#42
Escape Velocity
By Colin Brake
Here we go then. After six novels set (and stuck) on Earth the Doctor is finally getting his TARDIS back and is heading out into the universe. So no pressure, first time novelist Colin Brake.
To start positive, he does a few things I like. Brake has that very popular habit among Who novelists of changing scenes frequently, but he is more able than most to keep his focus between them, so we might dart over to the side but it’s clearly the same scene continuing, perhaps from a different perspective. (A cabbie or a passing cat, for instance.) I was still jolted by the all-too-TV-ish scene breaks that tie-in writers are for some reason obsessed with, but they contributed to the momentum overall, at least more than I’m used to.
Also, quite a big deal here, Brake introduces the new companion: Anji Kapoor. I don’t think he does a bad job, or at least no worse than we’re used to. Sam had as much introduction as Terrance Dicks could hurriedly scribble on the back of a crisp packet; Fitz and Compassion both had full stories setting them up, but the actual “join the TARDIS” bit fell between scenes and between novels respectively. Anji is the first one to be actively written like a trip in the TARDIS might make sense for her, and although she doesn’t go down the traditional “sign me up” route there’s at least a proper scene to solidify her ongoing adventures. It doesn’t sound like much but you notice when these things are absent.
Beyond that it’s a bit difficult to get excited about Escape Velocity. It’s a momentous story because of where it sits in the arc, but otherwise when it comes to significant events — whether they’re arc payoffs or just the plot — everything feels anticlimactic.
Some of that is due to scheduling. Staying on Earth means running into the same problem they had in 1970: the threat will be random monsters, mad scientists or alien invasions, over and over. As it turns out, The Turing Test, Endgame and Father Time all had malevolent aliens hiding on Earth. (Unhelpfully so did The King Of Terror over in the PDAs.) As a result I’m starting to get my shifty aliens mixed up. Father Time also stepped on Brake’s toes by sending the Doctor on a space mission at the end — an event that, in hindsight, probably should have been saved for the climax of the “desperate to get off Earth” arc, and certainly feels like less of a big deal now. (Granted, he goes in the TARDIS this time, but only as a last minute substitution.)
It’s not just a feeling of “been there, done that,” however. Major events in the book just seem to plod past. The invading aliens, the Kulan, are outed directly to the reader in an interlude, as opposed to through any sort of dramatic reveal or character interaction. That was easy! After that there are scenes of the Doctor and Anji, then Fitz, then biochemist Christine Holland all finding out about the Kulan, each with as little resistance or secrecy as possible — it’s either a case of someone telling them without prompting or them asking and getting back “yeah, since you asked, aliens mate, big time.” Easier still! Brake was a script editor before this, which makes me wonder if he was deliberately trying to move these beats along faster. If so, well done, but now they feel perfunctory — especially where they keep happening. (See also the bizarre damp squib moment when the Doctor announces that humans have Kulan ancestry. Are we doing anything with that? No? Just gonna drop the mic and go? Okay then.)
The Kulan are not a fascinating menace. The idea itself isn’t bad: an expedition crashed on Earth with the intention of reporting back on whether the rest of them should invade. They broke into two groups, for and against, and due to losing their ship they each need to work with a different space-obsessed billionaire in order to build a rocket that can contact their people. A space race ensues; meanwhile the fleet is approaching.
They’re just not very memorable otherwise. Aliens who want to invade Earth for the resources are ten a penny. We hear a bit of lore about their weird family structure towards the end, but by then we’re pages away from getting rid of them. There are some physical characteristics that mark them apart from humanity, but not so many that they can’t pass for human. Fitz notices that they don’t seem to mind rain and they’re good at mountaineering. (Fascinating.) Some of them are benign and at least one of them is a bit of a psycho — I’ll let you guess how this aligns with their views on Earth invasion. The whole “who gets their message through first” plot seems a bit redundant, since the fleet is almost in orbit. Would you turn around and go home? So the plot supporting all this feels much of a muchness until we can get up there and decide one way or the other.
Said plot is mostly a lot of perfunctory (that word again) action and kidnapping. We meet Anji and her boyfriend Dave as they encounter a “good” Kulan carrying precious cargo. He slips this onto Dave as he’s dying — hello, every other Hitchcock movie — who soon after gets nabbed by the “bad” Kulan. By this point Fitz, getting impatient waiting for the Doctor, gets involved because the dead man had two hearts. (An amazing coincidence that’s the only reason the Doctor and Fitz get involved at all.) Soon the CIA are chasing Fitz, Dave is dying of a strange alien infection, Christine Holland gets involved because of her missing daughter, and the characters are ping-ponging effortlessly between billionaires Tyler (team: good guys) and Dudoin (bad guys) until it’s time to launch, executing various quite easy break-ins and escapes along the way.
Some of this feels superfluous in the extreme, particularly the CIA thread that eventually just gives up and stops. (The afterword suggests that this was done to allow a “small cameo” for Topping and Day’s Control character. I’m sure both of them clapped.) Our time with the billionaires isn’t very well spent either. The concept has certainly/unfortunately aged well, what with Jeff Bezos and the like, but Brake is very optimistic with his nice-guy billionaire Tyler, whose last minute tragic info-dump and heroic exit from the narrative are pure B-movie stuff. Dudoin on the other hand might be insane — he seems happy for Earth to be invaded and he has no qualms about kidnapping his own daughter… so more your Elon Musk type, then? — but he’s not deep enough for it to matter, and he’s quickly dispensed with when the plot needs to wander off somewhere else instead.
Dudoin’s ex-wife and daughter — the latter a very unconvincing smart-beyond-her-years eight year old — don’t have space to process his end, and to be frank they don’t make much of an impact in general. Christine ought to be fairly interesting since her expertise is pivotal to the plot (build an interface that allows humans to pilot Kulan-assisted spacecraft) but there are some stumbling blocks to this. Namely: Christine’s bizarrely instant distraction from her kidnapped daughter just because she’s so excited by Dudoin’s task; her going from “I don’t believe in aliens” to “I’ve built the interface” in about a day; and the slight nitpick that they could probably just get a Kulan to pilot the bloody thing in the first place.
In short, there’s not much of interest happening in the novel-specific nitty gritty — it’s all a bit of a low rent racket. What of the regulars? It’s A Big Deal novel for each of them, after all. Unsurprisingly the answer is: see plot.
You’ve probably been wondering where the Doctor’s “Meet me in St. Louis” note would lead. He has, after all, done a few recces to the city of St. Louis by now and found no clues. (As per Father Time.) I’m not sure whose idea it was to make it a bar in London, or how it makes any sense that the Doctor changes an existing bar to be called St. Louis and that happens to be where the note was talking about, but oh well, if you don’t fancy setting the book in America then so be it. The actual meeting, though, is yet another anticlimax. Yes, it’s a delight to see Fitz again — but the Doctor doesn’t seem to agree, feeling decidedly neutral about the whole thing because (oh yeah) he doesn’t remember Fitz. But wasn’t he excited to find out anyway? I’m pretty sure he was. The plot soon requires that they split up (!!!) and that’s that for most of Escape Velocity. Hope you weren’t expecting a big reunion or owt.
Fitz is much as he’s ever been, thank goodness. (Although he fails to cop off with anyone, plus it’s made clear that Anji is not his type. She’s in a relationship anyway.) The relevant parts are when he wonders about the Doctor’s amnesia. He’s pretty sure it’s “denial on a cosmic scale” about what happened to Gallifrey, and he has a few occasions to wonder if he’s just putting it on, before the Doctor outright fails to remember Sam, which seems to clinch it. (The irrelevant part would be the portion of the book where Fitz seems to develop his own amnesia. Is that going somewhere or is it a dropped stitch? It doesn’t do a thing in context and it’s gone by the end.)
Then we have the Doctor, as well as inevitably the wider question of how this arc has progressed. Plot arcs like this always exist at the mercy of individual writers, and this one has been no exception: the Doctor’s allowance for violence comes and goes, his desperation to leave Earth waxes and wanes, at one point he had an adopted daughter but she’s moved on and there’s no sign that this has had a lasting impact on him. Brake very much has his cake and eats it with the amnesia, but to be fair that’s a constant among the writers: the Doctor can remember stuff when it helps, but in practical terms he’s just “the Doctor, a citizen of the universe. I travel through time and space in my trusty TARDIS and I try to help people. That’s about it, isn’t it?”
Presumably that return to simplicity was the whole point of the arc, but I’m not convinced it’s worth all that much, since a) it’s already getting pretty tedious hearing him say “I don’t remember that,” b) we know all the stuff he doesn’t, so it doesn’t add any mystery and c) the Doctor only needs to harp on about continuity as much as you, the writer, want him to. If you want the books to rely less on deep cuts then maybe just stop returning Craig Hinton’s calls. (The Quantum Archangel doesn’t do much for the “clean break” theory, does it? To the casual reader surely this all seems like the same range.)
The Doctor is a fairly breezy genius/action hero in Escape Velocity, albeit he lacks some of the confidence and any sign of the learned humanity he acquired in Father Time, apart from having the financial resources to casually buy a bar. He makes a decent enough companion (so to speak) for Anji, who sees him display various abilities and attributes. And yes, he gets the TARDIS back, which is a relief, albeit it’s yet another example of anticlimax: the TARDIS isn’t ready until it is, and then the Doctor can pilot it until he can’t, which sets up the Hartnell-ish status quo at the end. This is written in (sorry) as perfunctory a manner as ever, all eye-rolling “Doctorrr!” from Anji and “Here we go again” from Fitz. Much like the amnesia, I’m sure this could lead somewhere interesting in the right hands, but that obviously depends on who’s writing it and what Justin’s asking for. There’s nothing mind-blowing about what we see here.
And that just leaves Anji. As I said, some positives to consider here: she gets that “stuck in the TARDIS” scene so it feels like she is officially here to stay, plus there are several hints that she had wanted to broaden her horizons anyway: “What [Anji] really wanted, she had decided recently, was to go somewhere further afield, somewhere truly different in every way. Somewhere really alien.” Hey, I never said they were subtle.
As a character, so far she is unfortunately very much the sort of character you’d find in Escape Velocity. She’s well intentioned, nice enough but ultimately a bit too dry. She’s science-minded in a way that drives a wedge between her and her family. We hear lots about how practical and pragmatic she is: “As ever, a problem was something that needed a solution, and Anji prided herself on coming up with calm, logical solutions to problems.” There aren’t a lot of opportunities for her to show this; one example is when she incites the annihilation of the Kulan fleet, who otherwise might have been convinced to leave peacefully. Oops. (Mere pages later she shoots a Kulan dead: “Anji felt sick — she’d just killed a living creature. Disgusted with her actions, she threw the gun away.” Yes love, but didn’t you also blow up a cruiser just now? And everyone on it?) Her politics are otherwise less extreme than Sam’s, her friendliness is slightly greater than Compassion’s. She seems good enough, if not particularly intoxicating to read about, but then it’s not really her story.
Well, that’s a partial fib, as her relationship with Dave is a key component of the plot, and presumably it will inform her character going forward. It still isn’t much to write home about though: Anji and Dave are already on the rocks when we meet them, they spend little time together afterwards, Anji is too busy to ruminate on her feelings for most of the book when he’s missing and then when Dave recovers from his illness — easily of course, we wouldn’t want to slow things down! — he gets murdered anyway in a fairly dastardly and, the way it’s written, amusingly explosive fashion. Anji is again too on-the-go to be thoroughly traumatised by this, however. I presume that later books will do more with it, but by then I’ll have to remind myself: this is about Dave? That guy? He feels more like a plot object than a person; at best he’s a less interesting version of Fitz. Even when they’ve rescued him people seem to forget he’s there.
Escape Velocity is one of those “necessary” books that just needed to do a thing, which means you could probably have farmed that thing out to another book altogether — and maybe they should have. The scaffolding we get around said thing is unadventurous, if mostly inoffensive enough. It’s quite pacey at least. I’ve seen fairly scathing reviews for it and I don’t think it’s that bad; it’s just a tepid, unimaginative and not particularly well-written effort that seems weirdly keen to get past all that icky drama stuff as fast as possible, with characters bizarrely stopping for visits to the gym or naps at home during critical events. That’s how I’d prefer to live my life, quite honestly, but it doesn’t help all that much with a race-against-the-clock space thriller.
5/10
