Doctor Who: The BBC Books #50 – Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#24

Autumn Mist

By David A. McIntee

New writer!

Well, okay, that’s a stretch. This was his tenth Doctor Who book — he must have been running out of room for his proverbial “Bought The” t-shirts — but nevertheless it’s the first and only Eighth Doctor book by David A. McIntee, so it carries a sort of novelty value for the writer and for the range.

There’s some novelty in the placement of the book as well. Not that readers in 1999 necessarily knew this, but we’re in the last gasp of the Sam Jones era, with her final adventure(s) coming right after this one. Autumn Mist sort of nods towards that imminent sea change, before very directly addressing it at the end. (It would be a stretch, however, to say the book is about that.)

While we’re looking for these things, I’d say there’s also something special about the characters in Autumn Mist. Always a fan of something he can research, McIntee uses as a starting point the Sidhe (pronounced “shee” according to Google) from Irish folklore; fairy folk, in other words. While he goes to some pains to make them a realistic presence in the story, explaining that they are as much from Earth as we are but they exist in multiple dimensions compared to our measly four, there’s something incongruous about fairies or elves in a Doctor Who story. It’s not the first time we’ve flirted with the fantasy genre (Witch Mark was… an attempt) but it helps us mark out Autumn Mist from the rest of the range.

McIntee was perhaps keen to try new things after writing so many books. Sure enough though, some of his recognisable interests or habits are on display here. It’s another historical novel, set during the Battle of the Bulge (so, Belgium) in late 1944. The action concerns people on both sides of the conflict, which means we can get a decent amount of detail on weapons and vehicles. (It’s the sort of thing that’s cool if you’re into it, grit your teeth and get through it if not.) Autumn Mist is a rare lapse for McIntee, however, in that the location is not strongly felt beyond generally being some cold woods near an abandoned town. There aren’t any locals to demonstrate what it is that makes this their home, and all the soldiers regardless of their allegiance want to be somewhere else. You could pick a different moment in the war for this story, in other words — maybe even a different war. (I wonder if some of that vagueness is down to me as a reader. There’s an implication early on of characters being transported somewhere else. After that happened, I think on some level I assumed this wasn’t going to be “true” history after all. Oh well, it is!)

You’ll have guessed this just from the war setting, but it’s a story with a lot of action — another McIntee staple, and a reliable one. Not long after the TARDIS lands the main trio are separated (from the TARDIS as well as from each other) and there’s something breathless about their one-thing-after-another endeavours. The characters are rarely far from a sudden ambush or a catastrophe, with soldiers getting killed left and right, and brutal violence being aimed at everyone including the regulars. The book’s final stretch is an onslaught of action that casually dispenses with several major characters — so casually that it threatens to transcend “war is unfair” commentary and just feel a tad underwritten, in all honesty, but he might well have meant to do that. The book’s deaths at least allow for some of McIntee’s trademark “put you in the moment” writing, like an early observation that someone’s “blood had stopped dripping … and had frozen into red icicles”; a massacre of the wounded seen from a terrifyingly close perspective; and one memorable death we’ll get to later.

The book is naturally a showcase for that often used habit of breaking up the action into short sections — hardly unique to McIntee, although he is very known for it. I think Autumn Mist keeps a tight lid on it, however, often using these little resets for something good. They can shift our perspective to the person on the other side of a conflict, or zoom us in a bit closer to one of the regulars who’s just out of shot in their own storyline. Then there’s the Sidhe, who exist on different planes of reality, meaning that McIntee can break up a page just so they can have a private conversation that the other person in the room can’t hear. That’s an elegant use of simple page formatting.

It’s tempting to talk about the nuts and bolts of Autumn Mist instead of the bigger picture, I suspect because the bigger picture isn’t hugely interesting. Something is interfering with the war effort in Bastogne: strange figures are causing people to see things and bodies to disappear. Something, or multiple somethings are communicating with the leaders on both sides — Lewis and Leitz are both found talking to invisible benefactors in their offices, encouraging them to work against their best interests.

A fair bit of this feels uncomfortably close to The War Games, and combined with the less-than-usually-well-defined historical setting it feels a bit blah as a setup in its own right. The character writing contributes to this, with the Americans getting at least some degree of definition (usually a hard-bitten desire to get the hell outta this mess) but the Germans barely featuring as characters. Too often they seem like unpleasant or psychotic baddies in a war film, or even just crash dummies, rather than people. Lewis and Leitz have similar names, probably for a bit of “all the same in war” theme, but it doesn’t help much with reading comprehension when they have similar aims too.

Beyond the war stuff we have the Sidhe, spooky ethereal weirdos who are experiencing problems because of the war. They’re definitely an interesting presence, one that I’d be interested in hearing more about in other books — I love this spin on the old “humans vs Silurians” dilemma where the “aliens” are so beyond us that we hardly matter to them. But as characters they’re not much, breaking down into a good Queen (Titania), a bad King (Oberon) and a guy who’s just there to share scenes with Sam (Galastel). Apart from a nameless unhappy Sidhe at one point held captive, there’s no visceral sense that they are endangered by what is happening to them; the very ethereal quality that defines them makes them problematic as protagonists. The closest we have to character traits are Titania’s flirtations with the Doctor and Oberon’s (sigh) villainy for the sake of it. His motivations are helpfully guessed at by the Doctor and he suffers a very typical baddie fate in the end. He was the least interesting Sidhe despite having the most plot.

As to the plot, McIntee toys with this quite charmingly when the Doctor explains things to the soldiers: “I can call it ‘magic’, with all the nice feelings of wonderment that that word inspires; or I can waste your time with half an hour of technobabble that you could never possibly understand a word of anyway. Which would you prefer?” I like that a lot — the Doctor writing is generally good in this, particular the description of him as “just a normal guy from a different planet” — but the book leans more technobabble regardless, with the plight of the Sidhe being a little vague and the eventual resolution being a lot of strained, dramatically removed faff involving different dimensions. (Fun fact: the nature of the rift [the thing causing all the ruckus] ties in with The Taint, of all books, but if you’re at all excited by the microscopic organisms from that story then don’t be: he finds no narrative way to make them interesting in Autumn Mist and barely refers to them anyway, so he might as well have made up his own thing out of whole cloth.) The only simple thing about it is the degree to which they need to dredge up the TARDIS in order to fix it, but that retroactively makes dumping it underwater feel like an excuse to make the book longer rather than an interesting challenge. Not to mention, “plug the TARDIS into it” isn’t a very high bar for a genius like the Doctor.

The Doctor is, at least, pretty well written here. He convincingly ingratiates himself with the Americans (not many opportunities to win over the Germans, alas) and he has that typical for McGann isn’t-he-handsome encounter with Titania, but we do miss a few opportunities along the way, such as a bit of potential grief (we’ll get to it) and the fact that he seems altogether blasé about the deaths of enemy soldiers.

Fitz has a much better time here, and he pretty much steals the show. Finding himself behind enemy lines (but thanks to the TARDIS, able to speak German) he somewhat sidesteps the awkwardness he feels about his German heritage and carries out some slightly Doctorish action without any prompting. There’s a marvellous bit where he tries explaining things partly by making them up (“it was kind of fun; no wonder the Doctor behaved like this so often”); there’s a whole sequence where he rescues a Sidhe because it’s what Sam would have done (“Sam would be proud of me, he thought. Go free, strange thing”); and when cornered by Americans, conscious of his historically suspect name, he immediately flips it to “James Bond”.

There’s a good amount of continuity with earlier books, although it’s pretty much all surface level. He’s worried about the implications of sleeping with Other Sam (barely anything is said about it, next) and when confronted with the Taint creatures he reflects that he’d really rather stop them so they can’t kill his mum and stuff, but oh well, can’t do that, next. Hey ho, there’s enough for us to confidently point at him and say, that’s Fitz all right. Autumn Mist is another good showcase for him as an offbeat companion.

Is it a good showcase for Sam? Well, I don’t think McIntee does a bad job of writing her, although she spends entirely too much of the book being somewhere else. (At one point she’s replaced by a duplicate — this again, huh? — and even the fake Sam mostly keeps quiet.) Her wit is present and correct. There are problems with her story, though.

McIntee was, according to Steve Cole, “very keen to kill Sam”. He’s not the first, so automatically that wouldn’t have much weight to do again, but the decision to have her murdered partway through Autumn Mist is a puzzling one. (NB: she gets better.) It’s unlikely to convince anyone that the Eighth Doctor’s best friend is dead for a couple of reasons. You do that sort of thing at the end, surely? The fact that it’s not is surely suggestive. And haven’t we done it before? Not just the killing her off part (The Janus Conjunction, Beltempest) but the aftershocks. This is the third book in a row (!) that tries to put the Doctor through the emotional wringer over losing his friend. He seemed discombobulated in Dominion; he was forced to confront it from another angle in Unnatural History; here, he’s simply a bit sad and accepting, even seeming cold to an American observer, and then he’s happy when it turns out she survived. Is he simply exhausted from feeling this way again and again? Was he hedging his bets, since she normally turns out all right in the end? I dunno, just as I don’t know if this particular repetition across the books was deliberate and intended to achieve something. Beyond McIntee’s reliably visceral description, however, and her well written Sidhe encounter afterwards, it’s a very ineffective beat.

Somewhat impressively, death isn’t her most noteworthy event in the book. Steve Cole contributed much or all of the final two pages, in which Sam abruptly says she wants to go home. Was it the death-followed-by-resurrection? The near miss with rape by German soldiers? The simple fact of death occurring all around her, again, and that finally hitting a tipping point? I’ll be honest, there are plenty of things in Autumn Mist that could set the stage for this decision. But there’s no through line in the text. (Other than her death, and that’s much more the universe tapping its watch than her doing so.) Sam, on the occasions when she is in this, does not seem to be weighing up her life and where to live it. Yes, she has a thoroughly miserable time in the book, but (apart from, y’know, dying) there isn’t anything here that says this should be the one that changes everything. She just says it and — for poignancy, but also inevitably because there’s less than a page to go — the Doctor barely reacts. That’s it.

This could absolutely have worked if it had been a prominent theme in the book. Instead, it’s a very obvious substitution by someone other than the author; a cheap soap opera cliffhanger instead of a heartbreak. Let’s hope Sam is able to really feel this and make something of it in her swansong — and let’s hope the editorial notes move more towards suggestions for changes than “give it here, let me do it.”

Despite complaints, I liked Autumn Mist. I think McIntee’s writing is quite strong in places, showing off some of his better qualities. The story however doesn’t get off the leash. The fantasy elements could be more pronounced, as could the historical ones. (The tie-in with the Philadelphia Experiment got a laugh out of me, at least.) He clearly can write for these characters, which makes it rather a pity he didn’t do so again; it’s just the choice of what to do with those characters that occasionally lets them down. At least they weren’t all his choices.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #49 – Storm Harvest by Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#23

Storm Harvest

By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

The latest effort from Robert Perry & Mike Tucker opens with a dedication to Mark Morris: “for making us find a title without ‘deep’ or ‘blue’ in it.” This is rather apt as their book has some things in common with Deep Blue. Storm Harvest is another grisly, but otherwise traditional-as-all-heck monster mash. It’s another one that features bloodthirsty creatures from the deep. It’s another one that I read and enjoyed when it was first published and — happily — it’s another one that has more or less held up.

We’re following on directly from Matrix, so it’s understandable that the Doctor and Ace are in dire need of a holiday. They pick the ocean world of Coralee, which unbeknownst to them is not having its best summer ever. Ships are sinking without warning. A strange creature has been sighted around the colony’s control centre. A spaceship lurks nearby and its crew are itching to come and cause trouble and before long, everyone on Coralee will be at risk from the Krill — ravenous monsters that make the Daleks seem open to negotiations. Oh, and they’re due for a hurricane.

There’s bags of grisly incident to be getting on with. One area that distinguishes it however from Mark Morris’s latest is the characterisation. Perry & Tucker wrote their own potted Season 27 within the Past Doctor Adventures, with all their books following on from each other and several even having started life as scripts. That added continuity between novels means that we don’t have so much of the disposability that comes with a storytelling chocolate box like the PDAs. We can — hooray! — pick up on some of the trauma from earlier books.

But only some. There are references to how guilty the Doctor feels about almost murdering Ace before, and to what he almost became in that book. Ace, in turn, has a bit of mental processing to do about all this. We politely sidestep the possibility that he was the one actually committing the Ripper murders, which I suppose means that he definitively wasn’t; meanwhile, I couldn’t see any mention of the murder definitely committed by Ace, which seems to me like money on the table. Why write things like that and then drop them?

Her main drive in the novel is to support the Doctor and “to prove to [him] that he could rely on her.” She even gives him a pep talk, although she later has a brief unconvincing wobble with “Once again the Time Lord had arrived and taken control of people’s lives” before flipping back the other way because, somewhat implausibly, she believes she’s manipulating people too. I wonder if she’s just compartmentalising her feelings the way the Doctor does with necessary evils: when things get dangerous he creates “a space in his subconscious, a place into which he would push all the guilt when the time and opportunity came to destroy [the Krill].” Could Ace be parking her concerns because she feels sorry for his struggles in Matrix, and wants to give him the benefit of the doubt? (Let’s call that one headcanon, shall we? These books might be ersatz New Adventures in terms of when the stories take place, but that’s about as far as the parallel goes. Storm Harvest, while we’re on the subject, lacks the vintage NA weirdness of Matrix, being a lot more in line with their earlier gore-fest Illegal Alien.)

It’s tempting to say this is an interesting one for the Doctor. Still reeling from his identity crisis in Matrix, he’s immediately placed into danger here, but he has that moment of consideration (or at least compartmentalisation) for the Krill, and when he’s in the middle of a humans-vs-(not Krill) aliens uprising he’s forced to not pick sides, watching various humans die as a result. He escapes certain death by the skin of his teeth at least twice. Overall, he somewhat lacks his usual power and self-assurance, and because these books are a series within a series, it’s at least possible that they are Doing A Thing.

There’s some decent characterisation in the supporting cast, mostly in the (I use the term loosely) Malcolm Hulke-ian sense that members of a group or a species can act in individual ways. The aforementioned spaceship is controlled by the Cythosi, a group of hulking marauders who use humans as slaves and want to use the Krill as a biological weapon. Their leader Mottrack is as unpleasant as you could imagine, but second in command Bisoncawl has some layers, rejecting cruelty against the slaves and having an appreciation for art. The slaves are on the brink of a revolution but there are different views held within that, some (like Peck) being absolutely bloodthirsty and others (like Bavril) being more interested in a measured peace. One critical character is an undercover Cythosi, losing his physical shape and his mind flipping between one species and another — his loyalties fluctuate too, throwing multiple plans into chaos. There are also “cetaceans”, aka sentient dolphins that travel over land in a mechanical apparatus: two friendly ones can be found on Coralee helping various parties, while another is aboard the Cythosi ship aiding their attack out of a passionate hatred for land dwellers. (If you think that sounds like the Selachians, you’re right, it does. Given that the original angry underwater guys return in the next PDA, I’m surprised that the editors didn’t call attention to the similarities.)

The characterisation has its downsides — namely, a few too many characters, perhaps to better facilitate the differences between them. (Not to mention, a body count.) There are two experts on all things Coralee, who go on separate undersea expeditions at the same time, each with their own cetacean on board; I got confused flipping between boats. There are two female authority figures, both with a weight of responsibility that is tested by tragedy. (Helpfully, they are friends.) And there is Rajiid, someone Ace meets and — hey, we’re all grown ups — sleeps with. I like that Ace has reached a point where she’s confident enough to hook up with someone on her travels, but Rajiid really seems to be here just so her subplot (trying to retrieve a weapon that will stop the Krill) includes someone to talk to. I never learned anything substantive about Rajiid (or Greg, his partner in the boat tour business who until I checked just now I could swear was called Guy); Ace’s momentary consideration of inviting him about the TARDIS feels generous to say the least.

It’s perhaps fair to assume that people aren’t reading Storm Harvest for the characterisation. If they are then good, because there is some, but much more importantly: this is a novel where all involved were so excited about the monster that it was built and photographed for the cover. (The perks of commissioning a prop guru to write it!) I have no idea how the Krill might have been realised on screen, at least once you get past seeing the things; their sheer bloodthirsty frenzy would test a BBC budget as much as it would the censors. They work great in a novel though, initially as an unseen menace similar to the Sea Devils, then later as a relentless force that effectively puts any obstacle into a blender. They make for an excellent we’re-all-gonna-die level threat and there are some marvellous set pieces built around them, particularly a couple of tense submarine encounters and a horrible penny-drop moment involving an underwater tunnel.

I think Perry & Tucker realised that you can’t have all Krill all the time, however — they can’t be reasoned with so you either stop them, or you escape, or everybody’s dead and your story’s over. So we have some added machinations involving the Cythosi (an interesting but physically less clearly-defined menace) and the Dreekans (four arms and uh, not many other characteristics — look, the Krill are great). The plot is neatly worked out so that it makes sense we’re spinning more plates than just “look out, Krill”, but it must be said that if there is a weapon that will kill only Krill then potential modification of said weapon to kill whoever you like seems far more useful than the Krill themselves.

Ah well. Perry & Tucker moderate the Krill and thus leave room for suspense, as a threat like that means you always know what’s at stake. The setting makes for a very appealing base under siege: the colony is one of the rare pieces of land on this ocean world, making it uniquely vulnerable to aquatic attack. Scenes of them literally battening down the hatches in anticipation of a Krill attack and/or a hurricane practically ooze atmosphere, and made me wish there was an audiobook version of this with sound effects. The various ebbs and flows of violence are generally well apportioned; the authors do a good job of pulling back before the various onslaughts become monotonous, and — in figures like Ace and Holly — they make the chaos feel personal. It only occasionally goes a bit too far, such as a ritual killing that mostly just serves to thin the character roster and depress Ace.

Storm Harvest is unashamedly a giddy monstrous onslaught, and if you have the slightest inclination towards that sort of thing then you’ll want to batten down the hatches and ride it out.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #48 – Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#23

Unnatural History

By Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

The era of Sam Jones is almost over, but lucky us, there was another Blum & Orman book down the back of the sofa.

I doubt it’s in any way controversial to say that these guys write the best Sam stuff. It’s not that they’re the only ones who are good at it — Paul Leonard and Lawrence Miles are no slouches, and most EDA writers at least get the basics right. However, Blum & Orman seem the most actually interested in writing for Sam. They don’t just do it well, they make it the whole assignment. Vampire Science showed us what kind of Doctor/companion team we had now. Seeing I showed us how much they had grown. Unnatural History toys with the idea of not having Sam any more — perhaps more meaningfully so than the brief stretch of books where she actually left — and in doing so, it tells us in more certain terms why she is here, and what that means to her and to her friends.

I’m sure you’re as bored of me banging this drum as I am, so I’ll be quick: BBC Books rushed Sam’s introduction, and then never stopped paying for it. Sam just seemed like a cookie cutter companion, which left multiple authors unsure what to do with her apart from the obvious. Here was a 90s Ace, only without any trauma to fuel her actions. (Ah, I can already hear you saying, but that’s where the books come in. Cue multiple trips to the hospital for Ms. Jones…) She does what she does because that’s just what Doctor Who companions do, which makes absolute sense in a nuts-and-bolts storytelling way, but doesn’t do you any favours in a long-running series.

Was it always the plan for that sort of shiny blandness to be a deliberate act, in-canon? Some of Sam’s behaviour in The Bodysnatchers could be construed as an early hint. By the time of Alien Bodies, anyway, it was officially rubber stamped that she had a second set of biodata — another life, in other words, where she has dark hair and a drug habit. The Sam that we see in the books could suddenly be excused as not entirely whole; maybe there was another one out there to put her in context. But why? And would we ever see how the other half lived? Multiple books have since reminded us about Dark Sam — as she is somewhat portentously known, erroneously suggesting a goatee and a volcano lair — dropping occasional references just to keep the engine running. I tended to assume Lawrence Miles would be the one to pick up the thread proper.

Clearly he will to some extent, as some important questions are left hanging at the end of Unnatural History, as much concerning the Doctor as his oddly duplicated friend. In the meantime though, Blum & Orman take the opportunity to write The proverbial Dark Sam Book and, being Blum & Orman, get as much Samness out of it as possible.

How they go about this might raise a few eyebrows. Sam is gone: something finally snapped in her biodata and our Sam has been supplanted by her dark-haired equivalent, still very much Earthbound and not the person we know at all. The story opens with the Doctor, sounding much like a crazy person, trying to wrangle her help. (I love when stories start already on the move, and this one in particular made me laugh because of course page 1 of the final Blum & Orman book has someone turn up and say they know Sam Jones really well.)

In quick succession we meet Sam’s parents, who we learn have been receiving our Sam’s postcards whilst actually knowing other Sam* instead (*sorry, I can’t type “Dark Sam” with a straight face, I’ll stick with “other”) which suggests that this isn’t a sudden switchover at all, but rather a mess that goes backwards and forwards in time. It also makes a minor virtue of the slightly aggravating EDA habit of not visiting Sam’s parents or even really acknowledging the absence of their daughter: now, we couldn’t have gone back there without inviting a colossal mess. (Or maybe we could have. Don’t worry about it; certainties are not all they’re cracked up to be, at least in this one.)

We then encounter a member of Faction Paradox trying to get hold of Sam. (That messy biodata means a juicy paradox for them.) When the Doctor saves her life, that settles it, she’ll go with him — giving us arguably a more fully-formed companion intro than the one afforded to our Sam the first time around. Next stop, San Francisco, where our Sam went missing and things generally are in a bit of a state.

It’s quite daring to stick Sam, as in the proper one, in a separate dimension for almost the entire book. You might assume this derives from the same impulse as those authors who do their best to sideline her, but no: by replacing Sam with an almost-but-not-quite copy we can see the gap she leaves behind. Other Sam does this directly at times, commenting (usually with some bitterness) on the apparent perfection of her “goodie two-shoes” alter ego. “Was that all? Blonde Sam would probably have picked the kid up and carried him to the nearest police station so he could phone his mummy.” (Ahem, Beltempest.)

She doesn’t know the shorthand between the Doctor and her blonde self (putting her ironically in the same position as Fitz when he first joined), and lacks her immediately heroic instincts. She isn’t remotely as skittish about sex and romance with her two attractive male companions, giving the Doctor a massage that would have sent her primary self into therapy, and finding a human comfort with Fitz that would have been out of the question otherwise. She’s about as sarcastic as the more usual Sam, but here it doesn’t jar against an apparent starry-eyed commitment to her place in the TARDIS. (Other Sam, along with Blum & Orman it must be said, rather undersells Sam’s propensity for moaning all the bloody time.)

There’s a wonderful kind of mess about this Sam that is lived-in and deserving of life: she’s not a mistake, she’s just different, and coming from less overtly plucky beginnings has the effect of making her heroism (when it arrives) feel at least as earned as anything our Sam has done, if not more so because it’s so far out of her comfort zone. Other Sam has the opportunity to see what kind of life she could be living and she can honestly aspire to it because she’s seen the alternative. It helps our Sam make a kind of sense she didn’t before. At least someone’s out here reaching these decisions for actual quantifiable reasons, in effect repeating that opening “why yes I will go with you” set-piece on a bigger canvas.

Urgh. I’m going to say the thing, aren’t I? Yes, I think I prefer other Sam. I’m not convinced the deliberate falseness/double-biodata thing was always the plan, but either way, this version of the character plays out important beats in a more grounded and believable way. When she is placed in a moment of crisis at the end her heroic act has real weight; we can trace her journey from normal person to active protagonist. It’s deliberately heart-breaking that there isn’t room in this world for both Sams, but it’s perhaps more upsetting than was originally intended that it has to be this way around. The assignment could, I suppose, be considered a bit of a backfire as it’s not so much affirming what we’ve already got as showing us how much better this all could have been to start with. But I think this speaks more to the series’ handling of, or at least my enjoyment of the character as a whole. Ultimately Other Sam is Sam, and what Blum & Orman carve out of Sam(s) is really only confirmation that you can write depths within Sam Jones if you want to.

That’s not only true of Sam here. Unnatural History is an important outing for the rest of the TARDIS crew, continuing that process of showing us something by examining the gap it leaves behind. The Doctor and Fitz are clearly moved by the loss of their friend; an awkwardness hangs in the air as they implore her to help, all three knowing the optimal outcome here is that she will ultimately give up her existence for her better half.

Fitz is written at his best in the series so far, perhaps in part because he has that absence to work with, the better to define himself. He feels like a fully integrated member of the team, using his specific skills — mainly theatricality, also an irresistible amiability — to find out information. There’s a feeling that he really wants to be doing this, he knows he is putting these skills to good use. His usual brand of horny nonsense won’t work with this Sam, however, as she is more on his level to begin with, short-circuiting his gags. There’s a tangible sense that he misses his friend, but that he more strongly connects with this one. When they eventually sleep together it feels utterly natural, while also giving an outlet to Fitz’s sensitivity, as he supports Sam while her biodata keeps fritzing. (Something that occurs throughout the book, suddenly remixing Sam’s past and making her into someone new.)

He also has a moment or two of great heroism in this, and again these feel like they come from a real place, not just him signing up for the TARDIS life. Blum & Orman get mileage out of Fitz’s brainwashing in Revolution Man, itself an ideology with no basis in character — something not unlike Sam being a certain kind of way without having truly earned it as a person. When the Sams inevitably swap back at the end, and our Sam attempts to comfort him, Fitz’s familiar bitterness resurfaces for a moment; that cynicism, too, is made to feel more earned.

There’s a lot going on with the Doctor as well. (Indeed, you could write a book about it.) The plot and setting, surprisingly for a book so focussed on Sam, are really all about him. After the damaging events of the TV Movie a scar has been left in San Francisco, pouring out strands of the Doctor’s biodata and causing instability between realms, as well as in the city at large. Seemingly mythical creatures are roaming the neighbourhood while Faction Paradox, strange grey men and an even more sinister gentleman all observe. The TARDIS is as lost as Sam, put to work out of sight in a desperate bid to keep the “scar” from collapsing and causing total chaos. Before long a literal Kraken will awake and destroy the city, not to mention the Doctor’s biodata — and possibly his past and future.

First of all, how immensely cool and totally insane is it to revisit the TV Movie? We’re talking about a full on sequel to something legally off-limits for BBC Books (novelisation notwithstanding), and they went ahead and did it anyway. It gets really good mileage out of it too, building upon that earlier script’s scattershot weirdnesses like windows you can walk through to give us steep hills with varying gravity and unicorns, casual-as-you-like.

The concept of the Doctor’s biodata, torn apart by the Master’s machinations in that earlier story, allows us to dig into a few grand ideas about his heritage — not least of which is that blasted half-human thing, now fully recognised as a twist of the timelines, one possibility of many, and if nothing else the sort of inconsistency Faction Paradox eats for breakfast. Unnatural History is at times as nerdy as it is character-focused, throwing in among other things the fanbait mystery of Daniel Joyce (and his assistant who shares a name with someone in The Infinity Doctors), but there is meaning in how it for example juggles contradictory factoids about the Doctor, and makes the villain an obsessive categoriser who wants only to get his facts straight, someone “not interested in specimens that don’t confirm the theories he already knows. None of this messy ambiguity or complexity.” Griffin the “unnaturalist” is an archetype perhaps familiar to dwellers in fandom, but he also embodies the novel’s refusal to say that a person is one thing or another, just as simple as that. It’s a book about possibilities and uncertainties.

The Doctor is having a fairly terrible time here, having lost the TARDIS and Sam — again, it must be said, due to that unfortunate synchronicity with Dominion. (The authors do their best to recognise this but it still feels way too soon.) For what it’s worth, Unnatural History does it better by not having the Doctor at the whim of some agency for most of it and instead forcing him to confront and/or work around what he’s lost from the get go. Other Sam sees him struggling to cope aboard a plane — a little hint of the cabin fever he gets without a TARDIS, or simply being in one place at a time — and then generally leaving little things unsaid about his intentions towards her. She believes (in a thrillingly bleak moment) that he might simply throw her into the scar to get “his” Sam back. We can be in no doubt that he wants that outcome, but things are already too complicated to get it. His actions just before something like that finally happens leave a question in the air — did he engineer it? — and he refuses to answer, defiant that this uncertainty is part of who he is. There’s a rawness to how much he needs Sam and the TARDIS back, pleading with Joyce to hurry up and fix a gizmo that will aid him, negotiating with (and later ripping vicious strips off of) Faction Paradox, and at one point seemingly lying to the TARDIS itself that he won’t ultimately sacrifice it to save the city. Even he doesn’t seem to know sometimes — although to be fair, this close to the biodata equivalent of a random number generator, who would know for sure?

The Doctor’s ongoing crisis would perhaps be more satisfying if we hadn’t just had a very similar one before this — losing the TARDIS and Sam both times, for Pete’s sake — but again, it’s how you do it, and the situation here goes on to become a broader thesis on who the Doctor is; it makes the point that a loss of history won’t change who he is, he already changes fundamental tenets of himself just by regenerating; he must always cling to who he is now. This Doctor in particular discovered a foundational sort of happiness by forgetting his past. The story also, of course, demonstrates exactly how he’s come to depend on Sam when there are situations that visibly throw him and Fitz into disarray (or in Fitz’s case, heroic action) without her. It all comes back to that.

There’s heaps and heaps to think about, most of which I’ve hardly touched upon here. As I was reading it I was thinking about what I’d get out of it a second time. That said, Unnatural History isn’t perfect. For all the imagination of a San Francisco in this sort of cosmic disarray, there doesn’t seem to be room to meaningfully show it. The city feels incredibly small, with the action frequently ping-ponging back to the same alley with a special effect in it. We are told of things like dragons and unicorns but only briefly see them, and hardly see the reactions of the regular populace at all — there’s barely a supporting cast at that, although that’s perhaps deliberate in a character piece.

As fun as it is to throw out a mystery like Who Is This Daniel Joyce Guy Anyway (sources differ but it seems you can trust TARDIS Wiki here) it can be unpleasantly disorienting to wonder if you’ve forgotten something or someone from another book — and he’s certainly written in that way, just matter-of-factly being sought out by the Doctor. Blum & Orman are keen to play ball with ongoing plot arcs, toying cleverly with the question of who started this Sam biodata business and throwing out conflicting theories before definitively half-answering it (over to you, Lawrence), but some of this stuff does border on homework, which may or may not be your cup of tea. Mileage, and memory capacity may vary. (I’ve read The Infinity Doctors twice and I still missed some of the overlap in this. TARDIS Wiki ahoy.)

How much any of that matters (or is even true) will vary among readers, of course. I think there’s also a belief in some corners that the plot isn’t particularly strong. I have some sympathy with that, as there is a problem to solve here and there is a very nasty character seeking to gain from it, but everything that’s happening is really fallout from something else. Again though — does that matter? Unnatural History is all about the characters and the importance of understanding who they are in the moment. Surrounding them with chaos, not unlike replacing them with an imperfect copy, only serves to underline what matters.

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #47 – Millennium Shock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#22

Millennium Shock

By Justin Richards

Justin Richards is famed for his reliability as a writer. There can be few greater examples of this than Millennium Shock, written at short notice to fill a gap and reportedly turned around in a matter of weeks. He makes this sort of thing look bafflingly easy, first doing this and then putting out a critical Bernice novel the following month, a BBC Book only 2 months prior, and later the same year pulling another quick turnaround to fill a gap for Virgin. At some point we must face the possibility that there was simply two of him all along.

Of course, a quick turnaround is all very nice — especially for the publisher! — but all that matters to the reader is whether the book is any good. There are reasons to suspect that Millennium Shock won’t be. There’s the aforementioned turnaround, although the reader shouldn’t be aware of that. And there’s the fact that it’s a sequel — a surprisingly rare commodity in Doctor Who noveldom, unless you count multi-book arcs or linked books such as Blood Harvest/Goth Opera and Shakedown/Lords Of The Storm. It’s even rarer for bridging Virgin and BBC Books — see also Business Unusual, at least, which revisits baddies but with a different Doctor.

Millennium Shock is more your sort of direct sequel. And by direct I mean it literally begins with the last scene of System Shock, albeit slightly expanded. The main action takes place immediately after that, making this arguably just the next 280 pages of System Shock. The entire plot that follows revolves around a pen that happened to be mentioned on that final page.

If all of this sounds like a desperate Hail Mary just to squeeze another book out of something, anything, well to be honest it probably was. But Millennium Shock doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that, picking up the gauntlet of “what happened next” and running with it at full pelt. The pace is crazy, but in a good way: the story stays on track and there isn’t so much of the author’s occasional chopping and changing of scenes and characters. I suspect there wasn’t time to spin that many plates in this one.

Richards, a noted programming enthusiast, would inevitably have been inspired by millennium angst. He uses that to power his latest plot for the Voracians, the semi-cybernetic snake people from System Shock. Still fixated on the ruling power of technology and still keen to release their all-powerful program Voractyll, they are now working within the government to circumvent efforts to fix the millennium bug, which will naturally create a chaotic vacuum they can fill. Said bug is a real gift to the novel — the baddies hardly even need their own weapon since they can just ensure that a problem already happening will run its course. This is a very fun way to incorporate real history into a story. (Or rather, given the publication date, current events. There’s an element of catastrophising in painting such a gloomy what if about the millennium, but that must have been irresistible at the time.)

Millennium Shock has a similar, if not quite as uncanny sense of timing to System Shock: the prior book placed its 70s characters in a fictional 1998, which at the time was 3 years in the future. We’ve still got a 70s character in this one (the Fourth Doctor, travelling solo this time) but he’s in what at time of publication was the present day. There’s still a novelty to that, just as there would be from having him show up in 2025. (The “modern day” for a TARDIS crew is always when they were filming, for obvious reasons.) Of course he manages to fit in easily among the technology of the day, at once being innocently perplexed by energy-saving dimmer switches and running rings around modern programmers.

Richards wrote very well for this Doctor in System Shock and there’s more of that here, such as a scene where he goes “undercover” (“He was in disguise, of course, hat in pocket and scarf tucked away inside his coat”), various moments of winning verbal playfulness (“‘Now,’ [the Doctor] said, ‘tell me, are you one of the people who’s breaking in, or are you as surprised at what’s going on as I am?’”) and in a great pratfall making use of sound in a way Richards would later revisit in The Joy Device. “Behind him the door rocked precariously near the edge of the stair. ‘Well done, Doctor,’ he congratulated himself as he passed the fifth floor. ‘No one will ever guess you were here.’ … ‘What was that?’ Bardell demanded. They had all heard the noise. Clark shook his head and shrugged. ‘It sounded like something heavy falling down a flight of stairs.’”

The Doctor wins people over with his (for want of a less hokey word) bohemian charm, aided by what can only be described as a book that isn’t remotely interested in messing about. There’s very little obstinacy among the government officials who aren’t Voracians, with one noting re the Doctor’s tall tales that “It actually makes no odds. Whether we believe the Doctor’s story or not, we are faced with the same problems, so I suggest we leave the question of alien invasion for now and concentrate on the things we can believe and agree on.” It’s such a relief just to let the plot fly without all that usual time-wasting “do you honestly expect me to believe this” guff. Millennium Shock only occasionally threatens to trip over its own feet in the rush: there’s a sequence where a government official is murdered in a way that will frame Harry Sullivan, but it only seems to matter for a chapter or two and then the open-minded good guys sweep it away so quickly it almost wasn’t worth doing. Ah well.

Speaking of Harry, he’s on companion duty this time, only it’s “modern day” MI5 Harry. I found it quietly touching to visit an older Ian Marter in System Shock and that is still the case here, with more insight into his rather Spartan home life and the regrets that come with his line of work. The action really does tear along to the extent that we’re not exactly having long character conversations, but his easy rapport with the Doctor is a treat — there’s a marked maturity compared to his more chauvinistic youth, and it’s so far not been possible to pair the two of them without Sarah in tow, so that’s its own kind of treat.

Richards manages to build a little pathos into his characters who more often than not come to tragic ends. Harry’s young cleaner becomes somewhat pivotal to his story when she becomes a target, and the Doctor’s interactions with a converted programmer end up being decisive for victory, as well as rather sad because a man’s identity has disappeared. There’s a general pathos to the Voracians, even though they are plainly a piss-take of mindless corporate bureaucracy: it’s reliably funny to hear these megalomaniac cyborgs calmly spout bobbins like “If matters do seem to be exceeding control parameters then you are authorised to issue a termination notice” or “‘We do have a containment strategy for your approval.’ Cutter nodded, evidently pleased with this. ‘Then present it, Mr Bardell. You won’t get unwarranted pushback from me.’ ‘Very well, Mr Cutter. I won’t speak to charts, if that is all right.’ ‘Verbals are fine.’” Yet underneath all that, there is a sadness about these quasi-organic beings who can no longer access what they once were, who now are repulsed by basic things like food and water. It’s sort of an obvious avenue for a semi-artificial villain race, I suppose, and yet it’s distinct from how others like the Cybermen are written, focussing on that specific sense of distaste. Good work, although there’s a chance we’re covering similar (if not exactly the same) ground as System Shock with all this.

The prior book was 4 years old and well out of print when Millennium Shock came along, and it’s been even longer since I last read it, so I can perhaps forgive Richards for playing the hits. And he has other things to draw from, now he has more books under his belt, additionally fitting in another nuclear missile crisis after writing one in Option Lock. (While this one is a bit less heart-stopping, I thought it was far more convincingly woven into the plot.) I do think the timely story makes a case for this being truly its own book, and in any case I thought the pace of it worked better than the first go around, blowing all the dust out at every opportunity and maintaining a real sense of spy-novel fun throughout. How much of the frantic excitement of Millennium Shock is truly down to the time crunch I doubt we’ll ever know, but I like to think that Richards turned a (millennium) bug into a feature.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #46 – Dominion by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#22

Dominion

By Nick Walters

New author! Fetch bunting!

Well, strictly speaking Nick Walters isn’t entirely new to this as he previously co-wrote a Bernice Summerfield novel with Paul Leonard. However, whilst I really liked Dry Pilgrimage I struggled to pin down a writing style that was uniquely Walters. He reportedly wrote most of it, so he should take credit for a good book, but it sounded like Leonard, delving into the moral greys of its characters and the oddity of its aliens. None of that is a bad thing — I guess the two writers were paired with good reason. It just means that I didn’t know what to expect from him the next time.

His first solo novel Dominion still doesn’t leave me sure of that. It does a few things very well and it’s clear that effort has gone into it — I believe this is a writer keen to get the EDAs “right”. But as a novel, a statement of what the writer is like, it’s not much to go on.

There‘s some memorable action at the start. A new character, Kerstin, wakes up to find her rented Swedish lake house half vanished, and her partner Johan MIA. Her landlord Björn barely survives an encounter with a terrifying predator that somehow materialises on his farm. And Sam Jones — moments after her final disagreement with Fitz in Revolution Man — is torn out of the TARDIS by some sort of anomaly, crashing the ship in the process and expelling its two remaining occupants so it can recuperate. The Doctor and Fitz wander around local Sweden looking for help and, so they hope, Sam, but as we’ll find out later Sam is nowhere nearby.

I doubt I’m the first or even the fiftieth person to say that a lot of this feels like The X-Files, with spooky forests, weird alien manifestations and people disappearing into special effects. (Well it was 1999.) We bolt on even more of this when it appears there’s a conspiracy to contain these events, but this swings us helpfully back to Doctor Who as the shadowy force is revealed to be UNIT, or rather, UNIT-and-C19: the even shadier bunch first seen in the Virgin books (Who Killed Kennedy) and then ported to BBC Books (Business Unusual).

You’ll have noticed a fair bit of continuity so far. There’s quite a lot of that in Dominion, but I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm: references don’t seem to be made here in order to bolster the writer’s fan card, but rather to pull the worlds of these stories closer together and serve a purpose here and now. It’s UNIT and C19 because that then creates a specific tension when you add the Doctor into the equation. A nod to UNIT’s troubles in Kebiria is therefore a nod to Paul Leonard’s Dancing The Code, sure — and therefore to Virgin still being canon — but it’s also a usefully violent text to back up the mindset of the character in question.

We get stuff like the TARDIS butterfly room, because that’s a great EDA staple, but also because it can serve a specific purpose when some aliens need a zero-gee hideaway, as well as the “soul-catching” ability introduced in The Devil Goblins Of Neptune (also seen in The Taint) which further pulls together the PDAs and the EDAs, but also helps underline a specifically “Eighth Doctor” skill. He was established as clairvoyant in the TV Movie, a fact given rare scrutiny in Dominion as the sudden loss of that ability is a useful way to show us the effect of the Doctor’s separation from the TARDIS.

Walters seems very adept at characterising the regulars, but only up to a point. The Doctor is best served, being terribly but convincingly out of sorts because the TARDIS has locked him out both physically and mentally — he doubts himself, he can’t do certain useful tricks that have helped him before, and he is generally a bit of a raw nerve. The choice to have Sam and the TARDIS in mortal peril however means that it’s difficult to parse what’s actually bothering him at times, or rather, it’s difficult to believe that Sam is the major crisis for him when the TARDIS is so much clearer in his behaviour. When we do get nods towards the more human weight on his mind, particularly Kerstin wondering (based solely on his expression) if he’s in love with Sam, it doesn’t convince.

Fitz behaves more like a Doctor Who companion than we’re used to, which is great: he actively wonders what the Doctor would do in certain situations, then applies his own bullish equivalent. He seems fully mucked in for the most part, albeit he hasn’t learnt the Doctor and Sam’s weird little number codes. (Another little bit of continuity, usefully deployed to show that he still has progress to make.) Fitz is as haplessly horny as ever, immediately getting the inappropriate hots for the bereaved Kerstin whom he can’t help noticing looks like Sam. Paging Dr Freud. (For good measure, he later mistakes Sam for Kirsten.)

The only real downside with Fitz is that while Walters is very aware of Revolution Man, and keen to pick up the threads of Fitz’s experiences and turmoil in it — particularly his closing disagreement with Sam, traumatically curtailed in their first scene here — he never really runs with it. Fitz never reckons with his years of brainwashing and (Kerstin hots notwithstanding) he doesn’t have much to mull over about Sam and where she fits into all of this. He’s a likeable presence better aligned to the series than before, and Walters knows his stuff, peppering in references to what happened to Fitz’s mum in The Taint. But the story evidently can’t do it all.

Sam, of course, draws the “no two companions may occupy the same story” card — because god forbid we ever build this three character dynamic — and she spends fully 100 pages out of sight. When we pick up with her in the Dominion (the strange world that is inadvertently stealing people and replacing them with aliens) it’s a decent showcase for Walters’ world-building skills, conjuring something not unlike the stuff Jim Mortimore was doing in Parasite. But aside from making friends with a local and trying not to die, there isn’t much for Sam to do. You’d be forgiven for empathising with Fitz who, on page 231, realises he’s forgotten all about her.

I don’t know if Walters was consciously writing towards Sam’s departure but there seem to be hints towards it. There’s Kerstin, the pseudo-Sam who goes the whole hog and considers signing up to the TARDIS life at the end; she even theorises that she has two “selves”, one of which is destined for adventure, which has specifically been a “Sam” thing since Alien Bodies. There’s Sam’s room in the TARDIS literally being lost which, I mean, maybe we don’t need Freud for that one. And when she’s finally reunited with the Doctor in a moment of possible death, despite everything in their past she kisses him — surely an implied “we’re almost done so why not” finality there.

This stuff is as close as Dominion gets to thoughtful character work, though. There’s the supporting cast, such as Björn and a long-suffering police officer keen to give obvious whackos like the Doctor enough rope to hang themselves with: they have reasonably interesting inner lives but they exit the book so abruptly that you might forget they were ever in it. There’s the military contingent at the heart of the plot — Dr. Nagle, the mind behind the teleportation device that has caused all the chaos, and Major Wolstencroft, the UNIT leader trying to contain said chaos — but they’ve both got such tunnel vision that there’s no progress for them to make. Nagle earns our sympathy by gradually understanding the Doctor’s fury over what she’s done, but her insistence on salvaging her work is an obvious death sentence from the outset. And Wolstencroft is the worst kind of one-note military blowhard, stubbornly refusing to believe that the Doctor might be useful and impeding him throughout just to keep the action rolling, leading to the Doctor’s applause-worthy lamp-shading: “Not again! We’ve been through all this before!” He mostly seems to be here to muddy the waters between UNIT and C19, making the former seem as bad as, if not worse than the latter, but in the end all that does is make you wonder why we’re seeing both.

That leaves Kerstin, and it’s fair to say I don’t get what Walters was going for there. If she’s a signpost towards Sam’s departure then okay, up to a point, but having a pointedly Sam-esque character eating up all those pages instead of Sam will inevitably feel as much like a parody of her obsolescence as a sincere attempt to prepare us for it. Even worse, when the time comes to say no to her future aboard the TARDIS it’s handled as abruptly as possible, with the Doctor (mentally back together again by this point) snapping rudely that she has her own life to live and anyway, they’ve got dangerous work to do. (Walters here bookends his follow-up to Revolution Man with a prelude to Unnatural History — only what looked like a means of characterisation the first time feels more like a cheap way out the second time.) The book ends with Kerstin wondering what the hell just happened, and it’s hard to imagine readers being a great deal more satisfied than she is. What a strange, rushed note to end on.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that there is no great summing up at the end of Dominion. One of the reasons it took me so long to read and, I suppose, the real problem here is that it’s not about much of anything. Okay, these are Doctor Who tie-in novels, general sci-fi business tends to take priority over deep and thematic explorations of character, but Dominion is truly a “stuff happens” exercise outside of what it’s doing with the Doctor and Kerstin/Sam. It’s a sci-fi problem to be solved — a wormhole accidentally taking away people and things and replacing them likewise — but there’s nothing particularly rich about that as a conundrum, beside how unfortunate this will be for the Dominion. The figureheads of the problem are just some intransigent scientists and soldiers or some (academically interesting) aliens with no agenda and mostly no dialogue. It’s all much of a shooty exploding muchness, happy to trundle on until it’s time to stop. I didn’t egregiously dislike Dominion — did, in fact, appreciate the author’s attention to detail and his interest in the regulars — but I suspect the story’s heart has disappeared through a wormhole.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #45 – Players by Terrance Dicks

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#21

Players

By Terrance Dicks

Hullo, what’s this? Short chapters? Callbacks? Escapes to danger? This can only mean we’re in Terry town once again. Whether you like it or not, as a certain someone said.

Despite his many successes as script editor, writer and noveliser, the bar for Terrance Dicks: Novelist remains low. He’s still got it when it comes to telling a story at a rollicking pace — try and stop him. The problem is the stories he chooses to tell. Time and again he returns to ideas and, more often, tropes that interest him. If they interest you too, hooray! But for the rest of us there is a feeling of going back to the same old well.

Players is reminiscent of a few Terry books — in fairness, often deliberately. The story, although definitely a novel, reads like two short stories and a novella. You can tick off Shakedown there in terms of structure. (Shakedown had an actual reason to do that at least, the middle bit being a novelisation.) The story concerns dangerous forces trying to change the course of history, manifesting mainly in the Second World War. Tick off Exodus for subject matter. (It’s literally referenced at one point — and quite subtly, I had to look it up.) Tom Dekker, a character from Blood Harvest (tick!) shows up and joins the main cast, and some of the wacky tone of that book — see also Mean Streets there, particularly Garshak the trench coat-wearing Private Eye — bleeds into this one. And then there are the great sweaty slabs of continuity, ostensibly there to move the story along but, let’s face it, mainly because Terry likes to remind us of things he enjoyed or wrote. (Or both.) The book’s DNA must therefore include a bit of The Eight Doctors as well.

I suppose it’s really only important to consider what the book is and not what it’s like, since the reader might not have read any of that and so might not feel any marathon-y fatigue. So: in Players the Sixth Doctor and Peri aim for London in 1899 (Peri wants to go somewhere nice — this is long overdue, poor duck) and they hit South Africa instead. It’s the Boer War — oops — and a young war correspondent needs their help. This war correspondent drops numerous plucky bon mots as he inspires all the men around him, and with a little help from the Doctor the war correspondent eventually wins out against some armed Boers and a mysterious assassin keen on killing the war correspondent — and if you’re sick of hearing “the war correspondent” as a very conspicuous placeholder when everyone else just gets referred to by their name, fear not, for he is revealed to be Winston Churchill! After which the novel interchangeably calls him “Churchill” or “Winston Churchill.” (In the second case sounding as excited as Ant-Man saying “I believe this is yours, Captain America.”)

There’s absolutely no escaping the fact that Terrance Dicks thought Winston Churchill was the bee’s knees, and possibly the rest of the bee as well. Players drips with hero worship. “[The Doctor] noticed Winston Churchill’s unscrupulous streak … Just do whatever had to be done to achieve your aims. He smiled faintly. Perhaps it was a characteristic of all great men.” / “‘I wish you were leading the troops instead of writing for some rotten paper,’ said the General.” / “Ever since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Churchill, and Churchill alone, had raised his voice in repeated warning about the Nazi menace.” / “The old boy didn’t miss much, thought the Doctor. Winston Churchill was a hard man to deceive.” / “Not many people can arrive unexpectedly at 10 Downing Street, demand an immediate meeting with the Prime Minister, and be shown inside — but Winston Churchill was one of them.” Enough subtlety, Terry, tell us what you really think.

There are at least indications of the man’s flaws, or that he could conceivably have had some. Mainly there’s his unscrupulousness, and we are (very) often reminded of how many times he failed in politics along his storied career. However, his lack of scruples ends up feeling like a compliment in disguise (just look at all his achievements!) and his political frustrations become a sort of mantra. Surely the universe was wrong to keep Winston Churchill from his destiny, when his magic oratory was all that the country needed to succeed? Surely his setbacks were everyone else’s fault? It’s like the bit in most biopics where the famous subject hints at a thing they will do later and someone whom we all should laugh at says “As if! That’ll never catch on!”

Hey ho: Churchill is here and Terry loves him. Now let’s return to that mysterious assassin in the Boer War. He is joined by a fellow anachronistic co-conspirator seeking to release Churchill from prison, then capture or kill him again. What’s all that about? Escaping with their and Churchill’s lives, the Doctor and Peri don’t worry too much about this — the first “short story” having neatly concluded — until Peri starts asking questions, which is largely her all-too-traditional purpose in the book. (Hey, at least someone got around to asking what the Boer War was all about. I’m not much the wiser now though.) The Doctor thinks he remembers something pertinent, so he quickly fishes out the thought scanner from the end of The Wheel In Space, then mentally unspools an entire 50-page sequel to The War Games starring the Second Doctor, here conscripted to work for the Time Lords before his regeneration takes effect and thus canonising the Season 6B fan theory. Fanwank? Where?

Stepping back in awe at the sheer indulgence of this, it is rather strange to detour your Sixth Doctor novel into a Second Doctor one for a bit. (And here we come to the second “short story.”) In it, the Doctor reunites with Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, who of course don’t remember him post-War Games, and they are all inveigled in an attack on a young officer. Who could the officer be but Churchill again, now a decade older! And wouldn’t you know it, the same nefarious people are still out to get him, this time hoping to more subtly detour his destiny by delivering him alive to Germany. Again they are foiled, and (as Carstairs and Lady Jennifer seal their affections — presumably some fans cheered) the Second Doctor whips back to Gallifrey. Our Doctor, in the present, decides to visit Churchill a third time, reasoning that whatever random date he picks will miraculously be the next time these malefactors pick on him, and they won’t have troubled him or anyone else in between. I would have no further questions if I were Dirk Gently and believed in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but of course the Doctor is right and when they arrive in 1936 the shadowy forces are at work again, so what do I know?

This is the bulk of the novel at last, and Terry is clearly enjoying himself no less than in the other segments. Those mysterious people are colluding with Nazis and (unknowingly) Wallis Simpson and the King to enable a German victory before the war even starts. Churchill, the Doctor (usually in that order), Peri, Dekker and an older Carstairs foil various Nazis and blackshirts and eventually even the King. It all tumbles along in as frenzied and rollicking a fashion as you’ve come to expect from Terrance Dicks, and the denouement is neat, but it’s pulpy (not especially Doctor Who-ey) nonsense — fun in the moment, gone the next. I only started it two days ago and I’ve already forgotten half of it. Still, that quick turnaround says something positive.

Buried under all the (strangely sectional) shenanigans are the “Players” of the title, and they’re a good idea. Here we have some time travelling figures (not human, I think?) who want to divert history purely for their own amusement. They have strict rules (which they often ignore) and they don’t know who the Doctor is, although they’ve now met two of him. This introduces an interesting wrinkle into the Doctor’s travels: how much of the time are they secretly there, changing events? How much of actual history is their doing? Who, while we’re on the subject, actually are they?

Strangely Players — a book named after them — doesn’t get into it. The antagonists barely feature; due to the nature of their machinations (or the ones more subtle than “get a gun and shoot Winston Churchill”, anyway) they often appear to be more sub-plot than plot. Which seems like an odd choice? This is, of course, just setup for future books. But considering how one-note these characters are — I’m not saying they’re poorly written, more that they’re barely written at all — it ends up a pretty weak teaser for things to come. What a shame. The premise has potential. Why not toss in a few personalities as well? Hell, names would do. (“The Consortium” is the best we’re getting.)

Players mostly serves as an excuse to write a figure whom the author really likes, or otherwise a creation he fancied digging up again. As a Sixth Doctor and Peri book it hits some of the right notes, but I got the sense Dicks mostly likes about them what he likes about Doctors and companions generally: he is an awful name-dropper (who will happily swap his colourful coat for something more era-appropriate — as if!); she is quite capable thank-you-very-much but will nonetheless need to flirt with guards and eventually get kidnapped. (“In the good old days, the heroine screamed and waited to be rescued.” No comment.) There’s a real possibility that it’s only Sixie because his “truculence” was the best fit for Churchill — to whom he is, of course favourably, compared.

One good idea. Three goes at it. Not much luck. Players is harmless and it’s Terry at his Terriest, but not coincidentally it’s also Terry at his most aggressively forgettable. Want to see World War 2 gone awry? Stick with Exodus.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #44 – Revolution Man by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#21

Revolution Man

By Paul Leonard

Hoo boy. This one is nuts.

There are things about Revolution Man that reminded me of the New Adventures. (Which perhaps contributes to its somewhat divisive reviews.) It has bonkers ideas. It’s primarily about drugs. There’s violence, some of it moving in unexpected directions. And main characters act, or are forced to act in ways outside their nature. I think, deep down, it’s just trying to make statements about the characters and what they are about, and it’s using very eye-catching — perhaps questionable — methods to do that. I really liked it for the most part.

We begin in media res (something I enjoy as it cuts out all the faff) with the Doctor noticing temporal anomalies on Earth. Someone is carving huge “R” symbols on landmarks in 1967. Mucking about with timelines is bad, to say nothing of the suggestive power of someone casually defacing ancient pyramids just for a bit of graffiti. The Doctor, Sam and Fitz go to London hoping to learn more about the supposed “Revolution Man” responsible. They plug into the burgeoning counter-culture scene, meeting the somewhat revolutionary Jean-Pierre Rex (an idol of Sam’s) and an attractive waitress who catches Fitz’s eye. Before long they discover that a drug, Om-Tsor, is responsible for these incidents. It grants the user incredible astral power and it has already claimed hundreds of lives in collateral damage. The Doctor is desperate to investigate and sort it all out. Fitz, finding himself suddenly in a position of care with waitress Maddie, decides he’ll stick around, possibly for good. But even without his TARDIS friends he finds himself investigating Om-Tsor with Maddie.

There’s already a lot here to raise eyebrows. The novel sets out its stall with the amazing, horrifying power of Om-Tsor. Maddie derails a train full of people simply because she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, so what would a genuinely malevolent user look like? The imagery is immediately hard to forget: a pyramid with a logo on it, guns hovering around shooting people, enormous astral projections stomping around the Himalayas or grabbing helicopters. It’s one of the most sock-you-in-the-jaw concepts we’ve had in these books, plus it’s distinct from the kind of mental powers we’ve already seen in Virgin books. (For the avoidance of doubt, “psi powers” warrant a mention here. +1 geek points.) Paul Leonard is never short of imagination but Revolution Man is him in widescreen and technicolour.

Go back a bit, though — what’s this about Fitz leaving? Characters going on sabbatical is practically a tradition at this point, with Ace and Sam having done it and both come back changed, but Fitz only just got here! This is clearly a point of contention with readers, but I think there’s some mileage in it. Fitz is not your typical Doctor Who companion: unlike Sam, he’s not here because he has a burning desire to go out there and, uh, be a Doctor Who companion. He was in a traumatic situation where his only relative died and now he’s wanted by the law. TARDIS travel sounded preferable to that and in any case, probably quite fun too. Whoever said it was a lifetime commitment? Faced with 1960s England again, a few years on from where he left and perhaps any consequences of his departure, is it inconceivable that he’d politely part ways? It’s not as if he’s yet formed a major attachment to the Doctor or Sam; his only adventure that we’ve been privy to made the point that he felt out of his depth and out of his element. I think the promise of new love and some stability makes as much sense as anything else for this guy the Doctor and Sam — not to mention, the readers — barely know.

All that said… he’s back on the Om-Tsor trail pretty much the next time we see him, which he must know is eventually going to lead back to the TARDIS. He’s happy enough with Maddie, and even a little conflicted about the decision to keep investigating, but all the same I wish there had been time for “domestic bliss” Fitz, or whatever normal life looked like for him for that little while. I don’t think anybody reading Revolution Man seriously thought he’d be gone for good, especially a third of the way through. (Who is he, Dodo?) It’s more likely that the device serves to underscore his commitment to joining the TARDIS crew.

Or does it? Later on Fitz’s investigation grows enormously dangerous — just as, thanks to Om-Tsor, he grows about fifty feet taller (!) — and in the wake of it he is spirited away to the Chinese military, brainwashed using the same drug that’s causing all the problems. He’s actively an antagonist towards the end of the book, and although he fights against it and wins, there isn’t time to flesh out his side of the story, what it was like losing his identity, whether — since we’re asking — he does actively want to see the universe. The final lines of the book suggest that he does, but as so often happens with Sam, putting the character out of his head means he’s not having that conversation for a chunk of the book. Taking him away from the TARDIS sets up the opportunity to examine the idea of going back to it but we’re only doing half the job if he doesn’t, y’know, examine it. Instead he is bundled back into the TARDIS after — eek — another traumatic situation.

Fitz is at least well written, capturing his weirdly theatrical persona and his otherwise down to earth wants and needs. He doesn’t feel like a gimmick character, which must so often be a temptation with born-in-print regulars. Leonard is equally adept at writing Sam, though of course he’s had more practice there.

After Blum & Orman I think he’s the writer most interested in developing Sam. Genocide, Dreamstone Moon and Revolution Man all put her activism in context, allowing her to see how other people approach it, each time with a slightly different level of maturity. In the post-Seeing I world we have a Sam who is more weathered, able to work with the Doctor without awkwardness, confident about popping to Rome on reconnaissance. On her travels she observes a younger activist, thinking her “a young, ill-informed anarchist with an almost insane idealism, not much intelligence, and no clear mission.” She dresses down her own idol, Jean-Pierre Rex, disagreeing with his heavy-handed methods, based on her own hard-won experience. (And her own Fitz-style sabbatical.) The sixties is a keystone of revolutionary politics but she’s not that impressed with it, being aware of “just how far the flower children had to go before they reached maturity. Most of them — she recalled again her parents’ generation — would never make it. On the other hand, the steps they had taken would make it possible for future generations to be better than they had been.”

Leonard isn’t painting Sam as a perfect paragon here — she’s grown and she’s good at what she does, but there’s more than a whiff of protesting too much about the failings in others. When she comes to have it out with Fitz concerning the story’s climax, her defence of the Doctor — “‘He’s a hero!’ Sam was shouting too, now. ‘And he never never never does anything wrong — you don’t understand!’” — sounds every bit as far-gone evangelical as the Revolution Man cult, suggesting a pedestal that can only come down. On the whole Revolution Man is a good bit of exercise for who and what Sam is, without suggesting that she’s truly finished growing as a person.

The dynamic with Fitz is also nurtured in a way that hadn’t happened yet. This is a critical aspect of a new companion — how do they fit in? — and although Leonard essentially dodges it again by giving him an out, for a time it is under the microscope. Sam sees his potential departure even before he does, and she understands the rationale behind it. All the same she hopes he will change his mind. She knows what TARDIS travel has done for her and she hopes that will also happen for Fitz. When she realises he is no longer himself, she is desperately keen to get him back. This perhaps lends weight to Leonard offering us a “join the TARDIS properly” story by the back door — not making it Fitz’s choice, making Sam want it. She reflects on Fitz’s embarrassing attempts to flirt with her, almost regretful in case that has spoiled his future in the TARDIS. In short, there’s good stuff in here, even though I feel like no author has yet nailed the three companions setup, or even really tried. We’re getting there.

Darting between the two companions and between crises is the Doctor, and it’s fair to say there’s a lot to unpack here. Some of it literally isn’t unpacked. I try not to be a nitpick guy these days, but is there any explanation for how Om-Tsor wreaks havoc in 1967 when in the “normal” run of things, it didn’t? If it’s simply a thing that happened until the Doctor stopped it happening then that would be part of established events, but it’s presented as an anomaly to be resolved. We know that the pyramid stuff is new. Yet there is no time travelling malefactor in Revolution Man and there are no aliens, just an alien drug that is somehow on Earth and is now part of a timeline where a dangerous idiot stole some of it for his crazy plan. It’s a bit chaotic, not necessarily by design.

On top of that, these events create absolute havoc for two straight years, including unnaturally instigated natural disasters, a world just short of nuclear war and — less important but just as visible — bloody great big letters drawn on the pyramids. Doesn’t any of that have consequences? It won’t if it’s all “established events”, but again, we seem to be in “anomaly” territory to begin with, and the novel’s cumulative mess seems an absurd thing to let stand. I was half expecting a reset button by the end (and the Doctor does mention “purging the vortex”) but no, we just go nuts and get out of there. The pace towards the end is so relentlessly manic that to be fair, the only solution seems to be to just stop.

If you can tear yourself away from the plot (which works quite well generally, just not at a few important junctures) then the Doctor is having quite an interesting time here. He really is frantic about all this, getting awkward about moving the TARDIS and being unsure about telling Fitz what’s going on (this, too, feels like an under-clarified point), but he’s still buzzing with Doctorliness, particularly when he races after a woman pronounced dead and fixes her up not with magic, but simply better medicine than they had in 1967. He gives Fitz a police box calling card for emergencies (which is a great idea we’ll either see again or never mention again), perhaps suggesting he didn’t really think Fitz was gone for good. He and Sam are a well-oiled machine with their own shorthand and backup plans; he sends her on errands, not unlike his more manipulative predecessor. And in the end… well. A thing happens, which if you’ve read the book you’ll have been waiting for.

It’s probably the Revolution Man talking point if there is one, so here we go: the real Revolution Man has been hidden through most of the novel (the scene where an Om-Tsor user appears to kill him during a concert, who did that? Pass) and he has a grand, yet harebrained scheme to unite the world with the drug. Or destroy it. A concert is hastily arranged at Wembley stadium and this well-travelled Om-Tsor user goes for broke. He wants power. He wants the TARDIS, now that he has learned about it from Maddie. A still partially brainwashed Fitz panics and shoots him — only this doesn’t entirely work, and things are only getting worse, so the Doctor picks up the gun and shoots the man dead. It’s the The Doctor Shoots Someone Dead novel.

To be clear: I think the book puts him in an impossible situation. Fitz’s actions (themselves arguably not Fitz’s fault) have caused a dangerous Om-Tsor user to pretty well go nuclear, which is having an immediate effect on the TARDIS that might rip apart the world. The man is dying anyway but he will make everything worse before he goes. And look, it’s not as if the Doctor enjoys it, or jumps straight to that as a solution. It’s just an unusual response to an unusual situation. There is context for it.

That said, it bumps us up against a recurring problem with Revolution Man: it’s too short. Much like Beltempest, this is a novel containing enormous, almost cartoonish chaos that nonetheless comes in 30 pages below the average for BBC Books. Why? There isn’t time for the Doctor to reckon with what has happened, and also therefore — conveniently for the action itself — there isn’t time for him to think of anything else. I don’t have a problem with the Doctor doing this if it makes sense in context. Hell, Sam has killed people, and/or inadvertently caused their deaths, and she’s only learned from it. Characters should be allowed to be imperfect, Sam’s allowed, why not the Doctor. But… if you skimp on the meaning of a thing then it’s like writing a huge life change into a short story. What’s the point if we’re not sticking around to hear more about it? Sam was haunted by the death of a Tractite. Do we need to wait for other authors to do the same for the Doctor?

Revolution Man gives you plenty to think about — some of it in a head-scratchy, hang onnn sort of way. It pushes its characters to interesting extremes using huge, colourful, often beautifully written set-pieces — but it’s in such a hurry that it doesn’t put everything away afterwards. This has the knock-on effect however of making it a deliriously readable and exciting story. It’s weird. It’s a bit messy. But I like it.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #43 – More Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who

More Short Trips

Edited by Stephen Cole

Right, that’s enough novels. Back down the short story mines with you.

There doesn’t seem to be a linking theme this time, although Stephen Cole — clearly amused by the less than imaginative title of More Short Trips, going by the introduction and blurb — suggests that the simple fact of an increased number of stories ought to cover it. Maybe themes are overrated?

He also mentions being the outgoing editor of Doctor Who for BBC Books, which is surprising to me as he still had roughly 30 more books to go at this point. Were they really working that far in advance or did the plans change?

Anyway. Short trips. More of them.

*

Totem

By Tara Samms

Ah yes, Tara Samms, finalist in the 1998 Steve Cole Lookalike Contest. (I’m suddenly wondering how many of this collection’s “new voices” are Cole.)

This one features the Eighth Doctor working for a widow in Portugal, bringing her somewhat out of her shell and inadvertently romancing her. According to Wikipedia he’s making amends for something the Seventh Doctor did, but the story’s so short I didn’t pick up on that. Anyway, it’s an evocative moment.

*

Scientific Adviser

By Ian Atkins

The Second Doctor gets some work on a film set recreating The Invasion. (I very much appreciated the line “Having problems with the invasion, then?”) He’s ostensibly there to ensure a lack of historical accuracy and thus keep UNIT’s secrets safe. However, another plot is percolating.

Ian Atkins does a marvellous job of evoking the odd charm of this Doctor, particularly around children, and it’s an amusingly subversive way into a Doctor Who story — it’s surprising, really, that more stories aren’t told in-universe about known alien invasions, but I suppose that’s the whole reason for UNIT’s actions here. This is an instant hit, although I can feel my brain wrinkling when I try to fit it into continuity.

*

Missing, Part One: Business as Usual

By Gary Russell

Mel’s back home! I’ve got no idea about the logistics of this (wasn’t she last seen leaving Iceworld on Glitz’s spaceship, presumably in the future?) but the character beats seem more important here. Mel has apparently not enjoyed her time with the Doctor, or not enough to consider it worthwhile, which is a somewhat sour take when the author’s Business Unusual (heavily referenced here) was also concerned with keeping Mel from her destiny. It’s not really how she was the last time she was with the Doctor, which frustratingly leaves a gap that we’re not filling. We’ll see what Part Two looks like, but for now this is a quick and rather moody check-in.

*

Moon Graffiti

By Dave Stone

A characteristically funny piece from Dave Stone featuring a moon covered in graffiti and a tiny spaceship full of irritable and sarcastic aliens. This does a pretty good job of world-building for an Earth gone temporarily to hell thanks to some marauding spiders. (The aforementioned graffiti artists.) It has tons of ideas, including an in-universe explanation for Peri’s sometimes questionable wardrobe choices. In his rather pitiable status quo for humanity Stone inadvertently hits on imagery that would be used in The Matrix. (No, not the Doctor Who one.) The Sixth Doctor, needless to say, feasts upon Stone’s verbiage.

*

One Bad Apple

By Simon Forward

Here’s a name we’ll be seeing on novels at some point, and One Bad Apple is an excellent first impression. The Fourth Doctor and Leela are on a jungle world inhabited by large plate-covered animals while a platoon of Cyber-enhanced soldiers skulk about. The story posits an interesting future for those who have been partially converted into Cybermen, and it does clever things with biblical allusions such as knowledge from apples. The characters seem to ring with hidden intelligence. I’m keen to hear more from this writer.

*

64 Carlysle Street

By Gary Russell

Gary Russell gets creative here, telling a story from various viewpoints, all of them working in a country house. The First Doctor, Steven and Dodo have ingratiated themselves in order to investigate and deal with an alien visitor. They’re all well captured and the story ticks along nicely, quietly (for Gary Russell anyway) sequelising an obscure piece of lore.

*

The Eternity Contract

By Steve Lyons

A bit of metaphysical Gothic horror awaits the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa as they fight to escape a house that seemingly serves as a gateway to the afterlife. This is creepy stuff and it plays confidently with the level of the supernatural involved. It also constructs a likeable side-character, Patricia, in whom I invested pretty quickly. I tend to think this sort of thing suits the Fifth Doctor, a character with the sort of good-boy puritanical streak you’d expect to get the vapours when a vampire shows up. (Indeed, see Goth Opera.)

*

The Sow in Rut

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

We’re straight back to the supernatural with this one: Sarah Jane’s stay in a cottage is cut short by what appears to be a spectral force. Perry and Tucker have their cake and eat it with both kinds of explanation catered for in the end. For better or worse, this is something that would fit neatly into an ongoing series of K9 & Company.

*

Special Weapons

By Paul Leonard

This would be a great idea for a TV episode or even a novel: during the Second World War some German troops have got hold of an alien being that can separate a place from its surroundings, cutting off all light and eventually killing everything inside. They have done this to a small English village and they naturally have plans to expand — but the Seventh Doctor, here with Mel, knows this will backfire and kill the planet, to say nothing of the creature.

Apart from the terrifying image of unnatural night, this is a dark (ahem) piece with the requisite Paul Leonard-ish moral toing and froing of supposedly bad characters, here one of the German officers, and a supposedly good one named Oliver. The Doctor and Mel display unusual grit for Season 24 (the adventure happens not long after Paradise Towers) but this kind of gung ho action suits Mel surprisingly well. Excellent stuff.

*

Honest Living

By Jason Loborik

An offbeat sequel to Day Of The Daleks featuring some more time travelling guerrillas with a resulting mess of paradoxes. There’s some pathos in the bookended story of a man who should have died, and there’s an unusually anthropomorphic approach to time taking its revenge against paradoxes. However this one suffers from the problem stories about the mechanics of time travel usually face, in that it’s hard to understand so it needs explaining. I think the general pathos just about carries it.

*

Dead Time

By Andrew Miller

This is a rather excitable and talky bit of fan service with the Eighth Doctor trapped in a mental prison, for a while talking to a future (still McGann) version of himself, then having to battle through all his past lives. It’s one of those stories that needs to constantly explain itself, and although the idea of the Forgotten (beings that “time travel” back through someone’s life) is quite good, we don’t really get any mileage out of it here. Sam features and is not exactly a joy to be around, so at least that’s accurate.

*

Romans Cutaway

By David A. McIntee

I’ve ended up reading this at the perfect time, as I’m currently halfway through a rewatch of The Romans. McIntee — RIP — seizes on the gap in the story between the TARDIS crash landing and the gang all relaxing in the Roman villa; he relates how they found out about its original occupants and he puts Ian and Barbara in a life or death situation. (Their first of several during their stay.) The latter leads to a bit of soul searching from the pair. It’s a nice little pause within a generally restful story, with Ian reacting thoughtfully to his defensive act of violence towards the end.

*

Return of the Spiders

By Gareth Roberts

A romp (what else) from Gareth Roberts featuring (who else) the Fourth Doctor and Romana, here encountering giant spiders in High Wycombe. Roberts is as fond as ever of the banter between these characters and of satirising British society, and although it gets a little too arch for its own good in places it’s still a decently amusing jaunt.

*

Hot Ice

By Christopher Bulis

We’re back with the Fifth Doctor and Peri for the first time since The Ultimate Treasure, so it’s little surprise who wrote this one. It’s a pretty good tale of thieves chasing thieves and then ensnaring the TARDIS crew. I’m not completely convinced by the Fifth Doctor in this — he seems unusually clinical — but various parties do manage to hoodwink him, so it’s pretty close.

*

uPVC

By Paul Farnsworth

This one is in two parts and it has two distinct tones. First we find the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe noticing a strange knock from outside the TARDIS, only to end up facing a double glazing salesman who somehow travels in the vortex. It’s an absurd bit of farce, but when he expounds on his services the Doctor is suddenly interested. We then jump ahead to the Seventh Doctor and Ace for a more melancholy moment concerning the window that was built, and what it means to the Doctor.

It’s a lot to pack into a short story (set entirely within the TARDIS) and it’s inevitably a bit discordant, but it’s an interesting one, drawing a line between these very different Doctors and where they were in their lives.

*

Good Companions

By Peter Anghelides

Ooh. This one features a future Doctor (with ginger hair, I mean can you imagine?!) running into a much older Tegan. Sadly Tegan’s life took a turn after she left the TARDIS and her adventures have now been designated as a mental breakdown; she doesn’t believe in or fully remember them, or the Doctor for that matter. Bumping into “Dr Smith” and his companion Anna leads to an encounter with a strange theatre troupe. Everything that happens is more organised than it first appears, and Anghelides’ future Doctor is a lot more invested than he seems. This is deeply melancholy by the end, but — as much as I wish we’d avoid saying that characters’ lives took nasty turns, and in any case Tegan clearly did find some happiness too — I think this approaches its ideas with sensitivity. I’m guessing it’s the story people talked about most in this collection.

*

Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

At two pages long this is the shortest thing in More Short Trips, pipping Part One to the post. It describes, briefly, a message Mel left floating in space hoping that the Doctor would get it. (Paying off the last thing she said to him on screen.) But he didn’t and now he won’t, and we don’t actually know what the message was. It’s all quite melancholy.

I’m a bit at a loss with these Missing vignettes. Mel was broadly unhappy about her travels apparently (gee, thanks) and wishes she could say something to the Doctor (so perhaps it wasn’t all bad?), but these bits are so brief that they don’t really earn it. As I’ve said before, I don’t object on principle to companions having downbeat lives post-Doctor Who, although I do consider it the most obvious route to go down if we’re seeing them again. I just want it to be something. I was just saying how much effort Peter Anghelides had put into Tegan’s troubled future. The presence of both invites the comparison and it leaves this one wanting. What’s going on with Mel? Why ask if you won’t tell?

*

Femme Fatale

By Paul Magrs

Magrs is in typical madcap mode here with the Eighth Doctor, Sam and Iris orbiting Andy Warhol at the time of his attempted assassination. The Doctor’s feelings about Iris’ plagiarism of his life, multiple time zones with different written perspectives, at least one section that seems to repeat word for word presumably for reasons and a running Avengers parody all occupy the same lift in this jolly, if rather overcooked follow-up to The Scarlet Empress. My poor brain wishes that the most complicated one wasn’t last in the set, but characteristically for Magrs there’s plenty of fun to pick up even if just by osmosis.

*

And that’s More Short Trips. Cole’s theme-but-not-a-theme seems a decent enough excuse for authors simply to have at it, and quite frankly it doesn’t hurt the book at all. There are brilliant ideas in here and only a few swings and misses — with the increased story count, the odds tend to improve. Melancholy seems quite popular among the authors but there’s also a focus on creativity and fun. A breadth of scope is what you want here and the result is worth seeking out.

8/10