Doctor Who: The BBC Books #116 – Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#54

Ten Little Aliens

By Stephen Cole

This is one of those Who books that everyone seems to like. It must have had a certain cachet in order to have been reprinted in the modern era, with a new cover and everything. It also did well in contemporary reviews. It took me a while to figure out why.

Ten Little Aliens is a peculiar Doctor Who book. Sure, Whovian murder mysteries are ten-a-penny – they were practically the lifeblood of the Virgin Bernice Summerfield series – but then you add in of a bunch of space marines straight out of Aliens. Agatha Christie, James Cameron and late-stage Hartnell era make for a very odd Venn diagram.

Still, it’s not as if Cameron has a patent on space marines. Earthshock sent similar guys underground with the Doctor and friends four years earlier! (Eric Saward should sue.) But I struggled for a while to get into this story as it focussed so heavily on a bunch of tough guys in what is, deliberately, an “all these corridors look the same” situation. The added incongruity of them vs Hartnell, Ben and Polly felt like whiplash at times.

Stephen Cole puts a lot of effort into his guest cast, going over their identities and personalities a few times with a full character roster to boot. This might seem like overkill but we’re going to be stuck with them so we might as well have a fighting chance of telling them apart. (I’d additionally have suggested not using “Shade” and “Shel” as they’re a bit similar. Oh well.) Despite the shared gung-ho attitude there’s a good amount of unique disadvantages and secrets squirreled away here, particularly with Shade, or “Shadow” as he’s disparagingly called. (Perhaps not a brilliant nickname where it’s so close to what he’s actually called, but we are dealing with space marines, not Oscar Wilde.) An early scene where his commander, Haunt, beats him bloodily in front of everyone to prove both the effectiveness and limits of their armour tells us a bunch about both characters.

The TARDIS crew find these men and women on what appears to be a training exercise inside a hollowed-out asteroid. There’s a thrilling (to me anyway) sequence where the Doctor and co. require spacesuits because the atmosphere’s not very friendly – a surprising rarity in these novels. The two groups soon meet and encounter a pile of alien corpses: the Schirr, sworn enemies of the humans, pictured on the front cover. There’s no reason for said bodies to be there, especially that of the Schirr commander. And there’s even less reason for the bodies to start disappearing, one by one.

It’s around here that Stephen Cole’s primary influence becomes clear, and that’s saying something because I haven’t actually read And Then There Were None – or any Agatha Christie novels for that matter. Before anybody stones me, I’ve seen plenty of Poirot films, Miss Marple dramas, things that were plainly inspired by Christie and quite recently The Mousetrap, which is more than enough to experience a twinge of the little grey cells when bodies go missing in this, or soldiers vanish despite the local disintegrator guns not having fired.

I’ve got no idea how close the plot of Ten Little Aliens adheres to the world’s bestselling mystery novel (as per Wikipedia) but I tend to assume not much, what with the amount of sci-fi and horror going on here. The general pattern of disappearances and betrayals, merely suspected or otherwise, likely recalls the earlier work. It all fits neatly into Cole’s murky, violent framework.

Because oh yes, Ten Little Aliens is grim, beginning with performative army cruelty and a pile of corpses and not letting up from there. There’s a spate of strange afflictions mostly affecting the army folk, some of which are grotesque in the extreme, and these eventually become outright body horror. There are monsters – giant mobile angel statues if you (or Steven Moffat) can believe such a thing, only these guys do a lot worse than send you back in time to meet the love of your life. There’s also a truly horrifying engine system that essentially eats people, and if they’ve been torn to bits first then all the better for the digestion.

There’s a lot of potential here to revel in cruelty, but Cole keeps an eye on the character side of things so it’s never that bad. We have, by that point, come to at least empathise with the army guys. There’s Haunt with her strict ways, which hide a lot of pain; Shade and his secrets, as well as his desire to make good; Roba, a powerful but insecure man looking to keep his head above danger; Creben, arguably the most senior officer after Haunt and hoping to make a name for himself; Joiks, a somewhat skeezy guy who makes people uncomfortable to feel better about himself; and "Frog", a troubled young woman with scars and an artificial voice box. (There are more of them but to varying degrees they all stay in the background.)

Ten Little Aliens felt a bit limited and trad to me at first, what with army guys in a cave yelling at each other until the monsters come. Not very interesting, surely? But there’s a deceptive power in this as the book moves forward in such a confined space and more or less in real time, with a strict limit to its characters. Gradually a sense of claustrophobia sets in that you don’t often see in novels, which by their nature are often interested in expansion and world-building. All the world-building in Ten Little Aliens is conversational, describing worlds and conflicts outside this godforsaken asteroid that nevertheless inform what’s happening on it. There are at least two malignant alien races and we don’t meet very many of them: the point of focus is the people stuck in this crucible and whether they’re going to get out of it.

Cole’s attention to tension builds to the book’s USP, and probably its biggest talking point: a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure section. This sounds gimmicky in the extreme, but it fits what he’s doing, as the characters all use interconnected headsets to record thoughts and memories and the Doctor determines that in order to stay alive and solve the crisis they need to keep in contact, and this seems like the best solution. The reader is invited to jump between perspectives in a rough order, but many are optional, which paints a somewhat unique experience for each reader and reading. It also re-enforces the sense of confined characterisation that’s been building throughout the book. Lasting about 40 pages, it’s easily one of the individual creative highlights of BBC Books, up there with Eye Of Heaven and The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, except in microcosm. It’s bloody good going for what looks at first like a trad army story. I can only imagine how long it took to put together.

The story as a whole is less complicated and quite satisfying. I won’t spoil who’s the traitor and what they’re trying to achieve, but it comes together neatly, justifying the disappearances and murders. There’s a late reveal that smacks of a gimmick (and that’s in a book with CYOA), which is at least very Agatha Christie, but I think Cole just about gets away with it via some supporting memories and motivations covertly dotted through the book.

If it seems like the focus is entirely off the TARDIS crew, it isn’t really. Cole makes a very good case for the First Doctor who is initially dismissed by the likes of Haunt, then gradually makes his usefulness apparent. He faces down appalling monsters but still gives them the benefit of the doubt, and maintains a thrillingly aloof distance from Polly and the others (via a clever callback to The Space Museum, of all things) during the mind-swapping section. It’s here that Cole most overtly references the Doctor’s frailty and self-doubt: “We are (we will not waste a second of our life) still young, vital, but trapped inside this awful, ancient (frustration) corpse of a body.” There’s a lot of that throughout, with Ben referring to him as an “old boy”, the Doctor occasionally falling into people’s arms, “crouching arthritically” and even (a bit on the nose) searching for “words that were lost to him like an actor drying up on stage.” In the end when the crisis is averted he considers that he will “feel a new person soon.” (Please ignore the double entendre.) All of which gives the novel a tremendous sense of place in the lead up to The Tenth Planet.

Cole doesn’t sell the Doctor short, despite all his frailties; even his shortcomings feel intrinsically suited to the character, like when Ben observes him working on something “the way [his] dad used to try his luck fixing the family motor, when all else had failed, fiddling with bits of engine he didn’t understand, just in case one of them magically started the car.” The Doctor is nonetheless capable of being unfriendly, like his cutting Polly out of his mind, or making hard decisions, such as a grisly solution to their problems at the end. A cuddly Father Christmas figure he isn’t, or not entirely, which keeps him interesting.

Ben’s POV is achieved quite skilfully as well, with Polly noting that “Ben even thought in a cockney accent.” There are many little shards of his wit and dialect, with Ben observing that someone “had a face like the smell of gas,” that something exploded “like a firework going off in a jam jar,” and making references to “geezers”, “plates” and “jacksies” that we know from the perspective-swapping scenes don’t translate to others. Cole is keenly aware of Ben’s faults, with Polly calling out one of his comments as casually racist, and his strengths, with Ben using his Navy mindset to ingratiate himself with the soldiers and steer them right, such as snapping them out of a trance by telling them Haunt’s coming. He’s a rounded enough character that, even when he’s falling in with the blokes around him, he isn’t sure he should want to. Polly feels like the runner up here, often ending up in a quiet supportive role, but she still has moments to shine, such as a bit of ingenuity in leaving a trail (considering lipstick, then chalk, then making little cairns instead) and an ongoing battle of wills with Shade, whose deal isn’t entirely clear at first.

This is easily Stephen Cole’s strongest book yet, taking a trad setup and milking it for all the tension it’s got, incorporating a classic structure and then going completely off the wall with it. There’s a tight sense of description for the (sometimes abstract) horrors on display, such as “Their smiles were compassionate. Their fingers dripped blood” and “The frozen expressions on the bloodied Schirr faces seemed less representative now of terror and agony, more like those of creatures laughing hysterically, till it hurt, till the tears came rolling down.” It sounds like damning with faint praise, but he really has come a long way since Longest Day.

Probably the only wrinkle in the book, besides a serious case of “cut to someone else” syndrome (which is perhaps necessary for the story but gave me many opportunities to check my phone) is the debatable treatment of its aliens. There’s some typical militaristic small-mindedness about the Shirr and the Morphieans, with the latter being referred to as “spooks” and the former appearing as (among other interpretations) somewhat of a racist stereotype on the cover. The author/book’s proclivities are clear enough what with Polly calling out Ben’s blinkered views, and the Doctor doing the same thing with the marines (“‘They all look so similar.’ ‘How very enlightened,’ said the Doctor”), but bearing in mind the original title of And Then There Were None I did wonder about that choice. Of course I haven’t read And Then There Were None; presumably Cole and Tucker (not to mention Christie) were Doing A Thing here with regards to warped attitudes towards the unlike. There is, after all, textual colonialism and racism in the book. It just isn’t dealt with very much beyond the Doctor wryly commenting upon Earth’s grabby definition of “ownership”, a bit of SF blurring between human and Shirr, and the plot raising questions about whether the Shirr or the Morphiean peoples are really all on the same page as one another. The CYOA section, for example, isn’t used to challenge or deconstruct these views. (Unless I didn’t read those bits.) Perhaps it’s just one of those things that you can leave to percolate in the background of a murder mystery, but in Doctor Who tends to be underlined for emphasis as well.

It’s arguably a bit questionable and often very trad; it’s quietly creative, then very much so. On the whole it’s a winner.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #115 – The Crooked World by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#57

The Crooked World

By Steve Lyons

I got this one decades ago, free (if memory serves) with DWM. It’s been a funny little curio on my shelf ever since, this freebie that doesn’t look very much like a Doctor Who novel, and now I’ve actually gone and read the bugger. It’s a strange feeling; I think it was the last Doctor Who book I’d had since my youth but never read.

 

The Crooked World was Steve Lyons’s last Wilderness Years novel. (See also, Christopher Bulis’s Palace Of The Red Sun. We’ll be seeing more of these as the range ticks towards its end.) Thematically it’s a bit like Lyons’s first, as he once again embraces different media. Where Conundrum tackled alternative strands of fiction such as comic strips, The Crooked World focusses on cartoons: the TARDIS seemingly lands inside one, or at least a planet populated with noticeably off-brand recreations of Road Runner, Tom & Jerry, Wacky Races, Top Cat and Scooby Doo.

 

There are a few ways you can tackle this – including, it would only be fair to acknowledge, a comic strip rather than a novel. On that, I think Conundrum demonstrated well enough that Lyons can write a prose story about comic books, so he’s well within his capabilities doing something similar here with cartoons. Besides which, The Crooked World is more interested in the rules and restrictions of cartoons, things that you would want to talk about, than in their visual capabilities, so it works nicely as prose.

 

What starts as a jolly interlude for the Eighth Doctor and friends quickly turns into something nasty, as the Doctor is shot by a farmer and (contrary to local physics) actually gets quite badly injured. This starts a chain reaction of differences in cartoon logic which causes the blunderbuss-wielding pig, Streaky Bacon, to rethink his actions and consider his place in the world. There are other knock-on effects, some deliberate (like Anji telling Angel Falls, an ersatz Penelope Pitstop, to stop relying on men) and some indirect (like Fitz inspiring Jasper, aka Tom, to leave his kitchen and consider the wider world), and that’s the gist of the novel: cartoon characters wondering if that’s all there is to life.

It’s a bit like Pleasantville in other words, but then I’m not averse to seeing Doctor Who’s take on that, and anyway cartoons aren’t the same thing as 1950s TV shows. Lyons isn’t here to interrogate issues of race and sexuality as that film did, although both ideas are obliquely and humourously invoked here; the focus is on free will and what it means to break out of patterns. It’s quite a small-scale novel, despite concerning the fate of an entire world. There’s a feeling about a third of a way in that the plot isn’t going to escalate in the traditional way so much as continue to explore an idea to its natural conclusion.

I’m fine with that, quite honestly. There have been other books with dynamite ideas that didn’t have time to look in every nook and cranny. I tended to come away from those feeling a bit frustrated. Grimm Reality is one to which The Crooked World bears a more than passing resemblance; Lyons (via Anji) gently lampshades this a few times. Even apart from any concerns about repetition – and for all I know, Lyons was directly inspired by that earlier book – it’s worth pointing out the increased lean of the series towards overt magic and fantasy that is implied by seeing more and more novels like this. For my money, The Crooked World is a more balanced effort than Grimm Reality: the cartoon characters don’t just re-enact their little narratives wholesale, they think about them and sometimes change what they’re doing. The Doctor and co. feel less like passive observers this time – indeed, their arrival is the main driving force of the plot. I like idea-based stories that have a “just-right-sized” plot and this is one of those.

It’s a good showcase for the regulars, or at least an accurate one. I can’t be the only reader getting a little tired of the Doctor’s fragility post Adventuress Of Henrietta Street; his injury at the start of this absolutely fits the plot and moves it along, no complaints there, but it risks being yet another reminder of the poor wiffly Doctor with his one heart, a concept that Lawrence Miles sold as something more interesting than a difference in his physiognomy which subsequent writers have largely taken to mean “he runs out of breath now, the poor duck.” Never mind: once he’s back on his feet the Doctor is a joyous force, enthralled by the nonsense logic of the world around him as well as the challenge facing its people. Although he leaves the decision-making to them wherever possible he’s quite partisan here, insisting that to embrace free will and break out of their “cartoons” is the right thing to do. I don’t know if that was an attempt to underscore a more impulsive Doctor or if that was just the way Lyons felt he ought to lean, but it certainly creates sparks with Anji who argues – not unreasonably – that these people seem happy with their lot.

Lyons has a good grasp of Anji, someone who “couldn’t bring herself to believe in anything without tangible proof”; throwing her into a world of nonsense is a good challenge. Her feminist flag-waving with Angel is perhaps a little on the nose, but this is a cartoon, so fair enough. Her scenes with the Skeleton Crew (aka the Scooby Gang) are probably my favourites here, as she forces them to confront the patterns they’re stuck in and adapt how they do things, only to then understand that they’re pretty on the ball and can respond reasonably well to threats and mysteries by themselves, even incorporating what they've learned from her. Lyons prods at her uncertainty around going home, a theme the books have had-their-cake-and-eaten-it with so far, landing on it never seeming like “the right moment” to broach it with the Doctor. He also picks up on her withering relationship with Fitz, having her observe that cartoon characters have discovered the concept of sex and instantly know where that came from. She has a fairly accurate long-suffering opinion of the loveable schlub, such as when the local sheriff tells the Doctor: “‘You call this trouble, boy? Your skinny pal’s been kidnapped, that’s all. It’s not like he’s started to think or nothing serious.’ That was true enough, thought Anji.”

Fitz has long since achieved that Bernice Summerfield status of being hard to get wrong, and sure enough Lyons has a blast with him here, having him adorably care for the wounded Doctor, clumsily reveal the ins and outs of evil lairs to a cadre of supervillains, then make Herculean efforts to explain sex and love to Angel Falls. He wipes away a genuine tear of relief when he hears the words “Tell me about this Earth thing you call ‘sex’” in earnest. (“You don’t know how long I’ve waited for someone to say that. I mean, you really don’t know.”)

For me the most affecting parts of The Crooked World were the reactions of its cartoon characters to their changing landscape. Jasper, a mute cat, tugs the heartstrings in a surprisingly sophisticated fashion as he lopes around after Fitz, who fails to notice him, then gets trapped back in his routine only to escalate it horribly; Streaky, the roundabout sort of Porky Pig/Elmer Fudd creation, seems to be having an existential crisis throughout the book which pays off nicely at the end; Mr Weasley, Angel’s guardian/masked nemesis, starts a schism among the bad guys that leads to an evil witch working on medicines for the injured instead. It could be argued that the cartoons of The Crooked World lack originality or very much in the way of diversity – they’re all knock-offs and their individual storylines would not, with respect to Lyons, impress Chuck Jones very much. But first of all I’d say the plot has a baked-in reason for that when it’s revealed where all this cartoon stuff has come from*, and second we’re not really here to be dazzled by the brilliance of these cartoons. Breaking out of them is the point.**

*This doesn’t particularly explain Anime City, which is mentioned as another part of the world outside of the more Looney Tunes “Zanytown” we find ourselves in for the duration. Maybe Lyons came up with the explanation after he wrote that bit.

**It’s worth pointing out that for some reason Fitz and Anji never say “This is a bit like Tom & Jerry” or “Isn’t that Scooby Doo but with different character names”, and that feels a bit false. They would know these things. But I suspect it was a copyright thing. Perhaps I’m also just used to characters going “Look at that IP!” in the current landscape, which wasn’t as expected or legally possible in 2002.

The Crooked World doesn’t break a sweat explaining itself. That seems to be par for the course with the Eighth Doctor Adventures at this time, magic and fantasy being more normal all of a sudden. Anji pokes the bear a few times and gets a sort of science-y explanation from the Doctor: “In some places, in some entire universes, [reality is] stretched too thinly and the fabric becomes weak.” That’s a bit of a sop in-text and on the meta level as well, like when vampires in New Who turn out to be (gasp!) aliens that act just like vampires. As with his earlier book Salvation and, yeah okay let’s mention it again, Conundrum, the fun of it is in exploring the strange idea he’s come up with, which is: what if Doctor Who landed in a cartoon. It’s a “just go with it” novel that makes a good fist of what it’s trying to achieve, even if the lack of a particularly kinetic plot keeps it from being what I’d call a page-turner. There are plenty of jokes to tide you along, like the observation that an increase in thinking has led to a shortage of lightbulbs. It’s a sweet, creative effort that acts as a fitting send-off for one of the Wilderness Era’s more colourful writers.

7/10