Doctor Who: The BBC Books #101 – Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#50

Grimm Reality

By Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

Fantasy seems to hold a special fascination for sci-fi writers. It’s an alternative, perhaps even forbidden path to strangeness: we took the one with long words and explanations, they took the one with primordial rules and “monsters, just because.”

Now and again you get sci-fi stories that see how the other half lives. Doctor Who has already taken a few novelistic whacks at it. Conundrum is generally understood to be The Good One, though it mostly worked with different media rather than this genre specifically. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice took it literally, alternating fantasy and SF as the plot demanded — and I would argue, watering both down in the process. Managra dived into literature, but in a way that verged on fantasy. Grimm Reality might be the most direct example yet, hurling the TARDIS onto a planet where anything can happen, but always in the form of fairytales.

I can see the appeal already: narratively you can let your hair down, worry less about the mechanics of things, and it’s enjoyable to put your SF heroes in a different context. But it’s a tightrope walk. You still need rules and, on some level, your fantasy walk-on-the-wild-side still has to function as sci-fi, because look what it says on the front cover. It’s a conundrum (ahem) that’s hard to solve. Do you veer more fantasy or sci-fi?

Grimm Reality has its magical cake and vanishes it. There’s an upfront SF reason for what’s going on here: a white hole. (So what is it?) This has fired blobs of multiversal possibility at a nearby planet, although the planet already comes with fantasy craziness as standard. (We get another SF reason for that later on.) That taken care of, everything in-between can be as fantasy as you like. Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale (I don’t know in what configuration) dutifully fire a rat-a-tat-tat campaign of fantasy problems at the Doctor, Anji and Fitz, such as: a Cinderella job where Anji works for six cruel sisters, and a wishing box won’t help; a quest for Fitz working for two thoughtless princes, also involving a magic wolf skin; a journey to a giant’s castle for the Doctor and some new friends, where the giant’s size is never fixed; a contest to become a King’s bride, with the contest threatening everyone in the kingdom; multiple terrifying figures demanding answers to their riddles; and a sleeping princess whose rescue and reawakening is the talk of the town.

If you like fairytales, and most of us do, there’s a pretty constant supply of fun here. It does however get a bit wearying jumping from one fairytale to another, and within that from the progress of one group of characters to another, and within that from the Doctor/Anji/Fitz to a visiting crew of (reassuringly sci-fi) salvage hunters hoping to strip mine the planet of any white hole goodness. At its peak Grimm Reality has five or six protagonists on the go, each with their own cadre of supporting characters and all going through the motions of some vaguely parodic fantasy story. For a book intrinsically about storytelling, its general inability to sit bloody still and tell us one of them from start to finish is not a plus. Despite its colourful simplicity, I often found it hard to stick with as a novel.

There’s also the individual stories themselves. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a degree of subversion here: our brilliant SF characters bringing what they know to bear on archetypal fantasy stories, and either turning them on their heads or finding that the rules of fantasy will fight back. There is a little of this, with the Doctor plying his trade as “Doctor Know-It-All” and offering mostly quack solutions to fantasy problems, until the King demands more help than he can give; and Anji, tricked into servitude to possess a wishing box she can’t actually use, tries to game it so that the sisters wish to her benefit, only that doesn’t work. Mostly though, these are just straight fairytales that show up and happen. The presence of yer actual Doctor Who alumni in the proceedings doesn’t make a huge difference, which somewhat begs the question of why we’re combining the two things.

The sci-fi stuff is dialled down, perhaps by design. It’s promising enough: the salvage crew is made up of three distinct species, which is a nice bit of world-building, and at the start they take on board William Brok, a rugged but unlucky salvager who found the white hole shortly before his ship failed on him, only for his rescuers to steal the glory. He develops a combative quasi-romance with “human-Captain” Christina, which points to a decent arc, but it’s Christina we follow to the planet, leaving William more or less to the reader’s imagination afterwards. (Christina’s a pretty strong character anyway, or at least she’s consistent, refusing to wilt because of William’s or the Doctor’s charms. She is, frankly, a sod, which is quite interesting.) The abanak (avuncular hippo-people) and vuim (insectoids seeking a cure for a disease) are compelling enough, though they quickly fall into archetypes.

The SF ideas can’t really compete with the fantasy ones. Take the white hole/multiverse stuff: there’s a strong suggestion that this opens up infinite possibilities to anyone that encounters it. Obvious story potential there — only, we’re already on a planet that can manufacture anything, provided it’s a fairytale, so everybody on it is sort of doing all right for magical possibilities, thank you very much. The concept of growing literally anything for fantasy reasons cohabits in Grimm Reality with anything that can happen for sci-fi reasons, and the confluence of the two is just a sort of muddle, really.

In amongst all that you’ve got three regulars and, I would say, some potential for characterisation. That’s another tightrope walk: how much of this is just satire? You don’t really do satire for the meaningful character stuff, and sure enough Anji faces fairly archetypal “modern girl in ye olden times” difficulties living as Cinderella, or being magically compelled to compete for a marriage she doesn’t even want; Fitz has a rough time and harbours grudges against those princes, but for a considerable stretch his “character arc” here is that he’s cold; and the Doctor seems uncharacteristically naive for a lot of this, trusting dangerous people and needing a lot of magical help to get out of scrapes. But there are glimmers of meaning here, with the Doctor being offered (and refusing) the restoration of his memories, and Anji once again going back and forth about her place in the TARDIS, and pining for Dave. (I’m not too crazy about either of those. Do Doctor Who l authors ever compare notes? Aren’t these somewhat settled questions after books like EarthWorld and The City Of The Dead?)

With a few honourable nods to the anything-can-happen likes of Conundrum, Grimm Reality mostly reminded me of the Benny New Adventures. Story-wise it feels like a fusion of Oh No It Isn’t! and Down, and the book’s general wise-guy tone hews closer to that mildly inebriated world than, IMO, Doctor Who. I don’t know if I would have liked it better as an entry in that other range — lord knows most of them were unspectacular — but as a pit stop for the EDAs it doesn’t leave a huge impression. It successfully replicates another genre without doing a heck of a lot with it, and it arguably mistakes a large quantity of fantasy tropes for a coherent plot. It still provides good fun in short bursts, and the let-your-hair-down aspect is a genuine selling point for a Doctor Who book. But as far as subjecting fantasy tropes to critical thought goes, we already have quite a lot of Discworld books for that.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #100 – Psi-ence Fiction by Chris Boucher

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventure

#46

Psi-ence Fiction

By Chris Boucher

Chris Boucher is a bit like the proverbial box of chocolates. His scripts tend to be imaginative and they can be tight and brilliant, but sometimes they’re scattered and vague. His novels have followed suit: where there is a bedrock of clear ideas you get Corpse Marker, where there isn’t, Last Man Running. (So I guess you do know what to expect from him in a sense? Checkmate, Forrest Gump’s mum.)

I had hoped that Corpse Marker would be a turning point, but Psi-ence Fiction is a return to a less controlled, less effective Boucher instead. It even shows signs of skipping a thorough edit — hell, someone should have had a word with him about that title. Although come to think of it, an awkward pun does sort of set the tone for what follows.

It’s a Chris Boucher book so it’s going to feature the Fourth Doctor and Leela, which is good news: he wrote for the telly series during one of its peaks and he originated Leela with that Doctor, so he’s great at capturing those two voices. The combative twosome encounter both a profound sense of unease and some sort of time anomaly near a university in England. Said university houses a parapsychology department where Professor Barry Hitchins tests the psi abilities of a group of teens. Spookiness ensues.

If you read the I, Who entry on Psi-ence Fiction you’ll notice that the plot synopsis breaks down into two parts: everything that happens before the last thirty or so pages and then everything that happens in the last thirty or so pages. The first part amounts to one paragraph. Meanwhile in the actual book, the Doctor makes a mental note on page 194 that “There was finally some concrete evidence that something was happening.” It’s not plot-heavy, in other words, relying heavily on atmosphere instead. That’s not so terrible — very good stories have been told that are mostly just atmosphere and vibes. Image Of The Fendahl, for one. The downside, though, is that I can barely remember two thirds of this despite having just finished it, and its attempt to build atmosphere doesn’t come off anyway.

The Doctor and Leela are, predictably, fine. They split up for most of Psi-ence Fiction which seems more like a bug than a feature, but anyway, the Doctor is full of his usual ebullience and (albeit ineffectively) charm. He even indulges in a few of Boucher’s patented political aphorisms, such as: “[The Doctor] was struck once again by how uniform people’s behaviour became when they put on a uniform.” I could have done without his getting collared by security guards and policemen just for being eccentric – I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a “sign of the times” thing where the story is, unusually for these two, set in the 00s, but it felt like wasted time. Similarly, while no reader is in doubt that the Doctor has us all beat in the “genius” department, his ability to suss the particular universal and temporal peril going on here is akin to plucking it out of the ether, which isn’t very satisfying to read. Nor is the resolution, which pretty much resolves itself.

Leela is usually the highpoint of Boucher’s novels and that trend continues here. She keenly identifies a psychic threat, having been menaced in a similar way by the Tesh in The Face Of Evil. To deal with this she recalls her old teachings and considers the ways that her shamans and the Doctor differ in their methods, as well as how much influence they still have on her now, which is all pretty interesting. “There had been so many instructions and orders, so much advice, she wondered if she would ever be allowed to think for herself.” You get the sense that Boucher isn’t done developing her character, which is a great reason to write tie-in novels. It would be nice though if she had more to do with the plot. Despite all that introspection, plus interacting with and at times protecting one of the psi-kids, she doesn’t impact very much on events; she is yanked into the TARDIS by the Doctor at the climax. I was hoping she’d play a more decisive part.

Neither of them seems critical, or even really relevant to what’s happening until the very end. They mark time by chasing literal shadows or investigating half-baked conspiracies involving bottled water. For most of the sludgy “pre-finale” section of the book, aka most of the book, we’re marooned with other characters, starting with the teens at the university. You will quickly notice a theme in their dialogue: they’re funny. Or more accurately, they think they’re funny. It’s one of those dynamics where every individual character wisecracks all the time and every other character finds it irritating, then does it right back. I’ve read reviews that complain of not being able to tell them apart, and that’s sadly accurate.

The problem’s even worse than that, however: it’s every group of characters in the book. There are several university lecturers, each with some sort of stake in Hitchins’ work. (He is mostly referred to as “Barry”, which given that we’re on first name terms with all the students pushes him confusingly into the background at times.) The lecturers all gripe and bitch at each other all the time, so they don’t sound all that dissimilar either. Then there are security guards and policemen – at times I was unclear who belonged to which group – and all of them appeared to be gearing up for an open mic night. None of them are funny, none of them find each other funny, I can’t tell if we’re supposed to find them funny, but on goes the exhausting banter anyway, unearthing solid gold like: “‘No it isn’t,’ Ralph said, ‘and stop calling me Shirley.’” We also get stuff like “Enough with the comedy routine” – see the universal law of Irritating Characters Are Irritating. Telling me how annoying they are does not make them less annoying.

Some of it’s not so much unfunny banter as weak sitcom writing, with a general background radiation of swearwords possibly intended to grit things up, or more likely add a dash of Blackadder-ish snark. See distracting lines like “Put the sodding sandwich down, put the sodding coffee down, put this sodding character in the SODDING LOCKUP!” Urgh. A general lack of punctuation makes it all read as a bit breathless and try-hard.

Throughout Psi-ence Fiction (and boy, is it annoying to keep typing out that title) I wondered if all of this was meant to be creepy. I’m leaning towards yes. We open with a séance where one character is screamed at by a murderous and distractingly profane spirit. The tone of this is immediately difficult to take seriously – constantly calling her a BITCH! in all caps is a bit too bizarre for Doctor Who, like a rude older relative at a party – but said character isn’t strongly affected by it anyway, or not enough to give the insouciance a rest. The creepiness just goes away when the encounter ends. Another character is affected when an encounter with a Ouija board gets a little too threatening, but for some reason we’re not around for the scene where she is so distraught that she takes her own life, making that seem like a random crime that occurred in the background.

In the meantime, on we go with the relentlessly dippy dialogue, with endless references to one of them imitating Hugh Grant and snarky digs about TV shows. At no point was I concerned for their welfare: they all seem fine. I was generally wondering where the Doctor and Leela had got to, and whether I could come too. Nothing terribly frightening is happening in their absence, other than the prospect of more scenes with these people.

Things are a little more consistent around Leela as she hunts for the vague sense of unease or darkness that seems to exist nearby – but “vague” is the word for it, and no amount of Boucher’s at times atmospheric repetition can fill the hole where a defined sense of threat ought to be. Saying that, he really is good at using talismanic phrases to build a bit of mood: “She must not look back no matter how much she wanted to. She must not stop running no matter how much she wanted to. She must get out of the wood. She must get out of the darkness.” / “Everything was moving except for her: everything was motionless except for her.” But it’s all just weird hallucinations and misdirection that might lead to her death, or a murder, but never gets that far. Anyway, it’s not up to Leela to take this crisis by the shoulders and shake it into submission, more’s the pity, so she essentially just has a weird old time until things tidy themselves up at the end.

When the finale rolls around and it’s time to connect the psi-kids plot with the “temporal anomaly” business from the beginning, it just about works, but you’ve got to suspend a hell of a lot of disbelief even for Who. The emotional reason for a character inventing a device that can turn back time is sound enough – it would have been more satisfying if we’d spent time building up to it beforehand, ah well – but the actual concept of a university lecturer building such a thing, and in such a way that it could obliterate the universe, is a teensy bit of a leap, no? His reason for requiring a psychic collaborator is thin as tissue paper as well. All in all, I was left imagining a whiteboard with PSYCHIC VISIONS and TIME STUFF on it, and a lot of question marks in-between. Boucher employs that repetition trick again to make for a more atmospheric and exciting finale, but he can’t rise above a welter of technobabble, a load of “just vibes” prose and what’s essentially a magic wand that fixes it all.

I wonder if this one missed the usual editing window. The plot is ungainly at best, speed-running all of its important stuff at the last hurdle – surely that could have been tidied up. There are dropped speech marks and typos aplenty, with “Chole” for “Chloe,” “Gallifray” instead of “Gallifrey,” a reference to “the sweeny” instead of The Sweeney. And there are peculiar Americanisms like cellular phone, cemetery and galoshes – hardly a crime, but why are they there? I’d like to think the characterisation could have been tightened up a bit as well, but if you looked at that too critically you’d probably lose sheer, aimless banter that amounted to whole chapters.

 

It’s worth stressing that he really does write the Fourth Doctor and Leela well, and that’s a significant part of why you’d pick up a Doctor Who book by Chris Boucher in the first place. It’s quite readable and hares along at a good pace even though pound for pound little is actually happening, which is no small feat. There are aspects that genuinely work quite well, like the way Boucher writes a character with mind-reading abilities, sneakily picking up in dialogue on something we just read in third person prose. I wish there was more of that, and more was made of it.

I’ve had worse experiences reading BBC Books. This just isn’t among the particularly good experiences.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #99 – The City Of The Dead by Lloyd Rose

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#49

The City of the Dead

By Lloyd Rose

New author! New female author! New female very good author! It’s like several Christmases come at once.

Prior to this I didn’t know anything about Lloyd Rose, but it’s clear that this is not her first rodeo. There’s no awkward first novel vibes: she brings her setting, a particularly dank and magical New Orleans, vividly to life, while the prose and dialogue sparkle confidently. I didn’t jot a lot of it down because I was having a good time, but I took a minute to marvel at this confident piece of repetition: “He was having trouble seeing, as if there was a cloud between him and the group at the other end of the room. He squinted. There was a cloud between him and the group at the other end of the room.” Also this tidy observation: “He turned and pushed open the window, as if he needed the common sense of fresh air.” And this epic nugget about the city’s struggle against the elements: “Water and wind and heat would win in the end. The river wanted the land back. In the rain, the old city melted towards death.” Fiendish stuff.

It is also a novel of ideas. Oodles of them in fact — but fair warning, they mostly concern magic, which is an itchy subject matter for Doctor Who. But that’s a sensible enough basis for a story set in New Orleans, and though The City Of The Dead veers unapologetically into that realm — with no “what look like magic creatures are actually Footlejibbets from Arcteriax III” caveats, magic is just magic and you’ll have to lump it — Rose does it with enough conviction to sell it.

Anyway, the magic rites in this rely on elemental beings that aren’t so different from Dæmons or Eternals from Classic Who — they’re inexplicable, yes, but only because the Doctor isn’t trying to explain them. (You know what his memory’s like; he probably can’t do it any more.) Elsewhere there is a genuine ring of sci-fi to a brain-bending artefact that interacts with the Doctor’s timeline out of sequence — Rose singles out The Curse Of Fatal Death in her About The Author bit, and now that you mention it that bit does pong pleasantly of Moffat. On the flip side there’s a sequence of straight up deus ex machina magic to rescue the Doctor from certain doom, but a) it’s a beautifully written, quasi-romantic fantasy interlude, I’m not made of stone, and b) it’s not that much weirder than the New Adventures at their trippiest. I didn’t feel cheated.

Setting, good, ideas, convincing, so far huzzah — but where The City Of The Dead really goes for broke is with its characters. Rose’s New Orleans is a weird little place populated by strange people, running the gamut from the grotesque (awkward artist Teddy Acree and his voluptuous, perhaps too supportive wife) to the ridiculous (Dupre, a buffoonish and self-aggrandising tour guide) to the disarmingly likeable (Rust, a cop who instinctively pals along with the Doctor like Lieutenant Kinderman from The Exorcist), and even the flat out magical (spoilers). They feel like a self-contained eco-system and there is always a strong sense of who’s in the scene.

And the regulars are better. Fitz, just to rip the plaster off, comes in last place just because of how the action is dealt out, but Rose still underlines his absurd “big brother, little brother” relationship with the Doctor, which then highlights the Doctor’s fewer-than-usual number of marbles at this point in the run. Fitz and Anji note that he battles evil but is too fundamentally good to really understand it, which leaves him potentially blind to threats. (Which might come into play later in the book, maybe. Ahem.) Fitz, in all his scruffy glory, isn’t quite so enamoured of strangers, plus he knows the Doctor of old, so (as per books like EarthWorld) he wants to protect him from himself. That’s apt, and it’s also consistent, which is an all too rare treat in these scattershot-author novels. For good measure, Fitz’s cheery and slightly inappropriate sense of humour gets the better of him throughout.

Anji feels like she’s finding her place here. Rose is smart enough to let modern day Earth hit the displaced companion hard, and wily enough to let Anji wriggle out of simply catching a flight home from here — Anji reasons that it’s a year or so after she left, so better luck next time I guess, which feels like very quietly protesting too much. Her concern for the Doctor’s wellbeing gets more obvious as the book progresses, just as her attempt to let him worry about himself for a while quickly falls apart; you can feel her starting to belong in the team. Even her banter with Fitz, well, fits; the two give as good as they get, particularly when the Doctor sends them on a fact finding mission that quickly spirals into grave-robbing. (She really cares about Fitz too, as she demonstrates when she suggests he stop smoking out of genuine concern that he’s assuming the TARDIS will fix lung cancer.) Anji also, saints be praised, considers a romantic dalliance in a post-Dave world, although this only amounts to a few lovely dinners and a bit of snogging. We skip the aftermath, which as it turns out would have been worth talking about, but perhaps that’s also a sign that she’s toughening up.

Saving the best for last: the Doctor. The much-repeated reason for giving him amnesia (again) was to make him easier to write for. I don’t know if that was crucial to Rose’s understanding of the character, although it is crucial to his journey in the book, but however she got there The City Of The Dead is one of the most compelling depictions of the character yet.

The Doctor in this is more recognisably a person in his own right, not so much a mythical being who can do anything. When we first see him he is unusually vulnerable: in bed, at least partially naked, having nightmares. That thread continues throughout, with references to him being “off his game” as he misreads situations and — without getting too into spoilers — gets captured and tortured more than usual. He has that innocence that sets Fitz and Anji’s minds worrying, but perhaps less of it than they imagine, as e.g. he finds Dupre loathsome and is repelled by Teddy’s offers to paint him alongside his wife. He’s diplomatic but also capable of putting that up as a front — he’s not necessarily that nice underneath.

And speaking of what’s underneath, he’s not okay. The City Of The Dead focuses on his amnesia, or specifically the sense of what he has lost and what he thinks it might be, more convincingly than any other book post-Ancestor Cell. There are several references to forgotten misdeeds not being in any real sense gone or forgiven, or so he thinks, as well as some typically well-put moments where he is able to repeat information that he no longer understands, like Artron energy being a thing. There’s a terrific dream sequence that suggests his past selves are complicit in his amnesia, and by the time we hit the climax it’s clear that the Doctor’s guilt has been a major factor in his nightmares and his actions. It’s also rather neatly expressed in the villain plot, which handily is about reconciling the past and putting demons to rest, coincidentally in a novel set in New Orleans surrounded by graves. I mean, come on, that’s good.

By rights this should be one of my favourite BBC Books, and I think it’s up there, but I can’t claim it’s perfect. The plot doesn’t have much forward motion, being propelled mainly by a murder investigation that nobody seems to care about. Characters investigate things more or less on the off chance that they’re related to something else, and otherwise they tend to go on dates or, for example, get kidnapped by (possibly unrelated) nutters. There’s a genuinely good surprise near the end that knocked me for six, but I wonder how much of that was the lack of real detective work to lead us to it. The “Thanks” bit at the end suggests that a lot of work went into making this even resemble a plot, and I don’t think it’s too cheeky to suggest that this is still the author’s weak point. I’m fairly bad at maintaining concentration sometimes, so maybe it was just that — we’ve lived through less distracting times — but the loose plotting, combined with Rose’s sometimes intangible ideas, can make The City Of The Dead a slow read. And on intangibility: there is a fair bit of meta-magical “huh?”ery in this, which I don’t exactly mind — I’ve already defended one of the novel’s biggest diversions — but there were moments where I simply wasn’t sure what just happened.

There’s room for improvement, then. (Arguably, as I’m sure some readers loved all the weird stuff without caveats.) Nevertheless, the good bulldozes the bad. I’ve not even mentioned the keenly female perspective on things like dating, and the Doctor in particular; Rose, like Kate Orman before her, highlights his inherent sensuality (shall we say, the Paul McGann Effect) more convincingly than her male peers. If you’re going to hire different authors then you ought to find different perspectives too, and we have that here, whilst also staying on target with the series and its ideas. I’m glad they recognised a good thing and got her back for more books. Now find more good authors.

8/10