#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
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