#63
Reckless Engineering
By Nick Walters
It’s time for another roll of the dice as the TARDIS lands on another version of Earth, all aboard hoping that they’ve jiggered the temporal whatsits sufficiently that this is now their Earth. Fat chance.
The Domino Effect presented a planet that wasn’t just different but recognisably wrong. Progress had been stunted, the worst brought out in people – it was not a place you’d want to live. These issues were eventually “resolved” by tossing the whole world in the bin and setting off a chain reaction of similar “wrong” timelines for the Doctor to weed out. Reckless Engineering is sure enough another one of those, so once again we have a world that has skewed onto a tangent, only this time it’s even worse. Following a cataclysm nearly all animal life on Earth is gone. The remaining people live in a pre-Industrial wasteland.
For a series built on the exciting premise of going anywhere and doing anything it’s a curious choice to point at Sliders and say “yeah, but what if we did that instead.” Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with showing different versions of Earth – it worked for Sliders, but that was a show largely predicated on getting the hell out of each new version of Earth. Not so much Doctor Who: in the series proper, our characters effect meaningful change whenever they land somewhere, and if they don’t then that becomes the whole point of the adventure. (See Inferno for an alternate-Earth example.) Contrast that with this mini-run of novels where from the outset we know these Earths are wrong, and the only possible outcome is that they will be tossed in the trash or – trying to suspend disbelief here since I have yet to see a second outcome – maybe the Doctor will just leave and seal them off somehow? Either way, it seems foolish to get attached or invest in any of the minutiae. None of which is Nick Walters’ fault, or David Bishop’s, or Paul Leonard’s since he’s doing the next one, but by gum it makes this arc difficult to care about.
Really all you’ve got to glom onto is whatever the author of the week does for their terrible Earth, and to his credit Nick Walters has a good idea. In 1843 something happened that caused all animal life to get 40 years older. This instantly killed hundreds of millions of people along with most (possibly all?) of Earth’s fauna. The survivors had it even worse: anyone young enough to survive their four-decade mutation would have been so young that they had no idea what was happening. A generation of half-mad children in adult bodies was created. Cut to a century later and their descendants live mostly on bread and booze, unless you look in the less civilised areas where cannibalism reigns. All of this has something to do with a poet, Malahyde, as well as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and a curious house where time moves at a different speed.
Reckless Engineering contains a throwaway reference to John Wyndham which I suspect holds the key to the rest of it. The Cleansing (as Earth’s people politely name their cataclysm) sounds like something Wyndham would throw at us just to see what would happen next. As well as being revolting to think about the Cleansing puts humanity in an interesting spot afterwards, splitting them into the relatively civilised who are able to put themselves together and the “Wildren” who start out crazed and then stay there. Walters has thought about what would happen if we lacked animals for nourishment or (looking at this somewhat quizzically as someone who doesn’t eat meat) presumably any means to mass produce anything else. While I think this is a tad on the pessimistic side – what, so it’s literally bread or cannibalism? – it at least puts Anji into a situation where she contemplates the morality of eating people, considering one man to be: “a cannibal, yes, but not a fiend … A man is infinitely more complicated than a monster.” (You might wonder if BBC Books had a bit of a thing about cannibalism what with this, Combat Rock and Walters’ earlier Superior Beings, which had humans being eaten by aliens. No comment.)
Where Reckless Engineering diverges from The Day Of The Triffids (apart from the general lack of killer plants) is of course in its resolution, which defers to Doctor Who for its technobabble needs, and in its general lack of satire. The people of this world live miserable lives and are not great fun to be around. Aboetta is the closest we have to a fully rounded person, living in relative peace with Malahyde in his posh house before returning to her village to find that somehow ten years have passed there for her four months away. She reconsiders her lot in life, specifically the prospect of her old flame Robin. Aboetta’s dilemma might have been the heart of the novel, but given the general wet blanket qualities of Malahyde and the stout dreariness of Robin it’s difficult to read much into her eventual swing towards the poet beyond a preference for nice furniture over mud huts. Her general deportment, for example ditching the Doctor and co. after they saved her life, left her far from my sympathies when the novel reached its inevitable conclusion.
Walters finds other emotional beats in here but few of them pay dividends. Fitz and Anji both feel a kinship with this wrecked Earth, enough that they are shaken and appalled when (do I have to keep saying “inevitably”?) this version of Earth can’t stay put. Fitz goes all in: “And so what if there hadn’t been an Industrial Revolution? Perhaps that was a good thing — without the internal combustion engine, without the pollutants and effluents of industry, without man’s gradual enslavement to the machine, maybe the human race would retain its dignity.” / “All this represents the triumph of the human spirit.” We later learn that a malign influence is working on Fitz, the timeline “naturalising” him so that he starts to remember this version of reality in place of his own – a process that even affects the TARDIS and might in time claim the Doctor as well. This rather serves to neuter Fitz’s argument, but we circle back to it anyway at the end so he can throw a colossal wobbler about the Doctor’s indifference to the fate of Earth 3.0.
Much like the Sliders gambit there’s nothing verboten about debating the merits of individual timelines, even (or perhaps especially) ones that seem unappealing to the reader. Different experiences have value just as uncomfortable lives deserve to have been lived. This could be compelling. That said, there are things getting in the way of it working here. We already touched on these debates in The Domino Effect so they already feel a bit tired – you run that risk with a “same again please” arc like this one. Fitz is canonically out of his mind when he’s making these points again here. For all the book’s impassioned pleading on behalf of Robin et al we’re ignoring the malign killing of most of humanity and the devastation of Earth’s ecosystem — precisely the sort of hell these guys would normally do anything to prevent on their regular adventures.
The cherry on top is that there simply is no alternative. Left to merrily fester in their own crapulence, the denizens of Walters’ Earth would eventually cease to exist anyway due to the profusion of different timelines. And to make matters even worse (!), if that somehow didn’t happen then the malign alien plot behind the Cleansing would eventually destroy this universe outright. The only way for Fitz to make his argument is to steamroll this point entirely. The whole “what about Robin” debate is simply untenable, which makes it a decidedly wobbly basis for the apparent moral ambiguity of the ending. It just isn’t earned.
I’m not convinced that Reckless Engineering thought about very much besides its mad idea for the end of civilisation. On a character level it’s stop-start at best. Fitz is going through an interesting transition, but that mostly comes too late in the book to convince, and in any case it touches on things that boringly always seem to happen to him. (A different life away from the TARDIS, not sure which of his memories are real? Fancy.) Anji gets in some good yell-at-the-Doctor indignance, some of which is earned since he on two separate occasions uncharacteristically leaves her for dead. That said, her moral compass could do with some recalibrating: the bit where she talks about a morally grey cannibal dismisses the scene pages earlier where he admits to also being a rapist. Better is her outrage at the Doctor’s apparent sacrifice of a man to get them where they need to go, but her extrapolation afterwards that the Doctor would throw away all their lives is a bit far-fetched, as well as being yet another beat that was already covered in The Domino Effect.
It’s fair to say that the Doctor is unloveable in this, lacking many opportunities for charm and occasionally letting his companions down. (Even Fitz’s malaise is partly his fault, the Doctor having taken him at his word and let him stay behind, worsening his condition. For a moment Fitz regrets his choice. If only he’d waited…) The closest we have to positives here are a quite touching scene where he soothes a young woman affected by the Cleansing, and his general demeanour around Brunel once he’s collected from the past and brought into the TARDIS. (You knew they couldn’t resist.) His enthusiasm feels like his old self again. If the purpose of his journey overall is to paint a morally dubious character then it’s unconvincing – he simply seems a bit messy here, working in service of a moral dilemma that’s stacked to fall one way regardless of anybody’s feelings. Which, as established, ought largely to be of the “Good, this place sucks, dump it” variety, since no particular case is made for why anyone should be (or is) happy here.
The plot ticks along necessarily but without flair – it all feels like an excuse for the Cleansing rather than an interesting reason that enhances it. Too much exposition is required, even at times on a character level as some of them tell their life stories back-to-back. As we near the end, inevitably suspecting that reset button, Walters brings in nefarious alien beings and a Device Of Doom; we’re suddenly encouraged to worry about the end of the universe, despite all universes already being on the block when we got here. Mercifully this is blustered away in time for Fitz and Anji to do some finger-wagging, and then it’s back to 2003 for you’ll-never-guess-what. The only scrap of all this that matters is the darkness of the Doctor, but since no one presents him with a compelling counter-argument to their own non-existence, which would be the result of his not doing these uncomfortable things, I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
Reckless Engineering is another EDA that speeds by harmlessly enough. It makes for a more satisfying whole than The Domino Effect and it tries to do something with its reset ending – how successfully, I’m not sure. It doesn’t however break this cycle of self-defeating arc books that make me long for the variety of the PDAs. Once a safe companion piece to more forward-facing Doctor Who stories, they’re now the ones defiantly unsaddled with what Fitz here calls “temporal bollocks”. I wish the EDAs luck on their next landing; may they get us the hell outta here, sooner rather than later.
4/10
PS: No Sabbath! Party hats!
