed to be the good guys, so we are.” A book with this much action shouldn't have this much time to witter on, and when people say something it should be worth saying.

Tone is another of the book's major problems. It's clearly going for funny a lot of the time, and nerdy, if it can get away with both. (You know Topping, reference guides etc.) Sometimes it's quite unobtrusive: “‘Nice effect. Computer-generated?’ ‘Colour separation overlay,’ replied the Doctor dismissively.” Sometimes it's slightly off: "It’s exactly the same technique the Time Meddler used in the Seventies with that pop concert malarkey." (Yay, a Virgin/No Future reference... but does anyone in-universe call him "the Time Meddler"?) And sometimes it just doesn't work. There's a tissue of references to the Fifth Doctor not being a particularly impressive or well-liked incarnation: "[This incarnation]’s symbolic if somewhat mysterious. A lot of people don’t seem to like it.” / "He strikes me as being a bit wet.” / “‘Which one are you?’ ‘Fifth.’ ‘Oh, the vulnerable one. Well, you’d better sit down before you have an accident.’” What the hell are they talking about? They're not Doctor Who fans! This isn't a Doctor Who forum! You're breaking things for a crap joke. (And look, maybe don't keep telling us how limp and rubbish the character we are reading about right now is. Do you think he sucks? No? Well then, just write him with confidence and ignore the critics. This isn’t The Discontinuity Guide.)

Often that urge to tickle our funny bones arrives at the wrong moment. When we first meet them, the terrorists are variously likened to a With The Beatles-era Ringo Starr and "Noddy Holder circa 1973", and they're clearly meant to be hapless in the extreme. But then they're also very successful terrorists who blow up a building killing 70 people, and later blow up a car incinerating one of the main characters. But like? One of them looks like Noddy Holder, I guess? Ho ho? I barely know why they're in the book – their leader blows himself up after his girlfriend, who he fat shames but don't worry about it, gets her head blown off, and shortly afterwards the remainder are rounded up and that's them done. But they're a great example of the book not knowing when to be funny, or how hard to lean into it.

And yeah, stuff like "terrorists who successfully kill people" kind of punctures any nearby jokes, doesn't it? Those gangster aliens are always having people murdered. Paynter gets into various situations where friends of his die horribly, or he's forced to kill people in a nasty way. Pound for pound, this isn’t a funny story – so why does the prose occasionally lean in to roll its eyes, and why does he conspicuously insert song titles into the dialogue? Didn’t anyone chip in here to say, are you sure these things are complementary?

For the worst example of a tonal mismatch you can check out the nastiest thing in the book, which has no business sitting alongside all those comedy bits and arguably nullifies the lot of them: Turlough's capture and torture. This is done for ultimately baffling reasons, i.e. they want his DNA, which you can get from hair follicles. They nevertheless choose to laser him, rip bits of skin off him, blast him with intense heat, drug him and oh yes – they violently anal probe him as well, after which we're told he soiled himself. Sorry – editor? Justin, where you at? This was one of many moments during The King Of Terror – including action that simply isn't moving the story, puerile characters pontificating for pages at a time, exposition that projectiles at us like the book has food poisoning – that made me wonder if Justin Richards got sidetracked rewriting Endgame and simply didn't give this one his full attention. Because seriously, as well as the book being a literal crap-shoot in many respects, this here is unsuitable material for Doctor Who. Come on. Kids read these. What are we doing. (Turlough's revenge, where he beats his captor and seductress to death with a heavy chain, mashing her head to soup, would probably win the "this really shouldn't be here" award if it weren't for the probe. Good grief.)

The clanging tones are perhaps the worst thing about The King Of Terror, but there's more to go. It wasn’t really worth bringing the Brigadier back given the little he has to do here, and it’s done in a way that means having to reckon with his now thoroughly convoluted novel timeline. The book is way too pop-culture-brained, not just keen to make arch references in the dialogue but occasionally leaning on it for characterisation, which makes it all feel a bit more throwaway. (Tegan talks to a wounded man for support specifically because she saw it in an episode of M*A*S*H, and not because, I dunno, it’s the right thing to do.) Paynter’s misogyny leaks out into the book to some extent; there are very few female characters and they’re either dippy, casually offensive or meanly denigrated in description. And not to get all puritan about it but there are some expletives here that do not belong in a Who book. You’ve got a racist bit, where we’re meant to sympathise with the one saying it, an ableist bit between comedy villains and a random dreadfully homophobic slur when someone is mad at their computer for taking too long. (?!) There’s little enough of this stuff that you could easily cut it with no ramifications, but that just makes it more bizarre that it’s there. (Yes, I know times change and I’d put at least one of these down to just being written in a more ignorant real world — but cumulatively, oof.)

All of this is nitpicking to some extent, so here’s a bigger one: this has to be the worst writing for the Fifth Doctor so far in novels. Perhaps as a response to the (baffling and unnecessary) extra-textual criticisms of his character, he has a sudden equal-opportunities penchant for rude sarcasm, a fondness for making self-mythologising speeches at the drop of a hat, a blundering grasp of philosophy and a need to espouse it, and (when it suits) an apparent dumbness so that Geoff Paynter can "as you know, Bob" at him for a change. I don’t recognise him at all. He's not worried enough about Turlough and he/the novel doesn’t get anywhere near to reckoning with what's happened to him after the fact, attempting to cloak it in a "well, Turlough be mysterious I guess" bullet point that just minimises the whole thing. Similarly Tegan's experiences are apparently meant to make her more cynical, as if she needed the help, but that doesn't explain why she fell head over heels for a guy who smacked her in the face. None of the leads ring true, which raises the question of "why write a novel about them specifically.”

But then... none of it rings true. The King Of Terror doesn't have a clue whether it's a wacky comedy or a brutal action thriller, whether it's Doctor Who or a godawful misogynistic crime show about Geoff Paynter, whether it's introspective and descriptive or irritatingly flippant and obsessed with pop culture, whether it's huge in scope or putting its feet up so it can hear about it all on the news. I really cannot believe that this one passed all the usual editing checks. I don't understand how it's in this state generally, since I enjoyed both of Topping's previous co-written novels — surely Martin Day can't have done all the heavy lifting? As a published novel it’s as rough and misguided as any early days Virgin disaster you'd care to name. It’s the clear nadir of the BBC Books run so far, and with sufficient luck for the rest of it as well.

2/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #81 – Endgame by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#40

Endgame

By Terrance Dicks

There’s something quite apt about getting Terrance Dicks to write for the “amnesiac Doctor” arc. After all, his last McGann book was all about the Doctor losing his marbles.

The Eight Doctors struggled to put this to good use. It facilitated the need to meet other Doctors and borrow a few brain cells, but otherwise the latest incarnation was just some brown-haired guy who oscillates between moral objections and murderous fighting skills. Dicks didn’t seem interested in the whole characterisation bit. Endgame is more interested, and more successful, but it’s still not very much of either.

We find the Doctor living listlessly in 1951. He goes to museums to soak up information and resolutely refuses to get involved in other people’s affairs. Gone is the escalating need to take part and, if possible, leave the planet entirely which Paul Leonard introduced so pointedly in The Turing Test. (You could read his ennui here as a direct response to his failure there, but that will have to stay as head-canon. Which is annoying. Perhaps this is a minor point but I thought one of the main reasons for doing this soft reboot was to make the Doctor easier for the writers to grasp and more consistent to read? At this point it feels like handing McGann a new outfit every week and telling him to wing it.) Despite his disinterest he becomes involved in the hunt for a missing document. He soon comes to the attention of the British, American and Russian governments, not to mention a certain shadowy cabal whom he met previously but now can’t remember.

I got the impression that Dicks was mapping McGann onto another Doctor here. His curmudgeonly insistence on being left alone, and his refusal to help with “politics and causes and crusades” all reads a bit like Pertwee during his exile to Earth. (The shared exile is another canny enough reason to get Dicks involved.) The way we find him is almost a “What if the Third Doctor avoided UNIT and got on with his life” setup — with the unfortunate excision of his attempts to get the TARDIS working, since it’s still just a hollow blue box that he’s only glommed onto out of sheer habit. The Doctor is a rather pitiful figure in Endgame, clearly depressed.

There’s something to be said for this portrayal, even if it does bump irritatingly against The Turing Test. It gives him somewhere to go, and that’s the direction the book takes: the Doctor eventually roars into action, despite objections, and others note that he has “come alive.” (While still noting that “There’s a long way to go.”) There are moments of that old Doctor brilliance, such as a masterful (so to speak) deconstruction of a psychic training camp, and an impassioned speech to a villain about the virtues of humanity and their right to survive.

Dicks can be a good team player with plot arcs — Exodus and Blood Harvest both lobbed the ball to Paul Cornell for his follow up books — and he’s on good form with that here. Despite what I read as mismatched characterisation, he makes direct use of the events of The Turing Test, bringing in background player Kim Philby for a key role. The aforementioned “long way to go” is also more than just lip service: it’s clear that the Doctor has a conflicted relationship with his missing memories, at one point saying “Don’t tell me these things. I don’t want to know them. I am past all that,” and later responding to an offer of mental help by dropping to the ground and sobbing “I mustn’t know! I mustn’t know!” It’s perhaps not too much to assume that his blowing up Gallifrey is getting in the way of things like remembering who the Brigadier is or how the Daleks felt about stairs. More on that later, I assume, which is an altogether more productive approach than I was expecting from Terrance Dicks.

If my expectations seem low it’s because, well, I’ve read his novels. The more of them I read, the more I picture the revered script editor picking the name of a famous person out of a hat and spending perhaps five minutes concocting a reason for the Doctor to meet them. (I’m increasingly sure this is all a conscious effort to show some of the Doctor’s name-dropping in action — something the Classic era rarely did.) Endgame indeed makes some interesting points about the amnesiac Doctor, but it also flubs it a few times, as well as surrounding him with the usual mid-effort Uncle Terry plotting.

As for the Doctor, you can explain away and justify his total failure to keep a friend alive (very unlike him generally) as rock bottom for his refusal to get involved. The Burning and Casualties Of War did similar things. What Endgame handles poorly is the Doctor’s attitude to violence. He’s quite clear about his distaste for guns, yet he’s also quite capable of strangling an assailant to death — only pulling back because a friend tells him to stop. Even worse, there’s a moment where he gleefully attempts to kill a man with his own gun, in that case only being stopped by the villain vanishing in front of him. So what is it he actually dislikes about guns? The colour?

Dicks had a similarly bizarre attitude towards Doctorly violence in The Eight Doctors, with McGann engineering the deaths of multiple Sontarans and actively splatting vampires and a giant spider, not to mention generally Kung-fu fighting when the situation called for it. It’s really not enough to say “guns are bad” if you’re going around trying to kill people anyway, especially if you throw a gun into the mix as well.

The violence is also a bit boring as well as incongruous: the Doctor’s handy ability to “slip back into some kind of atavistic state” when attacked and promptly morph into Jackie Chan is an amnesiac carry-over from The Eight Doctors, and it feels just as ridiculous now as it did then. The Eighth Doctor has been in dozens of books now and he’s not in the habit of relying on Venusian aikido, so it feels like a lazy Pertwee default to get him out of lots, and I do mean lots of scrapes that way. (At one point he Vulcan-neck-pinches two people on the same page.) If all of this is intended to be yet another sign of the character needing to move towards a more familiar centre — “he’s only violent because he doesn’t remember” — which might be the only excuse for it, well, forgive me but I don’t buy that. Terry clearly isn’t a writer to keep such intentions secret from the reader.

There’s no companion to speak of in this amnesiac history tour, so that leaves us with the plot. This works on two fronts, the one self-contained, the other a sequel. Neither is particularly strong.

The hunt for the missing document (which of course becomes a Hitchcockian “wrong place, wrong time” deal for the Doctor) is suitably action packed, but this falls into a routine of the Doctor effortlessly fighting his way out of trouble and cutaways so that government organisations etc can go “wow, can you believe how effortlessly that guy fought his way out of trouble?!” The document eventually points us to a strange conspiracy involving random acts of aggression and mind control — which to be honest feels like an idea we could have seeded earlier. By the time we arrive at it, roughly halfway, Endgame struggles to get up a head of steam about it, merely reporting a few unprovoked attacks and promising big trouble if, for example, Truman or Stalin gets in on this. It’s underwhelming to say the least, although the aforementioned scene of the Doctor deconstructing a psychic training camp is a highlight.

The other plot strand is a direct sequel to Dicks’s earlier PDA, Players. I liked his idea about a group of time travelling malcontents, sort of malevolent versions of the Meddling Monk. I didn’t feel like he did enough with them in Players so I had no objection to seeing them again. Sadly, he still can’t seem to muster much enthusiasm about them. Their plans usually amount to little more than random irritations during historical events in the hope that it will create some vaguely defined level of mess, and their rules rarely matter to anyone playing the game, as they constantly cheat. For a big shadowy org they just don’t have their shit together.

Individually they’re not much better. The main antagonist is a guy called Axel who periodically shows up, monologues foolishly and then allows the Doctor to effortlessly kick him in the posterior. Not very inspiring. When the Doctor meets the enigmatic Countess, the aforementioned speech comes into effect — but unfortunately while this is a very Doctor thing to do, it’s quite a limp way to defuse the entire crisis all on its own, which again leaves this organisation looking utterly hapless. If the Doctor can run rings around them with barely half an idea who he even is, why are we supposed to be intimidated by them? (This ending should probably count as character development for the Countess, but given her handful of scenes across both books, readers are unlikely to be keeping score.)

All in all, it’s not looking good for Endgame. But it has its upsides. First of all you have that usual stand-by, Terry’s writing style. It’s all quite jolly, if flawed. (Philby more than once does an “As you know, Bob” spiel about the CIA and other such groups for the Doctor’s, and transparently our benefit.) But as for the pace, this one whizzes along even faster than Players, which made the awkward choice of spreading its plot across three short stories featuring two Doctors, one of them sequelising a TV story that mostly had nothing to do with it. Not so with Endgame, which might globetrot like a Bond film but does at least stick to one core plot and protagonist. There’s an absurd thrill to watching the Doctor (who, remember, is not the proactive character of old, more closely resembling a Hitchcock patsy) get forced into one shenanigan after another, and while it cumulatively becomes very dull to see him extricate himself over and over through fights, his success in itself is fun to read.

You also have another staple of Terrance Dicks books: historical hobnobbing. Endgame doesn’t disappear into fanboying as Players did over Winston Churchill, but it has a lot of fun spinning the various plates of Kim Philby’s loyalties, and arguably the most fun with Guy Burgess, hedonistic gay double agent. While the writing for Burgess is cartoonish, having him refer to himself over and over as “Brigadier Brilliant!” and occasionally offer his flirting services to get out of trouble, I suspect it all comes from a good place. He’s an enjoyable presence and his scenes fleeing the country with the Doctor are further book highlights. Meanwhile Truman and Stalin don’t appear much, and they don’t meaningfully escape from just having two dimensions — The Wages Of Sin this ain’t — but I think Dicks just about acquits himself within the bounds of his plot. They’re not in it much, so maybe they don’t need to impress all that much. (Hey, I’m trying to be positive.)

I was thinking of Players quite a bit during Endgame, and for what it’s worth I think this is a better book. Dicks makes a point (as well as missing others) about the Doctor within this story arc, and he leaves something for others to pick up on; he tells a coherent and reasonably engaging, if underwhelming story about spies in the meantime. I wish it had been more, and I certainly wish he could think of a more hands-on approach for his “players” idea, but the bar for his books is fairly low at this point and Endgame just about stretches a leg over it.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #80 – Independence Day by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#36

Independence Day

By Peter Darvill-Evans

The prodigal editor returns!

As you probably know, Peter Darvill-Evans helped launch the New Adventures and then edited them for years. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have EDAs or PDAs without him, so it makes a degree of sense to get him in to write something for BBC Books.

Of course the concern here is that his only prior Doctor Who book was Deceit: a plot-relevant but otherwise long, stodgy, vaguely unpleasant and action-heavy entry that introduced the controversial New Ace. (An older, gun-toting Ace who ran away and joined the space army for a bit.) It existed in service of a plot arc and what little you could glean about the author’s creativity was not hugely encouraging.

Independence Day* is at least a more measured effort — albeit not in terms of chapters, of which there are only six plus a prologue across 280 pages. Darvill-Evans is no longer saving up all the important bits for 50 page intervals (a weird Deceit tic), and although this one dips a toe in creepiness there’s nothing to rival the Stockholm Syndrome relationship in that book — although the concept of messed up attraction shows up again. It is, if nothing else, an easy to follow book.

If I seem cagey it’s because I spent most of Independence Day convinced that it was Doing A Thing that would eventually pay off. On the surface it looks like the most, well, surface kind of story imaginable: the Doctor and Ace become embroiled in a slave revolt. They’ll light the blue touch paper and then down will come the terrible tyrant. It’s not exactly new ground but it could be satisfying if done well. The way Darvill-Evans positions his players, though, suggests a much murkier story.

Straight off the bat, the Doctor’s past actions have played a part in all this. While travelling with Jamie he landed on Mendeb Two for no apparent reason — rationalising that he always arrives somewhere “for a reason” — so he asked Jamie to pick up a souvenir to remind him to come back. Jamie picked a vital part of the planet’s communication relay, which ultimately caused a critical imbalance between planets Two and Three. (Maybe tie a knot in your hanky next time.) Fast forward to the Doctor’s return with Ace and Mendeb Two is now easy pickings for its sister world; the populace are being used for slave labour. So you have a story about the Doctor fixing his own mistake.

Sat on the ancient space station between the two worlds is Kedin Ashar, a Duke of Mendeb Three who is apparently loyal to King Vethran, whose kingdom relies upon brainwashed slaves. However, he is secretly working against the King. However (part 2) he is also facilitating the King’s slave trade using his own skill as an inventor/chemist. His plan is to invent a new mind-altering slave drug which wears off sooner, and supplant the original without Vethran noticing. Which is… good, but he’s still actively trading in slaves, and has dosed who knows how many people with the permanent version of the drug already. So he’s not exactly the white knight he appears to be, at least to his followers. The question inevitably occurs of whether he’s really any better than Vethran, and his answer isn’t all that compelling: “I can’t claim that I have a grand new vision for my planet, nor that I’m acting from long-held principles. I’m a soldier and a scientist, not a politician.” So there’s a question of whether this coup d'état will turn out to be anything more than a redistribution.

Then you have the slave revolt, which is happening independently of Kedin/coincidentally with the Doctor’s help. Landing on Mendeb Two he finds the slave operation in full swing and meets Bep-Wor, a depressed fisherman whose wife is a slave on the other world. Soon they’re working together on Mendeb Three, with the Doctor hoping to find Ace and Bep-Wor hoping to find his wife. This mini-revolution soon becomes worryingly messianic, with the brainwashed and free slaves alike chanting “Doctor!” Bep-Wor is hugely swept along by this and he begins steering the group away from the Doctor’s plan of finding the King to negotiate; instead they go from place to place freeing slaves, and doing so violently against the Doctor’s wishes. (For a while he lies to keep this secret from the Doctor.) So this revolution isn’t spotless — there are questions to be asked about their methods, whether Bep-Wor is really better than the villains he’s killed, and how the Doctor squares that with his own moral code.

Then you have Ace. Free of her New Adventures continuity, she nonetheless wants to grow and be independent (geddit), and insists that the Doctor set her down on the space station to fend for herself. Soon she’s breaking up a fight to rescue Kedin, sleeping with him, winding up a slave herself and then eventually breaking her conditioning, assisting the revolution and intending to stay behind and make a life for herself. So you have a story about Ace’s independence and burgeoning adulthood, and the difficulties within that.

Even some bits you’d normally take for granted are presented with a little extra ambiguity. Vethran, our oogly-boogly bad guy, hardly appears in the book at all; he’s such a background figure that I couldn’t help focussing on Kedin’s grey areas instead. Is Darvill-Evans using this to tip the story the other way? Is Vethran’s reputation exaggerated perhaps, and Kedin’s muted? And we have the slaves. Now, obviously they’re not happy. They’re slaves! They’re drugged into forced contentment! But then we meet a slave/master couple who seem sort of genuinely functional, the one filling in the deficiencies of the other. Bep-Wor’s half-crazed army can’t cope with this idea so they kill the owner and liberate the slave; it’s strongly suggested that we shouldn’t cheer them on, which suggests that maybe, I dunno, there’s a grey area in all this.

Maybe I’ve got my charitable hat on but I think there’s genuine promise here. Sadly Independence Day doesn’t follow through on any of it. Which suggests worrying things about my choice of hat.

For starters there’s the Doctor. Yes, it’s interesting that his actions may have doomed Mendeb Two. But you ideally need to do something with that other than have the Doctor go “oh, whoops” and then proceed to get exactly as involved in the anti-villainy plot as he would have done on any other planet. His complicity doesn’t make much difference to the story since at no point does anyone find out or care about the Doctor’s little mistake, and beyond a little early encouragement he barely contributes to their victory anyway, instead spending a fair chunk of the finale dead. (He gets better.)

Then there’s Kedin, our distractingly handsome hero/slave trader — you know, that old combo. Kedin is anything but lily white politically, but he seems sure that he can fix the slave problem. Based on what, though? There’s zero actual plan to restore the slaves to who they were before, since at the time he planned all this he didn’t know the Doctor would turn up to at least have a credible go at it. Did he think setting a load of servile zombies free on their old stomping ground was a win? All his new drug does is confirm that some new slaves will revert back. Some plan!

His personality isn’t much better. We’re meant to believe he’s pining for his kidnapped love, Tevana. It’s a key motivator for him. That doesn’t seem to get in the way of his taking Ace to bed though, does it? Not to get all prudish about it, but that’s some very messy motivation for a guy already dabbling in straight up villainy, and yet by the time the dust settles at the end you’d think Aragorn had returned to Gondor. So I guess just don’t worry about all of that.

It’s clear that we’re meant to pity Bep-Wor, who gets a downbeat ending after hearing some unencouraging news. I nevertheless kept waiting for his bloody revolution and occasional lies to come back on him, but they didn’t. Shouldn’t it make a difference that he goes against the Doctor’s wishes, uses him as a figurehead and eventually (unconvincingly) feigns helplessness when his mob kills somebody harmless? Instead it’s just one of those things the book throws at us as if to go, well, it’s more colourful that way. And it is, but you really ought to put a button on it as well.

Like Kedin, Bep-Wor is lauded at the end. His unhappy postscript might be seen as penance — I dunno, he mostly seems unhappy about one very specific thing there. The best I can come up with is that Bep-Wor’s decay is because the Doctor felt he deserved it for making his earlier mistake, and that’s why he doesn’t do anything to stop it. I know, I know, it’s probably just (debatably) interesting colour.

You can see that Ace’s story is meant to be meaningful, a sort of New Adventures character arc speed run, but it just doesn’t work. For starters, she gets it all wrong: she completely misreads the initial attack on Kedin (she thinks the fancy rich guy is blameless, not the band of angry peasants? Ace thinks that?) and she puts a fatal amount of trust in him, even after he seemingly ejects her into space. The “mindless slave” section is then a very curious choice for the character, effectively writing her out for half of it. (That may be for the best as it’s strongly hinted that she did more than serve drinks on Mendeb Three. A reference to her being “fit for the arena” due to her fight skills is promising but that goes nowhere — perhaps it was from an old draft.)

Although her recovery and rush into action at the end is some of the most direct and enjoyable stuff in the book, her moral flip-flopping over Kedin is laughable. He drugged you and sent you into slavery! He boffed you while supposedly pining for his missus! But because he’s sad about it, Ace reckons she’s all grown up now and ready to go and serve Kedin instead of travelling in the TARDIS. No way: you, sir, are having a laugh. And so Darvill-Evans appears to be with Kedin’s wince-inducing Casablanca kiss-off at the end. At least we can find some amusement in the Doctor failing to entertain her plan for even a second.

Lastly we have the “take for granted” stuff, and no prizes for guessing how much that leaves in the bank. Vethran is described with, of course, thwarted ambiguity: “Bep-Wor had expected — he didn’t know what he had expected. Someone more remarkable, perhaps: a man whose face betrayed an inner evil. Vethran was tall, imposing, with keen, intelligent eyes and a full beard. And that was all.” But he’s clearly studied at the Ming The Merciless school as there’s no doubt of his total nastiness based on his actions; he even does the “try to kill the goodie when he’s not looking” trick! So yes, he really is worse than Kedin after all, because he just is, so there. (And to now put on my nitpick hat: why did he wait so long before brainwashing his hostage? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he just brainwash the world? Seriously, just poison the water supply and bam, no more wars. Why all the faff?) As for the apparent ambiguity around slaves — which I’m not exactly hopping up and down about as a concept — there’s only one scene of it. Another example of our “whew, that was weird, anyway” approach to moral complexity.

I’ve clearly got a bit sidetracked by all the ambiguity or-lack-thereof, so to get back to the book: yeah, I guess it is just a surface level slave revolt thing after all, despite appearances. And to be fair it can be enjoyed on that level. Darvill-Evans has clearly thought a lot about Mendeb Three and its strangely anachronistic society, with dukes and peasants somehow flying rickety rockets to a space station with much better tech. (5 years to get from radio sets to orbit? Yeah, okay.) Independence Day has an ungainly way of unspooling the planet’s lore at us, occasionally pausing just to “as you know, Bob” directly in the prose for no reason, but some of the added colour isn’t bad. Sue me, I got somewhat invested. (Sadly though it’s not just the prose that gets a bad case of the talkies. Ace, seemingly possessed with the soliloquy powers of Spider-Man, at one point announces to herself: “Now then … what was all that about? That Kedin’s a crafty old sod. Charming and very horny, but definitely crafty with it. I suppose he’s trying to find out how much I know about all this futuristic technology. It’s obvious he hasn’t got the hang of it at all. I just wish I knew what he was up to on this godforsaken space station.” Smooth!)

It’s not, without wishing to be mean, the most memorably written book. This is the sort of SF/fantasy plodder to throw out lines like “‘The signal, Tevana Roslod,’ Madok said”, and where “flirting” manifests as “I think you’d better say a prayer to your own deity, young lady. You’re about to sin.” (Oh, Pete.) We’ve established that virtually no one in this is someone you’ll want to root for, and there’s little in the way of interesting interior lives; nonetheless, the simple march of Darvill-Evans’s revolution keeps the pace up pretty well. The finale is exciting, and there are moments of wit along the way, like how Ace’s brainwashed speech and thoughts aren’t quite as flat as everyone else’s: “It’s a good job I’ve been told that I’m happy doing this, [Ace] said to herself, because otherwise I think I’d be quite pissed off.” If nothing else it’s unchallenging on a plot level and quite easy to get through.

I think I liked it better than Deceit. That’s not a very high bar, and it’s difficult to tell how much of my generally-finding-it-sort-of-okay was because I’d tricked myself into expecting a more complex book. I still think Independence Day has the germ of something with all that moral ambiguity, though equally that might just be a tonal leftover from the New Adventures. With a book this eager to comment on the action and tell us about the surroundings, however, I have to doubt there’s all that much hidden under the surface.

5/10

*Not a great title is it? This is a coup, they depose the guy. They’re not becoming an independent anything, they’re just getting rid of their ruler.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #79 – The Turing Test by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#39

The Turing Test

By Paul Leonard

Paul Leonard is one of those Doctor Who writers that sticks to his themes. Like Malcolm Hulke before him, he is interested in the differences and similarities between people – human or otherwise.

The Turing Test is a particularly subtle entry in Leonard’s “aliens are weird, but also not” canon. This time there are no outlandish life cycles or outrageous rituals to contend with; the whole point, as suggested by the title, is that they are similar enough to us that they bear further examination. There are little nuggets of alien-ness of course, such as a language that begins as singing, then awkwardly acclimatises itself to human speech. But they’re not so great that the three narrators of this book, themselves very different men with conflicting viewpoints (about the aliens, among other things), ever make up their minds to mistrust or fear these beings outright.

And on that: it’s another in a pleasingly growing line of BBC Books that plays with the format. Yes, we’re already in an odd version of Doctor Who that eschews TARDIS travel and features a Doctor with no idea who he is or what he does for a living. But The Turing Test also bumps the Doctor out of focus, letting three (coincidentally quite famous) men carry the story instead as a relay race. Shades of Eye Of Heaven, Heart Of TARDIS and Festival Of Death there, but Leonard’s book feels like its own take on a multi-narrator jumbled narrative. It occasionally steps back over itself to offer context (like Festival) but that isn’t the whole selling point here. Instead these narrators are trying to figure out who the hell the Doctor is and what he’s doing despite none of them having the complete puzzle.

It’s unusual on a story level too. The basic thrust of most Doctor Who episodes/books/whatever is that aliens, or otherwise bad guys want to carry out an evil plan. That’s not the case here: we just have one group of aliens trying to escape the world circa 1944, and another group of aliens trying to prevent them from doing so. Yes, we can place our bets as to which group of aliens is the “nice” one, but it’s never made explicitly clear – indeed, according to Narrator #3: “I saw that [the Doctor] had no more idea which side had been right than I had.” On one side you have a pompous and sinister general, but also a friendly woman that one of our narrators falls in love with. Both demonstrate constant, subtly inhuman behaviours. On the other side you have a group of strangers we barely interact with at all, but the Doctor seems taken with them, and isn’t that usually enough? It’s murky and anticlimactic to the extent that when some of them do escape in the end the Doctor and co. don’t even see it happen. (It’s even suggested that if you did see it, there’d be no great special effect.)

This is all set against the dying days of the Second World War, where jingoism has ceased to keep people motivated and some (like Joseph Heller) were going out of their minds questioning it all. There are occasional harmless Germans in the story, and few Nazis. Dresden features prominently – a classic example of atrocity not being the exclusive purview of the “bad guys”. Right and wrong are baked into The Turing Test, with Alan Turing and Graham Greene in particular debating the proper emotional reaction to the Holocaust, or to the deaths of regretful Nazi collaborators. Each considers the other to be heartless in his way, and both have a flawed, biased perspective. It’s another form of dehumanisation and wondering if other people have the same right to exist that was already powering The Turing Test via the alien plot.

A frustrated inability to communicate is at the heart of all this, summed up nicely with a line that could apply to all of Paul Leonard books: “‘I didn’t realise how different you could be.’ ‘Well, now you know.’” Alan Turing and the ENIGMA machine make for another smart backdrop to Leonard’s theme – understanding from chaos – which we then extrapolate to the uncertain human-or-not beings on both sides of the conflict, and of course to the Doctor himself, who is about as frustrated as he’s ever been.

We’re three books into the “Earth arc” which was, by all accounts, an attempt to reset the Eighth Doctor’s characterisation and make it easier for authors to grasp. (Personally I thought they were doing a pretty good job already, and their main problem seemed to be just not talking to each other enough, but hey ho.) The Doctor understandably wasn’t himself in The Burning and Casualties Of War, allowing for or inciting acts of violence and generally lacking empathy, or lacking it in his usual quantities. But you’d be hard pressed to point at the character in those books and say that was someone you didn’t recognise.

The Turing Test suggests that he is, if anything, getting worse over time. The TARDIS has evolved to the point where it’s a big blue box you can open with a key, but there’s nothing in it, which causes him to sob and wail. When he finally encounters aliens he has no way to understand them. (Hence Turing.) The very concept of finding alien life, and of sticking his oar in to rescue them or stop them (delete where appropriate) fills him with such wild excitement that he can’t seem to stop getting people endangered or killed for it. His plans aren’t good, and as I’ve mentioned they’re questionably partisan. He’s hardly putting a stop to Davros here: when he arranges for a colleague to bug someone, which inadvertently (??) kills them, there’s little evidence that he’s advanced the cause of good in the universe. And when he arranges/commits another murder at the end (it’s not clear who did it but several people blame themselves) it seems to have been purely in the name of getting off of Earth once and for all, which is the most barefaced selfish he’s been in recent (ahem) memory. We can assume he’s somewhat ashamed of this, as he immediately resets to helping the nearby wounded instead, but you’re still offered a long glimpse of the Doctor at his worst.

It’s debatable whether this stretches to his treatment of Turing, who he may or may not have strung along romantically. Memory or no, we can be sure he’s not dangling any real prospect over Turing, but then he’s also been acclimatised to Earth long enough to have tried signing up with the RAF to help the war effort, and he’s been close enough to people like Mary Minett (who also couldn’t contain herself around him), so this latest infatuation is unlikely to have escaped his notice or earshot entirely. At the end Leonard repeats the fact that no one knows why Turing committed suicide, which in this tie-in genre novel context allows for a certain crass inference. I wonder if it’s really the Doctor or Leonard who’s demonstrating questionable behaviour there.

If I have an issue with The Turing Test it’s Turing. Not so much the writing of him, which is as satisfyingly identifiable as the other two narrators. Turing is curious and analytical; his perspective is unusual, given his ability to sympathise based on logic rather than emotion, but all of that is still recognisably baked in emotion. Greene is emotive and dismissive; he constantly picks up on the tell-tale “bad movie dialogue” of the aliens, and the things happening around him that feel like developments in a dubious novel. (Protesting a little too much if I’m honest there, Paul.) Heller is sardonic and perhaps the most human of the three; it’s him who has to relate the explanations and consequences of all this, so it’s through him that the novel ultimately fails to reach any comfortable conclusions. All three narrators have a distinct and readable style, with Heller’s in particular racing along in an entertaining fashion. (I haven’t read Catch-22 but I’m guessing this bit rings true. Lines like: “Despite his evident willingness to kill me, he seemed a decent, honourable man. ‘Look here,’ said the Doctor. ‘I can see that you’re a decent, honourable man, Major.’” And: “‘You can’t,’ echoed the bewildered major, now very bewildered.” And especially: “Now the mad colonel had me over a barrel. It was a small uncomfortable barrel, rotting in places. It didn’t have any beer in it, and it was adrift, barely afloat, in the middle of the Mediterranean, or perhaps the Atlantic.”)

It comes down to a question of taste – admittedly mine as well as the book’s. Greene and Heller are both dismissive of Turing as a fawning, childlike buffoon. You can comfortably call this the whim of flawed narrators – the characters aren’t Paul Leonard, for heaven’s sake, they can say and think things the author does not endorse. And while Greene says just-plain-mean things like Turing having “the mind of a child — a weak child, timid and unyielding — and like a child he was given to tantrums when he didn’t get his own way”, and downright prejudiced things like “His unnatural sexual orientation, and his imposition of that attitude on the asexual being of the Doctor, were typical of his attitude to life. He may not have been very much more sinful than any of us, but he had no guilt for his sins, and that made him less than a whole man”, to say nothing of outright crass asides such as “His face was illuminated with that selfish flush, that suffusion of blood that you see in children when the lollipop of their choice has been provided. I wondered what lollipops the Doctor was providing for Turing”, the Doctor does at least take him to task for it, albeit slightly: “The fact that he’s homosexual should have nothing to do with it. You have some extraordinary prejudices.”

But then we compound it with Heller too, as he also has shade to throw at him. See: “Alan Turing was a dull, opportunistic man, intelligent and obtuse, observant and self-centred, kind-hearted and wilfully cold. A fleshy man, he nonetheless minced around, filled with uncertainty about his every gesture, yet he was always certain that his overall outlook on life was right.” And: “Turing thinks [life with the Doctor]’s good, because he’s a boring, unadventurous, stuck-up English prig.” (To be fair he also adds that “Greene thinks it’s bad, because he’s prone to swift, emotional judgements, and therefore judges most things to be bad.” So yeah, ’ave it, Graham.) To spend one third of your book lobbing zingers at a real, unhappy, ultimately suicidal man might be considered literary colour. To spend two thirds, well, it comes across as a bit mean-spirited and leaves behind an unpleasant taste. How could it not?

It’s quite possible I’m overreacting. Again, characters aren’t their authors. This is all made up and it’s not as if there’s a rule somewhere that says you specifically can’t be rude about Turing. But in a novel that’s already using the Dresden bombing as a sci-fi sandbox, and has the unspoken-but-kinda-spoken idea that an unrequited love for the Doctor might have doomed Alan Turing, I wonder if frequently jabbing at him as well, without any significant rebuttal or recourse to understand him better as a result of it – which as we’ve established is Paul Leonard’s whole bag – really serves a point other than to illustrate how some people probably reacted to the guy. Which we could already infer was “not with enormous sensitivity” given, you know, his life.

Anyway! Ahem. The Turing Test, then. Apart from certain distractions it’s a thoughtful book, and an unusual piece of ongoing Doctor Who. I don’t know what to make of the Doctor at this stage, and for once that’s not because I don’t recognise what the author is doing – it’s because we’re in somewhat uncharted territory. That’s exciting. The use of an uncertain menace, or perhaps no real menace at all, is something other authors could take note of. It doesn’t always have to be killer blobs or evil conspiracies, y’know. (Not that it always is, but anything we can do to get away from old tropes is a plus.) That’s three novels in a row where the Doctor is capable of not being the lily-white good guy, and although that’s not something I want to see become standard operating procedure, the journey back to a more comfortable place could be ripe for storytelling. There’s even, yes, plenty to be said for novels that are unafraid to make the reader uncomfortable. Without going off on one again about how he handled it and whether it had a point, I don’t hate that Leonard wrote very some human unpleasantness into this. But that aspect does keep me from championing The Turing Test outright.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #78 – Festival Of Death by Jonathan Morris

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#35

Festival Of Death

By Jonathan Morris

For a show about time travel Doctor Who is surprisingly shy about its mechanics. There aren't a lot of Groundhog Day-style time loops to be found, or Bill & Ted paradoxes, especially in the days before Davies and Moffat. Of course we know that's because time travel isn't really the point of Doctor Who: it's just a handy way into whatever story you'd like to tell. The TARDIS could be a wardrobe to Narnia or the Starship Enterprise and many of the plots could still work. If you were new to Who though, you might expect more (nyurgh) timey-wimey.

Jonathan Morris is perhaps a bit over-excited in claiming (via his Introduction) to have done all of this stuff first. (He at least goes on to credit The Sands Of Time as an early adopter, though he omits The Left-Handed Hummingbird which came even earlier. Tut tut.) Regardless of who dunit first, Festival Of Death probably does time travel shenanigans the most up to this point. It finds the Fourth Doctor and Romana stuck in something like a time loop, where their involvement in a crisis always seems to follow another still-in-their-future intervention. Thus they have to work backwards, parsing as little information as possible along the way to avoid breaking the laws of time, whilst still somehow being effective at solving the problem. It's a pickle and no mistake; Morris, like Richards before him (and perhaps like Orman, but who knows) had to use a flow-chart to keep it all straight.

The problem I have with these kind of stories – including, to be fair, Sands and Hummingbird – is the baked-in reassurance that the characters will get out of scrape A because we know they're going to pop up in scrape B later on. (Or should that be scrape -A?) Yes, the safety of popular characters is generally something you can assume, and it’s a downright certainty in canonical tie-in fiction, but suspension of disbelief still needs to work in individual stories; actively shooting it down with foreknowledge doesn't help. Morris neatly solves this problem by making it clear early on (as well as in the blurb, before anyone shouts about spoilers!) that the Doctor is going to die at the end. Is the reader likely to believe that, in a story that prominently features death and resurrection? Well, perhaps not, but the Doctor and Romana seem convinced. Drama is therefore assured, and the Doctor's knowing journey towards his own doom keeps the tension up, despite his increasingly comical responses to characters x, y and z having met him before, even though he's on his second or third or fourth trip further into the past.

It's not an especially confusing read, although some deliberate scene repetitions (no doubt meant to refresh the context) occasionally gave me unhelpful déjà vu. Morris grounds the story by allowing the Doctor and Romana to be as out of the loop as we are; although they're both brilliantly versed in the technical terms for things (well, Romana is anyway) they're essentially just doing their best to remember which bit of the plot slots into which other bit, which is exactly the experience we're having. There are moments when it threatens to become too much, with all sorts of Doctors and Romanas running about, but Festival Of Death is a light enough read that it doesn't feel as though you'll need to pass a test afterwards. For contrast, I had to make notes while reading Heart Of TARDIS simply to stave off a headache. (I made notes about Eye Of Heaven for fun.)

That's probably the other significant thing to take away: Festival Of Death is a funny book. Perhaps that's not surprising where it's set during the Douglas Adams years, but Morris is keen that it feels authentic to all that. (Indeed, you can point to City Of Death for an example of "Doctor Who already did timey-wimey stuff".) This Doctor/companion combo easily lends itself to comedy, hence the comedic focus of their Missing Adventures, and there are lots of opportunities here for more of that. The Doctor at one point bumbles about disguised as a conveniently mute guard. He clashes multiple times with Metcalf, the small-minded controller of the derelict ship/space station that houses all the trouble, and he makes short work of two unpleasant policemen. The Doctor's "death scene" is a long day's journey into ham, throwing in as many quotes as he can think of until another character gets sick of hearing it and helps him shuffle off. Romana, for her part, is more concerned than acerbic in this, but she enjoys playing along with various fibs that (thanks to all the paradoxes) she already knows about.

At times it's too broad, or perhaps a little too eager to please. Take this Monty Python paraphrase, which is as likely to elicit a groan as a giggle: "My card is marked, my number’s up, my goose is cooked. I’ve cashed my chips and have ceased to be. I am an ex-Doctor." Yes, this should all be a bit Douglas Adams-y, but we don't need a character to reference "life, the universe, and everything!" on top of that, or have a far-out character actually named "Hoopy". The space station's computer, ERIC, is a fairly obvious mish-mash of Eddie the upbeat computer from the Heart of Gold and Marvin the depressed robot, depending on the date when we meet him. We're not talking Slipback levels of "yes we know you're a fan", but it's not far off.

Sometimes it's a less specific broadness. Most of the supporting characters are somewhat lacking in depth, usually for comic effect. Space coppers Dunkal and Rige might be the worst offenders, with one of them mentally noting that "he was getting too old for this sort of thing. He couldn’t run more than twenty metres without getting a stitch. Drinking cheap coffee, slamming his fist on desks and roughing up suspects against fenders; that was more his style." Yes, all very The Sweeney; they drop out of the story after the first "loop" and are not missed. Metcalf is an awful guy for comic effect, which is fine as far as it goes but he never grows. Doomed spaceship commander Rochfort is another ghastly bloke, as well as being one of those bores who refuses to believe things so that we can stall the plot for a sec. Villain Paddox is eventually revealed to have interesting motives for what he's doing, but up to (and including) that point he's still just a creepy man in a lab coat. Harken Batt is perhaps the best example of a shady character: a disgraced documentary-maker with few scruples and fewer positive attributes who nevertheless endears himself to the Doctor and Romana.

Some of what I'm calling broadness might be because the story has to work so hard mechanically that there isn't time to focus on the finer details. Morris admits in his introduction that like a lot of first time authors he was anxious about never getting another shot at this, so he included as many ideas as possible. Consequently Festival Of Death has a couple of competing plots, even apart from the Doctor and Romana playing temporal catch-up, and they don't always chime exactly. For instance, Paddox needs 218 people to go into his "death and resurrection" machine in order to get what he wants. That happens to be the exact number of people used by the villainous Repulsion for its own ends, piggy-backing off of Paddox's work. (At one point it's suggested there's no such thing as coincidence, but I mean, isn't there?) It's hard not to imagine earlier drafts of Festival where he just used one plot or the other.

The structure of the story means that we have to wait a long time to find out what Paddox is up to, and it's a satisfying call-back once it comes, but we're waiting equally long to get to grips with the Repulsion, and that's about as standard a villainous force as you could imagine. We also get a mix of monsters, some of them memorable, some not. The Arachnopods are artificial killers that can reconstruct their bodies, each limb having its own intelligence, which is all fantastic but they're contained to one strand of the plot. Whereas we're also doing zombies again – man, they were really in vogue at BBC Books – and as well as being quite dull beat for beat, they come with the semantic nitpickery of being potentially more dangerous once they're being possessed, rather than merely remote controlled. Which, sure I guess, but it's not as if there are good zombies, is it?

It's worth saying that most of these complaints are themselves nitpickery. The process of following the Doctor and Romana (and don't forget K9) as they tumble through this ridiculous mess is a lot of fun, both in storytelling terms and because of the general light atmosphere. (Granted, it's debateable how light, given that the story revolves around a recreational suicide machine designed for temporary stays in the afterlife.) Morris is able to mine quite a bit of pathos out of the time loop – I'm not sure it is a time loop actually but I'm not sure what else to call it – with the Doctor and Romana both at points lying to people about their imminent doom, knowing that they can't change it. The story ends on a sombre, if slightly overwritten note as reality closes in on Paddox, and there's a lot to think about with the life cycle of Gallura and his people – ethereal creatures who experience their entire lives in loops. There's often a sense of pushing past the plot machinations to really think about what time travel means to people, what they can and can't do within it, and although Festival Of Death refrains from getting very heavy about any of it, I'm glad the story had that on its mind.

Jonathan Morris would go on to write a hell of a lot more Doctor Who, but it makes sense that Festival Of Death is still spoken of highly. It does a very good job of a seemingly chaotic bit of time travel, and it hews closely to the characterisation of its two leads, who pretty much guarantee an entertaining time just by showing up. I think the book makes life harder for itself than necessary, at least when it comes to finessing the things that live between the lines of a flow chart, but it's still very satisfying to make it through the maze.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #77 – Casualties Of War by Steve Emmerson

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#38

Casualties of War

By Steve Emmerson

This is another of those books that I’ve read before. A few years ago I was kindly asked to talk about it on the We’re All Stories In The End podcast (recommended!) and for reasons that made sense at the time I read it in a day. As that conversation showed, I loved Casualties Of War; I was swept away by its grisly imagery and emotive storytelling.

I think the self-enforced time crunch must have helped, because revisiting it now with no deadline and a much shoddier attention span I’ve spent a lot longer with it and… it’s not great.

I know that’s a very negative way to start a review, and I’m not about to slate the thing, honest — it’s still a pretty good book. It’s just so weird having such a different second opinion. (Sort of wish I’d written a proper review the first time. Ah well.)

Let’s start with the good. It’s another in the amnesiac Doctor arc (“I thought you were starting with the good,” yes, ho ho) and the Eighth Doctor is once again a pronounced and compelling presence. He’s enough of a charisma wizard to enchant everybody he meets, including the villain, despite a back story even flimsier than psychic paper. He still has no idea about his past but little bits squeak through, whether it’s monster encounters or future Earth culture. He once again causes romantic palpitations just by being there, but he maintains a slightly frosty indifference about it (and about everything else) that he picked up in The Burning. He still lacks some of his usual forward planning; while not directly endangering any companions, he lets one of them stray into danger, and while not actively killing the villain during a moment of weakness (otherwise known as murder) he sure seems to terminate the bad guy here.

I noticed similarities with The Burning the first time. (Back then I read The Burning as homework. I know right, what a conscientious podcast guest!) Both novels are set in rural towns in the early 20th century; both open with a mysterious hole in the countryside; both feature a noticeable class gap between a wealthy man and the rest of the townsfolk, and he’s the baddie in both; both feature monsters in human form, often taking the form of the dead; both have the Doctor strolling along and inveigling himself in everybody’s business to surprisingly little pushback. It’s enough to raise an eyebrow at least, especially where Steve Emmerson thanks Justin Richards for his Whovian inspiration in the acknowledgements.

Where Casualties Of War diverges — apart from the amusingly up front identification of the Doctor, no “who’s Who” this time — is its very specific setting. The Great War isn’t exactly present on the page but the absence of fit young men in Hawkswick makes it very clear. There’s a ghost town quality to the place, with a reverend, a farmer and his wife, a widower policeman and a spirited young woman forming practically the whole population. The only other people of note are in Hawkswick Hall, now a recovery centre for the war wounded. (So there’s a good reason, if you need one, for the easy acceptance of the Doctor’s cover story. There simply isn’t enough going on around here for anyone to assume otherwise.)

The war instantly adds meaning to the story. Casualties Of War is all about the horrible lasting effects of trauma, with a few moments directly relating incidents from soldiers’ pasts. There’s a brutality to the novel as a whole, which is never far from a grisly set piece, that speaks to the sort of everyday awfulness witnessed by these men. Whether this strays into bad taste is perhaps up to the reader; personally I enjoyed Emmerson’s horrific gags more as nightmare fodder than as a reflection of any specific nightmares. The “blessing tree,” adorned with the heads of animals and people, is genuinely upsetting, as is the moment when a zombie soldier removes a pitchfork it uncomplainingly finds embedded in its leg only to lick the blood off its prongs.

Perhaps the best evocation of the theme of loss and the secondary effects of war is Mary Minett. Lonely but headstrong, Mary misses her brother (killed in the war) and her father (away on business) but is otherwise a force of nature in the little village. She falls into easy lockstep with the Doctor when he arrives, as well as (you knew this was coming) falling head over heels. The Doctor is a kindred outsider, also touched by war; it doesn’t feel too easy to present him with a could-be love interest like Mary. Their questioning energy really does sync up, with the novel noting that between them is “something of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object”, to such an extent that I could easily imagine her working as a less doe-eyed companion akin to Grace Holloway. Alas, there’s too much feeling on her end for that to ever work, espoused beautifully when we see her goodbye letter at the end, and with a gut-wrenching laugh when his innocent “I think it’s time we went to bed. Don’t you?” is followed moments later with a cheery “Goodnight, then.”

As much as I like Mary — and I do, she’s the highlight of the book — I can’t help feeling that the effects of war should be demonstrated more strongly elsewhere. Hawkswick Hall and its patients form the obvious outlet for all this, with the seemingly squeaky-clean Dr Banham encouraging a unique form of clay therapy to get the aggression and trauma out of these men. There are certainly poignant moments to be found, such as the prologue which does a fine job of making us care about two men before killing them, and the aforementioned war flashbacks. But when it comes to the actual soldiers and what they’re going through, Casualties Of War overall defers to being a monster story.

The monsters are a bunch of mud soldiers going around committing mostly random acts of violence. They’re clearly an outlet for the psychic trauma at the Hall, but whose outlet exactly? Several soldiers are murdered in the course of the book; when the finale arrives they don’t even take part, the action shifting instead to a New Adventures-y mind battle/trench warfare recreation with non-human soldiers blowing each other up around the Doctor, Mary and the constable. Poignant imagery, yes, but it feels a bit more like a gnarly action sequence, especially in a denouement that zig-zags back and forth to a farmer battling zombies in his somehow-exploded-several-times barn.

None of this is helped by Dr Banham, the man at the centre of things whose evil plan turns out to be… not entirely articulated, actually, but the gist of it is using a magic book he got from somewhere (?) to elicit psychic energy from men with shell shock to give himself telekinesis, second sight and a mud monster army. Bonzer. All of this we find out right at the end, after he’s been a much more intriguing character early on, at points breaking down both mentally and physically into a sort of Clayface monster. We otherwise don’t delve into Banham’s emotional stake in all this, or how (if at all) he feels about his horrifying mistreatment of his patients. By the time his cards are on the table he’s stopped behaving like a character at all: after a brief bit of moustache twirling he barely has a say in the grand climax, dying more or less off screen as a sort of secondhand trauma-fuelled Mr Blobby. (So, a regular Mr Blobby, then.) On second reading I just couldn’t help wishing the story had pivoted around one of the soldiers instead.

A clunky finale and some debatable horror impulses are unfortunately not the only issues. The writing is also quite variable. Plenty of it is enjoyable. Pretty much all of Mary’s dialogue zings against the Doctor’s; his quixotic nature is on full display and all of that rings true, even without his memories. Some of those horror shots hit their grisly targets, but there are subtler moments too, like this description of undead soldiers that jabs you at the end: “No fidgeting, no gestures, no smokes, no jokes to pass the time. No motion. No boredom. No breathing.” Emmerson nicely juggles his themes with the ongoing arc by showing the Doctor intrigued by Hawkswick Hall. The observation that he longs to believe damaged men can return to their former selves makes a virtue of his arc without making a big deal out of it. Mary’s loneliness also feels real and not gone on about. It’s a small point but her dad doesn’t return from wherever he is at the end, which would have been a nice (but obvious) button on things.

The wonky stuff is mostly towards the end. Emmerson has a fine (and foul) imagination, but some turns of phrase err on the downright strange side, such as “The canopy opened and splattered the dead men with grotesque splashes of moonlight” and “Then there was the flight. The last response of the human mammal.” Dialogue is one of the book’s stronger suits, but some characters are lumbered with a strenuous country dialect, leading to awkward lines like “I did see one o’ these before” and “Ey, where yer goin’ now?” The aforementioned finale goes overboard on the dun-dun-DUNNN scene breaks, which is made more apparent by some unfortunate last-line repetitions that could have been caught in editing: “He landed with a crash and darkness zoomed in.” / “Darkness came.” / “Blackness rushed in and there was nothing at all.” The plot lacks complexity, relying on action and horror beats; there’s a lot of traipsing back and forth to Hawkswick Hall, Banham telling them to go away with increasing exasperation, interspersed with mud soldiers jamming guns against people’s necks or lurking or rampaging or attacking the proto-TARDIS for no reason until the book finally feels like exposing the truth. And we all know how that went.

It’s hardly a write-off. With a vivid imagination, in short bursts anyway, and a knack for character writing (for Mary and the Doctor) that makes you genuinely look forward to scenes, Casualties Of War really works at points. With stronger editing and guidance it could have been more consistent. There is clear promise here and I’m keen to read Steve Emmerson’s next book, but I just can’t go home again to my initial enthusiasm. This one’s rough around the edges and it could have sharpened its focus and themes into more than a way into the Grand Guignol. I want to love it, but like the Doctor at this point in the run, I lack a time machine.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #76 – Imperial Moon by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#34

Imperial Moon

By Christopher Bulis

There’s something almost endearing about the Past Doctor Adventures at this point. Their sister series had gone through a significant reboot to keep readers engaged, but if you’re writing about one of those previous fellas instead? Crack on mate, it’s all good.

Imperial Moon isn’t without its personality or quirks but it’s undeniably another Christopher Bulis book, once again looking at Doctor Who through the lens of whatever genre has grabbed him this week. It’s along the lines of his SF/fantasy mash-up The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or the stripped back adventure The Ultimate Treasure. This time it’s a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells-style space adventure featuring Victorians on the moon, which is found to contain a forest, monsters and robots.

Right away that’s a very striking premise, and a tremendously visual one. I often wondered if Imperial Moon would have been happier in a visual medium; the steampunk spaceships, the heightened action and violence, not to mention the (ahem) less than introspective character writing would all have suited a comic. The Doctor riding around the moon on a miniature flying saucer practically screams TV Action.

But we’ve got a novel to fill instead, so Bulis introduces a few complications to his old timey SF setup. The whole “Victorian spaceship” idea is as surprising to the Doctor as it is to us, so he’s got to find out how this happened, and more importantly whether this is the “true” timeline or not. (If it isn’t, he needs to get things back on track.) He also, for whatever reason, finds himself with a copy of a diary to be written by one of the astronauts later on. This was then placed in the TARDIS’s “time safe,” a box that apparently sends objects to different points in the ship’s history. The diary gives him and Turlough some useful background on the moon mission — as well as allowing Bulis to write some honest-to-god Victorian adventure prose for a bit.

The Doctor’s sense of agency is debatable in this one, as he’s just following the crumbs left by (presumably) his future self, and working to keep time on track. There’s a prim, almost patrician attitude to the character as he uncomplainingly insists on completing his mission, that doesn’t quite allow for Peter Davison’s natural light and shade. He only gets flatter when dispensing useful exposition, such as a truly indulgent info-dump on page 256.

This incarnation nevertheless is a good fit for this sort of historical action-adventure. He made just as much sense reacting with gentlemanly horror to the supernatural in Goth Opera and The Sands Of Time. The character’s wheels only really come off at the end when Bulis needs to get rid of the monsters, so he has the Doctor, Turlough and Kamelion laser-gun them all to death. No, really. Forget “Have I the right?”, this is more like “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”

Turlough at least makes some sense reaching that violent conclusion, since a) he’s always been a shifty type and b) the story gives him some trust issues that he then needs to work out. You can see Bulis trying to work with the character at this point in the series, aka just before his departure, noting that he has “something missing in my life but I don’t know what it is.” This fondness for continuity has its ups and downs, however, such as the unasked for explanation for Turlough’s limited wardrobe, and the particularly clunky lead-in to Planet Of Fire at the end.

Bulis credits Turlough with an almost meta intelligence, but it’s debatable to what end. He goes around lampshading things like the the obvious Verne/Wells connection and the evident cliché of a Victorian explorer group containing a token female love interest, and a spunky feminist one at that. These ideas aren’t subverted — there is no “Land of Fiction”-style explanation at the end, it just IS quite familiar stuff — which creates the dubious benefit of Turlough apparently knowing he’s in a hokey book. The Doctor at least disputes his view on female explorers, suggesting that Bulis is really just trying to get ahead of his critics here, but there is no rebuttal for the plainly obvious love-story-to-be. (Even Turlough can’t know everything however. At one point he delivers “a line from some B-movie he’d seen, art supplementing a momentary deficiency of imagination.” Is that Turlough or the author telling on himself?)

Despite those Turlough asides it’s difficult to believe there’s anything really meta going on here. Even apart from the gleefully pop art setting and storyline there are clunky moments like Turlough, who keeps reading ahead in the diary to get useful tips and appear knowledgeable, somehow noting that this “was another means of holding a mirror up to his soul.” Surely an insight for the novel rather than the character? The Doctor similarly at one point breaks down the class themes evident among the various moon characters in a way that feels uncannily like Bulis giving book club discussions a leg up.

The useful point here is presumably Turlough sneaking the diary even though the Doctor has asked him not to — that’s a fairly typical bit of Turlough shiftiness that ultimately means he’s desperate to do the correct thing because he’s read that he’s going to do so, which is quite neat, whilst also suggesting a burgeoning sense of doing-the-right-thing that might lead into his TV departure. Less impressive is his insistence on dazzling one of the female Phiadorans he meets on the moon. He’s desperately lovesick for much of the book, which isn’t exactly an established look for the character. (Can you really see Turlough wanting someone to “think [he’s] special whatever the reason”?) This is politely explained away as not his fault during one of the Doctor’s later info dumps, but by then you’ve read the book and reacted to the character.

Perhaps the most accurate character portrayal in the book is Kamelion, a mechanical character that was completely unworkable on screen and yet remains curiously under-represented in print. (Annoying questions such as “does the robot work” do not apply here.) Kamelion in this displays a “permanent expression of mild interest” and is easily prevented from taking part in the action by external factors — so far, dead on, if a bit disappointing re the latter. He eventually gets to muck in, turning into a giant spider to more easily traverse the moon’s diminishing gravity and rescue the Doctor, which is a nicely expanded use of his powers. If it feels at all incongruous that he joins in with a brutal assault rifle rampage at the end (seriously Chris, wtf) at least you can explain that away as Kamelion being canonically the most suggestible person the Doctor has ever met. “Hey pal, want to zap some monsters?” “Do I!”

I’ve left the overall story til last, perhaps for obvious reasons: it’s tissue thin, a sequence of action adventure stop-starts that captivates the imagination well enough but doesn’t really progress. The forest, it turns out, is a hunting ground for the rich and corrupt; prisoners are their targets. One of the Victorian ships crashes. The captain of another, and the daughter of the ship’s inventor are captured by mechanical guards and taken to a citadel to be prepared for combat. The Doctor and co. must make their way to rescue them — Turlough reading ahead for progress updates, as it was the captured man that wrote the diary — and along the way they encounter the all-female Phiadorans, fellow prisoners and expert warriors. (This feels like another concession to old-timey lit. Close enough, welcome back H. Rider Haggard.) Problems include automated flying saucers, robots, all manner of beasts, body-snatching predators and, closer to home, mutineers.

It’s easy to criticise Imperial Moon for its lack of depth, but it’s got excitement and incident in spades. Plot, not so much, although Bulis does tie everything up by the end. Sometimes too efficiently: he wraps up the troublesome citadel with a hundred pages still to go (whoops) so to keep us going a minor character has to be retooled into a murderous maniac; we repeat the last act of Alien on a budget; a betrayal flips a sympathetic character into a two-dimensional baddie (instead of, to be fair, the equally two-dimensional goodie they were before); and that’s before we pop back to Earth for tea and laser gun battles. I haven’t seen a story vamp this hard since Dracula decided that England seemed like a nice place to visit.

As often happens with these genre exercises, you get the impression that the author might be just as happy spinning off into their own non-Doctor Who book. Imperial Moon often itches to write about the side characters instead, particularly Haliwell and Emily, the uneasy couple trapped in the gauntlet. Their courtship is so prim and proper it almost ducks behind a curtain with embarrassment, but it makes for a nice undercurrent to the action, and puts a button on the story at the end. Emily’s deference to social issues and women’s suffrage is laudable, as is the ideological friction with Haliwell, but as themes go it’s as subtle as a brick through a window — another instance of that in the book.

I doubt anyone is rocking up to Christopher Bulis’s Victorians-on-the-moon novel for reasons of subtlety. What you do get with Imperial Moon is a constantly moving, easy-to-visualise adventure that probably works well even if you’re only a bit familiar with Doctor Who. Story-wise, once we get past the nifty Victorian iconography I’d put it closer to Terry Nation than Wells or Verne, but it’s not like he couldn’t keep people reasonably entertained for weeks on end.

6/10