Doctor Who: The BBC Books #68 – Campaign by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who

Campaign

By Jim Mortimore

NB: This isn’t a BBC Book, but it might have been. Commissioned and then rejected as it wasn’t quite what they’d asked for (NB: was that really the case? Read to the end of the review…), Campaign has been published a few times over the years, generally by Jim Mortimore. I think it counts as part of the overall BBC Books story. I’ve taken the original publication date (and hence the marathon slot, May 2000) from the publication history in the book.

You can reach Jim Mortimore to purchase a physical copy of Campaign here: jimbo-original-who@hotmail.com

An older PDF version is available for free here: https://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/campaign/

Right then. Book review. Yes. Review the book. Should be easy. Introduction — try to be a bit pithy about it, for God’s sake — and then set up your premise. Was the book something you basically enjoyed or wasn’t it? Oh for— Don’t give me “but it’s hard,” you’ve done this more times than either of us cares to remember. Good grief! Look, if you get stuck you can always go back to old faithful: summarise the book. The summary shall lead the way! Besides which, summarising the thing for posterity is to a large extent why you even bother reviewing these books. So. All sorted then? Good. Off you go.

What’s that? Sorry, didn’t quite catch that. It’s…? Oh. You’re on Campaign. Right. Well, that’s different isn’t it. Um. Probably a bit screwed in that case. Biscuit?

Campaign is famously odd, and — as very occasionally happens — its slightly bewildering reputation is earned. I don’t know exactly what BBC Books were expecting but you don’t need a world class imagination to surmise that whatever Campaign is is not what they asked for. It’s like Jim Mortimore read every confounded reaction to his books over the years, stored them all up and then came back with: “Oh YEEEEAAAAAHHH?!!?”

For what it’s worth, you can see traces of Campaign in his earlier books. As far back as Blood Heat he’s been interested in “What if?” alternate realities, not to mention casually-as-you-like killing off major characters within them. He played in similar sandpits for The Sword Of Forever and, in typical Ouroboros fashion, he came back with an alternate version of his own alternate history for Blood Heat Redux.

Also in his rap sheet: playing around with narrative convention. You’d mostly look to Eye Of Heaven for this one, a story told from multiple perspectives. (And out of sequence, just to keep you on your toes.) It worked like gangbusters.

Campaign is like if the alternate reality thing and the chopped up narrative thing climbed into a blender at a nuclear test site. What if those ideas… but in all directions, and also forever?

Nominally this is a First Doctor story with Ian, Barbara and Susan. They discover (to their understandable surprise) that the universe outside the TARDIS has ceased to exist. (!) This is after we learn that Barbara has died. (!!) Then, she comes back somehow. (!!!) And from her perspective, it’s Ian who has died. (!!!!)

Something very odd is going on. And for some reason, the name of the ship keeps changing. It’s the TARDIS. Tardis. T.A.R.D.I.S. The Ship. This on some level must be disturbing to Cliff and Lola — sorry, Ian and Barbara, as well as Mandy. Biddy. Jill. Janet! God dammit, Susan. Susan English! FOREMAN! You know, it’s a wonder that Doctor Who can keep his head on straight. Er… the Doctor.

Chapter to chapter, it becomes creepingly apparent that we are shifting realities. At first there is a nerdish glee to identifying each one. There’s one that follows on from David Whitaker’s Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks novel, which gave the crew a very different meeting. There’s one where unproduced stories such as The Masters Of Luxor or Farewell, Great Macedon took place. There’s one that follows the unproduced pilot script Nothing At The End Of The Lane, which we can think for Cliff and co.

It soon becomes clear however that there are endless variations. Besides which, there are realities that skip a groove part way through. They begin to bleed through consciously from one to another, with characters remembering each other’s deaths — as well as their own. You’d be much harder pressed to keep track of all this than, for instance, the modest shell games in Eye Of Heaven, although I’m sure someone has done it. (I didn’t even try this time. It felt like it would defeat the point.)

The plot is surprisingly simple: the TARDIS crew knows that the universe has gone wrong, and they suspect it’s the result of their own actions. Could they have changed history? They think it has something to do with Alexander the Great. They met him in some unspecified capacity at a young age, and possibly changed the course of his destiny. The Doctor urges them all to search their memories and see if they can identify what they did, and/or who did it. Then maybe they can see what they can do to fix it.

But it’s not that easy. Not only are they — and for that matter, us along with them — flitting through different realities, but it seems that an attempt to set history back on course has already been made. Ian, for one, spent time with a grown Alexander “to get closer to [him], to gain his trust and to assess the damage [they] might have caused by interfering in his childhood.” By all accounts this went poorly: Ian (or Cliff, etc) either went on a murderous rampage for his beloved leader, or committed regicide for him, or was run down by a chariot, or killed in battle, or assassinated, or all of the above. Susan at various points bore Alexander’s child — little ’Xander, or little Philip — and in most versions anyway, she lived to raise him. TL;DR, of helping to set time back on track, Quantum Leap-style, no one recalls very much. And the fact of its obvious failure suggests that this is not going to be their salvation anyway.

The quest to figure it all out is a compelling one, and the fact that it’s infuriatingly slippery somehow only makes it more so; the constant shifting sands demand that you re-orient yourself. We never gain a clear understanding of the original incident, but somehow that’s okay, it just feels like we’re watching a sequel to a story that got wiped. The resolution however is much more abstract. As with The Sword Of Forever, it involves bloodshed and horror… but maybe everything will be hunky dory afterwards?

The journey to this point involves ever-switching narrators (Eye Of Heaven again, you old rascal!) which is then compounded by not knowing who’s speaking, even when ostensibly we know who is speaking. (There’s a great chapter that doesn’t tell us it’s Cliff and Lola, rather than Ian and Barbara, until the very end.) It’s a mostly linear path however in terms of “what’s the most recent thing that happened”, although it occasionally jumps overboard entirely for a chapter, such as when we turn away to look at an incident in the Great Fire Of London happening in different ways.

We often switch formats as well. Mostly it’s your common-or-garden book of course, wiv the words and everyfink, but sometimes it’s (faux) handwritten diary entries, or giant overlapping text for added emphasis, or a comic book, or a board game or diagrams. It does not sit still. Is Jim Mortimore just a kid in a candy store with all this? I don’t think it’s uncharitable to say yes, a bit: Campaign is obviously an experiment and, equally obviously, nothing is off limits. The kaleidoscopic style pays off though, even when it’s incomprehensible, because (in my case anyway) the urge to understand what the hell this is all about adds momentum. It was a quick read, which seems an insane thing to admit. I guess I just wanted to know badly enough to get on with it? (I have read other books recently that were incomprehensible to me, and they never seemed particularly interested in getting to the bottom of it, which is maybe why I didn’t enjoy them. But this is all subjective: one person’s “this is needlessly confusing” is another person’s “ah but that’s the point y’see.” Campaign, for me, was clearly the “good” version of what-the-hell-was-all-that-about.)

When describing Campaign, in all its narrator/reality/format ping-ponging glory/horror, it’s easy to forget that there are characters at the centre of it. The splintering realities allow Mortimore to explore extremes in characterisation. Susan gets to wear different guises to her usual upset schoolgirl who’s prone to odd moods; as a mother, or a particularly surly teen, or an equal debater with the Doctor on all things universal destruction, she feels like more. Then we have Ian and Barbara, who both must reckon with the deaths of one another. Feelings which aren’t always as straightforward as loss where Ian is concerned, with him apparently having gone murderously native on a few occasions. Barbara must contend with her romantic feelings for him — in some strands at least — although in more than a few cases his heart still belongs to a long dead queen instead. Sometimes he barely knows Barbara at all.

Ian is torn apart here. He knows he’s done terrible things for Alexander, at times being deliberately hazy about them. Before arriving at a horrifying realisation that might end the whole crisis, he remembers his various violent deaths in agonising detail; he also engineers the deaths of the TARDIS crew just to end their purgatory; and he murders the Doctor over and over again because he’s been stuck in the TARDIS for so long that he’s forgotten how doors work and has simply run out of patience. A generally heroic character, it feels significant to push and dismantle him in this way. The Doctor, for reasons that perhaps become obvious right at the end, mostly remains in the background, occasionally biting back at perceived disrespect to his Ship. But unsurprisingly Mortimore captures him ruthlessly as well.

Now back up a bit: oh, yes. This novel is also set entirely within the TARDIS. With no universe to visit any more the TARDIS has no choice but to put them up, engineering animals, landscapes and whole worlds to support them while they work things out — or more likely, live out their lives and die. “Story set entirely within the TARDIS” is a bit of a white whale in fandom, even though there have been a few cracks at it. (Time’s Crucible qualifies, and wouldn’t you know it, I found that one to be “bad” incomprehensible.) Campaign is a compelling case for being careful what you wish for with this, very much showcasing the cabin fever and desolation that would come of being trapped in the TARDIS for decades, or even lifetimes. It’s an amazing and almost infinitely possible place, but it isn’t as real as a world. On some level, you’d notice.

What does Campaign actually mean? Well, there’s a very clear conclusion, which in itself might come as a surprise. A rug pull straight out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror redefines the whole crisis, providing a solid case for reading it again. Has it answered my questions? Not entirely. The opening with Alexander, though beautifully written, still seems a bit of an anomaly. I’m not sure how the Great Fire Of London fits into it. And obviously, after a solid answer is given at the end, there’s still a crafty question mark over whether that’s really the answer after all. So who knows, as a curator once said.

You can tell early on that definitive answers are not what Campaign is going for, so I don’t mind that there’s some ambiguity left over. I think it’s one of those where the journey, or the experiment, is its own reward. This is summed up neatly in the midst of the characters struggling and beating themselves up about their different lives when they get a visual sense of all those crossed paths. “‘A symphony of time and space.’ Barbara’s voice was dreamy. ‘What a beautiful idea.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Even if we can’t fully appreciate the music.’ ‘My child, I think you misspeak yourself. Look at it. Look deep into its heart. You see it as a thing of beauty to be experienced. I say it is experience. The life experience of ourselves and an entire universe of others. I think you will find that we are the music!’”

It’s bold, bananas and baffling. I think Campaign stands as one of the stronger examples of what you can do with Doctor Who in novels. Although it’s completely fair that it got cancelled for the simple fact of not being what was commissioned (EDIT: see below), I wish they’d set up a new commission for it, as it’s really not so much more nuts than some of the EDAs of the time. Also, being a Past Doctor Adventure it’s more proof, if any were needed, that you can tell interesting stories at any point in the series and with any characters. Continuity is a nice place to visit, but you don’t have to live there.

8/10

***

Extras

In the hardback edition of Campaign the novel ends after 245 hair-raising pages. Then there’s 200 more pages. What’s all that about? (Foolish of me to ask really. I mean, this is Campaign we’re talking about.)

First there’s something called Me & My Monkey: An Author’s Confession — Part 1. This is a commentary from Mortimore covering almost every chapter. Yes, he’s going to breeze through the entire book again, bit by bit. You can’t say he didn’t try to help.

It’s largely interested in the anthropomorphised (writing) monkey on Mortimore’s back, and it reads like Martin Sheen’s diary in Apocalypse Now. Eventually this commentary becomes its own pseudo-fiction about how he’s awaiting execution for the murder of another, distinct muse/monkey. Look, I think if you leave Jim Mortimore alone for long enough these things just happen.

As well as being characteristically bonzo there’s a lot of insight here, which shows you that Campaign contains much that is either autobiographical or inspired by his life or inspired by his other work or accidentally (and then deliberately) purloined from someone else’s. He confirms that he tried to write Susan in more dimensions than she typically received (“not quite the groovy teenager after all”) and he underlines a few plot specifics, such as how the Alexander prologue and Aristotle fit into things, which all helped my understanding. That said, Mortimore acknowledges that this isn’t a “plot novel”, since “a good book, like any good idea, is one whose contextual interpretation is forever open to change.” Perhaps for that reason he’s, IMO, a bit harsh on his choice of ending, calling it cliche, torpid and unsatisfactory. I’d say no to all of that: it is a little bit pat, the sort of ending that allows you to quickly tidy everything away… but I found that it so grossly undercut the emotion of what had come before that it added a fresh layer of discomfort and reflection. And anyway, it doesn’t even stick.

Mortimore offers hints about why the book fell through (this is mostly the purview of the next bit…), admitting that “Campaign never hit the minimum word count. Never even got close.” Then we un-redact history a little further: “Though he didn’t mind the prose-experiments and the wilder flights of fancy at all, Justin Richards felt unable to recommend Ben Dunn accept the manuscript for Campaign until I’d either a) removed the TARDIS scenes and replaced them with ‘proper’ historical scenes or b) removed the historical scenes and replaced them with TARDIS scenes. Either would do. He felt the story was ‘unbalanced’ as it was.”

Intriguing stuff then, and another wild journey into what a peculiar duck Jim Mortimore can be. I think it’s a valuable companion to the book.

Next there’s Getting Your Head Stuck In The Tar-Baby: An Author’s Confession — Part 2. This is everything you could possibly want to know about the publishing woes of Campaign, and a good deal more besides.

To be clear, this is fascinating. I always want to know how a book came about and there’s never enough information available — especially for the oft-neglected Past Doctor books. And all of a sudden, there’s this: not so much a peek behind the curtain as full access to the wizard’s private bathroom.

There’s an article from the time giving the scuttlebutt version of the book’s demise. There are several pitches for Burning Artemis, later retitled Campaign, and having just read the finished novel these tell us everything we missed about Alexander and Aristotle. It turns out that Campaign, as in the novel anyone has actually read, is not merely an evolution of an original idea but one that incorporates it literally. (I said it felt like a sequel to a lost story. AHEM.) This is like what Kurt Vonnegut did with Timequake: take an aborted story and write something new around it, and also about it. The pitches also give a window into the editing process, with at least one Steve Cole change — paring back a reveal of Alexander’s history changing/not changing to just one instance, reducing repetition — suggesting itself to me when I read the first version. Good change! They do happen.

I might as well say that Burning Artemis/Campaign 1.0 also sounds brilliant. It’s an entirely different beast, a full-blooded historical with tons of well-researched ideas and a fresh take on the “changing history” conundrum. I wish Mortimore had written it somehow, but since I also liked Campaign 2.0, and since neither book would work if the other had also been published, I guess we can only have one or the other. It’s like the Ultimate Answer and the Ultimate Question being mutually exclusive in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Again, it’s fascinating to track the progress of the story. But that’s not all. Mortimore provides heaps of correspondence with Steve Cole and Justin Richards (editors passing in the night) to explain the process of the book’s commission, then delay(s), then cancellation(s). And nothing is held back. The word you’re looking for is “unexpurgated”. It could only have appeared in an unofficial publication. I went bright red reading some of it; I cringed, involuntarily uttered “oh god” on several occasions. It’s still fascinating — I can’t help it! — because we never normally get this kind of tea about why a book happened or didn’t happen. But the level of awkwardness as these conversations blossom into full-on arguments is like listening to your parents fight. It’s seriously toe-curling, bridge-toasting stuff.

It’s worth saying that the key point of contention is not that the finished novel didn’t resemble the one they commissioned — although that is certainly true. The death knell is a series of requests for edits from Richards which generally revolve around his not “getting” the book, and feeling therefore that readers wouldn’t. To which I would say, well horses for courses and everything, but you guys published The Blue Angel — which is arguably just as odd as Campaign but with an added heaping of whimsy and no ending. I didn’t get it! Even the people who liked it didn’t get it, going by most reviews. But you still had Paul Magrs back, so it can’t have done any harm, surely? Some books are weird. With the release schedule of BBC Books at the time, it’s not as if another “normal” one wouldn’t be along shortly. It seems a curious hill to let a book die on when the range was so consciously getting a bit weird around now. But that might be a sign of what’s to come with Richards as editor.

It’s difficult to describe the rest of these conversations without feeling like I’m just contributing to gossip (it really is that personal, like a work spat that has somehow CCed the entire company), so suffice to say it gets a bit ugly and I’m not surprised it ended badly. By the end you’ve gone behind the curtain, into the wizard’s bathroom and spent what feels like several lifetimes at the bottom of his laundry basket. I think everyone involved had some semblance of a valid point, everyone involved was also a flawed human being, and BBC Books should probably pay people on time.

Anyway! That’s what happened. Book publishing, eh. Who’d do it?

Lastly we have Born in the Briar Patch: An Author’s Confession — Part 3. This is a collection of reviews for Campaign. And look, I’m not gonna review reviews, but they raise some interesting points. There’s a general feeling that people didn’t get The Sword Of Forever, perhaps lending some support to Justin Richards’s thesis. (I didn’t get it either, FWIW.) There’s an oft repeated refrain of “you’ll need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Doctor Who ephemera to understand this book,” which I don’t agree with — you don’t need to know where Cliff and Lola originated, you just need to know that they are alternate versions of Ian and Barbara. There’s the surprising breadth of reviews which includes negativity, either around the ending (contentious) or the book as a whole (didn’t get it). I think my favourite thing though is the reference to something said in Part 2, a Richards criticism that Mortimore won’t be available to write back to every reader with explanations if they need them — because in the first chunk of the book’s extras, that’s exactly what he does. I like to think this means he sees the sense in (some) criticism once he gets past the initial outrage — and really, what creative hasn’t felt that way? (See also, the book’s ending. Jim defends it passionately in his comms to Justin. Yet years later in this edition’s extras, he thinks it’s “torpid.” Clearly people change — a major thesis of Campaign, as it happens.)

The book’s final, definite, this-time-we’re-serious ending is Jim acknowledging his flaws, which then perhaps recontextualises the agonising dirty laundry on display. Perhaps this edition of Campaign is, among infinite other things, an attempt by a complicated guy to recognise when he might get in his own way. But anyway. The book’s still good.

This, for realsies, is the end of the review. Only now you’re reading an entirely different review of another book altogether, and my name by this point is, oh, let’s say Bert.

Rhubarb/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #67 – Verdigris by Paul Magrs

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#30

Verdigris

By Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs returns. Can a time-travelling double decker bus be far behind?

Verdigris continues along similar lines to The Scarlet Empress and The Blue Angel, picking up the thread of meta-textual silliness (not just limited to Doctor Who) and indulging in a more knowing sort of comedy than we’re used to seeing in these books. Magrs is clearly a confident and seasoned writer so, where Verdigris is daft as a brush — which would be pretty much all of it — there is always the sense of a deliberate intention at work.

All of that said, after three of his novels I’m wondering if I’m really a Magrs guy. I found Empress a delight for the most part, but the Arabian Nights/shaggy dog style isn’t my favourite. The Blue Angel was clearly a creative attempt at something, but the actual intention eluded me and in that context Magrs’s inimitable silliness just got on my nerves. Verdigris is at the same time a simpler affair than Angel and a more meta one than Empress. I think my enjoyment also fell somewhere between the two.

Iris Wildthyme is travelling with Tom, a young man from the year 2000, but he just wants to go home. Clinging to the idea of a Doctor/companion relationship Iris instead takes him to see the Doctor in 1973, with the intention of just spending a nice Christmas somewhere. (Naturally she gets the season wrong and it’s actually summer.) A relaxing trip to the Doctor’s cottage soon spirals into an adventure with strange telepathic children, conspiracies, UNIT in disarray, killer robotic sheep, rampaging fictional characters and objects brought to life.

There are a couple of big ideas squirrelled away in there. For starters, the Doctor has homes on Earth — plural! — thanks to “a rather good deal with the British government.” This makes a degree of sense what with him doing a job despite not needing any money, but obviously it’s not something that was ever evidenced on screen. Like the old joke about schoolteachers, I think we all just assumed that the Doctor lives at work. (If push comes to shove he can always sleep in the TARDIS.)

I can just about stretch to the Doctor having homes-away-from-home, including a caravan. (The Seventh Doctor had a House On Allen Road so it’s a bit late to quibble about that now.) I struggle though to believe he’d commission portraits of himself for decoration. I know he’s vain, but really? More significantly, when we find the Doctor all he wants is “to have dinner parties and enlightened conversations. [He’s] going to invite some very interesting people down to stay, and it’s all going to be remarkably civilised.” That kind of domesticity is very rare for him, although it’s at least framed as a way to avoid UNIT for a while. This serves a character point: the Doctor is trapped on Earth, but also (to an extent) trapped as their go-to guy for Earth’s defence. That must be a bit wearying after a while. (The thought however of the Doctor putting his feet up for a night in with some groovy laid-back types is still a stretch.)

Verdigris seems interested in the Third Doctor’s exile and what that means to him, so perhaps weird little swings like this are to be expected. He more than once laments being stuck on Earth, and naturally his eyes light up at the thought of Iris bringing a functioning TARDIS within reach. However that idea mostly seems to exist in Iris’s imagination, as outside of a slight mood shift early on he really makes no serious effort to high tail it away with the thing.

On a grander note, the entire plot eventually turns on the fact of his exile: a simple misunderstanding on an alien world has led a powerful being to create havoc specifically to encourage the Doctor to be free. It’s a nice idea but it’s a bit difficult to square it with the aforementioned groups of fictional characters — actually an alien race confusedly disguised as people in novels — even though the one idea is responsible for the other. They seem like a very Paul Magrs idea anyway, appealing to storytelling itself for inspiration, but there’s not a lot to them besides the amusing thrill of Miss Havisham making a mad dash through a fun fair. The idea soon retires to the background. The book at times feels like a box of chocolates: varied but all a bit too sweet and disposable.

Sometimes it seems like it’ll do something significant, like disbanding UNIT — sort of. The Brigadier, Benton and Liz Shaw are all out of their minds and running a supermarket instead of an army, while UNIT headquarters has been taken over by, among other things, robot sheep. And Mike Yates has been turned into a piece of paper! If you wade through all the whimsical bells and whistles there’s an interesting idea here about the Doctor and UNIT doing something different for a change — but sadly the UNIT bit of the equation doesn’t occur until very late in the book, and then it’s just for a cutaway gag. What a pity; I might have enjoyed digging into the gang’s ersatz existence.

The state of UNIT Headquarters, meanwhile, is cause for some trippy meta stuff where Jo is (unsuccessfully) convinced that her time here has been a fabrication, that all her colleagues are actors and the monsters are guys in costumes, drawing particular attention to the coloured lines around them in certain shots. All of which is quite jolly and fan-baiting, if rather unlikely to convince Jo or the reader. It’s at least a fun excuse to shift storytelling formats for a bit into annotations of security footage, with Iris’s diary also appearing throughout the book.

That’s the other big idea in Verdigris: Iris for all intents and purposes is the protagonist. We mostly view the Doctor and Jo as side characters; it’s Iris who brings us into the story, Tom who connects us to the weirdly powerful (and strangely attired) Children Of Destiny, and when the penny drops about what’s really going on and whose fault it all is, well… have a guess.

It’s quite a good story for Iris. (Likely the scraggly version we met in Empress, before she regenerated.) Her longing to have a lasting friendship with Tom is not so unlike her apparently one-way attraction to the Doctor; as well as being a source of bawdy fun there’s some real pathos in that, particularly when she pleads with him to recognise that they make a good team. There’s a surprising amount of Iris back story in this, explaining that she was of a lower class than the Doctor on Gallifrey and she rescued her TARDIS in a desert; it turns out her obsolescence to the Time Lords is less a collective memory gap than sheer social embarrassment. (Her very similar Five Doctors-esque adventure was apparently just a coincidence.)

The sheer focus on Iris in a story barely holding itself together logically does sometimes threaten to squeeze it out of Doctor Who altogether — but then there’ll be some incredibly nerdy reference to remind you of Magrs’s pedigree in that area, such as the string of continuity beats that makes Verdigris impossible to place. (It’s after The Sea Devils but before The Curse Of Peladon. Best of luck, list-makers.) There are meta references to the Green Cross Code (aka that advert with Jon Pertwee in it), The Avengers is canon in this universe, and there are even meta references to meta references when it comes to those faux-fictional characters, the point being that you shouldn’t show off like that. (At which point Verdigris threatens to create a paradox involving its head and its bottom.) It’s so busy being clever that little things like trees and unicorns coming to life feel like footnotes. Did I mention that Mike Yates is a piece of paper?

I very much got the impression that Verdigris wasn’t going for anything serious (I’m sure you’re dying to say, “What tipped you off?”) but there are still some moments that matter. The Doctor’s desperation to get away from Earth breaks through occasionally, and pityingly. Iris hints at his bleak retcon-future from Interference (about time someone did!) and she eventually takes pity and assures him that he will leave Earth eventually. Jo has her little reckoning with reality, although it doesn’t define anything about her that didn’t already seem solid. Tom has some pathos, feeling out of his element and hinting at a relationship with one of the Children Of Destiny, while also believing one of them might be his mother from an earlier period in her life. Neither idea comes to much though. (The Children Of Destiny are about three layers of icing too many for this story.) Otherwise when characters get killed, which happens quite a bit, it was a struggle to remember they’d been there.

Reading this I was occasionally reminded with a bump that Doctor Who is best aimed at kids. I suspect the free flow of ideas in Verdigris works better for them. But the novel also seems aware of the more, shall we say, particular kind of Who fan, not just with those cheeky continuity misdirects but in this oblique comment about time travel: “I don’t think human beings were meant to travel in time. We care too much about the order of things. About being sure of what has really happened and what hasn’t. We get insecure if someone shows us other alternatives.” I mean, now that you mention it…

Like The Blue Angel, Verdigris seems apart from reality, or even just reality as represented in Doctor Who books, and as with Angel it seems to have a more fluid footing than I’m personally used to in books, so I struggled to connect with any of it. Chunks of it are already making their excuses to leave my head early, like the alien delegates who for some reason have been duped into living inside a mountain in Wales, or the weird little Rumplestiltskin figure misleading Jo in UNIT HQ. As that time travel line suggests, some people like to get the measure of a thing, and I couldn’t quite do that with Verdigris, although I had a nice enough time leafing through whatever it was.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #66 – Coldheart by Trevor Baxendale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#33

Coldheart

By Trevor Baxendale

The last time we saw Trevor Baxendale he was injecting some very trad (though still quite effective) elements into the EDAs. The series had, to be fair, settled into quite a trad pattern by then, all “the Doctor and Sam visit a colony world” this and “ancient doomsday device” that.

Now things have changed. Sam’s gone, the gang’s different, they’re on the run in a TARDIS that is also one of them, and in the previous adventure said TARDIS was so upset she killed a guy. What a strange new world Baxendale has stepped into! But for all the difference it makes we might as well still be in the Sam era, because with a few honourable exceptions Coldheart is just another EDA.

That’s not always a bad thing. Baxendale’s The Janus Conjunction didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it did its thing sufficiently well that several later books felt like they were treading on its toes. And Coldheart finds some of the same things interesting: once again we have a largely inhospitable planet that’s killing its people, there’s a schism between two groups which means one of them is visibly decaying to death, and the leader of the mutants wants wholesale destruction for everybody out of sheer spite. Missing this time is a sense of intergalactic doom, with only the people living on the desert planet Eskon in immediate danger. That’s no problem though, as long as they’re quite compelling and/or sympathetic.

So, yeah, about that.

What I will say is that Baxendale once again sells the physical details of his world very well. From the underground ice caves to the blistering heat on the surface (already a memorable juxtaposition there) we soon discover vast caterpillar-like “sand-cars” that work like wagon trains. Then there are the native Eskonians who look a bit like camels, and their city Baktan which is a giant hollowed-out rock. Water is at a premium on this world so it’s the basis of their economy, itself a free albeit rationed resource that you can sell on in other forms once you have it. Eskon and its society are very easy to picture. Mind you, I read most of this during a heatwave, which added a certain horrible verisimilitude. (Yuck. Eff off, heatwave.)

The Eskonians have a few problems besides the heat however, which recently has increased causing their previously not-that-bad climate to worsen. (Gee, what must that be like?) Their society looks down on women, frequently denying them identity or even speech. Then there are the “slimers,” a subset of society with an unexplained degenerative disease; they are literally losing their shape and when they die, an event somewhat unfortunately called “the Squirming,” they dissolve into a pool of slithering leeches. Needless to say, the slimers have been ostracised, but rather than politely go out into the desert and die they’ve blockaded Baktan, causing even more friction with the non-infected Eskonians who hate them as their presence has halted trade between Baktan and neighbouring cities. What few aliens come to their city tend to take advantage of their desperation.

It’s an interesting and heated dynamic. There’s an obvious question of who are the real monsters here, with the less unpleasant-looking Eskonians behaving inhumanely towards the more mutant-looking slimers who live in squalor. Baxendale complicates this however by making the slimers unlikeable as well: they’re justifiably angry about their situation, but their leader Revan is just another fanatical nutjob who delights in arranging murder and havoc. If any of his lieutenants feel differently, they’re awfully quiet about it.

The slimers even reject Ckeho (rhymes with “keyhole”, which we are told and then I thought of it every time I read his name) because he is the son of an Eskonian elder. That elder also rejected him, however, locking him in his bedroom because his position prevents him from having kids and a slimer in the family would bring great shame. When Fitz releases Ckeho his first impulse is to strangle his rescuer. In the end however, Ckeho is our token likeable slimer.

The non-slimer Eskonians don’t have such good representation. There’s Brevan, an ice-miner who meets the Doctor and co. early in the story and then lingers beigely in the background. Not memorable, but at least he isn’t outwardly horrible. Two of the ruling Forum members, Krumm and Anavolus, seem alternately harmless and perhaps even kind, but they’re still complicit in the living conditions of slimers and the mistreatment of women, as well as the political cover-up surrounding Tor Grymna. (Ckeho’s shamefaced father.) Grymna is a dubious and troubled figure, whom we’re obviously supposed to hate because of his treatment of Ckeho, but he wobbles back and forth in a way that suggests character growth. I say “suggests” because in his final scene he’s definitely a baddie again, even getting dispatched with a one-liner. Presumably we’re not meant to weep.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about a society with problems. It would be boring if they didn’t have any! But Coldheart isn’t here to fix anything. (A fact it’s well aware of, with Fitz noting “They’ve still got problems here, Doctor. Big problems” after it all wraps up.) The treatment of the slimers reverses, to the paltry extent of allowing Ckeho to represent them on the Forum, and only because the Doctor and co. find a scientific basis for what’s happened to them which proves that they are blameless. The Eskonians don’t use empathy to get there, they just get more information.

The subjugation of women is even worse. There’s only one woman in the story apart from Compassion; she only gets one line and her death isn’t used as a direct motivator for change. It’s still up to Fitz to make the case — off screen! — that maybe they ought to stop being so awful to women like her. This is also right at the end, and there’s no Ckeho-like rep in the Forum, so good luck with that, I guess.

If you cram all of your societal change into the epilogue then what is the rest of the story about, and who are we rooting for in the meantime? The Doctor is “not very impressed with a lot of things about these people” and Fitz more than once expresses the view that he could take or leave everyone here (“As far as I’m concerned, you can all bloody well starve to death, dry up and blow away or mutate into who cares what. To hell with the lot of you”) and it’s hard to disagree with either of them. All that’s left when you take out emotional progress is a load of plot and action, most of which we’ve either heard before or just plain isn’t going to set the world alight. 

Coldheart does a pretty good job of upping the stakes at least, especially near the end with the delirious one-two punch of “your people are all going to turn into slimers and die out” BUT ALSO “the slimers exist because of a giant terrifying alien worm lurking underground” BUT ALSO “Revan’s actions will cause tectonic disasters that will destroy your city” BUT ALSO “the big worm had babies and they’re gonna eat everybody before any of that even happens.” I actually laughed (not entirely derisively) when Fitz, then the Doctor, then Compassion all walked into a dramatic summation to contribute one bombshell each, although obviously we are kind of playing silly buggers at this point. You reach a point when you genuinely think, wow, they’re screwed! Which at least adds a certain excitement to the final act.

That sense of peril is shared by the main trio, who are continuing their randomised flight from the Time Lords. I was cautiously optimistic about the randomiser (hold that thought) because although it takes away Compassion’s agency as a TARDIS it can still land them in interesting places. To the device’s credit, it means that they can’t rely on Compassion to spirit them away from danger, as she won’t be able to control her landing. Given that Compassion is otherwise invincible and could, in theory, shield the Doctor and Fitz from all harm, anything we can do to introduce an element of danger is a good thing.

It’s hard not to be a little sceptical about where this new TARDIS will take them, however, based on current evidence. They’re not really achieving anything with their random hops since “go somewhere the Time Lords aren’t” is the single stated goal at this point. What does progress even look like in this arc? Not a string of Coldhearts, surely. I hope some sort of progress is made soon. Even The Chase had the Doctor working on an anti-Dalek weapon between landings.

Coldheart is not, as you might have guessed, very big on the arc stuff. (Inasmuch as there can be arc stuff once you land and there are definitely no Time Lords about.) Some effort is made to ask questions about Compassion in a way that is in conversation with the previous book. There’s the curious development about the randomiser. (You can release that thought you were holding.) “She hadn’t liked the idea at first. It still rankled … But she had found that travelling through the vortex, feeling the passage of space-time around her and through her, was a glory in itself. She didn’t actually care much about destinations. It was the journeying she craved.”

I wouldn’t call this a complete back-pedal, she’s entitled to change her mind after all and the thrill of travel probably is a big factor… but it’s still rather abrupt after the previous novel had her, not to go on about it, killing or attempting to kill people over it. For good measure she considers abandoning her fellow travellers (“What was to stop her just leaving?”), something the Doctor appears to sense during the final crisis. This stuff is interesting, although to be honest if Compassion was still willing to stick with these guys after The Fall Of Yquatine then I don’t see why she’d wobble about it now.

There’s a bit more wobbling with Compassion apparently tuning into the Doctor’s telepathy and mourning her inability to save a man from a great fall, which of course she survives. (Not to get all “I hope someone was fired for that blunder” but could she not have popped him safely indoors before they hit the ground?) Both things suggest an increasing sense of empathy, which would be an ironic character shift after she became less and less personified before. This is somewhat at odds with the way Compassion is actually written, however, which is robotic at times. I know she’s a machine of great power now and she was specifically never personable, but having her rattle off lines like “I’m still not certain how my own position in the space-time continuum is defined. As a temporally annexed life-form I am irrevocably linked to the space-time vortex too” brings to mind a Star Trek science officer, not the surly cyborg from Yquatine. I guess ongoing characters + rotating writers is a lucky dip.

There’s some interesting stuff around the Doctor, although Baxendale doesn’t fully integrate it into the story. We have a moment where Fitz, for some reason, intuits that “the Doctor was [possibly] trying to distract himself … from the sudden loss of his TARDIS.” I would have no problem at all with that: if anything, we’ve been severely undersold the impact of that event since (and during) The Shadows Of Avalon. But there’s not much actual evidence of it here, and it doesn’t come up again. Then we have Compassion observing (so it’s external, again) that “there was something nagging at her subconscious. Something about the Doctor’s whole demeanour.”

Possibly this is the same “something” that allows the Doctor to cheerfully orchestrate Grymna’s death, in a way that will also resolve the planet’s giant worm problems. The Doctor is generally anti-killing, although it would be unhelpful to storytelling to never consider going there; this time, however, he seems a bit blasé about it. Is this what Compassion was talking about? Are we Doing A Thing? Could we be hinting at the Doctor’s still-percolating time bomb disease from Interference? No idea. But it’s among his more notable moments in an otherwise pretty standard performance, all “I like meeting new people!” and “Wow, things!”

Shockingly, Fitz is not left to fend for himself this week, or not to the extent where he has to consider a new lifestyle. He has a likeable enough dynamic with Ckeho (once they’re past the whole “sorry I strangled you” business) and he manages to find and get attached to the only woman in the book, because of course he does. I’m not sure if we’re meant to infer more than just companionship here — Compassion seems to raise an eyebrow when she interrupts them indoors — but I hope not, since her mute slave status would render a relationship with a passing white saviour a little on the iffy side. Fitz’s capacity for fancying is so far beyond parody at this point, but it does at least speak to empathy of a sort. The Doctor’s suggestion that Fitz stay behind and mediate is, however, laughable. (Anyway, isn’t he still planning to go and live with Filippa some day? Is he going on tour?)

Fitz is not especially well written when it comes to dialogue, steering clear of bad language in a way that recalls some of Ace’s less natural moments; see “I don’t give a cuss about him or anyone else here” and “What in the name of muck happened to you?” Dialogue isn’t really the book’s strong-point, however, often gravitating towards hoary SF/fantasy-speak like “‘Revan! Manag! Come quick! Ibres is ill!’ ‘Is it the Squirming, Hefeg?’” (There’s a lot of “good morrow, character A” followed by “indeed so, character B”, which is a pet hate of mine. People know who they’re speaking to! You can make this apparent to others by making them sound different!) There’s the odd good bit of prose, such as “Dawn struck like an ironmonger’s hammer,” but the book mostly just trundles along between shouty bits — to be fair, often at quite a lick.

Coldheart is meat and potatoes stuff. The characters arrive, there’s a problem to resolve, action, escalation, sigh of relief, wheezing groaning sound. Some of the visual ideas are well established — none of the nitty-gritty ones fare that well. There’s perhaps a subtext here about empathy (which snuck into my review more than I intended), with a generally unlikeable group challenging the notion of who you should care about, an idea that maybe includes Compassion as well? Your guess is as good as mine. Really though it’s a sharp reminder of how quickly an interesting arc can level out; like Compassion, you’ll wonder if there’s any compelling reason not to just leave.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #65 – Short Trips And Sidesteps edited by Stephen Cole and Jacqueline Rayner

Doctor Who: Short Trips

Short Trips and Sidesteps

Edited by Stephen Cole and Jacqueline Rayner

It’s time for our third and final round of Short Trips. (Books that are, ironically, longer than the novels.) This one promises offbeat interpretations of Doctor Who ideas, and it brings in Jac Rayner, a name I associate with good writing. I’m optimistic, but also sad that for whatever reason this is our last one. (No I’m not doing the Big Finish ones. I took one look at eBay and my eyes nearly melted out of my skull.)

NB: The introduction is an adorable time capsule that name-checks The Curse Of Fatal Death as a sign of freshness and innovation in the series. I’ve still got the video!

*

The Longest Story In The World

By Paul Magrs

Paul Magrs writes about a storyteller — it’s very much in his wheelhouse. What’s unusual is the suggestion that we’re looking at an alternate Susan and First Doctor, with her telling him endless tales of the travels he will one day have, and him disbelieving them. It’s flavourful but soon over with, which is a pleasing irony given the title, but nevertheless it’s the sort of story where you go “oh, are we done?”

*

A Town Called Eternity, Part One

By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

More Short Trips experimented with multi-part stories and it looks like those are back. I just hope this one sticks the landing. Part One is a very fast-moving bit of fun with the Fifth Doctor and Peri in the old West, facing a conundrum that manages to involve the fountain of youth, a significant piece of continuity from Planet Of Fire and dinosaurs. It’s a laugh, and I enjoyed the recognition of Peri still adjusting to her new life. The characterisation of the Fifth Doctor leans puritanical enough to risk being a parody, but at least he gets to wear a Stetson.

NB: The Doctor says “I quite liked my grandfather — what I remember of him.” I wonder if that’s meant to be an Infinity Doctors nod or some such.

*

Special Occasions: 1. The Not-So-Sinister Sponge

By Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman

The Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on a planet made entirely of sweets. As you’d expect from the authors this is Season 17 on steroids (or, I suppose, too many sweets) but if you’re in the mood for a daft confection then this will probably do. Gag-wise I thought “Masterbakers” was pushing it, but I enjoyed the cutaway where Romana seemingly experiences the most blockbusting episode of Doctor Who ever and we all miss it.

*

Nothing At The End Of The Lane, Part One: The Valiant Woman

By Daniel O’Mahony

Another story in multiple parts? They should have called this book Short Trips In Small Doses.

This is a very evocative (er, part) story about schoolteacher Barbara Wright suspecting that something isn’t right about her student Susan Foreman, whilst being plagued by visions of impossible dangers and suffering from a mysterious mouth wound. This feels like an Unbound story (one of the promised “Side Steps”) and as it’s incomplete I’ve no idea where it’s going. I’m intrigued though by its uncanny almost-the-sameness.

*

Countdown To TV Action

By Gary Russell

At last we have a one-and-done. This is another very light story, either parodying or sincerely imitating (I wouldn’t know the difference) the run of Doctor Who comics from the 1970s named in the title. Pertwee here is a rather blunt version of himself, happily answering to “Dr Who”. He’s off to solve a faintly Dæmons-esque mystery in a small town that involves killer trees. I’ve no idea how similar this is to the source material but Gary Russell has a good handle on the peculiar humour of the medium. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

NB 1: I liked this meta nudge towards BBC Books and Audio Visuals/Big Finish, which Russell was busy with at the time: “‘[We’ll be] forced to say lines and make moves predetermined by others until one day someone decides we’ve outlived our usefulness and we get cancelled. Or transferred to some other less popular medium, like books. Or worse —’ Dr Who shuddered — ‘audio!’”

NB 2: And here he gets points for sheer clairvoyance: “The powers-that-be have created a new channel. BBC4 will be devoted to nothing but educational programmes.”

*

The Queen Of Eros

By Trevor Baxendale

The Eighth Doctor almost gets married in this Aztecs-ish adventure, where alien Queen Asheya takes a liking to him while the TARDIS and Sam are imprisoned. The novelty of an Eighth-Doctor-and-Sam story caught me off guard, somehow it feels like years since I was reading about just these two. Sam doesn’t get a lot to do (typical) but her humour is dead on, and the Doctor’s awkward attempts to reason with Asheya are quite compelling, as is the real hint of romance. She’s an interesting figure as well.

*

The Android Maker Of Calderon IV

By Miche Docherty

New writer alert! This is pretty much a setup and a punchline, but it’s very funny. A man on a world that has been visited and sorted out by the Doctor isn’t too happy about the result, and he plots his revenge involving murderous android duplicates. Then he is thwarted by bad timing. Lots of fun here — but I must say, it’s a bit of a madcap collection, this one.

*

Revenants

By Peter Anghelides

This was a pleasant surprise. Peter Anghelides has brought back the future Doctor from More Short Trips — who I have since learned is the “Merlin Doctor” alluded to in Battlefield and then described in Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation. (Not very tall, scraggly red hair, bangles on his wrist, yellow waistcoat, big afghan coat. For some reason I picture him as Barrie Ingham.) In this one the Doctor and Guin — his current companion, a parent, divorcee and museum director — investigate a time experiment on a space station, only to find themselves stuck in a time loop. Time loops are tricky things to write and this one threatens to get (forgive me) repetitive, but the sparkling dynamic between this Doctor and his academic companion kept me engaged.

*

Please Shut The Gate

By Stephen Lock

New writer! The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe visit Mars only to discover that the Doctor has been to this exact spot before, with some embarrassing consequences that are about to get even worse. This perfectly captures Troughton’s brand of scruffy chaos (you could interpret a line here to say that he hasn’t washed his trousers since the Ben and Polly era — plausible tbh) and it ties in amusingly with, or so I assume from a quick Google search, the ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter landing in 1999. Very jolly stuff.

*

Turnabout Is Fair Play

By Graeme Burk

Another new writer! We’ve got a very fun premise here with Peri and the Sixth Doctor body-swapped. The story is from Peri’s POV as she improvises her way through an encounter with the sort of megalomaniac the Doctor is good at putting a stop to. She does quite well using a mix of her own botanical knowledge and a Doctorly sort of vamping. Peri’s natural grouchiness comes through in spades. My only negative here would be the too-easy concessions to the Sixth Doctor being overweight. I get that narrators can be subjective and therefore derogatory, and jokes are just jokes, but much like Tegan getting nastily personal about Adric in Divided Loyalties, calling the Doctor “Blubbo the Time Lord” here seems a little much.

*

Special Occasions: 2. Do You Love Anyone Enough?

By Norman Ashby

Short Trips and pseudonyms go together like two sticky go-together type things, so it’s maybe no surprise to see one here. We can perhaps assume that this was written by whoever was range editor at the time, or otherwise Steve Cole, known pseudonym fanatic. It’s surprising however that it’s this pseudonym, a very specific one employed by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln for The Dominators.

Anyway! This is the shortest trip so far, a one-pager with the Fourth Doctor and Romana watching the end of the universe to celebrate Valentine’s Day. I won’t spoil the joke alluded to by the title, except to say that if you get it, you probably have achy joints and bad eyesight at your age. It’s fine; the choice of space/time location feels Douglas Adams-y, which seems appropriate for the pair.

*

Nothing At The End Of The Lane, Part Two: The Watchers On The Walls

By Daniel O’Mahony

We return to Barbara, who apparently did not try to get into that rather odd police box at the end of Part One and is still having difficulty at school. She’s having fainting fits and hallucinations, mostly about nuclear Armageddon, but some of it is about something else altogether. The sinister quality of what looks to be Doctor Who itself breaking into her life made me think of Robert Shearman’s Deadline. Barbara’s nervous inroads to a friendship with Ian are (deliberately) painful to see. This now seems like it will eventually tally up with An Unearthly Child, more or less, but I just don’t know for sure. It’s enormously atmospheric stuff.

*

Dr Who And The House On Oldark Moor

By Justin Richards

He’s only gone and written one about the Cushing Doctor! Set shortly after the Roman epilogue of Dr. Who And The Daleks, this one finds the castaways on a moor in Britain, visiting a not-so-subtly named house. (Oldark.) There they find a Gothic mystery perhaps more in keeping with Hammer than Amicus. The mad scientist is named Tarkin, which could perhaps be another link to Cushing.

The movie characters are evoked very well, with Cushing’s upstanding and bristly Dr Who, Ian the bumbling boob, Susan the bravest and most inquisitive one of the bunch and Barbara still thanklessly reporting for duty. It reads like a colourful ghost story.

*

Gone Too Soon

By Christopher M. Wadley

New writer! (Almost getting bored of pointing that out. What a nice problem to have.) Some time after The Trial Of A Time Lord, the Sixth Doctor somehow finds out about his impending doom. At first upset and then defiant, he decides to make the most of the time he has left. He makes a statement, has some historical fun with the Beatles and intervenes at a few important moments in time. This one packs a lot into a few pages and if anyone was going to rage against the dying of the light, it would be Colin’s Doctor. I particularly enjoyed seeing the Doctor actually do the sort of historical hobnobbing he’s always alluding to.

*

Reunion

By Jason Loborik

New guy again! This is a rather grim bit of sci-fi about an unhappy accountant being lured onto a train along with a lot of what appear to be strangers. The Second Doctor arrives to help thwart an unpleasant creature who has been on Earth for centuries. It’s very visceral at points and it shows a more controlling Troughton Doctor than the earlier Stephen Lock story. Pretty good, but I don’t think it quite digs into the horrifying ramifications of the plot.

NB: Is this Season 6B? I can’t think when else the Second Doctor would be on his own like this.

*

Planet Of The Bunnoids

By Harriet Green

New writer, and this one’s a lady! Our cup runneth over.

This time we get the First Doctor, Vicki and Steven facing off against malevolent robot rabbits and a disembodied force that feeds on emotions. This leads to the Doctor instigating a virtual fairytale for his two companions in which he is cast, perfectly btw, as the Fairy Godmother. Then there’s some cheeky use of the Doctor’s guilt around his companions in order to feed the monsters. A very enjoyable runaround, and it’s interesting that we have two stories in a row with monstrous beings who just want to go home. (Both stories draw opposite conclusions about whether this should be allowed, however.)

*

Monsters

By Tara Samms

Steve Cole alert.

This is quite an urban and exciting tale for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, who are looking for monsters in the wrong places. Things get nasty for young siblings Kirsty and David, who are both having a rough childhood in different ways. Then the ending rolls along and things somehow look even worse for Kirsty now. I suppose Cole makes a compelling enough point about monsters hiding in plain sight (although, do sick people count?) and it works memorably as a horror tale, with excellent characterisation for the two regulars, but eesh, it’s ’orrible.

*

Special Occasions: 3. Better Watch Out: Better Take Care

By Steve Burford

Continuing this jolly series of (hey, new writer! I didn’t forget to point it out!) the Fourth Doctor and Romana in celebratory mood, we now have them breaking into a certain old friend’s abode to mark a certain most wonderful time of the year. This is another nice little confection. These aren’t really world-beaters but they’re delightful.

*

Face Value

By Steve Lyons

We’re getting our money’s worth with the “side steps” idea now, with a sequel to The Ultimate Adventure — the 1989 Doctor Who stage musical that nowadays mostly exists as fan race memory, or perhaps, shared hallucination. (Also: a Big Finish adaptation! All together folks: Buuusiness is business…) You don’t need to know much about it to find this funny, although Lyons does manage to make reference to the three actors who played the Doctor during its run, and he squeezes in a few musical numbers too. Fans of Zog (perhaps the lowest-hanging-fruit alien name in all of Doctor Who) will not be disappointed. Honestly though, it’s a good and funny story in its own right. I loved the idea that some very dodgy villains were inadvertently taken over by some other ones, who had no idea the first lot were even up to no good.

*

Storm In A Tikka

By Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

At first it looks like Tucker and Perry are going to give Steve Lyons a run for his money, geek-wise: this is a sequel to Dimensions In Time, also set in Walford, which then bothers to set up the Seventh Doctor and Ace’s educational appearance in Search Out Science. Nerd alert! The actual story though is bit of not-particularly-EastEnders-y action adventure with a fair amount of bloodshed, concerning the Thuggee goddess Kali. (I’m not entirely sure what to make of this one from a cultural standpoint. Shall we move on?) It’s more noisy than funny, but you’ve got to admire the silly setting.

*

Nothing At The End Of The Lane, Part Three: The Only Living Thing

By Daniel O’Mahony

We answer the conundrum of just what this story is about — it’s not an Unbound version of An Unearthly Child after all, but the “real” Barbara suffering an attack from a psychic monster whilst adventuring with the Doctor and friends. Before she finds this out there is a disturbing altercation with “Grandfather” in Totters Yard; shaken out of her delirium, Barbara shares quite a sweet moment with the real Doctor, where she thinks of Ian in a way that puts unusual focus on his vulnerability as a man out of time. I would happily have finished there, but this is Daniel O’Mahony, so we plunge right back into the nightmare before he lets us leave. Got it all figured out, have you? Nice try. All in all, perhaps the most interesting thing in the book.

*

A Town Called Eternity, Part Two

By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

The second part of this is suitably action packed, with an eyebrow-raising moment where the Fifth Doctor runs out of patience with a familiar rascal and shoots him point blank. Broadly I think the best bits and biggest surprises of this story are in the first half, but it’s still a satisfyingly cartoonish whole.

*

Special Occasions: 4. Playing With Toys

By David Agnew

One last pseudonym — Steve, is that you? — sees the Fourth Doctor and Romana finish their series of wistful mini-breaks by visiting the room where the Key To Time was once held; they ruminate and (in Romana’s case) nod off. Then we end the book on a spooky note, as a familiar toy-themed menace suddenly takes control of the Doctor. Like a few stories here, I’m not sure what I’m meant to take away from it, but I suppose this one makes a change from whimsy.

*

(And then, hidden after the bumf at the back of the book…)

Vrs

By Lwrnc Mls

A solid gag involving famous monsters and vowels. This review is two words longer than the story. I checked.

*

And that’s the end of Short Trips, at least as far as BBC Books are concerned. I think they rose to the occasion and delivered something colourful and weird on their way out. I didn’t always get it, but it’s okay to be puzzled sometimes. Probably the best of the three volumes, and worth seeking out.

9/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #64 – The Fall Of Yquatine by Nick Walters

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#32

The Fall of Yquatine

By Nick Walters

Once again the Eighth Doctor Adventures have changed. From introducing Sam, then losing her for a bit, then bringing in Fitz, trading out Sam and then bringing in Compassion — not to mention the stuff on the back-burner like The Enemy and Faction Paradox — you can’t really fault their ambition to keep things fresh.

There’s a gulf between that and how it’s all executed, though. Take Sam’s lacklustre introduction, her equally on-the-spot decision to leave, Fitz and Compassion both officially joining the team off-screen — not to mention the general abundance of EDA tropes established by this point. So there’s good reason to be concerned about this latest seismic shift, however exciting it is, and to what degree the series will follow it up.

I hope you’ve read The Shadows Of Avalon, because 3, 2, 1: the TARDIS has been destroyed, Compassion is a TARDIS now and the three travellers are on the run from the Time Lords. What, quite simply, the heck do you do next? I half expected them to gloss over it and just do another normal EDA adventure.

I was half right.

The Fall Of Yquatine is very interested in the new dynamic. (Hooray!) Is it a good dynamic? Well, we don’t know that yet, but we’re off to a rocky start. The Doctor doesn’t seem entirely able to communicate with Compassion now that she’s also a mode of transport — he’s familiar to the point that it’s a tad uncomfortable, and that’s before he adds a Randomiser to her console without asking. The thinking here is of course to evade the Time Lords, which is in her best interests, but she has vehemently argued against this by the time we rejoin the gang after Avalon, so this is a serious violation of trust. A Randomiser cancels out her free will and stops her really becoming the thing that she is — and where does that leave her, since she didn’t even ask to become it?

I’ve seen the Doctor’s actions criticised quite heavily in fandom, and I mean, yeah, they should be. But they’re criticised a lot in the book too: it’s questionable behaviour and it is presented as such. The Doctor certainly regrets taking away her autonomy like that, reflecting (somewhat bluntly IMO) that what he’s done is no less a rape than what the Time Lords intend. When his actions cause him to lose his two companions, potentially to their deaths, it’s not really up for debate whether he knows that he’s messed up.

Why aren’t I running screaming from this awful behaviour? Well, it is awful, but I think there’s an opportunity for mistakes in the current story arc — and mistakes are interesting. The TARDIS is gone! (Again, I know, but bear with me.) Who is the Doctor without it? He’s clearly not playing with a full deck since he’s taken Compassion and Fitz to a world that’s presumably famous for its downfall, arriving willy-nilly on the day of its big disaster. That’s something he’d normally plan for, but he’s clearly on the hoof now. That fact speaks to a desperation that I think, if not excuses, maybe explains some of his callous disregard for Compassion’s feelings. There is a huge gulf between a travelling machine that is in a sense alive and one that can call you an arsehole to your face, and the Doctor hasn’t had long to fill it. I think, compounded with the loss of his ship/his oldest friend, a degree of discombobulation is understandable here. (Admittedly the degree to which he’s affected by the loss of the TARDIS is my inference. I would have liked that to be in there more clearly, because why wouldn’t it be?)

This betrayal also puts Compassion in an interesting light. She is a character with, I think it’s fair to say, not many distinguishing features until very recently, although her detached matter-of-fact attitude has marked her out from the more gung-ho Sam. (Her Remote nature is also interesting but the writers have been pick-and-choose about that, and now it’s quite possibly gone forever.)

Now she finds herself powerful beyond imagining, yet also violated by someone she trusts. She completely spirals, going so far as to almost kill Fitz when urging him to remove the Randomiser (which he can’t), then dump him in a different time-zone and leave him there, and later actually kill someone while they’re trying to remove the Randomiser because she’s so out of control with pain. Despite all of that she’s still fundamentally committed to going back to Fitz and the Doctor — because she knows, deep down, that the Doctor was trying cack-handedly to do something useful — and she ends up suffering even more for it, spending “years, decades” in the time vortex first.

Compassion is unquestionably a victim here, but it’s nonetheless eyebrow-raising how out of control she is, particularly when she is ostensibly usurping the safest character/location in Doctor Who. It would be unthinkable for “the TARDIS” to casually threaten murder, or accidentally commit it, or dump people wherever it likes in time and space. It’s also hard to picture the TARDIS casually saving the day, using a mixture of the chameleon circuit and a complete absence of morals, or very nearly rewriting history and creating a paradox without any apparent qualms, both of which Compassion does here. You simply have no idea where you stand with her, beyond the broad sense that she’s a goodie.

Introducing this kind of fallibility completely redefines what travel means for the ongoing series, and the Doctor/companion relationship will bear some re-examination too. I don’t love that this has happened to Compassion several books down the line — and I’m no fool, I know this also isn’t going to last — but it’s definitely a positive that the book directly after The Shadows Of Avalon has committed to, and then built upon the boldness of its ending. The three characters are in a very interesting place, and that’s just what you want in an ongoing series.

Arguably less interesting is the plot of the week — and I do mean “arguable”, because I quite like it anyway. Much of it just feels a bit familiar. With an intergalactic threat targeting a relatively harmonious solar system it’s difficult not to recall Beltempest. but for my money The Fall Of Yquatine paints a more detailed picture of the different planets involved, who occupies them and how it all works. The representatives of each world feature somewhat prominently, which helps us to picture the plethora of species in this solar system.

That sense of variety also helps to overcome the initial sense of “here we go again” about an EDA set on an Earth colony world, not to mention ye olde planet-killing horror. There’s somewhat a sense of a do-over of the author’s previous book, Dominion, which perhaps didn’t go into enough detail about its own wacky eco-system. The Fall Of Yquatine certainly supports the idea that Nick Walters is following on from Paul Leonard in terms of authors fascinated by different species and keen to celebrate their differences. The Saraani from his and Leonard’s earlier Dry Pilgrimage also get a cameo.

The catastrophe happens quite fast, as mysterious ships appear above the planet and rain down an unforgiving black acid. There are few survivors and it initially seems that the vengeful and warrior-like Anthaurk are responsible. However they are soon joining the effort to gather up survivors. Compassion and Fitz have fled by this point, the former in a rage about the Randomiser; the Doctor meanwhile is in a small spacecraft with only a friend, Lou Lombardo, and a wounded woman whom he tells “You’ll thank me for this later” about leaving behind her doomed husband. (I’m sensing a theme here with the Doctor’s confusion around what other people want. I’m enjoying the concept that the Eighth Doctor is just as dreadful as the Seventh, but he’s more up front about it, and is then baffled when it blows up in his face.)

The rest of the book mostly splits between the Doctor trying to figure out what happened and stop it getting any worse, Fitz making the best of a bad situation after being unceremoniously dumped a month in the past, and Compassion flitting around trying to get rid of the you-know-what. It’s one of those books that changes scenes quite often, but Walters is one of those authors who keeps these changes on track and aligned to the same character, so it’s exciting rather than disorienting being swept along. There always seems to be something interesting going on; it has a good pace.

That impression peters out a little as it goes on, mostly because the supporting characters aren’t a lot to write home about. We open with a brilliantly self-contained chapter about Arielle, a visitor to Yquatine who begins a whirlwind romance with the ruling President Vargeld. But then we leave Arielle for a large chunk of the book, skipping whatever was compelling about their romance and arriving after it’s turned sour. Our main impression of Vargeld is that he’s an obsessed, abusive, short-sighted blowhard, leaving us mystified as to his initial appeal. He never gets any better, right up to the last chapter when the Doctor has finally calmed things down. We do pause along the way for an argument/reconciliation between him and the Doctor, both mad at the other’s actions, but it’s too little and far too quick to convince. And Vargeld is awful again soon enough.

The Anthaurk are similarly intractable. While not responsible for the attack, they’re itching for an excuse to change the local power balance in their favour, and are soon behaving about as sympathetically as Selachians. Their way of life has its interesting bits, but the general murderousness ends up putting them in the realm of watered down Ice Warriors or Klingons.

The impression begins to dawn that while Walters has put some effort into populating this solar system with weird and wonderful creatures, he hasn’t made many of them easy to care about. This extends to the threat itself, which we learn is a form of artificial weapon made by someone (footage not found) and capable of doing better if only someone would reprogram it. The Doctor tries, it goes predictably, and then you sort of wonder what it was all in aid of.

Fitz is presumably here to help, and his part of the story is compelling, but I mean — Fitz on his own, separated from the TARDIS and forced to make his own way for a while? We’re really doing that again? There’s the potential to make it fresh because he alone knows what’s going to happen on Yquatine in a month’s time, and he agonises about whether to tell anyone, but that hardly matters in the end — although I did enjoy the bit where Compassion seemed happy to undo the whole mess without a thought for the timelines. (It doesn’t work, so the inevitable tête-à-tête with the Doctor doesn’t happen.)

Then there’s his love story. He meets a down-on-her-luck Arielle just when she’s breaking it off with Vargeld. The two become fast friends and they try to flee the planet. Now, there’s a very fun (and kind of awful) brain-teaser here about whether Fitz’s choices are what ultimately dooms Yquatine — although by that logic it was really the Doctor’s idea about the Randomiser that started it. And there’s a fun sort of chemistry between the two. But Fitz Falls In Love (and its inevitable sequel, Fitz Loses Girlfriend) is threatening to become parody at this point. He even references Filippa from Parallel 59 a few times, just to remind us that that situation was important to him, but also reinforcing that it’s happened before. Then we go ahead and make Arielle another tragic affair he’ll need therapy to get over anyway. It’s like Sam totting up failed attempts at activism.

None of this is bad in isolation, but for a range busting a gut to do something new it’s… well, it’s a choice to mash that “again” button, isn’t it? And it’s not as if the story beat even does Arielle any favours, since by virtue of spending most of her time with Fitz she gets written with a-man-wrote-this-isms such as “The way she carried herself wasn’t how beautiful women usually carried themselves, with a knowing, superior air.” (Arielle’s too-perfect looks are a major character point, but there’s nowhere much to go with that.) There’s some compelling imagery around Arielle thanks to Compassion’s “forest room” — a sort of spookier update to the TARDIS’s butterfly room — but in the end it feels alarmingly close to a copy and paste.

I’ve ended up sounding quite negative about this one. I think part of the reason is that I more or less finished the book (and started my review) a few days ago, and now my memory’s started to fog a bit on the finer details. Or that might be a sign that The Fall Of Yquatine can’t sustain interest throughout, with perhaps too many elements that we’ve seen before.

What’s good about it is the arc stuff. The status quo has changed, and it shows no real signs of becoming as reliable and stable as the good old days. The Doctor’s relationship with Compassion is unlike any he’s had with a companion before, which keeps the interest up for where the series will go next, but Walters also prioritises making it interesting now, which is a basic necessity some of your fancier Lawrence Miles-types might overlook. For that reason, I’m still happy to recommend this one. Although seriously guys, you don’t have to make things more interesting one thing at a time.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #63 – Tomb Of Valdemar by Simon Messingham

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#29

Tomb of Valdemar

By Simon Messingham

One thing I like about these daft old Doctor Who novels is that the writers sometimes treat them as novels. That’s a rather pretentious statement, I know, since by definition they are all exactly that, but I sometimes get the impression that writers are transcribing imaginary scripts rather than building books from the ground up. See any that constantly change the scene, as if to deter channel-hoppers.

You can see this more novelist attitude in books like The Roundheads, a Boy’s Own adventure that surely belongs in prose; anything by Paul Magrs, who seemingly lives for the particular craziness you only get outside of a visual medium; and the fruitsome Eye Of Heaven, which places great store in who is telling the story and how it is told.

Simon Messingham made similar inroads in Zeta Major, a space opera that occasionally switched away from traditional “he said/she said” prose in favour of news reports and journals. It added a dimension to that story, but I didn’t feel at the time that it was entirely essential. The Face-Eater, a much more conventional Doctor Who book, also dabbled in story perspectives, even using second person for the monster bits. Messingham has now returned to that area wholeheartedly. This time it definitely needs to be there.

Tomb Of Valdemar is a story that relishes being a book. It’s full of choices, which it knows might catch you out. I’m thinking particularly of the use of present tense, which a character nitpicks: “And the way you tell it, all this ‘He says… she says,’ it ain’t right. It should be ‘He said… she said.’ Like proper stories.” (I’m tempted to include the title as An Interesting Choice as it kept wrong-footing me — why isn’t it The Tomb Of Valdemar, which arguably scans better? Was it just more interesting to ditch the definite article? — but then, it is actually called that on the title page. So: was the cover a typo, or the page, or was it all deliberate? *shakes fist* Messinghammm!)

The main reason for that use of present tense is that this story is being told, in the text, to somebody else. This allows for some very human, narrator-led moments such as telling us that a transformed person is chasing them (before telling us the transformation has occurred), or noticing something about a person before they’re described as being in the room, or diving back suddenly to back-fill the reason for telling us something else in the first place. The style is sort of, carefully messy.

A mysterious woman arrives on a fairly harsh world and, for reasons that will come along in good time, tells her story to Ponch: an unassuming fur trapper. My first thought here was that the present tense was creating a sense of danger that you don’t quite get in hindsight — implicitly if you are telling me about it afterwards, then you survived those events — but Tomb Of Valdemar plays a rather cheeky game with the woman’s identity, which throws that off. The tense is mostly a stylistic choice, then; one of a few that the narrator (and presumably author) simply liked best. “Do you think I’m doing this just to be pretentious?” / “Fair enough, Mr Redfearn. Perhaps he is a little incongruous, but I like him. You’ll just have to accept it.”

The story itself concerns, as you’ve probably guessed, a tomb. You might be able to guess much of the rest: this tomb is a gateway to Bad Things and efforts must be made to prevent it from being opened. It’s one of those books where the ideas somewhat edge out the plot, which isn’t to say it’s weak — rather that I just felt I’d been on this sort of archaeological raid before. (Heck, there’s already a famous telly Who story about not mucking about in a tomb, and it also has “tomb” in the title.)

Making things more interesting is the world-building, something Zeta Major also excelled at. There’s a kind of death cult surrounding Valdemar — a shadowy historical figure, supposedly lying dormant — and this cult is mainly there because of a classist revolution that has swept through human society. The disarmingly normal-named Paul Neville leads the cult, and with the help of frustrated novelist Miranda Pelham (who wrote about Valdemar, largely inspiring Neville’s quest) they have located the tomb on what can best be described as a Hell planet. Neville believes Valdemar will grant him all the usual madman accoutrements, but really all he wants is to get one over on Hopkins — the hairless lunatic puritan leading the purge of the old human elite. Both leaders are violent and awful, with poor unsettled Miranda stuck in the middle.

Following Neville are a band of insufferable rich drips, the mysterious and seemingly teenaged Huvan (also insufferable) and the misleadingly-named butler Kampp, who masks with an effete exterior a keen interest in torture devices. Into this mess arrive the Fourth Doctor and Romana, diverted from their quest for the Key To Time by an early attempt to open the tomb. The Doctor must prevent its opening and get back to the business of preventing universal catastrophe — although as it turns out, these goals have a lot in common.

It’s Messingham’s first novel with this Doctor, and it’s a strong showing, with Tom Baker’s unique irreverence blustering through every interaction. (I really enjoyed “He is a charismatic, handsome man, the Doctor supposes,” which nods towards “You’re a beautiful woman, probably.” Also a big fan of: “The Doctor sees a large bank of impressive-looking computer consoles and feels the hum of power beneath his feet. ‘Don’t tell me, the kitchen?’”) There’s a thrilling fusion of his confidence and intelligence with an occasional scruffy underestimation of what’s going on, leading to a lot of very educated winging-it. (Such as his high-born use of telepathy to turn out the lights at a crucial moment, or — inevitably! — the use of his scarf to survive a deadly showdown.)

The placement early in Season Sixteen is no mistake, as his friendship with Romana is still at a formative stage. He more than once bemoans that she is not like his usual companions, and he rather unwisely leaves her at the mercy of a suitor, perhaps assuming that her apparent confidence will prevent any malfeasance and perhaps (on a more bleak note) simply not being that invested in her safety. I think the only Doctor note that didn’t entirely ring true was his seeming insistence on getting back to the Key To Time, a task he mostly found an annoying encumbrance on screen; however I think the question of flawed narrators naturally covers this, as well as layering some external suggestion into his attitude towards his companion.

Romana shines. Perhaps the less popular incarnation when it comes to tie-in fiction, since you’ve inevitably got to work around the Key To Time story as well, her fresh-out-of-the-academy attitude comes into play quite a lot, especially during a few clever references to The Invasion Of Time. (A recent Gallifrey story she wasn’t featured in, it would canonically be fresh on her mind.) Mary Tamm’s somewhat regal bearing makes her a natural, if unhappy fit among Neville’s ghastly acolytes, and it’s difficult to dispute the effect she would have on a confused teenage boy who writes a lot of awful poetry. Despite the very deliberate comedic awkwardness of that pairing, their story manages to affect Romana in more ways than I was expecting. I’m not entirely sure I believe where we leave the two of them, but that’s a great rug-pull nonetheless. (Take note, EDA President Romana.)

There is a degree of archetype about the rest of the cast, with Kampp and Hopkins tending to blur together in their shared sadism, and Neville being a maniacal bore even from the perspective of the other characters. Hopkins’ crew and some of Neville’s guards seem more balanced, but they hardly get a look in. Miranda though is wonderfully well-drawn: a flawed and susceptible creative who essentially just wants to make it out of wherever she’s found herself, deep down she also yearns to make a name for herself. She makes a great pairing with the Doctor (Romana, unfortunately, being stuck with Romeo), with her scatty vulnerability working well against the Doctor’s unpredictable energy. In another life she could have made a great recurring character.

I have criticised the plot, but it’s enjoyable to watch it unfold, with Neville’s adoptive citadel (linked to Valdemar’s tomb) gradually driving its inhabitants mad — and ultimately transforming them. Grotesque transformation seems to interest Messingham, being a The Thing-ish impetus for The Face-Eater. See also the antimatter monsters in Zeta Major, and of course the fantasy/body horror of Strange England, which weirdly might be the closest analogue for this story: Valdemar, without giving too much away, will bring unimaginable chaos to the universe if released. Even before the climax he inspires seemingly random violence and upheaval. (The presence of a couple of sadists also reminded me, somewhat unhappily, of a certain era of Virgin books. At least those guys aren’t driving the plot this time.)

There is a lot of talk of Old Ones, which I suppose might tickle your spider-sense if you like Lovecraft. (As ever I’m taking that as read, since I haven’t read any.) The general speculation on the state of the universe in relation to Valdemar, and how it all links to ideas like telepathy, is all pleasantly mind-expanding without being incomprehensible; no previous Lovecraft-lore is required. The question of “who or what is Valdemar?” kept me guessing and it lands on something that works — not always a given in mysteries — much like the riddle of who’s telling this story and why. Messingham also manages to layer in the idea of storytelling in a way that complements his choice of narrative style, which lends more credence to the mechanics of Tomb Of Valdemar being important rather than just there on a whim.

Tomb Of Valdemar seems confident and comfortable having its narrator (and the Doctor) wing it at times, and it never seemed particularly indulgent to me. Even the rare moments of lamp-shading, like that bit about he said/she said, tell us something about the people complaining. Some of the character writing could be a bit more fleshed out, but at the risk of expanding the benefit of the doubt to breaking point, perhaps the narrator just didn’t get to know everybody?

It’s not perfect, and it can feel a bit off-kilter at times, but the latter mostly just serves to mark it out from the rest. For me, it’s one of the range’s swings that also hits.

8/10