Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #100 – The Well-Mannered War by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#33

The Well-Mannered War

By Gareth Roberts

In all the excitement and sadness of the New Adventures ending you could almost forget that another range was going away forever. Unfortunately I feel about the Missing Adventures the way Arthur Dent did when he met prehistoric cavemen who would soon be wiped out by hairdressers. “It’s all been a bit of a waste of time for you, hasn’t it?”

That’s not to say there aren’t any good MAs – only that by design, they were all over the place. They were a series of one-offs set at random times in the show’s history, so of course they had no overall direction or momentum. You were meant to enjoy them as treats, like Doctor Who’s highly erratic video releases – but the actual show wasn’t made like that, with a different production team turning up each week to frantically busk a different era. Conversely, the shared themes and ideas of the New Adventures were among the series’ key strengths. It’s no coincidence that the NAs got better and more consistent as they went along. What you got with the MAs was more like speed dating, where the only question was “What do YOU think would make a good Missing Adventure?” And well, nobody knew.

One of the few taking a bloody good stab at it anyway was Gareth Roberts. “What If TV Episode, But Book” is the most obvious route you can take with these, and The Romance Of Crime did Season 17 verbatim, but it also remembered to be massively entertaining. The English Way Of Death pushed more into Wodehouse territory than Douglas Adams – which depending on your view is much the same thing anyway – and it was subsequently more like a novel, less like a missing Target novelisation. Then The Plotters came along and showed that, with or without Tom Baker, Roberts could capture an era, structure like mad AND keep up the laughs. Conclusion: if someone has to close out this wobbly series of whatevers then Roberts has the best CV for it.

First, I should declare an interest. Although I’d never read The Well-Mannered War, I have heard the Big Finish adaptation. (I loved it, then forced myself not to listen to it again until I’d read the book; it’s been a while.) So I knew the main plot beats already, which took away much of the surprise. However, you come to a Gareth Roberts book mostly for the prose, which doesn’t translate to a script anyway, and The Well-Mannered War doesn’t disappoint there.

The setup* lends itself to the author’s favourite thing, British awkwardness. Two races are at war over a planet no one could conceivably want, except the war hasn’t officially started yet (in over 100 years) so all they’re doing is going through the motions and being terribly nice about it. Few of them actually want to start a fight (including the Chelonians, a race of bloodthirsty tortoises), but there are pathetic little displays of aggression anyway like haphazard missile launches, and a ritual where the leaders of the two camps attempt shoddily to assassinate each other, usually after a cordial lunch and before going back to their bases to give everybody presents. It’s as protracted as it is gloriously pointless. “The summit was dissolved after only four hours when it became clear that the parties could not agree on the wording of the initial clause of the discussion document.” / “‘I’m not expected to, er, well, you know...’ He mimed a shooting gesture. Even that level of violence made him feel giddy. ‘Oh hell.’” / “The atmosphere was rather like that at a party when the host goes to check the dinner leaving a room full of unacquainted guests.” / “There was an uncomfortable silence. Dolne regarded Jafrid as a friend of the kind one mixes well with in a crowd. When there was only the two of them conversation was hard. They just didn’t have enough in common. The big screen stayed blank. Both of them made disapproving noises to cover the embarrassing lapse.”

(*It’s marginally similar to another MA just two books ago, A Device Of Death. I’m curious whether there were any crossed words about this at the time, but there’s certainly no fatigue in this second, stronger take on the idea.)

The two commanders, Dolne (a prissy admiral who has to mentally remind himself that he wears a uniform, not an outfit) and Jafrid (a relatively nice Chelonian) have a delightful friendship, which is worth highlighting as it’s a Gareth Roberts book and those are usually full of people who hate each other. (This can lead to lots of amusingly bitchy dialogue, but it becomes wearying after a while.) Depicting war as a silly routine is a clever way to parody the politics surrounding it, and not one I’ve seen a million times before, for which I’m very grateful.

But characters can’t be terribly nice and do nothing all the time, so things must escalate, notably during a scene with a broken down copier that at first sounds like it fell out of Roberts’ pile of sketch ideas. Much merriment is had about an error message that doesn’t make any sense, until this turns into “PREPARE TO BE ABSORBED BY DARKNESS” and that character is horribly killed and absorbed by an alien intelligence. (The automaton-spouting-a-demonic-message gag would crop up again via the Ood.) There’s a genuine sadness about this, as the character still has a vestige of himself afterwards and feels quite sad about being dead; also, the “Darkness” occasionally loosen their mental grip on him, apparently out of mercy. We’re right back to tragedy when he passes it onto another character you’ll have grown to like, who should probably have known better than to contemplate an early retirement just before answering the door.

Roberts invests his characters with enough little quirks to make their deaths really matter, like one guy’s love of dull grey uniforms and his subsequent hope not to be promoted into a nicer one. I’ve complained at length about unnecessary physical description, and Roberts indulges in it only where it expands your understanding of the character. That a man’s hair is greying tells us he’s been here for a while and is perhaps easily stressed; that a politician’s corpulence prevents him from easily getting out of a chair tells us he spends most of his time sitting comfortably, and so on. The Well-Mannered War is not a short book, but it doesn’t fill the time doing busywork with words, which separates it from a lot of MAs.

The Doctor, Romana and K9 find themselves on the dull rock Barclow due to an apparent series of coincidences. This is a theme throughout the book, which culminates in a much more satisfying explanation than Roberts’ last coincidence-themed book, The Highest Science. (That coincidentally (?) also featured an apparently dull planet being warred over by Chelonians and useless humans. Douglas Adams wrote reams about convenient things happening for no real reason, which is clearly not a coincidence.) Their misadventures certainly feel in keeping with the Adams era, with bit part characters espousing their woes such as a tea lady in no man’s land, a revolutionary running an anti-authoritarian press by himself in a cave, and Menlove Stokes, a returning nuisance from The Romance Of Crime. The vainglorious artist and imbecile perhaps works better when performed (by Michael Troughton in Big Finish’s Romance and War adaptations), as putting him on the page surrounded by people who loathe him, without the benefit of spirited inflection, just lays bare the joke that powers him and risks making him monotonous. But he’s not as bad as the revolutionary Fritchoff, who (like Spiggot, the nauseating cop in Romance) only exists to parody a certain outlook and method of speaking, here have-a-go fight-the-power nitwits who say “bourgeoisie” a lot. We get it, as does everyone he meets, over and over and over again. Folks, beware writing deliberately irritating characters because of that universal truth: Irritating Characters Are Irritating.

Fortunately we have the Doctor, Romana and K9 to anchor it all, who are all very entertaining in this, though they are in slightly sniffy moods. The English Way Of Death wobbled the Doctor-companion relationship between wanting to kiss and wanting to kill each other, and The Well-Mannered War places its bets on the latter, with nuggets like “Romana sighed. ‘Do you answer the question or do I employ physical violence?’” She spends most of her time with Stokes, so she’s irritated for almost the entire book with or without the Doctor. Still, this can work: “‘I specified to be woken [from cryosleep] only when my work was re-evaluated and properly appreciated.’ There was an unpleasant silence. ‘Stokes, we’re getting close to the very end of the universe.’”

K9 is distracted by the loveable subplot about suddenly becoming a political candidate (“What do we want? A K9 administration! When do we want it? As soon as possible!”), but Roberts indulges an apparent love of the character by making it clear he still has some very human, or at least rather emotional thoughts and just expresses them like a machine. “‘Come here.’ [K9] crossed the room and [Romana] bent down and stroked his sides. ‘Misunderstanding of the functional nature of this unit,’ said K9. ‘Petting unnecessary.’ But he didn’t pull away.” K9 is instrumental to much of the plot; the Doctor not-so-coincidentally chides him for becoming too useful.

The Doctor spends most of it on his own or meeting the smaller bit-parts, and he’s in a foul mood for some of it (again because of company, such as Fritchoff who goes irritatingly back and forth over rescuing him from certain death – because he’s really annoying, you see). But he also leans into the whimsies of Season 17, such as putting a full cup of tea in his pocket and later retrieving it unspilled, or finding himself under attack by rockets and hurriedly thumbing through a booklet called So You’re Caught in a Rocket Attack. (There’s also a crafty sub-sub-subplot about his coat getting ripped and tattered, which helps explain why he switched to a different one the following year.) The writing is undoubtedly on point for Tom Baker, but there’s a certain feeling about him of being sick of it all. Maybe this ties into the Season 17 arc of evading the Black Guardian (who irritatingly doesn’t turn up to justify it), but it could also be a nod to Tom’s advancing years in the role. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it and Roberts just enjoys a snippy Doctor.

One of the reasons I’m a bit iffy about the main characters in this is also one of the book’s strengths: the plot is excellent, a sort of Rube Goldberg device full of layers. It’s very satisfying watching it all click into place. But, as the Doctor eventually realises, he doesn’t have much agency here, someone else is manipulating events. This is satisfying in terms of construction, not so much in terms of the main character(s) driving the action, which is sort of a necessity. The war is a sham (which we know from the outset), the creatures arranging it are themselves being manipulated, and the people leading them into a trap have been manipulated as well. It goes click, click, click wonderfully, but it makes the main trio slightly surplus to requirements. (Even K9’s candidacy is written off not too convincingly as “It amused [the villain] to bring out the superiority that has always bubbled beneath that servile shell.” So for a laugh, then?) It’s debateable whether this matters, and even I’m not sure it does. But it’s odd.

Still, look what it achieves. In pulling all the coincidences and manipulations together, Roberts creates the Season 17 finale we never knew we needed. Forget Shada! Wouldn’t it have been better if, after setting up the whole “run away at random to evade the Black Guardian” plot, they didn’t just get bored of it and never mention it again? Finally it’s addressed, ending infamously with the Doctor and co. flying out of the known universe, where previously he ended up in the Land of Fiction. It’s a deliberate cliff-hanger, what with these books ending and no one being able to write a direct sequel, but it’s still satisfying. This explains how they shook their pursuer and carried on having normal adventures afterwards. We only miss the bit in the middle where they were in the Land of Fiction, or whatever realm it turned out to be. In all honesty that book would have been an absolute sod to write, and you may have been better off just imagining it even if they did carry on. It’s also quite sweet to leave us wanting more, imagining the next Missing Adventure ourselves.

The real takeaway here is that once again, Virgin went out on their own terms. The Doctor and Romana press the button that takes them away from all this, not some poxy BBC Books man. For symbolic good measure there’s a reason why they must not land on Dellah, the planet where the Bernice New Adventures are set. (And it’s not just that Stokes is going there which, strewth, why didn’t you warn me?! Props to Roberts for specifying he would “most definitely, never so much as think about the Doctor and company ever again”, saving everyone else the bother of an explanation.) For a series without any overall continuity it ties up nicely, including the Guardian name-checking earlier books as proof that he’s been observing all the while. (Gifting us the Doctor’s retort, “You’re dabbling with the forces of continuity”!) The Well-Mannered War is a finale in several respects, and even if I’m still uncertain whether this represents the best sort of Missing Adventure you could get, at least we ended on one that mostly works.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #97 – The Dark Path by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#32
The Dark Path
By David A. McIntee

Time for another entry in the “horrifyingly expensive Doctor Who book” line. To find out why it’s so pricey, besides the license expiring when it arrived and there not being any time for reprints, you only need to glance at the cover, which promises the earliest adventure featuring the Master. Will it explain why he’s such a little rascal? Talk about fan-bait; of course it sold out! (As to the question, TL;DR, yes and no.)

David A. McIntee’s sixth Doctor Who book opens with his customary introduction, promising something “more introspective” and less “action-based”. Naturally, we open on a space battle. Hmm. We soon find out the complicated political situation that led to this: settlers from the Earth Empire (the Roz and Chris era) have for centuries been living in isolation on the planet Darkheart, unaware that humanity has since joined the Galactic Federation (the Curse Of Peladon era). They do not take kindly to aliens or strangers (see space battle) and they’re not thrilled about a Federation ship coming to extend the olive branch. Needless to say, there’s a secret on Darkheart. The Veltrochni – a non-humanoid species, several of whose ships were wiped out by paranoid Empire scouts – are coming to investigate and take revenge. The Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria turn up in the thick of it, as well as another Time Lord and his assistant Ailla. The Time Lord’s name is Koschei, but he will soon be referred to as something else.

Even in summary this is a busy and densely populated story. Not the sort of thing that leaves a lot of room for introspection, you might think, and you’d be right. Especially as The Dark Path engages right away in one of my all-time book pet hates: absolutely no prizes for guessing, short sections. Not short chapters necessarily, which often give a nice bite-sized sense of progress and speed you through a book (or do for me, anyway) – but constant interruptions so we can go off and see what another group of people are doing. If this doesn’t bother you, great, tuck in. But for me it’s the absolute death of reader investment. The Dark Path is cut, cut, cut right from the word go, a million little pauses to remind you of other things you might want to go and do instead. There are other reasons this book wasn’t for me but honestly, it never stood a chance with this kind of pacing.

I’ve yet to really love a David A. McIntee novel, but that’s not to say there’s never anything to like. He’s great at writing focussed bursts of action, such as a boat crash in White Darkness, a plane crash in First Frontier, a brutal attack in Sanctuary; he’s occasionally brilliant at capturing a character’s voice, particularly Turlough in Lords Of The Storm, or the Fourth Doctor and Romana in The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang. He’s even – bearing in mind the introduction to The Dark Path – quite adept at introspection, such as Bernice’s gut-wrenching acceptance of Guy’s death in Sanctuary, K9’s snippy little thoughts in The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang, and pretty much everything about the villain Hsien-Ko in that novel. (See the sequence where she uses teleportation simply to steal a few peaceful moments with her lover, also the deft creepiness of a barren woman whose monstrous henchman dresses like a child.) He can do it, but it’s always cluttered with… other stuff.

There’s usually a level of historical research that borders on the obsessed, and doesn’t necessarily add to the story so much as (ala Lucius Fox in Batman Begins) tell you how hard it was. The Dark Path eschews this because it’s pure sci-fi – not that this is really stopping him, as Lords Of The Storm was a space opera that still incorporated Indian culture. Whatever the reason, The Dark Path has (almost) no obvious links to Earth history or culture. But it still manages another McIntee bugaboo, the unnecessary attention to detail, telling us (tediously) what buildings look like and how they link to each other, what items are in a room, that a character is “of medium build”, pausing after “Hathaway gave a polite nod” to observe “They were both in cream and gold dress uniform”, noting that a man “with short blond hair – dark at the roots – [had] high cheekbones, with a wide and expressive mouth”, and stating when the Doctor stands behind another character that “there wasn’t much difference in height between them.” This is just information, it’s not automatically interesting. And check out this absolute monster: “Pack Huthakh was one of the younger Packs. Made up of family members from three other Packs, including Pack Zanchyth, they had only recently been granted true independent Pack status within the overarching House that contained those three Packs.” This is seriously Get Out Your Red Pen stuff. I wonder if a certain amount of leeway was given due to the license time constraints. (Which would explain the rather odd paragraph on P279 that begins “psbw”, followed by an indent and some dialogue.)

Nevertheless, the book does try to be introspective. Without going back to check old McIntee novels I can’t tell if it’s worse than usual, but this is not good introspection. We are privy to everyone’s thought processes, but they’re not thinking anything interesting; it’s reminiscent of The Ghosts Of N-Space and Evolution, where everybody thinks in rhetorical questions or blandly internally states how they feel about things. For example: “Locked alone in the cabin, Salamanca felt lost. How long had he been serving aboard this ship? Perhaps that was a question that he should take more literally, and the concept felt saddening.” The concept felt saddening?! And hey, two paragraphs later he “felt guilty” as well. I could weep. We are literally told that characters felt sad, felt guilty, felt angry – sometimes several at once, “In short, she felt lost, alone, and frightened” – and we get their internal responses to other characters’ actions in real time, which is generally redundant as they then respond to them either with dialogue or an action. Virtually no one in the large cast becomes more interesting over the course of the novel. The only thing really going on here is the plot, and every character’s reaction to it (internal or otherwise) is simple and direct. The prose doesn’t really have a life of its own. Reading it was like endlessly eating grey paste.

At this point you’d usually turn to the main characters, who automatically have more definition and shape and so should give the author more to work with. And this is entirely my personal preference, but did it have to be the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria again? Stuffing another book (after Twlight Of The Gods) in between The Web Of Fear and Fury From The Deep means building to Victoria’s decision to leave… again. But Christopher Bulis already made the point that she was thinking of moving on, and frankly Fury From The Deep made the point clearly and subtly enough on screen. This is the dilemma of the Missing Adventures: outside their own stories, they can’t create and build character development as they’re one-shots, so (unless they follow on) they have to mine whatever was said or unsaid on the screen. They always have to use as reference stuff we’ve already seen, which blurs the line between character writing and continuity reference.

And The Dark Path is a gallumping great continuity fest even before you get to the TARDIS crew, populating the Federation with familiar species (Tereleptils! Draconians! Alpha Centuarians!), using previous adventures for context (The Highlanders! The Chase! Twilight Of The Gods! The Sorcerer’s Apprentice! Dancing The Code!) and sometimes just dropping references because god damn it that’s how I roll, bruh (Vraxoin! Mentiads! Usurians!). McIntee at least uses as a crucial plot point the fact that Victoria’s father was killed by the Daleks, but in amongst the Russell/Hinton-esque wank backdrop, it ends up looking like familiar plot points are the only things rolling around in the characters’ heads. Particularly Victoria, who only ever seems to be prim or miserable on TV or off. (The only interesting thing that ever happened to her was being a Victorian person living in the modern day, and the novelisation of Downtime is the only place it’s been explored, in expanded material not seen on TV.)

Jamie fares pretty well, and almost certainly represents McIntee’s penchant for research for this book, as he’s forever dropping Scottishisms that either need to be explained by a secondary character (usually the Doctor) or just sit there. There’s certainly an argument for doing this, as Jamie is Scottish and McIntee is a Scot, and perhaps he felt that Jamie could do with more definition in that area. But it jars a little against Frazer Hines’s somewhat generalised nationality that for this book only, he’s forever saying “ye” instead of “you”, “heid” instead of “head” and referring to a “ceilidh”, his “skean dhu” and things being “braw” and “sleekit”. Yes, I’m complaining about a Scottish character being arguably too Scottish – I’ll get me coat.

This leaves the Doctor and the Master, and the book’s main selling point. I should state that while the Doctor’s past is both a tantalising mystery and a matter to handle with care (achieved admirably well in Lungbarrow), the Master is less intriguing to me. From the outset he’s been a 100% villainous foil for the Doctor, whose motivations never amounted to much more than wanting power and wanting to outlive his natural lifespan. (So he can get more power, presumably.) The main thing that’s interesting about him is his relationship with the Doctor and how that went wrong, and The Dark Path sort of phones that bit in.

Koschei is semantically different from the Master: he has an assistant and is cordial to her, and he does not seem (at first) to be working towards ultimate power, so much as just expressing a general curiosity about the universe similar to the Doctor’s. (His companion Ailla has more deliberate reasons for being on Darkheart, which he is unaware of.) In time, he learns the secret of Darkheart and what the Darkheart (confusingly the source of power of the planet Darkheart!) can do. Tantalised, he yearns for ultimate control over the universe, supposedly to undo things he doesn’t like (such as a friend’s apparent death) and, er, to just generally be in control, Master-style, I guess. We don’t know enough about him to track his journey to this point, although it’s worth noting that he had no qualms about murdering a man in the first hundred pages so he can adopt his image as a disguise. His feelings for Ailla, who at one point is killed, and later turns out to have had ulterior motives, seem to be the reason for his transformation into someone more like the Master. But I never really bought it. There’s a flutter of seemingly romantic feeling here, but… seriously? That plays a part in later conspiring with Nestenes, Daemons and suchlike?

As for the Doctor – written in a perfectly sound Patrick Troughton manner, but with few truly memorable moments – he seems keen enough on the fellow, not perturbed to have another Time Lord around, and not particularly involved in the disagreement that creates “the Master”. This doesn’t ring entirely true to me, what with the panic he feels in The War Games about his people catching up with him, and it seems odd that (for admittedly obvious reasons) no one ever mentions Ailla and Koschei again where the Master is concerned. It’s all a bit of a damp squib; those hoping for some sort of precursor to the Holmes and Moriarty relationship shared by Pertwee and Delgado will be disappointed.

Despite McIntee’s stated aim, it’s just not that kind of story: character is a distant second to plot. And the plot’s not my favourite. The Darkheart – a strange choice, not using that as the title? – is an all-purpose sci-fi thingummy that does whatever the writer fancies. It keeps the planet’s population alive but makes them sterile, it can replace entire species with humans, it can blow up spaceships and planets or do the same thing further back in time. Any more for any more? Koschei and the Doctor spend so much time wittering on about how this stuff works that it’s difficult not to feel like Jamie and just nod along with the gobbledegook.

Frustratingly The Dark Path doesn’t make much of its conceit. It should be fascinating that a planet full of people have unnaturally long life (and consequently cannot have children), but they take it in their stride. The Master should, based on what we already know about him, find the whole eternal life thing rather interesting, but it just strikes him as a total side effect of the more interesting things that the Darkheart can do. Even the political divide between the Empire and the Federation is something the book can’t really make us feel anything about, because it takes so much explaining. If we were talking about two civilisations that were vastly and clearly different, maybe, but these are both futuristic groups whose only major difference is the number of species on the call sheet. (While we’re at it, I don’t remember the Empire being as all-around speciesist as this – they weren’t all like Roz, surely?) Even a subplot about an unseen, shape-shifting “demon” stalking the planet is variously ignored and laughed off as rumour by the Adjudicators dying as a result of it. I kept forgetting it was a thing.

There’s an obvious appeal to a story offering The Answer about a well-known character; it’s exactly the sort of gap you’d expect the Missing Adventures to fill. But I don’t think The Dark Path answers its central question with much that you couldn’t fill in yourself – to wit, the Master was a slightly less dangerous dude with a different name, until he became a more dangerous dude called the Master. It’s sadly one of the author’s less accomplished pieces of writing, offering infrequent action (which reads like generic Star Trek, pilfering much of that show’s terminology) and great bogs of characterisation mulch to wade through. It’s one of life’s little annoyances that it’s so difficult to get hold of, which artificially raises your expectations. (Not the author's fault, but there you go.) I would advise not stressing about it on eBay, and maybe catching an online plot summary instead.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #95 – A Device Of Death by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#31

A Device Of Death

By Christopher Bulis

Okay, so you’re about to lose the Doctor Who license. What do you do? Looking at the books published around this time (such as Cold Fusion, Lungbarrow, The Dark Path) I can’t help imagining a frantic race to green-light the wildest, most fan-maddening things they could think of. And why not, since they were getting evicted? But that theory sort of wobbles when you look at A Device Of Death, published right near the end and about as likely to frighten the horses as a Doctor Who episode guide. What was the pitch? “Hey Chris, we’re a book short”? “Which Doctor was your mum’s favourite”? Of course there’s no real obligation to do something crazy or fannish here, nor any guarantee that doing that = a good book, but the sheer ordinariness of this is a bit stifling so late on. When you can count your license time in minutes, it seems like folly just to churn ’em out.

That’s not to say A Device Of Death feels cynical or knocked together, as Christopher Bulis has a decent idea here and he clearly likes all his characters. But it could have been published at any point in the run, and whether or not that matters, it feels a bit disposable now.

Fresh from changing history a bit in Genesis Of The Daleks, the Doctor, Sarah and Harry are heading back to Nerva Beacon via the Time Ring – or so they think, until the Time Lords decide there’s something else that requires their attention first. Something goes wrong and the travellers are split up. The Doctor lands in Deepcity, their real destination: an underground weapons facility that is part of a massive space system war. He soon becomes a valued guest helping with the war effort. Harry arrives in a war-zone where his medical skills quickly endear him to the military. Sarah, ever the lucky one, winds up working in an enemy camp, and later befriends one of the humanoid battle droids that litter both sides of the conflict. All three have amnesia to some degree, but the Doctor will be affected by it for most of the book, not being sure what he was up to in the last story, where his home planet is or what blueish box-type thing he happens to be obsessed with. Mostly the memory loss serves just to delay the plot, as a Doctor playing with a full deck (and knowledge of TARDISes) makes short work of the problem later. Harry and Sarah get their marbles back soon enough, and having this happen one after another begins to feel redundant – Sarah must be interrogated first, so she can remember the return of her memories!

From the outset, something clearly isn’t right about this war. This is particularly apparent when 1984-ish “daily hates” come along to stir wartime spirit (in, improbably enough, Harry). There’s also the peculiar absence of enemy soldiers – Sarah comes closest to seeing any, and then it’s mostly synthetic prison guards. Bulis clearly has a plan in action, but dramatically it’s a bit inert as the main factors are all too obvious early on. (One side is clearly perpetuating the war, so it just becomes a question of Why.) Meanwhile the Doctor and Harry have quite a pleasant time of it (Sarah, admittedly, less so!), and the narrative – though switching adroitly from one character to another with each chapter – moves very slowly, with a lot of information dispensed in heavy exposition dumps. (There’s something uncannily odd about the image of Tom Baker sitting patiently while another actor talks at length.) There are interesting moments when Harry wins the trust of aliens on a battlefield, not to mention plies his trade as a field medic for once, and Sarah’s experiences in a work camp are suitably harrowing, including witnessing a failed escape. It’s genuinely satisfying when they come together at the end, and it becomes apparent that (spoiler?) the planet Harry and Sarah are heading towards is the secret one that houses the Doctor. But the journey to that point is mostly spent going “Yessss?” with increasing impatience.

There’s something novel (or perhaps desperate) about cramming a story into this gap – which went from the Doctor, Sarah and Harry spinning through space at the end of Genesis to, er, the same thing at the start of the next story, presumably! – and there’s something awkwardly redundant about the wartime bunker stuff that fills the plot. This is in no literal way a repeat of the previous story, but it still couldn’t have been made in Season 12 for the sensible reason that you don’t want to see two things in a row that look or feel alike. There’s more or less a deliberate reason for this, but it arrives on the second to last page of the book, so it’s not really enough to offset the creeping suspicion that Bulis simply loved Genesis and wanted to repurpose some of the sets. (Mind you this was Season 12, when they were so thrifty they set two stories in the same place. But like, eight weeks apart, which was something.)

Bubbling along beneath the “What’s really going on?” action is a subplot with Sarah and the robot, which she christens Max. This has a wider significance to the story which becomes apparent in the last stretch, then clicks fully into place on the last page. (!) This is worth noting because, if you didn’t know it was going somewhere, these scenes add nothing you haven’t seen before. Even Sarah notes the parallel with befriending Kettlewell’s robot in Tom’s first story, and the teaching-a-robot-to-appreciate-human-foibles act is as old as, well, robots. Max is garden variety “nice robot” in every way, and I say that as someone who absolutely loves anything with robots in it. A Device Of Death could, in another draft, have been all about emergent robot life, and may have been more interesting, but there doesn’t seem to be room to dwell on that theme as we drily move from one plot scene to another until someone finally owns up about the purpose of the war. There’s a cast of dozens, only some of whom (like the guilty scientist Tarron or the pompous actor Malf) feel at all lived in. It definitely feels like Bulis is invested in everybody here, but the story doesn’t have room to flesh them all out. It has themes, too, about the dangers of jingoism and ignorance of suffering, but they seem to happen in spite of the chugging prose rather than because of it.

Is it worth the wait to find out what’s going on? Not massively. I won’t say exactly what’s going on here because, beyond spoilers and what would just be the obvious reason for perpetuating a war beyond its sell-by date, I’m not sure I entirely followed it. A Device Of Death reaches count-the-pages territory by the end, not unlike some of Bulis’s other sloggy novels like Twilight Of The Gods. It’s never actually bad (although you may sprain something rolling your eyes at the Me Robot, You Friend stuff) but it lacks a great sense of danger and, being all about war, much in the way of fun.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #93 – Burning Heart by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#30

Burning Heart

By Dave Stone

A Missing Adventure by Dave Stone? This should be interesting. And it is, but mainly because Burning Heart is not so much a Missing Adventure as a New Adventure cosplaying as one.

The Habitat is a messy, barely civilised outpost in humanity’s distant future. Adjudicators rule with blunt force, but tensions are palpable between the resident humans and aliens. Into this sweeps a random, unearthly element of violence, and lurking beneath the central fabric of the Habitat itself is a sinister intelligence.

This isn’t just set in the aftermath of the well-known NA, Original Sin – it pretty much is the setting for Original Sin. Then there’s the tone. The foulness of life in the Habitat is a lot like Transit, cheerfully highlighting violent crime and body horror in a very un-Classic Who way. If that wasn’t enough, the story ends up leaning into the theme of emergent life, which is even more like Transit. As for the language, the New Adventures’ favourite swearword (cruk) gets a resurgence, plus we bandy around another one (Sheol) that may or may not be new to the books. As well as Adjudicators there’s a supporting character called Kane who, being in a book by Dave Stone, just might be related to someone from the New Adventures.

Now there’s an argument to be made that much of this (the violence, the futurism) makes sense in the Colin Baker era, especially after the satirically violent Vengeance On Varos, so it should work as a Missing Adventure. But you’re reading this years later and potentially alongside the other books published around then, so it unavoidably rings different bells. Even the front cover, which infamously gives us Adjudicators ala Judge Dredd, sends NA signals: my housemate, who doesn’t read these books but has heard me go on about them, took one look and said “That looks like one of the other lot.”

Getting back on track to what Burning Heart is rather than what it is like, the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive on relatively rough terms. I don’t recall Varos ending on a sour note for these two, and I’d suggest that this kind of characterisation might work better coming right after she meets an unpredictable Sixie in The Twin Dilemma. She doesn’t mince words (or thoughts) here: “One again – yet again – Peri felt that edgy mix of disappointment and annoyance. Once again, on some deep emotional level, she had expected to turn and see the friendly and engaging, utterly decent and trustworthy man she had once known – only to find that it was, well, him. The Doctor. It always slightly disorientated her, kept her on the wrong foot. The fact that she had now known this version of the Time Lord longer than the original seemed to make it all the worse. Now he looked at her with that little supercilious sneer she had come to know and loathe.” / “The real Doctor must still be in there somewhere. That was the only reason why anyone would stay with him and put up with him. At least, any other reasons for staying with him were just too horrible to contemplate.” Ouch.

In the long run, Burning Heart has an excuse for Peri’s instant loathing of him, and Dave Stone comes up with another one up front: seeing Peri’s reaction to the appalling conditions of the Habitat, and acknowledging that they can't be changed, “the anger [the Doctor] had instilled in her had countered and overridden the severe culture shock that might well have threatened to tear her mind apart. Hopefully, it would protect her for a while yet.” I’m not sure culture shock is that likely after the spate of aggressive and weird aliens she’s encountered already – she’s met killer androids, megalomaniac slugs, Cybermen, a smaller and more perverted slug, she’s been turned into a bird – but it’s a nice piece of character work for the apparently thoughtless Sixth Doctor, who elsewhere is “someone who, [Peri] sometimes felt, could not honestly care less if she lived or died.”

The overriding problem for me is that Peri and the Doctor spend the next 200 pages apart. They’re in something like three scenes together, so if Burning Heart is intended to be the great “Peri accepts Sixie” book, it lacks the material to qualify. Meanwhile, the Doctor runs afoul of the Adjudicators and spends most of his time meeting other alien undesirables in their holding cells, while he (all too slowly) begins to suspect that something is wrong here. Peri falls in with a violent faction called Human First, which she improbably believes is just this harmless bunch of guys, y’know? (Perhaps 2019’s depressing political atmosphere has made the red flag easier to spot.) The aforementioned excuse for Peri’s bad mood also covers her sudden interest in species-ist uprisings, but then Stone’s bets are hedged with the idea that this dangerous anger was already a part of her. Burning Heart doesn’t really go into or justify that, although her state of undress (taking a moment to examine her bruised, naked body) and her luck with outfits might go some way to explaining a burning rage within: her Human First uniform “mostly came from a supplier for the underground fetish clubs”, and “had also been carefully tailored to enhance certain bits and pieces into what a realtor would probably call a spectacular development of frontage ... She felt like a cross between a peroxide rock chick and the wet dream of a gentleman of a certain age.” I see what you did there, but... can you really be said to be commenting on a thing, if you’re just doing it anyway?

As well as separating them, the book doesn’t seem all that interested in them. The mysterious Kane buzzes around Peri, maybe-or-maybe-not working for Human First, and generally driving the action more than she does. He has an attachment to an Adjudicator named Chong, who works with the somewhat blinkered cop Craator, who seems to impact the plot more (or at least more often) than the Doctor. His boss is the religious zealot Garon (oh good, a religious zealot), while Peri and Kane have to contend with the equally zealous Jelks. Both leaders are getting people killed for their rather vague causes, but neither develops any depth. Same goes for most of the in-between characters, many of whom don’t even get names – it’s just group descriptors like Hand Of God, White Fire and so on. Things in the Habitat get worse until they explode into violence, but unfortunately Burning Heart hasn’t installed enough rounded characters for us to invest in its decline. The Habitat is also such a hot mess to start with that it doesn’t feel at all momentous when it gets worse. It just feels like Tuesday.

Maybe some of this is just the nagging sense that Dave Stone is playing in the New Adventures sandbox, and we’ve heard all this before. I’d also raise an eyebrow at the revelation that (spoiler) people are behaving the way they are because of an outside influence which is (in its own way) benevolent, meaning the violence is incidental. I certainly suspected some mind control with Peri – and got increasingly worried as the book went on and nothing was said about it, in case Stone had simply decided that Peri Loves Terrorism this week – but as well as being yet another accidental (?) yoink from Transit, this also allows Burning Heart to completely shrug off the two-dimensional characterisation of Garon and Jelks. It’s just, well, of course they’re dull fundamentalists. That’s the point! Urgh. Really?

Some arguably interesting things are happening here, such as the pulsing alien Node that hangs monolith-like over the Habitat and causes some of the random craziness below. (Such as deadly hallucinations, psychic murders, angel-like visions that kill and just all sorts of other random yuckness.) There is also OBERON, the computer / intelligence that Garon and the Adjudicators are slave to. Both of these are revealed as emergent lifeforms quite near the end, but it’s more of an info-dump than a drip-fed mystery; the book has by this point shown so little concrete interest in the Node that I was worried he’d forgotten about it. The revelation is like the Sixth Doctor himself, dropping hints and waiting for you to get it, then saying in his most irritating tone, “Well? Give up?” (He tells Peri “Telling is for people without the wit to see”, which is a bit bloody rich.) On the way here, all you can do is wade through Burning Heart, bouncing from one group of characters whom the narrative may or may not be writing with a deliberate lack of detail to another. It felt like 250 pages going on a million.

Much of this sounds crazy, to me anyway, coming from Dave Stone. Sky Pirates! is as jolly, fun and mad as its title suggests. Death And Diplomacy is a jaunty, if somewhat patchier romantic comedy. Such sustained futurism and misery is a funny fit for him, but there is the occasional concession to what, at this point, we can probably call Dave Stone-ness. There are plenty of witty observations, like a tangent on alien religions that includes The Rite Of Exterminating Everything That Isn’t a Dalek. Stone has (inevitable) fun with the Sixth Doctor’s verbosity, leaving other characters bored or irritated in exchanges such as: “Indeed, as the Doctor had said once, if it wasn’t for all these thinking, walking lumps of organised meat, these automemes in organic machines bucking local entropy all the time, the Universe would be in a hell of a state. And Peri had said, ‘What?’” And just when you think Stone has found the ultimate vessel for his obsession with long or obscure words in Sixie, he introduces the Doctor to someone worse: an enormous centipede called Queegvogel with a malfunctioning, psychotically verbose translation box. (I’m not even typing it up, just trust me.) He peppers the book with words like “bathetic” and “geodesic” that we both know aren’t part of everyday conversations over the counter at Tesco, and I may have needed to Google afterwards. He can turn a lovely phrase, like the Doctor’s summing up of what it means to impact other people’s lives even a little, or the coda that follows it.

But here we are. Burning Heart is still a dull, derivative wander through the wrong book range. You’re right, the Habitat sucks. Get me out of here.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #91 – The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#25

The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang

By David A. McIntee

NB 1: I’m reading this one out of order. Cold Fusion was published here, but it was set before The Death Of Art and had a small impact on that book, whereas The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang – published there – is a random one-off that could go anywhere. I’m sure Mr Sin won’t mind me swapping them.

NB 2: I also reviewed this years ago, back when I wasn't reading all of these and the reviews weren't quite so exhausting.  If you'd like a shorter version from way back, here you go!

Well, you can’t fault his ambition.

The Virgin novels have kept returning baddies to a minimum, perhaps inspired by the complete unavailability of Daleks. Where we do get sequels they’re offbeat, like The Sands Of Time focusing on a time conundrum instead of on Sutekh, or Twilight Of The Gods largely ignoring the aliens from The Web Planet in favour of even more boring ones.

At several points, David A. McIntee’s latest tries to do things unexpectedly. The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang sequelises probably a Top 5 story for most Who fans, but sets it in a different century (thus ruling out Jago and Litefoot), uses a different location and keeps the titular Chinese false god absent. It’s a sequel in the sense that the earlier story set these events in motion, but the iconography of The Talons Of Weng-Chiang – Victoriana, darkly comic dialogue, Gothic horror – isn’t part of the deal. It’s certainly a clever title, highlighting and possibly begrudging the expectations set by the earlier story. “The Baggage Of Weng-Chiang” would also have worked.

By making his story so different it becomes a bit irrelevant to say, for example, that it’s not as horrifying or as funny as Talons, but nonetheless that’s the case. Shadow ditches horror for pulpy ’30s adventure, with car chases, robberies, international unrest and a vigilante literally inspired by The Shadow. (Oh god, is the title a pun?) That’s not necessarily worse, it’s just different. One of McIntee’s writerly habits is indulging in action and, if you like that, there’s plenty of it here, such as the opening raid on a theatre/museum, a violent robbery ambushed by police, a sneak attack by the villain involving Mr Sin and an air vent, and K9 dangling out of a crashing plane while tied to the Doctor’s scarf. (!)

Speaking of Peking Homunculi, Mr Sin shows up occasionally to cause stabby havoc, mostly in a school uniform. (I take it back, that might be creepier than anything in Talons.) He’s used as a garnish and, frankly, the plot doesn’t need him much. Sin is the only element directly carried over from the previous story; so much of what made it good was atmosphere, there isn’t much else you could re-use without just making more of it. He’s one of those monsters that worked incredibly well (and only appeared) once, but put him in a novel and it quickly becomes apparent that he’s not exactly a gift to writers, being mute and wanting to kill people absolutely 100% of the time. (Because of his pig brain – pigs being notably homicidal?) He at least provides some irony for the villain, Hsien-Ko, who can’t have children but does have a monstrous lackey dressed as one.

She’s a major part of Shadow not quite being what you’d expect. Her link to The Talons Of Weng-Chiang is kept secret for a while, and though it’s fair to assume she’s the antagonist, McIntee keeps her allegiance and feelings towards Weng-Chiang and the Doctor ambiguous. She has nothing much against the Doctor and doesn’t want to kill him; she’d rather have his help. Confronted by his not wanting to do so (because duh), she’s happy enough to dump him on a distant island (using the teleportation of Dragon Paths, a key plot ingredient) and let him make his own way back, knowing he’d be too late by then. Even the Doctor is surprised to be up against a downright amenable bad guy: it “makes a nice change.” Elsewhere she is genuinely disappointed at having to kill someone not necessary to the plan, and a key motivator is her love affair with Kwok, a lieutenant, which in turn makes her sad because a quirk of time means she will far outlive him. Together they occasionally use the Dragon Paths to go to an unspecified tropical paradise just to have a peaceful five minutes – an entirely pragmatic use of teleportation and a humanising one for a “bad guy”. Throughout the book, I was pleasantly surprised by her.

McIntee’s choice of Doctor and companion is slightly unusual, pairing the Fourth Doctor with the first Romana during their search for the Key To Time. That’s not a sequence of stories you could easily cram something else into; he gets away with it by making Hsien-Ko and the Dragon Paths give off a signal that is a lot like the Key To Time. Hsien-Ko is surprised that his companion isn’t Leela. (Given Virgin canon’s almost complete ignorance of the noble savage, I am not. Alas.) Both characters are written fittingly as if they’re being script edited by Douglas Adams, with the Doctor having fits of whimsy and eccentricity like putting his hand up to his eyes and then “realising” that he left his telescope in the TARDIS. There’s some amusing one-upmanship with K9, who has a quiet sense of superiority that’s funny without being implausible. (Yet more subverted expectations come when K9 finally meets Mr Sin. It’s over rather quickly, but by then you’re a bit sick of the stabby git, and K9’s quiet triumph is adorable.)

Romana is the only part that falls down, not because she’s poorly written or because Mary Tamm didn’t play the character well, but because in one year that version of the character didn’t develop much beyond haughty and smart, and McIntee sticks loyally to that characterisation. Tom and Mary didn’t have much of a rapport at the time – certainly nothing that compares to the Pygmalion quality with Louise Jameson – and the strange absence of something is noticeable here. The Doctor and Romana seem to exist quite independently, as they haven’t got the firey chemistry that came with Lalla Ward; as they’re both superior Time Lords at the peak of their confidence, there’s never any feeling that they’re in peril. When they’re with Hsien-Ko, she’s so accommodating that there isn’t a lot of tension. When they’re taken into police custody, McIntee writes “It was as if [Romana] were going along purely as a favour,” which pretty much describes their entire journey through the novel.

Taken on its own, an indomitable Doctor and/or companion can be a thrilling change of pace. Terrance Dicks wrote the Seventh Doctor that way in Exodus, and it was a tonic. Similarly, writing a villain with technically positive ambitions who really quite likes the Doctor, and will go to some lengths to keep him safe, is a twist on the good guy/bad guy dynamic that is so often easy and stale. I’m all for both of these things, but the combination doesn’t quite work. Shadow has the odd feeling of a bunch of people who can come and go as they like, harmlessly moving from place to place until their plans finally become impassable. Despite McIntee’s signature action, it becomes a chore.

Sadly there are other McIntee habits on display, not all of them good. It wouldn’t be one of his books without a historical setting and attendant rubbing-your-nose-in-it. Writing a story in a historical period? Good, those are fascinating. Providing lots of detail so it sounds authentic? Great. But you can get distracted by that, and he does, often describing locales and objects in nearly tedious detail, pausing the flow of the story to make really super-duper-mega sure you know he knows what he’s talking about. I get it – you do. “The Doctor’s police box stood just inside the gate, on a wide promenade that looked out eastwards over on the vibrant green depressions between the three main peaks and their attendant promontories, all of which had temples or inns built upon them.” Uh huh. Sometimes his embedded enthusiasm sounds like that of a tourism board. “The pine-scented fresh breeze that blew through the gardens would undoubtedly be as refreshing to anyone in the pavilions as would the shade provided by the pointed golden roofs.” Oooh! And sometimes it seems to have little to do with history and more to do with presumably drawing things out first and then wanting to prove it. “The parking area was in front of a large three-storey French-style mansion. The front of the house was graced with a wide patio from which two staircases descended to the gravel.” Fascinating.

It’s becoming clearer with each book that this writer loves detail and information – which isn’t a bad thing, but is perhaps more suited to scriptwriting than prose. There are scenes where characters list different makes and models of weaponry, or recount the complicated political situation of Shanghai at that time, and numerous scenes with an aircraft that refer to it as “the CNAC Stinson Trimotor.” Ohh, that aircraft! Thanks for clarifying!

Even the character writing falls into the too-much-information trap. We learn vital (and to be fair, often interesting) back story about Hsien-Ko, her lover Kwok, the Shadow-inspired Woo who also runs a night club, and cop-with-an-agenda Li by the slightly cumbersome method of them pausing what they’re doing to have a bloody good remember. Sometimes when they’re under attack. There’s a moment when, aptly enough, Romana is observing a landscape and we get this: “Romana had nothing against admiring beautiful scenery, but there was a time for everything.” Too bloody right there is.

Some of the difficulty I had in getting through this one may be that I’ve read it before, as you don’t necessarily have that urge to find out what happens next the second time. Mostly though, I think it’s the writing style. Now, there are some genuinely creative choices made with the characters, the style of “villainy” they’re up against, and the resistance to more obvious call-backs where it’s a sequel. (We still get continuity, some of it quite unexpected and arguably welcome, as it’s from the books: Hsien-Ko’s plan ties into Invasion Of The Cat-People, and there’s a significant cameo by a character from the first Decalog collection, of all things.) There are some random beats include the Doctor comparing somebody to Chow Yun Fat, suggesting he watches a lot of Chinese action movies from the ’90s, and a bizarre conversion with Romana about political correctness, as well as all those odd travel brochure bits where we marvel at the sights. But the book’s problem is more endemic, being so aloof with its heroes and villains and so excited about period detail (and detail in general) that it’s difficult to invest. Once we’re into the climax it just goes on endlessly in an actiony, detaily haze.

I can see why you’d admire The Shadow Of Weng-Chiang, and I like what it tried to do. If you are going to read it, though, I suggest one-and-done.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #89 – The Plotters by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#28

The Plotters

By Gareth Roberts

If you were new to Doctor Who you might find it odd that there are so few stories where the characters get embroiled in history. It seems like an obvious win for a time travel show, and to be fair there are many great examples of this in the early years, with characters trying to keep history on course while struggling to escape from it. But Daleks and Cybermen get you more Radio Times covers, I guess, so after 1967 the historicals sadly died off; all of a sudden the only way to see history was if aliens were trying to blow it up. (Not including Black Orchid, where you only wished aliens would blow it up.)

The novels have mostly followed suit, stapling reassuring sci-fi bits to any errant historical settings with two exceptions: Sanctuary, David A. McIntee’s grim book about the Spanish Inquisition, and now The Plotters by Gareth Roberts. In some ways this is the better historical. No doubt McIntee did more detailed research (Roberts’s book opens with an acknowledgement that The Plotters isn’t very accurate), but this one’s set in the Hartnell era, where you were most likely to find trips to the past. Roberts knows exactly how best to use these characters in that context, with the Doctor, Vicki, Ian and Barbara assuming more or less parallel roles to those in The Crusade. They slide back into the swing of things with such ease that you could easily imagine this being made for television.

Arriving in 1605, the Doctor dismisses Barbara’s obvious enthusiasm for this period of history but allows her and Ian to take in the sights while he and Vicki loiter in the TARDIS. This is a lie, of course: he knows just how close they are to a juicy bit of history and he intends to find a good seat to gawk from. His deception leads to some pretty unpleasant business for everyone else, and it’s absolutely in keeping for Hartnell’s Doctor to lap up every minute of it regardless. He’s a wily, wilful, crafty old sod in this, as comfortable leading Ian and Barbara astray as he is playing word-games with the devious Robert Cecil. He never exactly apologises to his friends for the consequences of his fib – more on those shortly – and none of it seems to upset him at all. He practically cries with laughter at King James’s oblivious line on the back cover, “If anyone tries to interrupt the opening of Parliament … there’ll be fireworks!”, and later he works with one of the conspirators because doing that will be better for history than not. You could put all of this down to Roberts indulging Hartnell’s gift for mischief, and that’d be fair, but I like to think it deliberately underlines how the Doctor is unlike his companions. He can often be a serious presence in historical stories, reminding the others of the implacability of time, but at this stage Ian and Barbara have learnt the lessons, so he seems almost free of obligation. He has faith that time will sort itself out and if he has to give things a little nudge along the way, nudge them he will.

Barbara, possibly winning the “least fun weekend in 1605” award here, goes with Ian to a tavern and promptly gets embroiled in the work of Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby. She’s kidnapped, assaulted and threatened several times with execution, only escaping because she tells Fawkes a worrying amount of the truth about where she comes from and what she knows about him. (You can guess what she leaves out.) Fawkes is dead set on his goal, but he has no wish to harm her; he helps her escape from the more dangerous Catesby. Barbara observes several times that Fawkes is not such a bad man, or not universally so, and she’s absolutely tortured by the knowledge of what will happen to him. She still goes out of her way to ensure that it will. If The Plotters had somehow been made back in the ’60s, this would have made a bleak but satisfying end to Barbara’s learning curve in The Aztecs.

Good as all of that is, it would be fair to say that Barbara essentially just gets captured and escapes in this, which makes it even more unimpressive that Ian’s entire role in The Plotters is to dash about looking for her. Despite often inhabiting the more heroic role in Doctor Who, or maybe because he does, Ian fades into the background of the plot. (And later, The Plot.) He meets a pair of cheerful shoemaking rogues, Firking and Hodge, who offer shelter and haphazard support when he needs rescuing from Catesby and co. Roberts seemingly can’t wait to steer Ian back towards these two, as it allows more opportunity for amusement. I love Ian, but he’s at his funniest when the Doctor is making a faux pas, not so much when Barbara’s in danger.

Firking and Hodge provide a few straightforward laughs, but there’s a better comedy double act in the bickering Haldann and Otley: working to transcribe the King James Bible, they constantly snipe at each other but quietly agree it’s best to leave out some of the boring bits, because “Well, would you like to be stuck on the begats for week after week?” The Doctor’s apparent interest in 1605 is the transcription (at first), and he ingratiates himself not just into the King’s court, but between these equally cantankerous old goats. I found myself looking forward to these bits and gleefully imagining them on telly.

It’s debateable whether this version of King James would have made the cut. It’s remarkably similar to Alan Cumming’s take in the recent series, all lascivious looks and lusty Scots wit. But Roberts doesn’t so much acknowledge the King’s sexuality here as build a rocket out of it: he subverts the trope of the lusted-after companion by disguising Vicki as the Doctor’s ward, then making her the object of his affections precisely for that reason. It’s a particularly crafty farce that all Vicki has to do to end the King’s advances is lose the disguise, which is the one thing she can’t do. Grim as the consequences of her discovery would be, Roberts has endless fun with the obsessed King, whether patting his knee hopefully and sending knowing looks or throwing a drunken sulk because he can’t find him. There are some near misses: “‘I promise if you let the King have his way you will get a lovely surprise!’ ‘Not half as lovely as the surprise you’d get,’ said Vicki.”

A character like King James is a gift when you can write prose like Gareth Roberts. “With a snap of his fingers he summoned a boy to refill his goblet (boy-summoning was a choice pastime of his).” / “He was constantly searching for these little reminders of his specialness. He remembered his father warning him that the first sign of serious levels of unrest in one’s subjects was everybody’s dinner looking the same. Poor Dad. Blown to bits at Bannockburn.” / “‘Something – oh, something awful has happened!’ ‘Ugh. How awful?’ ‘Very awful, Your Majesty.’ James remained to be convinced. ‘On a riding scale, if one is a stolen pie from the kitchens and ten is revolution in the streets, how awful?’ The Chamberlain hesitated. ‘Oh, eight, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh, doom.’” Even the prose around him is fun. Describing the busybodying Chamberlain: “Patches of pink bloomed on his cheeks, making plump mulberries of them.” And the Chamberlain on food prep: “He’d forgotten to remind the cooks of James’s innate loathing of meringues.” There’s just gobs of this stuff, all delicious.

Where the TARDIS team are concerned, the wit is tinged with characterful insight. Barbara on the TARDIS’s failure to hit the 1960s: “Back to the Ship and pull the handle on the fruit machine again.” And adorably, “We’re only about three hundred and sixty years out. That’s quite good for the Doctor, all told.” Vicki is particularly, almost conspicuously unamused by the Doctor in this – probably spurred on King James’s affections – observing “He wore his own Edwardian outfit, which [she] didn’t dare point out was as anachronistic as any plastic mac.” More significantly, “[she] had noticed before how he faked symptoms of ill health when bringing bad news or trying to conceal a mistake.” At one point she’s so tired of lugging books for Haldann and Otley, she contemplates kicking him in the shins. The Doctor meanwhile snidely congratulates himself that “This excursion was turning out quite satisfactory, particularly without those schoolteacher people to distract him,” and on meeting the Chamberlain “found his constant gesticulations irritating, and quelled a desire to reach out and slap him.” Significantly (and dangerously) he gives Cecil one in the eye when he says “‘The ordering in the Alexandrian section is quite gone to plot – I mean to say, pot.’ Feeling rather puffed up and pleased with himself for that one he strode away round the corner.”

It’s not all playful and fun, of course, what with Barbara’s mistreatment and her inner torment over the fate of Fawkes. Also some marvellous, earnest little nuggets like this jumped off the page: “In this age it was still possible to see the stars, and as he trudged up the road Ian stopped more than once to look up and wonder which of them he had visited.” There’s a grim interlude where Ian and Barbara witness a bear being exhibited for cruel London punters, and there’s a surprising and horrifying murder late in the book (which thankfully Barbara misses), but nonetheless the plot errs on the side of fanciful. (Hence Roberts’s acknowledgement/warning at the start.) The Plotters offers a sinister linking presence to the machinations of Cecil and the delusions of Catesby. It’s never less than fun to read, particularly as the Doctor surprisingly disarms Cecil by agreeing to help him, then hoodwinks a mastermind by sheer dumb luck. But some of the machinations do get a bit silly, particularly a male character’s prolonged successful disguise as a serving wench, which seems more like Blackadder than Doctor Who. Towards the end of the book there’s an almost unruly number of scenes with characters held captive in dank little rooms; I had trouble remembering who was where, held at sword-point by whom.

I’ve definitely got some quibbles. The Plotters is a smidge too long at nearly 300 pages, some of it being the aforementioned game of “Whose cellar is it anyway?” Also it’s so intent on giving the Doctor a whale of a time that Ian and Barbara, and very nearly Vicki don’t get a great deal to do. But I’m so enamoured with the prose that I can just about write this off as era-appropriate. Historical stories could go on a bit just as much as the sci-fi epics, and four characters is always a lot to balance in terms of plot. (The Crusade, which I adore mainly as a novelisation, ultimately runs out of material for the Doctor and Vicki.) Where The Plotters isn’t perfect, it still feels like something the Hartnell era was foolish to let go. It’s just great Doctor Who.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #87 – Speed Of Flight by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#27

Speed Of Flight

By Paul Leonard

Oh good, it’s Paul Leonard. A bit of a sleeper hit when it comes to Virgin’s Who authors, Leonard has now written three quietly impressive books. Venusian Lullaby is the standard bearer for (very) alien life; Dancing The Code is a characterful examination of violence in the Third Doctor era; and Toy Soldiers has an evocative plot steeped in atmosphere and imagery. Now we have Speed Of Flight, another Lullaby-ish deep dive into offworld life. All aboard.

He sets the tone right away with a prologue following Xa, a simple-minded labourer on an expedition he doesn’t understand. The language is all a bit vague, much like Xa, describing suns, skies and lands in a way I can’t quite pin down. And Xa wants to fight – he must fight, if he wants to be “promoted”. The life cycle on this planet demands a mortal battle and to win means evolving wings and changing in other ways.

All of which is sort of interesting, except we’re stuck in Xa’s head and he just goes on and on about fighting while not understanding any of what’s happening around him. As a first impression, it’s frustrating. Not to worry though, since the rest of the book is (mostly) about other characters. But that sense of somewhat imaginative vagueness never goes away regardless of the character we’re following, and I struggled through more or less every page.

It’s hard to pin down the problem here, as there are a lot of complex ideas at work. Nooma – only named in the blurb unless I'm mistaken? – is an unusual setting with its seemingly artificial sky and low gravity. (Just typing “artificial sky” recalls The Also People, and look at the bountiful rewards in that.) The life cycle of its people has obviously been thought through in much the same way as “remembering” in Venusian Lullaby. The villain of the piece, Epreto, isn’t a bad guy per se; he just wants to break free from the strangely rigid evolution of his species, and while he’s at it the world around him, which seems to be falling apart. I’m all for moral ambiguity and a villain with only “good” motivations is a welcome change. There are even ideas to spare, such as the Dead, a series of pseudo-mechanical recreations of deceased people, and there are plenty of neat visuals such as the ubiquitous steamships.

For some reason though, none of this takes off. The world isn’t heavily explored: there is mention of temples on the sky but we hardly see them, nor most of the people who live here; roughly a quarter of the book seems to take place in one character’s house; the lack of gravity never seems important (and is surely at odds with the overall obsession with flight), and there are assorted characters of different sub-species with varying job titles, such as “confessor”, who just refuse to crystallise into relatable, breathing people. I never really understood what the Dead were all about and, as much as Leonard has applied his characteristic flair to the born>fight>evolve process on Nooma, the plot never progresses much beyond it. Also characters yakking on about wanting to fight is really not that interesting to me.

As it takes place after Dancing The Code (with references to prove it), you’re probably expecting more character work to bed in Jo’s imminent departure. That last book ended on a note of defiance for Jo, after all: a fork in the road between her and the Doctor where she was the one offering to help. Unfortunately, Speed Of Flight isn’t all that interested. Hoping to visit Karfel (so we can tick off that all important Timelash Easter Egg) the Doctor picks up Jo and Mike Yates, who have been sent on a prank blind date. Jo promptly meets the Dead and spends most of the novel not feeling like herself. (Towards the end there is a nod towards her desire to move on, but that’s all it is.) Mike’s clumsy arrival gets a sympathetic character killed, and he then spends a portion of the novel dead himself. (An incident at the end hints towards his troubled loyalty in later stories, but it’s a bit of a random link.) The Doctor figures out how this planet’s life cycle began as well as Epreto’s plan, and is curiously unsympathetic.

While his mannerisms are spot on as ever – including a delightful bit where he claims “Eeny, Meany, Miny, Mo” is a Venusian nursery rhyme – the Doctor’s attitude leaves something to be desired. It ought to be significant that he spends most of the novel away from Jo, but that feels incidental, as her out-of-it mind-set means she isn’t really learning and growing from her experiences. Mike Yates was mostly a nothing character on screen, and outside of The Eye Of The Giant (where he displayed some military efficiency for once), he’s the same in print. The Doctor is unfazed by his arrival and not especially knocked by the possibility of his death. It’s an odd three-man unit (ahem) to base your book around.

Speed Of Flight has some of the mechanics that made Leonard’s earlier books great, but it gets hung up on some details and doesn’t delve into others. It’s a book desperately lacking in colour and feeling, soldiering on to service an ultimately simple plot and finding no other rewards. It’s not a book I hate, but it is thankless work. I wish he’d filled this particular gap with Dancing The Code and then moved on.

4/10