Doctor Who: The BBC Books #97 – Dark Progeny by Steve Emmerson

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#48

Dark Progeny

By Steve Emmerson

Colony worlds. Gotta love ’em. Apparently.

I’m not going to pretend that all EDAs are like this, but boy this seems like a popular setting. There have even been a few baked-in reasons to keep going there. Colonies gave Sam an easy way into activism, seeing how humans had progressed and done it “wrong.” Compassion was mostly fleeing the Time Lords so was unlikely to visit the Doctor’s favourite planet for a chunk, and humans-in-space is easier to write each month than The Web Planet. And would you look at that — Anji can’t go home. What’s the next best thing?

None of which is to say you can’t do a good colony world story. That’s like saying you can’t do a good base under siege. (The Web Of Fear called.) It’s just that with such a well-worn format it’s tough to avoid diminishing returns, and Dark Progeny doesn’t so much avoid them as get beaten up by them in a dark alley.

The story has promise. Ceres Alpha is being aggressively terraformed by pesky old humans in vast, mobile cities. (That’s slightly different to Kursaal, at least.) The planet has ancient ruins that the uncaring WorldCorp is threatening to demolish. (That’s a bit more like Kursaal.) Related to this, presumably, is the synchronised birth of multiple unusual-looking psi-powered babies. The corporation immediately swept this under the rug, telling all the parents their babies had died but in reality keeping them hidden away to experiment upon. Into all this arrives the TARDIS, seemingly driven mad by a psychic force, and Anji along with it. The Doctor must fetch help while also inevitably coming to the aid of those children.

Right away there’s potential for something weird and emotive, which were the watchwords of Steve Emmerson’s earlier Casualties Of War. Instead of the pain of shell shock and survivor’s guilt we’re looking at children in danger and the loss of a child (even if that turns out to be a lie), which is perhaps even more potent. It’s odd, then, that Dark Progeny seems so uninterested in the kid storyline. A gaggle of alien-headed youngsters are indeed being held in a lab somewhere, tortured and supposedly driving their captors mad with mind-powers… but that’s not really the meat of the novel, which is far more interested in the military bureaucracy of the city, the Doctor getting pressed to reveal who he’s working for, and the general irritated back and forth of an archaeologist (Bains) trying to hold back the bulldozers. In other words, all the stuff we’ve definitely done before.

And so much of it is just stuff. There are loads of characters in this, and with no opportunities for the Doctor, Fitz or Anji (in any combination) to pal up we’re forever cutting between micro-storylines. Yes I know that you know that I hate this approach, but to be fair Emmerson is quite adept at it, for example cutting away from character combo A because one of them answered the doorbell so now we’re following character combo B; it’s thinly spread but at least it’s not too all over the place. But each section of this is barely moving, with e.g. Bains’s attempt to get another look at the dig site needing practically the entire novel to take off. (At one point he gives up and goes to a bar to reminisce about his sad romantic history. We cut away and then return to find him still there.)

Even the Doctor’s outrage at the mistreatment of the kids isn’t a prime mover: it’s just A to B, well of course he’s not going to be pleased with this, followed by well-he’s-not-going-to-be-able-to-do-anything-about-it-until-later-on. By the time he is, bundling the kids and Bains into a helicopter — two birds with one stone there — we for some reason skip and summarise the bit where the Doctor rescues them and Bains is introduced to them, which might have been quite interesting. Similarly, shortly afterwards the Doctor plucks the answer to the psi-kids and the ancient ruins seemingly out of thin air. That’s not the most satisfying conclusion to a mystery, but then if you will spend the entire book on “the Doctor pretends to be someone they were expecting” and “military mind probes” then what else can you do at the climax?

It’s just maddening how the “psi-kids” thing feels like a book that’s happening next door. There are references to how they’ve responded to and attacked their captors — they haven’t done much if you think about it, since they’re still captive — but not enough is done to support the flimsy idea that no one working here thinks it’s remotely iffy to treat them like this, calling them “evil” and “monsters” when they’re just very unusual two-month-olds being, y’know, tortured. A bit of nuance would be nice when the story’s already so black and white that it’s about child torture — it won’t exactly need to work overtime to get the reader on the kids’ side, will it? So why not try to understand the bad guys?

To be fair, Emmerson puts the time in there, marooning us with Foley (military), Perón (military doctor) and Tyran (head of the operation and one letter away from “tyrant”, so I’ll let you guess whether he’s a nice boss). There are flashes of maybe-they’re-okay-actually with some of them, but a violent return to form is always on the cards, so those end up feeling a bit pointless. As for Tyran, he’s actually got a compelling reason to force through the development of Ceres Alpha in that Earth is close to uninhabitable — we could definitely do something with that, but no such luck. We do however tie his story into Bains’s woes, but it’s done with as much care and setup as the Doctor’s “eureka!” moment with the kids, i.e. suddenly and very near the end, so to call it unconvincing would be kind. We don’t do a thing with it afterwards, naturally.

There isn’t much connective tissue between the “military bulldozing the planet” plot and the psi-kids, at least until the Doctor checks his magic 8-ball, but there are a few things on the sidelines. The parents of one of the kids, Veta and Josef, refuse to believe what they’ve been told and go on the rampage to find their baby. Promising and potentially powerful stuff here, and it lets the mother take the lead with all the clever problem-solving stuff, which feels like a turn up. (I don’t care much for Foley, Perón or Ayla, but at least all these prominent characters are women. Dark Progeny does quite well at the Bechdel test.) It might have been better if there was a genuine link between them and their child — this is surely possible, given his powers — but as it is, when they’re reunited it’s as dramatic as the plot demands, yet not exactly a punch the air moment. There’s nothing to really tell the kids apart, there’s no scene of their kid going “has anyone seen my mum and dad?”, and the Doctor doesn’t even know the parents are around. As to any others out there, god knows.

We also have Anji, who (as you’ve probably sussed) is under the psychic weather because the kids reached out to her too hard. (They did this to her and not the Doctor or Fitz because she is a woman, and not because she has ever expressed maternal feelings, which is perhaps half a step backwards on the whole Bechdel thing. Ah well.) Giving the companion a link to the tortured kids feels like a neat way to get the book’s emotions straight into our veins, but alas, that’s not the plan: Anji spends about a hundred pages unconscious, another third of it stuck in hospital, and the in-between bits trying fruitlessly to find the Doctor. Emmerson writes Anji well enough when he does it, bringing up her young brother for the closest comparison to all this, but like the kid stuff generally there seems to be an open goal where there should be substance.

Don’t even get me started on Fitz. I think it’s safe to assume there wasn’t room for another guy in Emmerson’s outline, because Fitz is separated from the others at the start and they spend the rest of the book acting on the assumption that he’s dead, so never mind. When (like Anji) he is resuscitated he’s stuck on the planet’s surface, nowhere near the plot, so there’s nothing useful for him to do. He subsequently (deep breath) gets captured, escapes, gets recaptured, escapes, is briefly recaptured, escapes, is then recaptured again, escapes again, and then meets up with the Doctor, at which point they’re all captured. (I’ll leave you in suspense about what happens next.) Fitz also flirts a bit with his rescuer Ayla and at one point he has a shower. Solid gold. This whole thread feels like an unintended parody of how little plot the book has. At least, I hope it’s unintentional.

There isn’t much to tell Dark Progeny apart from your Kursaals or your Face-Eaters, but Steve Emmerson’s writing stands out a bit, as it did in Casualties Of War. Unfortunately this isn’t always to the good: he tends to over-do it for effect, giving us curiously overwrought statements like “An immense silence stretched between them, like a cold dark ocean filled with fear” and not-meant-to-be-funny ones like “The room was filled with a screaming baby.” Physical descriptions try slightly too hard and become a bit disembodied, such as “She insinuated a wry smile into her face,” and he’s entirely too fond of adverbs, leading to the occasional awkwardness or traffic jam like “Josef shook his head sorrily.” / “Now the electrical activity in the brain was flatlining extremely worryingly.” / “Ultimately, he invariably got his way.” / “Carly Dimitri wondered what he had in mind for this poor man who had somehow inadvertently, most probably quite innocently, crossed Tyran’s path.” That last one sounds like he’s keying up the Lollipop Guild.

It settles down after a little while though, and then the prose bounces along harmlessly enough. There are nice moments like the aforementioned link to Anji’s brother, the Doctor doing a spot of ventriloquism, and this enjoyable Tom Baker-ish non sequitur when he meets the baddie: “‘Mr Tyran. It’s a very dubious pleasure to meet the man responsible for the atrocities I’ve witnessed down in your so-called medicare unit.’ The smile was up full volume, as if [the Doctor] were genuinely complimenting Tyran on an exceptionally well-run operation.” There are also some moments of horror that recall Casualties Of War, such as telekinetic attacks, a zombie (for a split second) and Tyran hallucinating a dead relative who behaves very inappropriately. We could have done with more of this (as in the horror, not the creepy mum) to more consistently inform the novel’s tone, but those bits at least made it not entirely a sci-fi runaround. It’s bad luck, though, that he goes all in on the scariness of rats, as I’ve been an enthusiastic keeper of pet ratties for years now. My main negative emotion about them is that one of the little sods may have stolen my dinner. Otherwise they’re cute little beans that don’t, in fact, hiss.

I can’t help rooting for Steve Emmerson after that joyous initial reading of Casualties Of War, so I feel a bit mean for not enjoying his follow up very much. I’d point the finger at the editors too, however: there should be more pushback on books that sound like we’ve already read them, there should be somebody to spot the lack of forward motion in the plot (as well as sudden wafts of it towards the end), and “is it horror or isn’t it” was a question worth asking that apparently wasn’t. As before, there’s a better book in here somewhere, but it needed to commit to its more compelling parts, and perhaps leave the mind probes and the escape/recaptures in the recycle bin. As it is, Dark Progeny is an “another one” book for completists only.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #96 – Byzantium! by Keith Topping

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#44

Byzantium!

By Keith Topping

My first impression on plucking this one from the bookshelf was similar to the first impression of the bowl of petunias plummeting to its doom in Hitchhiker’s Guide: oh no, not again.

I did not like The King Of Terror very much. Horses for courses – there are enthusiastic reviews for it out there (NZDWFC gave it 5/5), so what do I know? But I still found it a rocky read with its off-the-chain violence, poorly-judged character swings and bizarre air of silliness that seemed to throw the whole thing even more off course. I was surprised to see the author back again so soon.

His next effort is a very different beast. (Whether that has anything to do with The King Of Terror, I don’t know.) Byzantium! is still a fairly violent story but it’s set in a violent time, so that tracks; there is still a little bit of silliness, but it’s in manageable doses; and as for the wild character swings, well there are still a few of those. (Whoops.) Bottom line, it’s a more reasoned and less frantic novel than his last one. Phew.

The setup is a bit unusual. At first it seems like Topping is going to replace The Romans outright, as the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki appear fresh from the cliffhanger of The Rescue with the TARDIS falling off a cliff. (Vicki is clearly new here which also dates it.) They are in Byzantium (duh) rather than Rome, but otherwise it’s the same time period as The Romans. This all turns out to be an extended prologue to the televised story, ending with the TARDIS in Rome and the travellers on their way to find it. That’s an interesting proposition for a novel, sticking another adventure onto an existing one, but it begs the question: is there much you can do that won’t just repeat The Romans?

The basic gist is similar. The four characters are separated in a Roman city and they must work to get back together and find the TARDIS. But since we’ve got the added scope of a novel it can be a much bigger separation than what we got on TV (a home invasion): violent Zealots start a riot in a bustling city square, killing many and forcing the four travellers to go their separate ways. Each is completely oblivious to the fate of the others.

This is a good way for us to explore the makeup of Byzantium. Ian gets into the good graces of the Romans, seeing the high society on offer to a select few; Barbara is gradually trusted by the Jews, aka a more everyday society whose antipathy boils over into the Zealots; Vicki is taken in by a family of Greeks, the downtrodden native group who have every reason to hate the Romans; and the Doctor finds himself with a band of Christians, currently the city’s outliers and quick to be persecuted while they work on the tenets of their religion. Byzantium is a powder keg and if the Zealots hadn’t lit the fuse then somebody else would have.

I think Topping’s right in that this is a situation worth exploring, even if it means bolting your book onto an existing telly script. The tricky bit is the number of moving parts, and how to get momentum out of each one. Where The Romans split into fairly archetypal parts of Roman society, allowing for clear and dynamic action in each one (slaves, assassins, the front and back of the Emperor’s court), Byzantium! concerns a complex society with many different ingredients. Frankly there are a lot of characters and they don’t all have particularly pressing goals – irritations, dislikes and suspicions, but not much in the way of a mission. This even extends to the regulars, who from the outset either assume that their friends are dead or otherwise can’t get any immediate help to find out more, so just carry on with what they’re doing. This is critical: the impetus for The Romans (find each other and get back to the villa) isn’t there, so despite the more violent and exciting inciting incident Byzantium! veers away from the more usual quest narrative, moving towards a slice of life drama instead.

That’s not a bad thing – it would be redundant to repeat the telly story any more than we’re already doing just by setting this one so close to it. But it does mean spending great swathes of the novel wondering when the Doctor, Ian, Barbara or Vicki are going to get a ruddy move on and start looking for one another. There is drama to be had in the meantime, with the Zealots planning further outrage and a Roman mutiny in the offing, but while these things have clear figureheads and they could result in bloodshed, all the same it’s a bit difficult to track their progress in such a densely populated story. One very-full-of-himself Roman officer or promiscuous-and-power-hungry Roman wife is very much like another after a while, and the Zealots aren’t in it much comparatively.

This is where our four characters come in handy, anchoring the action. Barbara moves past the initial suspicion of the Jewish quarter but never dispels it entirely; she captures the eye of Hieronymous, an officer with great sway, and later rebuffs him painfully, which all feels very “60s Doctor Who episode”. His decision, once spurned, to persecute the Christians to an ever greater degree felt like a turning point in the plot (page 160!) but it doesn’t hugely change things, although it does add some serious light and shade to the Jewish characters. The Doctor, meanwhile, has quite a nice time helping to translate and write the gospel of Mark, which is “the equivalent of collaborating with Shakespeare between draft one and draft two of Hamlet.” He’s initially a rather bleak figure here, weighed down by the loss of his friends, which puts him in a good position to be buoyed by the Christians. (There’s probably something to be said by someone more religiously-minded than me about the emphasis on peaceful Christianity in this book versus the other religions, but I’ll have to sit it out as it’s all Greek to me. So to speak.)

Vicki has perhaps the biggest character arc in Byzantium!, eventually becoming the focal point to get the gang back together. Straight away she goes from the raw nerve of The Rescue to yet another tragedy in (apparently) losing the TARDIS crew. It makes sense that she feels out of place pretty much for the entire book, befriending a young Greek girl but incurring the wrath of her mother. She is clearly still coming to terms with growing up – something that Topping elucidates quite well at times, less well at others.

The problem is her blunt, occasionally just plain weird manner of speaking. “Sorry but that’s, like, pure dead easy for you to say.” / “That sounds peachy-fine to me.” / “Look, don’t trade any of that philosophical babble with me, old man.” It just doesn’t sound like her. I think Topping covers this somewhat by emphasising her insecurities: “She came from an age of computers, electronics, space travel, interactive learning, virtual reality, chemical stimulation, instant maturity. She was fourteen, going on 108, yet to these people … she was what appeared to be to the naked eye: a mere child.” Later a character calls her on it: “You are a child, my angel. Oh, you try to obscure that. You like to think that you are old before your time. That you have had your childhood stolen by tragedy and circumstance. You have seen much that the likes of I shall never see. But, at heart, you are still blessed with the vigour of youth and the freedom that goes with it.” None of this quite squares with the fact that Maureen O’Brien was given generally sweet and innocent dialogue on screen, or at least dialogue that runs counter to the grouchy teen we see here, but at least there’s a rationale.

Then you have Ian. Story-wise it’s not bad stuff: he befriends some officers and a respected librarian (called Fabulous – this isn’t important, I just thought you should know) which gives him a passing familiarity with the local politics and shenanigans and makes it easier for us to follow it. He also finds himself fending off advances from wives and female slaves, lending a little of that farcical flavour from The Romans. Honestly this kind of thing feels more suited to Steven Taylor, or even Fitz – and it’s especially odd where Byzantium! is bookended with “Ian and Barbara married in the 1970s” vignettes but the book offers no material about their relationship. (Ian isn’t even saying “no” because his heart lies elsewhere. He just doesn’t want anyone to have another reason to murder him.)

His dialogue is the bigger issue, though. For whatever reason Topping characterises Ian as a Cockney wide-boy, with all sorts of sayings and dismissive bits of slang that just sound bizarre coming from the generally-RP schoolteacher. “Do you mind awfully if I get up, only it pen and inks a bit down here.” / “Okay, so the former lady of the house goes like the netty door when the plague’s in town.” / “If you want to talk geography, darlin’, then fine.” / “It was a well-known fact (which Barbara Wright had spotted some time ago) that it was the quiet birds that always got Ian Chesterton’s attention. She was peach [sic], this slave girl.” Again, the basic skeleton of this seems right enough for the era: he was similarly well-in with the local court in The Crusade, and he gets an inscribed weapon here to match his Knighthood there. It’s just weird that an author as specific about the nerdy details could swing and miss so hard on what the character sounds like. (Meanwhile he makes time for Billy fluffs, having the Doctor say “Cheddarton” and “Chestington” on the same page.)

There are other peculiar details. The Doctor seems to know Vicki’s future, somehow. (“I shall take care of [Vicki], [he] said quietly. ‘Her destiny was mapped for her thousands of years before she was ever born.” I’m guessing this is a general “make the Doctor seem more mystical” gimmick?) He also mentions Mondas, despite not finding out about that until his final story. (Same again?) There’s a possible cameo from an older Vicki, or “Cressida” anyway, even though the dates for that don’t remotely line up. There’s the strange detail that the TARDIS fell off a cliff at the end of The Rescue, where we find it at the beginning of Byzantium!, but it presumably needs do so again once it gets to Rome in order for the stories to link up. (One of those funny little messes that the story, in trying to be clever, creates for itself.) On the whole though, Byzantium! plays it straight – although there is a bit where someone says “What have the Romans ever done for us?” I guess he just couldn’t help himself. (Honourable wackiness mention: the exclamation mark in the title.)

I mention all of this because The King Of Terror (again) had a tendency towards quirky, ill-judged asides. Byzantium! also does that a little, but it’s subtle, for instance using the flight of a passing bird to connect various scenes, or lines like: “When Georgadis and Evangeline awoke a sleepy Vicki to give her similar news…” or “Ian Chesterton had hardly slept either, though for vastly different reasons.” I have a well-documented (moaned about) dislike of frequent scene changes in books and that’s obviously going to occur in a book with four protagonists, but this feels like a graceful way to handle it. The same applies to the character descriptions. Overly detailed to the point of distraction in TKOT, here it’s mostly left to our imaginations, or otherwise handled with care. “Handsome and dignified, a thin and wiry frame that spoke of many meals missed so that others could eat instead” beats pretty much any attempt in the earlier book. Byzantium! probably benefits from less zany subject matter and tone than its predecessor, but it just feels overall like a more assured piece of writing. (Just for posterity though, there are quite a few typos in it, and at least one historical snafu re Prometheus being transposed to Rome as Vulcan – that was Hephaestus, surely? But it mostly goes off without a hitch.)

It’s hard to disagree with Ian’s uncertain summary at the end: “Is it just me, or didn’t we solve anything?” Byzantium! presents a complicated problem (a place teeming with different peoples and interests; conflicts within conflicts) and just watches it all fall apart. The main characters don’t influence it much, and I’m not sure what they learn from it other than a generally better or more bloody-nosed understanding of history. (The Doctor gets this in early: “Do you really believe everything you read in those history books of yours, child? Do you think it was all that simple?”) I’ve seen Byzantium! criticised for a lack of plot and I can’t really dispute that; it feels like we have four protagonists mostly just sat about existing in a troubled place. It could certainly be tighter and more exciting – somehow, it’s more low-key than the story it’s (by implication) expanding upon. And yet, I liked hanging around here, watching the world go by, wincing at the occasional murder. It’s strangely peaceful. I do quite want to watch The Romans now, though.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #95 – The Slow Empire by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#47
The Slow Empire
By Dave Stone

Once more unto the breach – the breach, here, being a novel by Dave Stone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but upon finishing one there tends to be a feeling like that scene from Arrested Development where Jason Bateman looks inside a bag labelled DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT: “Well, I don’t know what I expected.”

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy The Slow Empire. Let’s be clear: I think it’s one of his more consistent efforts, and it’s certainly less of a palaver than Heart Of TARDIS. It’s just that it’s another fairly typical example of the mystery that is Dave. Your mileage will probably vary. (I’ve seen five-star reviews for it. Also… less than five stars.)

The closest Stone comparison I can think of is Sky Pirates! – that’s a good thing – in that this is another fairly straight (here meaning “utterly fruit-loopy but at least it’s passingly certain what it’s about”) adventure story. The Doctor, Anji and Fitz are on the run from strange vortex creatures in a temporarily clapped-out TARDIS, only to find themselves entangled in a similarly hostile multi-planetary empire. The planet they arrive on is backward and bizarre, the local militia being armed with (at first inspection) musical instruments, and their only ally is a fellow prisoner, Ambassador Jamon de la Rocas. If this is your first Dave Stone novel then it might surprise you to learn that this man is rather ebullient.

The empire is not what it was, with the only constant being the technology used to send Ambassadors hither and thither: Transference, or a kind of teleportation where you are vaporised at one end and created anew at the other. The Doctor and co. soon determine to get to the heart of the matter, which will mean visiting various planets as the TARDIS slowly recovers, finding information as they go. Along the way they encounter story-obsessed circus folk, a very Dave Stone-ian alien that talks like a sitcom waiter with a dodgy Visa, a sinister virtual reality and finally a gestalt menace with a murderous plan.

If I seem a little light on details, well that’s because they’re starting to fade, and I only finished it an hour ago. The Slow Empire isn’t exactly hard to follow (take another bow, Heart Of TARDIS) but it does have that malaise typical of the author where it all seems faintly silly and amusing in the moment but with only a vague IOU that it will all mean something eventually. The planet of the awful musicians is memorable enough, until we leave it behind for good, as is the planet of the circus people whose entire economy is stories, until we’re done with them as well. We spend a good 30+ pages dealing with alternate lives in virtual reality – another popular Stone theme, see Oblivion – but as well as feeling rather been there, done that after Parallel 59 (what with Fitz being here and doing it again) it doesn’t feel all that consequential to the wider narrative. Once they’re out of it, that’s apparently that. I don’t know if being episodic is a bad thing since it tends to come with quest narratives, but it left the novel in a very wishy-washy place afterwards.

With Dave Stone the good stuff is very often the friends you made along the way, which is to say all of that verbiage surrounding the stuff that’s actually happening, which you may or may not follow and/or be able to commit to memory, is its own reward. The prose is full of Stone’s usual diversions and wafflings, except in The Slow Empire they become their higher selves at last and come with bonus features, aka endnotes. (I find footnotes mildly annoying and endnotes fatally so; I’m not going to flick back and forth like that, soz. But it was perhaps worth it to see Stone defend himself from calls of sounding too much like Douglas Adams by announcing that on one occasion anyway he was actually sounding like Lewis Carroll… who was being quoted by Douglas Adams.)

Stone’s sentences require concentration and to be frank they don’t always reward it. Anji (inadvertently?) lampshades this by way of the Doctor’s excessive verbiage: “‘No offence,’ said Anji acidly, ‘but what you’ve just said didn’t contain any actual new information at all. It’s like saying something’s taller because three feet have been added to its height.’” I find I sometimes have to go back, start again and pick through the words to find the bit where something actually, quantifiably occurred. On the plus side, this is very definitely a style and that is something to be appreciated in a range that – naming no names – can tend towards the stagnant, writing-wise. Stone’s text might wander off to the shops in the middle of a thought but at least it ends up going somewhere, even if it’s just somewhere funny. He’s not for everyone, but he (along with The Slow Empire) is generally good fun. (Anyway, some of his jokes are to-the-point: “‘You have the shard?’ the High Ambassador asked, in that curious way of those in authority, however unearned, who already know the answer to a query — or at least know what the answer damned well better had be.”)

Jamon de la Rocas is perhaps Stone’s best outlet. The florid, garrulous, pick-your-talky-adjective supporting character holds court in his very own first-person passages throughout the novel. As well as being generally amusing he also underscores one of the book’s more interesting ideas, the potentially soulless existence of those people in Transference. I wish there had been more to that, but at least it comes to a head when Anji (being typically forthright and thoughtless) chastises him for his probable lack of substance and gets instinctively slapped for it. (He is very sorry about this.) The Transference idea weighs significantly on the plot by the end, but by then it’s more in the line of technobabble than something I really felt or cared about as a reader. Even in that awkward Anji scene, and following his unhappy experience in VR, Jamon never seems to be soul-searching or wondering about all this particularly. And believe me, we spend enough time with him to find out.

At the other end of the Stone spectrum we have the Collector: denizen of a species that I had completely forgotten was introduced in Heart Of TARDIS. (Only in a passing aside, mind you, but I liked it enough to highlight it in my review at the time.) He/it speaks in the same sort of comedically broken cadence as Sgloomi Po in Sky Pirates!, because heck, if it ain’t broke. Strangely this highlights that in all his wanderings Stone is choosing his words carefully, even if only for maximum amusement: “‘I might not be entirely up on the specifics, but I’m certain the Collectors are known for ravening across entire planets and destroying everything in their path.’ ‘Is not destroy monkey-hominid worlds,’ the creature said virtuously. ‘Is just take things nobody want.’ ‘Oh, yes?’ said the Doctor. ‘What sort of things?’ ‘Nice things. Shiny things. Things what is not nailed down to floor. Is then wait for bit and come back for things nailed down to floor.’” It’s the sort of thing that might be very annoying for some readers but I found welcome and amusing – if nothing else because it’s a break from Jamon’s (and Stone’s) usual Douglas-Adams-if-he-was-born-150-years-earlier cadence.

The regular characters get a fair bit of that too, most noticeably (and out-of-character-ly) Anji’s thought processes in a few early scenes: “In the same way, so Anji gathered, that the commercial spacecraft of The Future supplied ‘viewing ports’ which displayed to their passengers false but aesthetically pleasing images — and which bore about as much relation to the actual conditions outside as Bugs Bunny does to the proliferation vectors of myxomatosis — the Stellarium factored external electromagnetic and gravmetic readings to produce an image with which the mind could more or less cope.” If you say so, Dave. He writes Anji rather well otherwise, walking the tightrope between her wanting to get home and yet also being invested in the safety of the Doctor and Fitz. She nearly goes a whole novel without tearing strips off the Doctor, Tegan-style, but the plot allows her to do so once near the end. This time without creating too many waves. (See Eater Of Wasps and The Year Of Intelligent Tigers for shoutier examples.)

The Doctor is an interesting figure in this, at least academically: Stone has this idea about people’s inner selves regressing to different points, including Anji’s and Fitz’s, which allows him to write the Doctor in different (actorly) ways. The trouble is, since I tend to take it as read that everyone in his novels is going to say twenty words when five might have done, and the Doctor does that from the outset, I didn’t really spot anything out of the ordinary. It just became a rather odd exercise of the Doctor, Anji and Fitz announcing that this was happening rather than me actually noticing it. (The only time I noticed a direct quote from someone else, I’m pretty sure it was Arthur Dent. In hindsight though, some of the Doctor’s technobabble and mood swings could be attributed to Tom Baker or Pertwee, and his eventual strategy is more or less likened to something McCoy might have thought up.) Stone gets some mileage out of the Doctor’s incomplete memories (with the usual obligatory reminder of what happened there, remember everyone that this is the less continuity version of the EDAs), landing on a pleasingly powerful yet still chaotic mix for the character.

Fitz is here too of course, Fitzing his little head off in the virtual reality section where he gets to be a rock star, but to be honest I’m starting to worry about him as a regular. You wouldn’t want to read an EDA with no Fitz in it – like Bernice Summerfield he’s a difficult character to get wrong – but it’s becoming apparent that he’s always the third wheel, good-naturedly bumbling along in the background. That’s largely all he does; even Jamon bumps him out of frame at points here. We’ll see how it goes in later books. It may be the case that, like a Dave Stone paragraph, the general atmosphere of Fitz is its own reward, and fair enough if so, but it would be nice if he actually drove stories too. (Perhaps Anji’s “get me home” angle is all we’re currently allowed.)

I wish I could think of more to say about it. The Slow Empire feels as dense as most of Stone’s books, throwing out sci-fi concepts left and right and couching most of them in jokes, but it nevertheless feels a bit lightweight in the end. I still appreciate having a voice like his in the roster, distinct if not always easy to digest, but Stone novels where the whole thing comes together and wallops you over the head are clearly the exception. With its quest narrative and relatively tight supporting cast though, The Slow Empire at least comes a bit closer than most.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #94 – Superior Beings by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#43

Superior Beings

By Nick Walters

After four books it’s safe to assume that Nick Walters is mostly in it for the aliens — the more diverse, the better. Dry Pilgrimage, Dominion and The Fall Of Yquatine all concern conflicts between different species, each with their own peculiar habits and habitats. Superior Beings is another in that line. This one even includes a xenologist. (Sort of a sci-fi anthropologist, and presumably the author’s dream job.)

The differences between strange beings and the things that make them all interesting is a fine starting point for a sci-fi novel, and in that sense Superior Beings gets off to a good start. We’ve got humans of course, but also the Eknuri, a sort of more advanced Greek God-looking variant; we’ve got the Valethske (bless you), a bloodthirsty bunch of human-hunters who resemble large bipedal foxes; and there’s a planet with a strange plant-centred eco-system, which offers heaps of potential for weird and wonderful creatures. Walters grasps it with glee: there’s a mighty tree at the centre of everything, there are colossal loping “Gardeners” that can quickly evolve into something more dangerous when threatened, and there are car-sized bugs that hold a few plot secrets for later. It’s not exactly Avatar, but it’s something.

As often happens in his books you can tell he’s thought about the minutiae. Where Superior Beings suffers is in the broad strokes. What the book is about, what these characters hope to achieve, what they do achieve. The answer to all of that is invariably, not much.

The Fifth Doctor and Peri (a rare-ish pairing) arrive on an Eknuri planetoid somewhere. They find a xenologist, Aline, getting her feet wet with alien species after a traumatic encounter that previously put her off such unlike creatures. (The Eknuri, who look pretty much human, are a safe enough assignment for now.) All seems to be hedonism and larks, with a pouting Peri letting the impressive Athon show her his massive boat and the Doctor finding common ground with Aline, until a shipful of Valethske turn up: the hunter species periodically gathers human victims to sustain their long journey through space in search of their creators. They replenish their larders, somehow miss the Doctor and Aline, and otherwise leave no one alive.

The Doctor and Aline jump forward a hundred years (!) because they can only get the TARDIS onto the Valethske ship once it’s out of hyperspace. (The humans, including Peri, are all in a deep freeze.) Roughly half a dozen humans and Eknuri are rescued including Peri, Athon and some starship crew members. The rest of the captives are just… not rescued. Violent and gleeful death and dismemberment awaits them all. Soz. This must rank as one of the Doctor’s more pitiful efforts, capped off by parking the TARDIS somewhere that will instantly be out of reach. Nice one, celery.

The Doctor and co flee to a nearby planet — which they will imaginatively call The Garden — where they park and more or less just hope the Valethske won’t join them. No such luck: soon they’re fending off yet more attacks with varying levels of success, generally getting captured and/or eaten and/or murdered, unless some very angry plants get them first. And that’s the rest of the book. You can add in the Valethske wanting the Doctor to share the secrets of time travel (which they improbably suss that he’s capable of doing), the better to get back home or carry out their insane mission, and Aline fulfilling a confused sort of destiny with the plants, but it otherwise levels out as: run away from Valethske, fail at that unless you’re the Doctor or Peri, marvel at the Garden. I was bored senseless.

It’s not for a lack of action. If you want to read about horny fox people eating humans while other despairing humans look on, you’re in luck. (Also, ew.) The eventual battle in what I suppose we should equate with Eden is quite explosive. There’s just little to no point underpinning it all.

What are we meant to get from the characters, for example? Aline has potential, but it largely goes unfulfilled. Her “Encounter” doesn’t really pay off (it’s strictly tell-don’t-show), and if she was intending to offer some incisive commentary on people vs Eknuri vs Valethske vs plants, she doesn’t get around to it — although she does furiously “as you know, Bob” about the Garden’s history near the end. The starship crew (a captain and a female first officer) seem to have their own stuff going on, but that inevitably halts when they die. (I’m not saying a character can’t be interesting unless they survive, but if they escape death only to get killed a little bit later that’s not much of a story arc, is it?) We ought to get to know the Eknuri at least: they seem like a typically Nick Walters-ish idea, offering a chance to contrast “perfect” people against regular humanity, but that’s a dead end for similar reasons. In practice the Eknuri are just big, sexy people who die as easily as we do. We might as well have landed on The Planet Of The Influencers instead.

I suppose that feeds into the title, which is perhaps meant to be ironic and dismissive? The Eknuri aren’t superior (although they generally don’t claim to be), they’re just different. We can read the same sort of thing into the Valethske, who inherently place themselves above mankind because they hunt and kill them; there’s no particular dressing down for them, but they are practically feral in their appetites, so the book puts us on a pedestal for not being that bad. Probably. I’m trying, here.

The Valethske could be interesting, but I kept thinking: the Hirogen did it better. There’s no depth to their practices; it’s repetitive to have scene after scene of these aliens ripping people or each other apart and — yes, I know! — enjoying it a bunch. There’s something to be said for their spiritual mission (something that seems outright insane at first but ends up having a kernel of truth), but as that’s just another form of hunting and killing, I didn’t come away from it with any great food for thought. Their ultimate prey, the Khorlthochloi (I hope you’re practicing all the pronunciations in this, there will be a test) are another example of superior beings who exhibit no great wisdom or brilliance in the end, but all that really does is underline the idea of flawed superiority that we already got from the Eknuri and the Valethske. Yah, we get it.

At least it puts the Doctor and Peri through the wringer. That’s perhaps a crass thing to do to these characters since they will shortly find themselves violently dead/resurrected and traumatised again and again respectively, but drama is drama I suppose. There’s not a lot of that either, though. The Doctor — already on probation for letting a truly bewildering number of deaths happen on his watch — spends most of this offering mealy-mouthed “you didn’t need to do that”s to a society of openly violent marauders who don’t know any better. He’s concerned for Peri’s safety, but The Caves Of Androzani this ain’t: the closest he comes to that kind of lunatic heroism is a mildly amusing sequence where he holds himself to ransom.

Peri has also seen better days. We must assume there were a lot of unseen adventures between her introductory story and Androzani (there’s always The Ultimate Treasure, eh?) because she is snarky as hell right out of the gate, for some reason. Oddly jealous of the Doctor’s ease with Aline, then tortured, surrounded by death and inevitably stripped naked at one point (sigh), it would be difficult for any writer to find a clear through-line for what she endures here. Walters doesn’t quite manage it: despite witnessing (and nearly experiencing) unimaginable horrors she just comes off as petulant, often moaning about wanting a bath and some donuts, occasionally chiding the Valethske not to have her as a “snack” while the Doctor’s not looking. It would make more sense if she spent the whole thing screaming or doing a thousand yard stare. It’s not hard to believe her sentiment near the end, “I’ve had enough of all this crap!”, but her prompt flip-flop to forgiveness of the Doctor, then anger at him again because he befriended one of the Valethske, then empathy over the death of a mutual friend (in one scene!) makes her seem crazily impetuous. I don’t really get her in this.

I’m not convinced there’s any depth to Superior Beings, which is no great crime — I’m not that silly, I know I’m reading pulpy tie-in books here. It doesn’t hold together especially well as an action adventure, however. The race to escape a lot of violent aliens is one the characters mostly don’t win, only (in the end) to more or less send them on their way to keep doing horrible stuff in future. Great. There’s no sense of victory or even relief, just the relentless grind of violent scenes happening until we’re done. For what storytelling purpose, I don’t know: it doesn’t interrogate what they’re doing beyond it being thoroughly unpleasant but normal for the Valethske.

Unusually for Walters there’s not much to dig into with his sci-fi menagerie: the aliens either aren’t very interesting in the first place or don’t complement each other in any useful way. It’s a shame, as I do think the author has some good impulses. They’re just not on display in a book that definitely has some ingredients and lasts for 280 pages, but otherwise may not have been worth the effort.

4/10