Doctor Who: The BBC Books #121 – Time Zero by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#60

Time Zero

By Justin Richards

I’m not quite sure where to start with this one. It’s written by Justin Richards post-The Burning, so it seems likely that some arc plots are going to be resolved or kicked into a higher gear. Time Zero sort of does and doesn’t do that, which nicely fits its quantum theme.

Some of it is an “event book”, i.e. setting things up for future books — the next one in particular. But most of it is self-contained, perhaps even an example of a typical EDA at this point, including a cheeky effort to appear to finish one arc and then — surprise! — not do that. It’s mostly just a self-contained story with lots of action.

I say “just” as if you’re not getting a lot of actual book here, but you are. Richards has a whale of a time with multiple adventures going on in different time zones, all inexorably heading towards each other. And if you like inexorability, check out the chapters: he’s numbered them backwards so that the book becomes a countdown. (At first I thought the whole thing was backwards since the first two sections were. You can relax: he hasn’t done a Memento.)

The initial germ is a satisfying bit of continuity. Fitz is carrying out his wish (see Camera Obscura) to go on an Arctic expedition with George Williamson in 1894. This is “something [he has] to do.” His friends meanwhile aren’t resting on their laurels: Anji has finally decided to go home and, in an abrupt break with tradition, actually does that. Eighteen months pass in her normal job and life, including a reunion with Dave’s distraught family.

Quite an unconventional way to get rid of a companion, doing it at the start like that, and sure enough we’re not done here. Out of the blue she’s recruited onto a military mission to Siberia. Meanwhile the Doctor has discovered what looks like Fitz’s expedition journal up for auction, and quickly gets involved in a web of intrigue that ends in — contain your surprise — a trip to Siberia. Soon the three of them, one over a century in the past, are chasing around the same Siberian castle while murderers and alternate-reality dinosaurs run amok.

It’s very busy. You may, like me, wish to keep a record of all the different groups taking part. Richards helpfully channels his occasional habit of getting distracted into lots of very short chapters, which keeps the plot-lines coherent and gives Time Zero a moreish readability. If, like Anji, you can’t be bothered to learn everybody’s name then that’s all right, since there are murderers and dinosaurs around to reduce the numbers… eventually. The key players and their goals are distinct enough, if not all fully known from the outset.

As the backwards chapters suggest, the plot is fairly complicated. It involves a man with an unusual relationship with gravity, a man who might be a ghost, two people in disguises, impossibly distant galaxies and impossibly frozen fire, dinosaurs, two military groups with their own Siberian missions and let’s face it, very probably a certain character originated by Lawrence Miles somewhere in the mix.

As with the groaning character list however, you don’t need to take on the burden of understanding the plot: explanations will be provided, and at some length, and several times over. A popular criticism of Time Zero would seem to be the Doctor’s commitment to explaining things like quantum theory, and to be honest fair enough. The book slows down when it comes time for the Doctor to tell one group after another how this all works, only for some of them to still not get it. Frankly I’m at a point where quantum theory (which is disputed here as much as it’s reinforced) is functionally indistinguishable from magic. I think I started hearing soothing wildlife sounds after a while as a defence mechanism.

Perhaps the complexities of quantum theory and the differences between light speeds etc caught me off guard because it’s otherwise such an action-oriented story. There are some great images, like a man terrifyingly transforming into a black hole, and many excellent set-pieces, most of which revolve around a team of mercenaries. Anji is caught in several life or death struggles with them; perhaps most memorably she gets herself stranded alone on an airplane as it’s about to hit a mountain. That (incredible) moment ends up highlighting one of the book’s weaknesses, however: sometimes it’s action for action’s sake, as in that case where we’re really just doing the James Bond version of “escape only to be recaptured.” Similarly the bloodthirsty Captain Hartfield and his men, executing scientists left and right, transcended terrifying for me and just became monotonous. “I will shoot you” doesn’t leave much room for characterisation.

The regulars fare better. Fitz and Anji have rarely been this forthright. Fitz’s decision to go on this voyage in the first place is a sign of character growth, but it’s also fun watching him occasionally apply his out-of-this-world experiences to the dangers around him. He builds a meaningful friendship with George, which has its own dramatic ups and downs, and his affection for Anji and the Doctor comes through in spades. I particularly liked this nod to long-time readers re the Doctor’s amnesia, and Fitz’s continuing duty of care: “‘So it’s a paradox?’ Fitz said. ‘In fact, it sounds like the granddaddy of all paradoxes.’ He blinked. ‘Sorry, forget I said that,’ he murmured.”

Despite one of the more hair-raising experiences of Fitz’s life, which is saying something, this is still more Anji’s story than his. The quiet way she goes back to work is disconcerting when she’s someone who’s been in the TARDIS, but that just speaks to who she is. Richards then finds more depth while she’s there, quietly showing her loneliness without Dave: “[She was] ignoring the fact that in her sleep she had pulled the other pillow down so that it was lying beside her in the double bed.” This swings both ways, with her eventually considering that “‘home’ was the TARDIS.” Her specific concern for Fitz, who might be dead for all she knows, is especially poignant: “As she sat cross-legged on the floor, the discarded telephone beside her, Anji was still crying. She cried for herself and for Dave. For Dave’s Mum and Dad. She cried because she had been crying for so long she no longer knew how to stop. And she cried for shame — for knowing that every time she had said Dave she meant Fitz.”

The fact that Anji survives this ordeal and still wants to go home is a great note to leave her on: happy, appreciative, but not in need of the Doctor at all times. However this isn’t her last trip in the TARDIS. Time Zero ends with the timeline in tatters, meaning it’s no longer safe to send her to “modern day London” because that might not be what it is. I’m certainly not mad that we’re keeping her around for a while longer — the camaraderie has got so good I’m a bit confused why we even need to get shot of her. (It’s not as if the actress has itchy feet, and anyway, Fitz is staying.) Richards at least contrives a very good reason to put off her departure, but I suppose anything might be better than “he won’t take her home because um,” which I guess we just fully aren’t resolving now. (At this point I’m guessing it was just an editor’s note to keep her in a holding pattern.)

The Doctor has some of that aloofness that Richards brought with The Burning. He captures the character’s confidence: “Once inside the building, the very fact that he was inside the building seemed to serve as his credentials.” Neither of the disguised characters, with their own agendas, are able to pull the wool over his eyes; the scene where he exposes the Duchess works very well: “‘You are a very clever man,’ she said. ‘Well,’ the Doctor replied with a smile, ‘if I was that clever, I wouldn’t need your help.” And there’s the climax, where he leaves the fate of the world up to another man’s willingness to die for it. Cold, but necessary; a far cry from the TV Movie.

By rights the most memorable Doctor stuff in this ought to be his dressing down of Sabbath, who is in this of course. (I didn’t even need the big reveal: when a mysterious “large man” is mentioned on Page 6 it’s unlikely to be Father Christmas.) Sabbath’s plan ends up a mess that gets him rightly mocked from all comers, including the “Duchess”: “‘There was always a chance I might not succeed here,’ Sabbath said. ‘No?!’ [She] sounded scandalised at the thought.” The Doctor gets some moments of triumph about it, notably: “The universe works the way I say it does, not the way you assume.”

The main issue with this is simply one of context. Camera Obscura already had this debate one book earlier, albeit with less evidence, and went about it in a more interesting way. Sabbath was also a more rounded (behave) character then. I’ve seen him circa Time Zero referred to as a Bond villain, which I get, but I’d place him more as the Master in one of his “foiled again yet still inexplicably confident” moods. He’s even got the disguise! (And the impractical plan. Did he stay with Curtis for years, decades?) His myopic outlook on timelines, effectively the plot of Ghost Light writ large, is beginning to wear thin, and I’m starting to wonder why the Doctor hasn’t found a jail cell for him or some such. He’s just a man, with one heart and a boat full of monkeys. Stop arsing about and get on with it.

Once you get to this point in Time Zero it’s busy getting its ducks in a row for the next book, which is all well and good — and quite sneaky, even name-checking “a race against infinity.” But it made me wonder how much substance is actually left over for Time Zero. I’m wary of movies and TV shows that always have their eye on the next sequel or season, and there’s a little of that here: Anji’s story has arguably stalled, and the entire plot is a mix of fuel for The Infinity Race and (truly inexplicably, but why not I guess) a last minute retroactive explanation for the monsters in The Burning. We also meet the next companion, Trix, whose involvement here is mostly shenanigans. Paul Cornell introducing Bernice Summerfield this ain’t, although her unpredictability has obvious potential.

Time Zero is one of those books that does what it sets out to do with practiced gusto, Richards ably demonstrating his skill with action, thrills and comedy. As often happens he’s clearly got an idea he’s excited about and we’re gonna hear about it (quantum theory), but mostly not to the extent that you’re not having a good time. It’s an energetic example of the mad chaos of the EDAs, that would perhaps pack more of a punch if it hadn’t followed such a strong novel. Ah well: there’s a sense of the workman about Richards, what with his keen collaboration in the arc, which suggests that Time Zero was happy just to show up and set off its fireworks.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #90 – The Shadow In The Glass by Stephen Cole & Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#41

The Shadow in the Glass

By Justin Richards and Stephen Cole

NB: I read the 2015 reprint for this, titled Shadow In The Glass (no “The”) by Stephen Cole & Justin Richards (in that order). Were those deliberate changes or did somebody jot it down wrong? I don’t know, so I’ll stick with the original title and order of authors.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: when a novel didn’t quite come together as planned, BBC Books were left with a gap to fill at short notice. Looking at you Millennium Shock, The Banquo Legacy and (I’m pretty sure) Grave Matter. This time Justin Richards — for it is usually he — also enlisted Stephen Cole, late of this parish, perhaps feeling that another editor (and fellow what-do-we-do-now sufferer) would speed things up. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to do another one of these by himself.

It’s tempting to look for signs of cobbled-togetherness in the finished book, especially when there’s an introduction telling us how it all came about. I think it’s safe to say they didn’t spend too long coming up with ideas: Richards had just read a book about the death of Hitler, turn that around and there’s your central premise. They felt like the Brigadier made sense in that context, so in he went. The Sixth Doctor hadn’t met him properly on screen yet, so he was recruited as well. Throw in a crashed spaceship for added Doctor Who points and you’re nearly all the way to The Shadow In The Glass.

This is not, however, their first rodeo. It has a certain economy of pace, I suspect because of that time-crunch: there are multiple occasions when the Doctor could sort something out just by hopping in the TARDIS, so dammit, that’s what he does, and to hell with the many occasions when only a much more long-winded plan would have done! But Richards and Cole (or Richards, or Cole) make a virtue of this, using the Doctor’s apparently casual time travels to create and solve a puzzle as they go. Similarly the premise is quite a straightforward one: is Hitler back from the dead, and if so, how could that be? But instead of launching into a protracted and noisy modern war with the Nazis the authors dive into the mystery aspect, turning The Shadow In The Glass into a fact-finding mission. There’s a wider sense of economy here, of taking their somewhat meagre grab bag of ingredients and thoroughly tasting each one. Get two editors in a room, I suppose.

It’s a peculiarly light book for something with Hitler in it, or it often felt that way to me. The alien plot has very knowing echoes of The Dæmons, a perennial UNIT Family favourite: there’s even a dangerous heat barrier surrounding a village, watched over by none other than Sgt Osgood! There’s also a suggestion that the Brigadier — retired, getting on a bit, not yet rejuvenated via Happy Endings — just fancies a bit of a lark. “Did some invisible imps near the Dorset coast count as a crisis? The week stretched emptily ahead. The Brigadier decided they did.” And so he gets, haranguing some lowly military men, investigating a crashed spaceship, nipping off to Russia (!) on reconnaissance, and making a few TARDIS trips to meet Hitler, at one point handing him a half-eaten sausage roll. (At another, smirking at the dictator’s historic demise.) The Brigadier is at his most avuncular in this one, not really trying for the action heroics of old. It feels like a mature understanding of where the character and actor were at. However, it’s not entirely Christmassy: when the time comes to fight, the Brigadier does so brutally and without apology. But more on the climax later.

It’s a memorably strong book for the Sixth Doctor as well. Travelling without companions — BBC Books no longer tell us when these are set, but we can easily put this between The Trial Of A Timelord and Business Unusual — he’s also in a gentler mood, albeit still a dizzyingly proactive one, again maybe because the book had one eye on its watch at all times. In need of answers about a wartime Nazi raid on a British town, he elects simply to take part in it, first calling in a favour from Churchill to smuggle him into France, then ingratiating himself with the high command. There are obvious moral questions here, unavoidable when the Germans shoot multiple British soldiers, but on that subject the Doctor takes a pragmatic, and not entirely painless view of history: “Would Churchill have the British reinforcements waiting? Would the raid be repulsed? … There was no sense angonising over what he should and shouldn’t do. Like a sleeping man can cheat an alarm call by incorporating it into his dream, as a fire alarm or a ringing telephone, so Time itself could effortlessly sublimate the tampering of even the most flagrant meddlers, such as himself. There was a simple elegance to the way it responded to such stimulus; efficiently mending its torn web, unthinking, again and again, like a spider.” It’s a useful (if slightly mixed!) panacea to such activities as hobnobbing with Hitler, but it’s one that he’ll come to regret by the end.

I suspect the book is only as light as it is because the threat mostly keeps to the shadows. The monsters, literally so: as the title suggests they live much of their lives in reflections or silhouettes. (This approach is honestly much creepier than having them skulk about in earnest.) Hitler, if it is he, is not yet ready to reveal himself to the world, which saves the writers a lot of fuss. Only a journalist, Claire Aldwych, knows about this; she enlists the Doctor and the Brigadier to help after a fellow reporter is seemingly murdered for his discovery. Since the roof has yet to blow off this situation Richards and Cole can keep the scale relatively small. (I know that sounds wrong in a story with aliens, Hitler and impromptu trips to Russia, but you’d be surprised how much of it happens while Claire is waiting for the kettle to boil.)

Claire is a memorable, irreverent presence, clearly filling the space where a companion would otherwise have gone. (I suspect the authors wanted to give the spotlight to the two male characters instead, since they never had one on screen. That or they just couldn’t be arsed writing for Peri or Mel.) Claire is not exactly likeable, or rather she’s goal-oriented to a point where I suspect the Doctor would have refused her coming aboard the TARDIS if she’d asked. Her nose is always pointed at news, even if it’s dangerous and even if it’s found by dishonest means. She also has a few mildly eyebrow-raising moments that I couldn’t help thinking of as blots in her copybook, such as patting the Brigadier on the bum and calling the TARDIS arriving “an awful noise.” (Saints preserve us!) It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the book finds a less than happy ending for Claire — but maybe I’m reading too much into that. Claire is more or less an innocent in the grand scheme of things, and the climax is shocking because of that.

The book doesn’t have much in the way of themes. Be fair, Richards and Cole weren’t trying to win a Booker Prize here — The Shadow In The Glass is mostly aimed at giving you the coffee-at-2am feel of a paranoid conspiracy, probably because that’s how it was written. But there is a tendency towards things not being what they seem. The crashed aliens, the Vvormak, are altogether creepy, and their quest to repair the spacecraft takes several human lives — but they’re still not as evil as they appear. You spend the whole book trying to figure out the crazy Venn diagram of “crashed aliens plus rejuvenated Hitler,” but that ends up not being quite the grand conspiracy it seemed. (Nazis, you would do well to remember, are crazy people. Their plans may contain barking mad assumptions that visiting aliens don’t know about.) The explanation for “Hitler in the modern day” is also a lot simpler than I would have guessed — I was looking in the wrong place entirely, as were the characters.

But then, after a novel that mostly felt like a spirited “what if” that occasionally takes place in a comfy abode, it becomes very serious indeed. It doesn’t feel like cheating to switch up the tone like that: it would have been disingenuous to write a book about that person, treat his being as a somewhat frivolous thought exercise and at no point present the horror of what he was. (Although the book does offer some challenging moments of sympathy too.) The final stretch in Hitler’s bunker, as we settle once and for all what occurred there, kills off multiple characters in very nasty ways. Despite that, there is a grim satisfaction as the puzzle pulls together; at one moment I actually looked up and went “ohhh!” realising a puzzle piece had not yet been accounted for and therefore what it was going to be. A malevolent character says “Perfect” at the possible killing of another, and from a structural point of view he is sadly correct.

I don’t know if it was Richards or Cole driving the time travel shenanigans — it’s too easy to compare it to Richards’ The Sands Of Time, apparently people are always wrongly assuming who wrote what here — but The Shadow In The Glass is definitely at the stronger end of Doctor Who novels using that format. It doesn’t rely on it too much, and then it makes a virtue of it. Time, as the Doctor reflected earlier, will make things fit no matter what; the ending gives a tremendous sense of time as an implacable and amoral force beyond the Doctor’s control. Suddenly you see that it has drawn together inexorably through the whole book, trapping several unwitting characters within. It’s a good way to stamp some meaning onto a satisfying, but otherwise slightly B-Movie endeavour.

And yeah, not to get all dismissive right at the end but The Shadow In The Glass is — like its aliens — a little bit ephemeral. I’m already having trouble remembering some of it. I think that’s just the “get it in before the deadline” of it all. With books like this the authors are probably just hoping to get away with it. While it does occasionally threaten to evaporate — such as the bits that resemble a Dæmons re-run — The Shadow In The Glass still for the most part resembles something they meant to do from the start.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #75 – The Burning by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#37

The Burning

By Justin Richards

We’re a little over three years into The Eighth Doctor Adventures at this point. That would be a good enough run for any series of tie-in books, let’s face it, but this is Doctor Who we’re talking about, so stopping isn’t really an option. This presents a problem: how do you keep things fresh?

The obvious answer is to do as the TV show does and regenerate the Doctor. But you can’t easily do that in books — it’s hard enough writing about a guy we’ve only seen for 90 minutes, let alone somebody made out of whole cloth. That means keeping the same Doctor’s adventures interesting over a long period, so arc plots must come and go, along with supporting characters. It risks getting a bit convoluted. New readers might not bother jumping aboard.

Enter Justin Richards and The Burning, which is pretty obviously intended as a jumping on point. Continuity has been muted, if not jettisoned altogether. There are no characters you need to recognise. The monsters weren’t in a previous episode. Everything that happens is self-contained, with the exception of the Doctor’s story, which has places to go from here.

In another life The Burning might have made sense as the first book of the run, easing readers into things in a much less hurried fashion than The Eight Doctors. Richards even plays with the idea that readers might be unfamiliar with all this: he refuses to identify the Doctor at first, whilst also introducing characters that seem to embody his personality. I found these misdirects quite fun and creative — it’s a gag that can only work in prose, with no actors to give the game away — but I can see how they might be irritating. He pushes his luck with exchanges like “‘Did I hear correctly, sir, that you are a doctor?’ ‘I am. Of divinity. So I am equally used to being called Reverend.’” The Doctor eventually arrives more or less between sentences, again playing with prose, which is a bit of fun. I think it’s encouraging that the format itself, as well as the format of the stories, is open to reinvigoration.

Richards doesn’t stop at literally reintroducing the Doctor, however, because this Doctor is no longer himself. He has (I know, here we go again) amnesia, which gives us even less reason to humour any past continuity. He doesn’t have a TARDIS (hold that thought) and what’s more, he has no idea why he’d need one. The Doctor here refers to the future as “a closed book.” There is no hint of time travel in The Burning, just a bloke turning up unannounced and getting involved in some local difficulty. The barest essence of Doctor Who, in other words. (As well as, to be fair, Knight Rider.)

Would new readers come away from The Burning with a clear idea of Doctor Who? Yes and no. You get the basic shape: there are terrifying forces that only someone like the Doctor can stop. The Doctor is someone who endears himself to strangers and throws his weight around as necessary; he stands his ground against villains and encourages heroism and change in those around him. He’ll either defeat the monsters or be the one who made it happen.

But on the flip side, this Doctor doesn’t seem very good at it. At one point he takes a new friend into danger to investigate; when fleeing said danger shortly afterwards, he takes no great pains to keep his friend safe and promptly gets him killed. When another character is found horribly murdered he doesn’t express a lot of sympathy to those that knew him, but he finds the crime scene “interesting”. When the solution to the crisis presents itself, and that solution involves probably killing a lot of innocent people, he casually writes this off as the lesser evil and no further debate is had. And when the villain of the piece finally realises his mistake and reaches out to the Doctor for help, our hero pushes him away and causes him to drown, presumably hoping that this will tie off any possibility of the crisis starting all over again. If he feels any remorse about that, we don’t hear about it.

There’s something to be said for calling this a contrivance. We know what the Doctor is like, and he’s not like this: setting him back to someone more callous and indifferent gives you somewhere to go, obviously, but it requires a pretty drastic overcorrection to get us there. I’m a bit on the fence about it. I can understand the need to strip away everything comfortable since (some of) the authors complained that they didn’t “get” this Doctor and found him hard to write for. Solution, gut him and start over. It’s not very elegant, and it feels weirdly like an admission of failure after 36 books, but maybe it’ll work.

Amnesia is a useful panacea for something like this. (Though Richards doesn’t worry too much about how it works, since the Doctor apparently does remember being a different incarnation who wore a hat.) It’s also worth pointing to the absence of any softening influence, aka a companion. The First Doctor was ready to cave a guy’s head in with a rock until his companions said otherwise. He grew into the person we know. By that logic, showing the reader what the Doctor is like sans friends might create a genuine need for companions. That couldn’t hurt, since we know what it’s like when the books simply tell us that a spunky side-character needs to be there. Since we’re starting over, we can avoid those mistakes. (I’m not convinced they have a better idea yet however. We already know we’re not getting a new companion as a priority, since we know that Fitz will return, but we also know that won’t happen for years in-universe — all of which puts the Doctor in a bit of a holding pattern. I guess it’s not that much of a reboot after all.)

There’s not a huge lot else to think about besides the Doctor. The Burning is a plot-driven monster story and it has plenty of incident, although it takes a while for that to really get going — possibly because the Doctor isn’t playing with a full deck. He still makes friends with the local Reverend, a visiting scientist and his assistant; the group develops a certain Victorian kinship not unlike The Banquo Legacy (and, tired reference point I know, Dracula). There’s a sense that they are banding together to fight something really evil, with the added frisson that the brilliant guy bringing them all together might just as easily get them killed, or otherwise allow bad things to happen in the interim.

As for the evil, Roger Nepath (another strange visitor) seems connected to a mysterious molten rock substance which can do many things, including the duplication of people. Richards is a bit of a kid in a candy store with this stuff, also using it for marauding zombie-like figures, molten Claws Of Axos blobs, bodily possession and even surveillance tech, depending on the needs of the scene. The Doctor’s amnesia seems to be catching, with the suggestion that the creature also “has no past that it is aware of. No memory of who or what it really is.” I suppose this reassures any visiting reader that there is no homework, whilst also doubling as “look, it can do whatever the hell we need it to, okay?” This includes, rather spuriously, a happy ending for one of the dead characters. Shh! Amnesia! (To be fair to Richards, you can also see him working this theme on the town itself: Middletown is “a place defined by where it was rather than what it was, with no identity of its own.” If anything in this book requires the reader to know about it already I want it caught and shot immediately.)

The set pieces are all very solid, if not always surprising. If you somehow missed the signs pointing to the location of the finale, please go to Specsavers. The monster chases are exciting and easy to visualise, and the climactic moments are downright cinematic. Richards also enjoys little motifs like dangerous characters having fire in their eyes; he likes to repeat words and phrases, such as “burning”, in a way that’s almost mantra-like. It builds atmosphere, and reminded me of some of Terrance Dicks’ better books. (E.g. “Like a waxwork” in The Auton Invasion.)

There’s a dearth of really interesting characters in this, however, perhaps to make it more palatable when Richards kills most of them off. The only one that’s really going anywhere is the Doctor, with his dual questions of who/what he is and who/what he isn’t at this stage. This also extends to the TARDIS, as it turns out he does have it after all, except that it’s just a mysterious black cube that tells him where he needs to go. An encounter with the molten rock turns it into more of a big blue oblong with a sort of woody finish. Clearly it’s going to grow and change alongside him. And perhaps it needs to, as the decision to come here was likely driven by its need to encounter that deadly gloop and make use of it — suggesting the TARDIS in its current iteration is just as callous as its master.

There’s plenty to enjoy about The Burning, but it’s not a book that really lingers. The Doctor isn’t yet the kind of character to care deeply about what’s happening, and without a companion to fill that role, nobody really does. But it’s all suitably gruesome, and it’s good at things like setting the scene for the Earth arc, giving new readers some idea about Doctor Who and hopefully giving the other writers something to work with. If that doesn’t work, well, you can always wipe his memory again.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #71 – The Banquo Legacy by Andy Lane and Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#35

The Banquo Legacy

By Andy Lane & Justin Richards

At last, we’re getting somewhere. After several books where the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion elude the Time Lords so successfully that you have to wonder if anyone’s even looking for them, The Banquo Legacy introduces the radical idea that the bad guys could put some effort into it.

All of which feels like a spoiler, and indeed I was quite worried that I’d ruined it for myself by listening to a podcast about an earlier book. (It’s been 20+ years, inevitably that sort of thing is a minefield.) But no, The Banquo Legacy makes it clear early on that a Time Lord presence has caused the TARDIS to land in 1898, so it follows that a Time Lord will be lurking nearby. See also the blurb, which straight up tells you that the Doctor is “desperate to uncover the Time Lord agent who has him trapped.” Frankly it would be amazing if you got to the big reveal near the end of the book and didn’t already know.

Too much foreknowledge is unlikely to hurt The Banquo Legacy, since it didn’t begin life as anything Time Lordy or arc-plotty anyway. It turns out that BBC Books had yet another gap to fill, with Rebecca Levene’s novel Freaks sadly disappearing due to work commitments. Enter Justin Richards who — somewhat typically for Justin Richards — had a completed novel just lying around. A non-Who murder mystery co-written years earlier with Andy Lane, it was an epistolary, intended to evoke Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. (Lane wrote one character, Richards the other.) As well as it being terribly nice to get their old manuscript onto shelves, it was simply more expedient to insert Doctor Who elements into this than to write a whole new thing from scratch — especially where Richards had just done so with Grave Matter.

It’s debatable how obvious all of this behind the scenes stuff is when reading the book. It’s not as if epistolaries are unheard of in Doctor Who — Lane’s All-Consuming Fire was a very good one. As that author notes on Pieces Of Eighth, the original book had Who-ey overtones simply because that stuff was baked into its authors; where it is overtly horror, it is arguably by way of things like The Talons Of Weng-Chiang. And Richards, ever the editor, does a convincing enough job of weaving not just the Doctor and co. into this, but the ongoing Time Lord plot as well. It is relevant that this particular murder plot has ensnared these particular characters at this particular point in the run.

While it’s a bit coincidental that we ended up here, it makes for a fun experiment to tell a Doctor Who story from someone else’s perspective, or multiple someone elses. It also allows for an unusual take* on a mystery plot, with one character seeking answers that the other possesses, one character’s scenes filling in gaps from the other’s, and action overlapping. (*I haven’t read any Agatha Christie. Forgive me.) It pays particular dividends about halfway through after a couple of murders in close succession, with the two narrators hurriedly jumping to and fro in a way that satisfyingly speeds up the pace.

There is a downside to this, however, in that the two narrators are not hugely dissimilar. This is awkward to note since it was apparently two separate authors writing them, but Inspector Ian Stratford (Lane) and lawyer John Hopkinson (Richards) are both upstanding chaps of more or less the same type. Neither sounds especially Victorian or egregiously different from one another; if there weren’t two different fonts at work I’d be unlikely to pick either one out of a paragraph.

There is a whiff of cop and criminal about them, Hopkinson having numerous secrets to impart, but — in an admittedly very “Victorian epistolary” way, see Dracula — they end up full of camaraderie anyway, united by chivalry and whatnot. Before long I was wishing that there were more perspectives in the mix. You could even sneak in the Time Lord agent as one of them, and drop hints that way. Agatha Christie did that sort of hide-in-plain-sight thing, or so I hear. (It bears repeating that this book was the work of two quite young writers, and All-Consuming Fire, for example, showed a more pronounced difference between its narrators some years later. Practice makes perfect.)

The murder mystery has enough horror elements to tickle a Whovian’s fancy. The main thrust is a psychic experiment in an old country house which immediately goes wrong, killing the scientist and raising the question of accident or murder. More deaths follow, along with disappearing and reappearing bodies, a gun-toting maniac and — heck, why not — the walking dead. Sprinkle in a fake-out death for the Doctor and the ongoing question of a Time Lord agent and you’re unlikely, all in all, to sit there wondering how this novel ever got stitched together in the edit.

That said, it’s not exactly groaning with plot. Once it is confirmed whodunit and what, for that matter, they dun, The Banquo Legacy becomes a slightly lumbering zombie vehicle, alternating between a really quite amazingly durable killer corpse and a single deranged woman with a gun. I wondered how this presented such an insurmountable problem for the Doctor and friends, but then Richards has done some homework to ensure that regeneration will not work in the vicinity of the house, so dead means dead. (A threat that perhaps loses some meaning in a story that features a zombie.)

The mystery itself is reasonably good, though it’s not without its loose ends. The book opens with a couple of century-old murders that, in the long run, Richards uses to inform the Time Lord plot. I was never clear on why there needed to be two murders in close succession, or why one of them seems distractingly to be the work of a vampire. We never circle back to the details. And the Doctor’s fake-out death leads to a very exciting reveal later on — clearly a nod to The Hound Of The Baskervilles — but his laying low/information gathering doesn’t end up being anything worth hanging around for. These sorts of things tend to suggest the ragged edges of one novel brushing up against another.

For more on that, take a look at Compassion. On the surface this is another neat little solve: there would have only been so much room in the book for new characters (the Doctor replaces one who would otherwise have been killed off), so what do you do with someone as complicated as a human TARDIS? Answer, amalgamate them with someone nearby, and thus create an identity crisis. It gives you an element of danger, not wanting Compassion to be identified to the Time Lord agent, and theoretically it gives Compassion some interesting stuff to work on as she juggles two selves. You can blame it all on chameleon circuits or something.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, Compassion has simply been subsumed by another, markedly less interesting character. Her inner Compassion-ness rarely rises to the surface, and when it does an occasional aloofness or a sarcastic “obviously” will have to do. There’s no especially dramatic conflict at work between the two characters, and no meaningful sense that one of them is diminishing. (It’s not even hugely clear what’s happening.) Yes, the situation has rendered her mortal, but the human being she inhabits was already mortal anyway. Which is certainly handy for the rewrite.

Knowing that she had to be shoe-horned into a pre-existing novel casts a suggestive pall over all this, but even if you don’t know that, where the previous EDA was The Space Age — which had Compassion mentally out-of-it for most of the story — this just looks like another author(s) not wanting to engage with Compassion. Given how many EDA writers would clearly rather dive out of a window than write for Sam Jones, it’s not as if they don’t have form. Honestly, I can see the legwork that has gone into justifying these choices, but the end result still bears an uncanny resemblance to just not knowing what to do with her. Again. It’s disappointing to still be in this position with so little time left.

The Doctor and Fitz are perhaps easier to handle, and sure enough both are creditably written/inserted, with Fitz throwing a very ill-advised (and very Fitz) German accent into a tense situation, then forgetting it; at all times he believably fails to convince. (Stratford notes that he is “about five sentences behind everyone else and struggling to keep up.” That’s him, Officer.) I suspect that the Doctor’s role may have been very loosely Doctorish even in Lane and Richards’ student days, but there’s enough of a whiff of Sherlock Holmes about him to maintain the murder mystery ethos and all at once keep it convincingly Who. He’s very commanding, when he isn’t being (perhaps a little too easily) terrorised.

At least we’re moving the whole Time Lord thing along. The mystery of who the Time Lord agent is, or I suppose if there even is one, might have seemed pretty obvious to me (see second paragraph) but it’s still exciting when the Doctor and [redacted] have a sudden stand-off with a shotgun, all pretence now dropped. It’s interesting to have someone reinforce the Time Lords’ morally suspect argument for capturing Compassion, and for a moment there it did feel like the stakes were higher because her TARDIS capabilities had gone away — even at the potential cost of the agent’s life, since they can’t regenerate either. I especially enjoyed the idea that Time Lord agents had been sprinkled all over the galaxy and are, understandably, running out of patience. (Wouldn’t it be nice if this wasn’t the first we were hearing about it?) The stakes have certainly been raised — or at the very least, reintroduced — for the upcoming grand finale.

Looking at other reviews, I’m clearly less enamoured than most readers, but I didn’t have a bad time with The Banquo Legacy. The epistolary could be better but it’s still fun to read, especially where it’s so ghoulish, and hey, I’m only human — I like zombies too. (NB: I didn’t feel like this was a retread of Grave Matter. Mind you, this one came first.) It’s a good, if patchy example of rewriting something for a new brief, and it inevitably re-energises the EDAs — especially since all the other books have slept on the arc plot. The Time Lords aren’t the only ones tapping their watches.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #70 – Grave Matter by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#31

Grave Matter

By Justin Richards

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Write Novels Quickly Man!

Whilst I can’t exactly prove it, I’m confident that Grave Matter was a last minute replacement for something else. A few things point that way. Justin Richards was clearly very busy around this time, gearing up as range editor, co-writing the next book in the schedule and then fully writing an EDA two books later to soft-reboot the range. I doubt he had time to write another manuscript voluntarily. Then there are the behind the scenes materials in Campaign, which point to the PDA slot after Verdigris being vacant after Jim Mortimore’s book fell through. That was in October 1999, and they needed the next (now non-existent) book at the printers within 2 months. Enter a very frantic Justin Richards, perhaps? (We know he can do it. Look at The Joy Device and Millennium Shock.)

I suppose the other little clue is the book itself. It lacks the sense of a special interest that you get in some of Richards’s books like Theatre Of War or System Shock. For Grave Matter he’s doing a sort of Hinchcliffe-era pastiche which, while very entertaining, could have been assigned to anybody. The pacing also suggests a certain degree of, if not rushing exactly, perhaps not finessing as much as might be preferable. It takes some time to get a real sense of the threat here, and once we’re into the climax there’s a sense of throwing one thing after another just to keep it going for 240 pages.

Not that I mind, of course. The thing to remember about those last-minute Richards novels is that they tend to be very entertaining, almost as if that sense of urgency got baked into the product. If Grave Matter is another one of those then something like that has happened again.

We get some Gothic imagery right away as a strangely corpse-like man flees captivity on an island, then is (literally) hounded off a cliff. Once the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on the island of Dorsill they meet the man, who is frightful to behold, and he prevents Peri from falling to her doom. Once the duo then make it to the town they find a funeral procession by lamp light, which promptly collapses showing Peri the corpse. Even after all that high-level spookery there is Dorsill itself to consider: a strangely old-world place that holds modern day anachronisms.

It’s an arresting start full of memorable visuals, and there’s a lot of that still to come as Dorsill reveals its odd little quirks and — as I mentioned above — its problems, albeit slowly. There have been deaths recently, but nothing in particular links them. Animals have peculiar habits, with the sheep seeming more organised than the sheep dogs. Even the school children have developed odd aptitudes for things in a way that only makes sense if they are somehow psychic. The fact that Dorsill is a modern day (albeit undated) community willingly cut off from technology is the least odd thing about it.

You get the sense though that the Doctor and Peri are investigating a general vague air of mystery rather than anything specific. For instance, the Doctor wants to find out what year it is. (You might think the strange-looking man they meet at the start would be an inciting incident, but they seem to forget about him instantly. Rather odd. He crops up again later.) They are made quite welcome, for once, and this adds an air of comfort to proceedings. Dorsill is very well defined visually and it’s quite pleasurable to follow the characters around it. Not exactly a page-turner in the same sense as Millennium Shock, then, but it’s compelling enough all the same.

Eventually the title starts paying dividends. There’s a marvellous sequence that begins with Peri witnessing an apparent grave robbing-cum-zombie resurrection, which then turns out just to have been grave robbing. (For medical curiosity purposes only.) This is followed by the same corpse actually rising from the grave in the same spot, which is very neat work and would have been horrifying/hilarious if televised. It turns out there are shady experiments originating on Dorsill’s sister island, Sheldon’s Folly, and these connect all the unusual happenings on Dorsill. Suffice to say, the local mad scientists have slightly overstepped, hence the minor problem of the zombies.

Once we find out what’s happening the action re-centres around the Gothic house/laboratory on Sheldon’s Folly, giving us a bit more Hinchcliffian bang for our buck as zombies attack and allies become enemies. This is where the previously mentioned fodder comes into it, particularly in a sequence where Peri runs to fetch help and is variously attacked by possessed seagulls, owls, foxes and (ah why the hell not) a shark. It’s nevertheless fun to watch the Doctor try to figure things out on the fly here, especially when he has to translate the only-brainwashed-a-bit messages of a colleague; everything she says is a deliberate lie to fool the ruling intelligence so he must always infer the opposite. (This feels like a suitably Justin Richards bit of cleverness.)

It’s the kind of story where, once you’ve finished it, there isn’t a lot of substance to mull over. It’s a vibes thing, as da kidz say, coasting along pleasantly enough on spookiness and peril. It does occasionally overstep, in my view. There’s a character who is understandably upset about his brother’s death, who then becomes an antagonist towards Peri for no particular reason beyond presumably being an aspiring rapist. (Which is a very tropey way to treat Peri, on top of everything else.) And there’s a character inveigled in the conspiracy who wants out in the most final way possible, being moved to attempt suicide three times, with a great deal of detail provided in each instance. Got to wonder if anyone other than the range editor could have squeaked that through unedited.

Character voices are otherwise quite strong, with Sir Edward making a memorable accomplice for the Doctor and Peri, and local farmer Hilly feeling like a real-enough person. The two regulars are very well drawn also, particularly a Sixth Doctor still early in his tenure. He’s brash, alliterative and single-minded, but sensitive underneath it all. A moment where he appears to have been taken over by a malign intelligence feels alarmingly plausible when it’s a guy fresh from being in The Twin Dilemma. Peri’s lot in life here is mostly to grouse and try not to be upset when the Doctor is rude, but all of that feels true to where she was at in the series. Although she does experience a brush with the malign influence on Dorsill, at least she’s spared being transformed into something else entirely, which was very much her thing on television.

There’s not a heap more to say about Grave Matter, perhaps for reasons I’ve already speculated about, but the overall concoction is a successful one. Richards kept my interest even when it felt like he was still figuring things out, and he applies memorable little flourishes whenever he can, such as describing a possession as “Her mouth was twisted into a smile, but her mind was in tears.” Spooky, colourful and (perhaps excessively at times) action-packed, it’s a decent enough fusion of the grimdark Season 22 with its similarly nasty ancestors. I’m sure Mary Whitehouse would not have approved.

6/10

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 #41 – Demontage by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#20
Demontage
By Justin Richards

Here’s one I read earlier! This was part of a run of books that I picked up as they were originally released. (I was about 13. Yikes.)

I remember really enjoying Demontage. A few fragments of it have stayed in my mind since, which tends to be a good sign: in particular there’s the incongruous opening image of a cramped spacecraft where terrified elderly passengers listen to their tour guide, an enormous anthropomorphic wolf. It’s quite a colourful and visual story in general, with fairly regular bursts of action. I can see why a younger me liked it.

I’m older now, somewhat jaded and beginning to creak, and it’s fair to say Demontage didn’t work as well the second time. But there’s still stuff to recommend about it.

For starters, this is our first bona fide adventure with the Eighth Doctor, Sam and Fitz. The newest companion was introduced in The Taint, which put some work into what he is like, but not so much into how he slots into Doctor Who. There are more clues to that in Demontage. Visiting a casino in space (Vega Station) Fitz has enough cultural mores to pretend to be James Bond, and he only sticks out as horribly as most visitors already do, so he’s capable of enjoying himself out among the stars. He’s still out of his depth, at points either flailing about and making a mess or simply hanging back from the main action because he doesn’t know what to do, but all of that seems to be part of his charm.

It’s a surprisingly vulnerable showing for a character who seemed so carefree in his first appearance, but that feels like a natural evolution when you’re sending him off in the TARDIS for the first time. Besides, I loved all the comical flailing and the farcical misunderstanding where he is mistaken for an assassin. I didn’t much like Fitz in The Taint; this revised prat version, this I can work with. (I also enjoyed the genuine crisis around his diminishing number of cigarettes. I’m not a smoker, but this seems like a neat way of reinforcing his native time period and highlighting that he might not get back there.)

Sam, as seems almost irreversible at this point, doesn’t stand out much. There’s an amusing moment early on when she snaps at a friendly stranger, then catches herself and apologises; an awareness, perhaps, of the character’s heavy-handed sarcasm and general lack of charm. (There also seems to be a mild frisson between the two characters, both women, but perhaps I only imagined it.) Richards makes some effort to relate Sam’s experience here with the wolf-like Canvine to her time with the wolf-like Jax in Kursaal; he flirts with a sense of trauma that we could meaningfully build upon, but sadly leaves it at that. Bonus points, however, for appearing to recollect that Sam is missing memories from that adventure — not everybody does!

Something interesting does eventually happen to Sam (Fitz and his not-the-assassin routine generally draws more focus here), but again not enough capital is made from it. Suffice it to say she is forcibly transported to another mode of existence from which she’ll be lucky to escape, and when she shortly thereafter does escape, that’s pretty much that. I doubt this one’s going into the Suffering Sam files — it’s a cool idea that just sort of sits there, being an idea.

All the same, this central conceit — the strange realm — is perhaps the biggest thing to recommend about Demontage. An art exhibition is taking place on Vega Station, but there’s something off about it. Turns out, due to the technology used to create them, the paintings can come to life and roam free, and similarly people can be trapped within them. This feels like a distant echo of Richards’ earlier Theatre Of War, where a projector could bring plays to life. It’s not, to be clear, a rip-off — it just feels like Richards isn’t done being interested in the concept of art wandering into real life. Fair enough. There’s some pathos to the painted creatures lumbering about in Demontage, albeit apparently not enough for the Doctor to think twice about incinerating them. (The Doctor in this has the right amount of flighty whimsy but he can seem oddly cold, at one point dismissing Sam’s concern about someone trapped in a painting, at another itching to start a deadly fire. Not sure I’m on board with this.)

There’s a theme of things not being what they seem in Demontage, which allows for some shades of grey in the Canvine — huge wolves that eat raw meat but also enjoy culture and opera. I got the sense that this was also meant to extend to the paintings, who ultimately are just following orders, but no one seems really interested in pushing the point. Richards seems more interested in the expectations surrounding his human (or human-ish) characters. There’s an assassin who strictly obeys random chance; his agenda isn’t as nefarious as we think. There’s the visiting President of Battrul, whose visit isn’t what it seems. The head of the station is hiding in plain sight as merely the head of the casino, a misleadingly flamboyant character in pink suits. (The “flamboyance” is pretty much just his suit for most of the book, which makes the [groan] homophobic slur from Fitz towards the end feel a bit of a stretch, as well as just plain unfortunate to a modern reader.) Richards is clearly having fun with Newark and Rappaire, a couple of art collectors/forgers/card sharps, although they never quite break through into the genuinely funny realm of a Holmesian double act that you sense he’s going for.

I think that’s a key problem with Demontage: it should be funnier. There are great bursts of farce here and there, particularly the “Fitz accidentally identifies himself as an assassin” stuff, but both the character and plot largely shrug that off. The Canvine are an inherently amusing contradiction — and it’s one we mine for pathos, as we get to know “Bigdog” Caruso better — but they’re not in the book very much. The general atmosphere of Vega Station, if not the book, is one of low stakes misunderstanding (when the Doctor observes that it’s “best to keep things low-key” he might as well be talking to us), but as it goes on there’s an inevitable pull towards a tight plot and some serious stakes instead. These are not bad things to have, but they feel off-course from where we begin, and they don’t enrich the somewhat scrappy setting. Moments where we find the Doctor gambling for the fun of it or cheating at cards to get out of trouble feel too much like exceptions to the tone, not enough like they’re supporting it.

Somehow, that sense of fun worked for me just fine the first time I read it. I think a key difference is that I’ve since then picked up an adverse reaction to this style of writing — that cuddly mascot of this marathon that is Short Sections With Lots Of Scene Changes. Your attention span changes as you get older and I think mine was better at locking in when I was younger. Demontage always seems in a hurry to pause what it’s doing and go check on something else, which just kills the momentum for me, or it does so now anyway. Richards is very good at plots but I became more and more aware that I was being reminded of disparate characters just so that we could get them all arranged for the grand finale. We rarely spend enough actual time with them in these hurried chunks that I’m overly thrilled to be back with them, or all that moved to discover that character X or Y was the real bad guy all along, or miss them when they’re gone. There’s a sense of mechanism to all the dancing back and forth in Demontage, which could perhaps have been obfuscated if we’d leaned more into the confusion and farce of it all. Isn’t that what Fitz is here for?

The pace didn’t work for me, so I ended up taking ages to re-read Demontage. I think it’s too busy to really land anything, and for all the effort we just move on from the plot as soon as we can. But the general atmosphere of low-stakes fun is still a tonic after multiple moody books with this Doctor and Sam, and it seems like a good way to allow that new dynamic to develop — even if it’s admittedly still glomming together at this point. I’m a firm believer in fun books and at its best Demontage is fun enough.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #29 – Dreams Of Empire by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#14
Dreams Of Empire
By Justin Richards

Justin Richards finished up a very busy 1998 with Dreams Of Empire, his third published novel of that year. It is, impressively, not much like Option Lock (his Eighth Doctor Adventure about secret societies and nuclear war) or The Medusa Effect (Bernice Summerfield visits a haunted spaceship), although coincidentally each of these, like Dreams Of Empire, is a story fixated on its own past. (Armchair psychiatrists, start your engines.) Managing a breadth of tones as he does across these unrelated books, you can really see why BBC Books were keen to keep him around.

Dreams Of Empire is one of his more compelling efforts, although at first glance it doesn’t look all that interesting. Set almost entirely within a medieval-ish prison on an asteroid (well, I did say medieval-ish), it’s effectively a base under siege story — bread and butter to the Troughton era. And if you liked that, wait until the TARDIS arrives very near the site of a recent murder: would you believe the Doctor and co get into some hot water over that?

Fortunately Richards knows this stuff just as well as his target audience, so although he touches on the trope, he doesn’t wallow in it. We don’t spend a lot of time and effort trying to prove the Doctor’s innocence — there’s no reason to bother when the situation with the guards and inmates of Santespri (a name so jaunty I was sure I’d heard it before) makes for a better whodunit.

Some time ago, the Haddron Republic very nearly became an Empire. A civil war erupted between three highly placed friends, and the aggressor — Kesar — became a figurehead. He was eventually defeated and sentenced to exile, but was attacked and badly hurt on his way to prison. He now resides on Santespri in an iron mask with a voice synthesiser to cover for his wrecked vocal chords. More interestingly, his remaining loyalists are there with him, some of them working alongside Republic soldiers as guards. (Sort of like Police Officers and PCSOs.) Attacks on the prison and murder plots within its walls could equally be happening to free Kesar or kill him — Kesar, for his part, seems content to remain imprisoned. When bodies start dropping and an unknown space cruiser approaches, no one knows what to expect. Thrillingly, “the three weirdos next to the police box did it” is not a popular theory.

There’s an oddly genial atmosphere to this civil war and its after-effects, particularly after Richards grounds it in friendship in the first chapter. There’s less animosity than you might expect between the different sets of guards, which is surprising given some tragic shared histories. I wonder if Richards is playing on his proximity to The Enemy Of The World, another story about a world-famous rotter that is placed directly after this one, in encouraging us to expect a lot of back-stabbing in the guy’s orbit. (I’ve seen some reviews point out this arguable overlap and then criticise him for it.) Dreams Of Empire takes a somewhat more optimistic view: most people who are hurt by a few dangerous personalities at the top just want to get on with their lives. I was surprised how well the book kept to this thesis statement, even in the face of some outright villainy and a few tragic deaths before the end.

If you want an example of civilised opposition, it doesn’t get much better than chess, which features heavily in Dreams Of Empire. (And on the cover.) I’ve never learned the rules, so chess scenes in stories to me are like high pressure card games in movies — I can tell which general direction it’s going in but you could make up the words and I wouldn’t notice. Fortunately the chess scenes here have a very clear intent, coming in handy plot-wise in ways anybody could follow, and they help contextualise the tensions in the story. I can see why it seemed important to Richards in a story about taking sides without aggression. It’s also a fun backdrop specifically for Troughton’s Doctor, a character of mercurial intelligence who may or may not be a few moves ahead.

For what it’s worth, I think Richards is betting on “may not be”. That’s not to say the Second Doctor here is not brilliant, or not capable of outsmarting the villains — he’s believably able to win people’s trust, just as he can piece together the bad guys’ schemes and his own counter-schemes. However, Richards puts a lot of effort into keeping up the slapstick side of his portrayal, at one point mixing up a flight from suspicion of murder with a comedy bit about a sandwich stuck to his bottom. The Doctor’s scatterbrained silliness doesn’t feel like a put on, and it also doesn’t contradict his brilliance — it’s all just one big amorphous self. He’s able to ping-pong believably from a stray comment by Jamie to a solution for the whole crisis, and make it a joke. (“He grabbed Jamie’s hand in both his and shook it vigorously. ‘You’re a genius.’ ‘I am?’ ‘Oh yes. Well’ — the Doctor considered — ‘one of us is.’”) I think it’s a great read on the Second Doctor, believably impish and yet intelligent all at once.

Richards is similarly apt when it comes to defining Jamie and Victoria. The former is on high alert around a scene that was once a warzone and might become so again; the latter is affected by the ruined dignity of important figures and shares their sense of loss. There’s a bit of tension when Victoria seems attracted to someone and Jamie doesn’t like it — all-too-easy stuff there, but it still seems well enough established in the era they come from. As the book progresses there’s less and less for the companions to do, perhaps betraying a certain authorial preference for the characters made out of whole cloth here. (Probably the most notable interaction is the Doctor unveiling the sonic screwdriver a few stories early, but in a way where Jamie and Victoria don’t see it, leaving continuity in tact. Phew!) The writing is as considered for them as it is for everyone else, highlighting any quiet words or private little glances. The contained location perhaps focuses the characterisation; just as if it were made for TV: you’ll go stir crazy looking at the walls and invest in all the little stuff instead.

Dreams Of Empire doesn’t build a huge head of steam, or not for a while at least, which I think is a side effect of all that geniality. It makes for oddly pleasant company to read, rather than a furious page-turner. But Richards is an old enough hand at this to reveal a very smart plot as he goes along, some of it not until the very end, and although you’re sort of expecting that (come on, it’s chess) it’s still satisfying when he plays the final moves.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #15 – Option Lock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures
#8
Option Lock
By Justin Richards

It’s time once again to spin our Lazy Susan of Returning Doctor Who Writers.

Of course BBC Books sought out Justin Richards. Another sensible choice, along with the likes of Bulis and McIntee, Richards had published several Who books already and was also contributing to the Bernice Summerfield range. Option Lock was his first novel of three published in 1998; he’d increase that to four the following year. We must assume he slept at some point.

I’ve always regarded him as a safe pair of hands, which I know sounds like a dig, but I genuinely think there’s something of Terrance Dicks in his work ethic and general readability. That said, he is capable of writing strange and unexpected things, such as The Sands Of Time, which indulged in a lot of timey-wimey storytelling before Steven Moffat did it. (Though admittedly after Kate Orman did it.) More often he likes to write thrillers that contain some element that personally interests him, such as theatre in Theatre Of War and programming in System Shock. We might infer from Option Lock that he finds nuclear warfare pretty interesting, given the loving detail it receives. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves where the plot is concerned, front cover mushroom cloud notwithstanding. (While we’re jumping ahead, though, this one feels like a mix of his “thriller with bits I like” and “bit odd” approaches.)

The TARDIS arrives (while experiencing an odd power loss) near a country house. As they make their usual recce, the Doctor and Sam are promptly taken for historical surveyors interested in some nearby ruins. They are welcomed into the home of Norton Silver and his wife Penelope, and by all accounts they spend a fair amount of time there. This passes pleasantly enough, apart from a Hot Fuzz-esque encounter with a robed miscreant, and a hypnosis-induced sleep-walk through a fountain at night. Sam builds a a rapport with a military man named Pickering, there to receive hypnotic therapy from Silver, who advises important people from across the globe in the same manner. There are mysteries regarding an ancient society that operates near the house, and the sudden death of a local painter (and what it was about his final painting that drove him to it), which keep the Doctor somewhat occupied.

All told, it’s a leisurely start — stuff is here and stuff is happening, but it’s not noticeably driving us anywhere. Even the Doctor at one point thinks “the whole enterprise was really rather boring in comparison with his usual investigations,” and honestly, including a line like that is absolute death, don’t do it. Because he’s right and now it feels like a lampshade. Option Lock drifts along amiably enough for a while, but it lacks a clear sense of what problem exists that the Doctor must solve. If I wasn’t determined from the outset to finish this book in order to get to the next one (because marathon), this one would be at serious risk of going on the “I’ll get back to you” shelf. It’s not bad, but there were times when I wondered how Richards even persevered writing it. Is this really a strong enough hook for a novel?

While all of this is happening (or barely happening at all, ho ho) there are cogs turning in America, with a political assassination and the replacement of the dead man in the President’s staff. This clearly has some link to Silver, but it’s obscured at first, which is fine — it’s a whole novel and you haven’t finished it yet, chill — but that sense of obscurity is not helped by hard-cutting the action from a country house in Britain to intrigue in the States and then back again. Richards is a good enough writer to buffer these jumps with similar-sounding prose: we go from “A moment later the gallery door opened and the two soldiers started down the staircase, their boots clanking on the metal steps” to “Their feet rang on the stone steps as they raced down towards the water gardens.” But even so, every time it happened it felt like jumping out of the frying pan and into a coffee table.

If you made it to around the 100 page mark (and to be fair, plenty of readers might love all that build-up and not find it stagnant), then Richards has a life-jacket for you. The action ramps up instantly, as some of the inhabitants of the house turn out to be working towards a grand plan, and we get the hardest cut yet: they have instigated a nuclear launch drill in Russia, but in such a way that it will actually launch the nukes. America scrambles to either retaliate or, in case this isn’t what it looks like, hold fire, just as forces in Russia struggle desperately to stop this happening. Events escalate past the point of no return and the US is forced into unveiling one of its deadliest secrets.

It’s a hell of a sequence, both as an exciting piece of writing and in length — it’s fully 50 pages of the book. Option Lock got my attention at last, but then it also raised further questions, such as: is there any chance Justin Richards thought of a great nuclear thriller plot and then had to retrofit it into Doctor Who? Because wow, the Doctor does nothing here. Eventually an escape is made, but until then he sits and watches this play out. Again I had that disoriented feeling of going from one thing to another — here, remembering with a thud that it was even a Doctor Who book.

Not long after this, we get some exposition (slightly inorganically with Sam asking what’s going on and the Doctor unspooling it — yes that’s the tradition way of it, but they really lean into it by the end), and this puts the first hundred pages, or at least the first ten, into context. I was honestly impressed by the pulling together of ideas here, although the most interesting one doesn’t amount to enough: the arrival of the TARDIS played a part in what’s happening. The way it’s executed, this is a functional and useful idea, but not a thought-provoking one. There is no pontification on the inherent dangers of landing somewhere, which perhaps throws away some of the impact of even suggesting it. Similarly, there are moments where Sam considers contacting her family, since this adventure makes that possible. She doesn’t though. (Just think, in the not too distant future of the series that would be unthinkable.) Ultimately all the “oh, how clever” feelings that follow that leaden first act don’t retroactively make it engaging to read. I wonder how many readers simply binned off before they got to the good bit.

I found it hard to shake the idea that the Doctor and Sam were passive voices in Option Lock, despite a growing emphasis on Sam’s interest in Pickering. (The comic possibilities of the name are not lost on Richards: “‘Pickering?’ the Doctor asked, in a voice that suggested he enjoyed a good picker when he got the chance.”) There is even more sitting and watching before the end, with the Doctor and Sam literally placed in front of a big screen, and when the time comes to prevent the villain from completing his mission it’s over to TV Tropes so that a secondary character can make the ultimate sacrifice instead of the Doctor. This is nonetheless a memorable, violent sequence, with a decent amount of psychological impact on Sam. She continues to feel these reverberations in a post-TARDIS epilogue. Both Sam and the Doctor have had one now; we must be building to something seismic. (For those keeping score, we can add Sam’s unwitting actions here to those mind-altered crimes in Kursaal and her regretted actions in Genocide. Her Scrapbook of Sadness floweth over.)

Despite the eventual downer, or rather before we get there, Richards writes a good rapport between the Doctor and Sam. Their overall level of “Is this a fun time, do they both want to be here” is higher than in some of their adventures so far, and that’s how I like it. (I’m not against a bad time in the TARDIS at all — Sam’s certainly getting the mileage for it! I just don’t like it to seem like a chore from the outset, which can be the default Doctor/companion setting — think early Sixth Doctor and Peri.) The Doctor overall has had better days than this, watching bad events unfold and failing as he does to spot treacherous parties all around him; a moment right before The Ultimate Sacrifice (of some other geezer) where he is totally capable of blowing up the bad guy goes bothersomely unexamined. Perhaps another time. (Again, I’ve nothing against saying bleak things about the characters or showing them to have flaws — I just want it to be for a reason. I can’t tell if the Doctor’s slight ineffectuality in Option Lock is there on purpose, if it is meant to say anything. For the most part he just seems a bit dotty.)

There’s a scene in Option Lock where characters must force themselves through a psychic barrier. That’s how I felt reading the first wodge of this (admittedly, without the nausea), and although Richards goes on to pull together his plot strands and pay off his mysteries, it’s still an uneven read, with the highs feeling like they wandered in from somewhere else altogether. There’s not enough personality to the high number of characters who, like the Doctor and Sam (only this time deliberately) are going through the motions — meanwhile, the shadowy force that sits behind them barely registers at all. It’s one of those stories that technically ticks the boxes but never quite comes alive, finishing up blinking blearily as if revived from hypnosis.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #124 – The Joy Device by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#22
The Joy Device
By Justin Richards

The New Adventures were at an awkward stage when this one rolled around. We’ve introduced a major arc, run with it more consistently than the range has done before, then appeared to resolve it, but introduced a new arc element anyway, then knocked that one off that in the next book. The main arc is over or merely paused, depending on who you ask, and we’re just… still here. It’s like waiting for a bus. They’ve brought Justin Richards back one book after his quasi-finale (did they even let him leave the building?), probably in the hope that at least he’ll know what to do.

By all accounts he didn’t, because The Joy Device is anything but a decisive next step. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Bernice needs a holiday. Before long she becomes entangled in a crime and a murder due to a Hitchcockian wrong-place-wrong-time contrivance. Various parties seek a mysterious artefact. No one seems remotely interested in what is or isn’t happening on Dellah. It’s as if they all collectively picked up a script that fell down the back of the sofa ten books ago.

None of that is by mistake. Per Richards: “[They] came to me … and said ‘We need another Benny book and we need it in a month.’ I said, ‘Well, to be honest I've written the last-ever Benny book. Doing some more is a shame from a narrative point of view.’” As a stopgap, he came up with something even he didn’t think would sustain a novel, and probably no one would think of as essential to read, but which might pass the time amiably enough. Think, average Benny novel, but as a farce. (“So, average Benny novel then?” you might say. No comment.)

Bernice’s need for a holiday does at least come via the arc plot. She is no longer dying, but chunks of her memory have gone for good. She doesn’t know how to cope with that – having copious journals isn’t the quick win you might think, partly because she rewrites them all the time. So she wants to make new memories. The best way to do that, she reckons, is to live dangerously, which horrifies all her closest friends. (It’s worth mentioning here that she isn’t 100% committed to this and expects them to talk her round, but Jason makes such a balls up of it that off she goes. (It is also worth mentioning that all her closest friends are men. Isn’t that weird?)) So Braxiatel, Chris, Jason and Clarence decide to keep a close eye on her activities and swoop in – literally viz Clarence – to remove any dangerous obstacles. Bernice is going to Mr Magoo it, in other words, whether she likes it or not.

I’d be lying if I said this approach reaps a lot of rewards (as would Richards: “I don't think that's a book. It might be a short story but it won't sustain a novel”), but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. The entire conceit is based on how much the characters care for Bernice, and that appeals to me enormously. One of the major issues I’ve had with Jason as a character is that he butts heads with Bernice, usually as a tired prelude to the old “they fancy each other really” routine, but often with a real unpleasantness that makes you think, well why bother adding him in then? Since Beige Planet Mars though, he’s kept the twattishness to a gentle sarcasm and by all accounts he actually wants to be here. Suddenly the bullish uselessness is endearing, and the concern - though not enough to sustain a marriage between two unstoppable forces - is genuine. (As I said about another Dave Stone protagonist in Return To The Fractured Planet, I wish they’d reached this point sooner. I’d read more books about this guy.) To a lesser extent, concern for Bernice makes Clarence a better character too: he has identity crises for days, but one thing he’s sure of is his platonic love for our scrappy archaeologist. It anchors him, which is no mean feat for an artificial life form with giant angel wings. In short, these two running around to make sure Bernice is okay made me smile a lot.

It’s also quite funny, although your mileage may vary. I’ve watched enough Frasier to rub my hands with glee at the thought of a comical misunderstanding, and there’s tons of that here, with Bernice being assured of danger at every corner by her well-travelled guide Dent Harper only to see nothing of the sort. “I appreciate your tales of danger and mystery and intrigue, really I do. But everyone here is just as nice as pie.” This slowly drives Harper to distraction, which is quite fun in itself. Later, when the two of them are tasked with finding Dorpfeld’s Prism – our mysterious object du jour – they narrowly escape execution only because, unknown to them, Jason is jabbing a knife against the mob boss in question, so she suddenly becomes courteous.

Some of the writing is just downright good, like this bit of unseen slapstick: “‘The genuine ones are incredibly strong and emit a perfect C-flat when you tap the lip of the opening on something.’ She carefully lifted it up again. ‘Here, like this.’ The embarrassed silence was broken by the sound of the lift arriving. Dent followed Benny in without a word. Benny coughed. ‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered. ‘Do you have someone who clears up?’” And I’d direct anyone in need of perking up to Chapter 2 – the comedy of errors as Bernice makes her mind up and her friends panic is a thing of bliss.

How far any of the above will take you probably depends on your tolerance for frothy comedy and gentle character beats. I was clearly in the mood for it, and even then I found the story almost aggressively lightweight. The whole debacle around Dorpfeld’s Prism feels like it should be interesting, but it isn’t. The artefact causes whoever holds it to be happy, but only because they are oblivious to danger. That’s a thematic link to what Jason and Clarence are doing for Bernice, but even then it’s just the same thing again, except more literal and more obviously a bad idea. So bad you sort of wonder what the local crime boss thinks she’ll get out of stealing it. But even then, Bernice eventually gets hold of the thing and is fine actually, so I don’t really know what Richards is saying. It doesn’t do much to enhance the action; narratively all it does is defuse situations or get people killed by proxy. As for the idea that real happiness can’t be as easy as holding a magic gem, I’m struggling to even take the piss out of such a basic concept, but Bernice does pretty much have a nice time with or without it, so…

Most of the non-regular characters are similar non-starters. The crime boss, Mrs Winther, shows promise as a weary and potentially reasonable fixture of the underworld, but firstly it’s hard to root for someone with such a patently daft retirement plan, and secondly Richards won’t stop making references to her weight, as if that has any bearing on her characterisation. (Technically it could do, but it doesn’t, so it just seems cruel.) Her number 2, Nikole, thinks her boss is old and weak and is itching to bump her off and take over the business - but first of all, how bog standard is that, and second of all, that was Mrs Winther’s plan for her anyway. Chill, love, the promotion’s in the post.

Perhaps wonkiest of all is Dent Harper, Bernice’s famous guide, who just doesn’t quite add up. He’s an adventurer who keeps journals and rewrites them – okay, there’s a parallel with Bernice. (Again, it ain’t subtle.) But he’s a little different in that his rewrites exist to sensationalise his life and make him sound better. (Bernice’s rewrites also come from a place of insecurity but there’s no pomposity there, and she keeps the original versions.) After we’re introduced to Dent and the concept that he embellishes things, he then appears to believe his own hype, which makes for good comic fodder. But then, with Jason and Clarence taking care of business all around him, it’s not really possible to show that his (overhyped) worldview is wrong – because it isn’t, if external forces need to get in the way to make it safer than it really is. You could show him being surprised at more real life danger happening than is normal, and then bafflement when it’s taken away before Bernice can spot it, but that’s a layer of complication that just isn’t happening. As with Dorpfeld’s Prism then, I ended up wondering what Richards was trying to achieve here. A comic buffoon who can’t tell reality from aggrandisement? Probably, but he’d have had exactly the same journey if he really was the danger-loving guy he purports to be, and that doesn’t seem right.

Probably the only material gain from The Joy Device is Bernice’s perspective on memory loss: she eventually decides that not knowing how she got out of this scrape or that disaster is no bad thing really, so long as she knows that she did. This is not as much of a boon as getting her memories back - and I still think that was a weird, mean thing to do to your protagonist in her surely soon-to-end series - but it gives her something of a restorative to be getting on with. (And it probably would have felt a bit pat anyway if she got them back right after she cured her terminal illness. Here’s an idea, just don’t fire these random life-altering horrors at her if you don’t want to keep them around.) Apart from all that, The Joy Device is knowingly just a runaround, destined to be enjoyable in the moment or irritating as part of a series. I got through it very quickly, which ought to count for something, and like Benny I really did have a nice time, whilst sort of wishing more would happen.

6/10