Doctor Who: The BBC Books #106 – Relative Dementias by Mark Michalowski

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#49

Relative Dementias

By Mark Michalowski

Bunting! Sparklers! Those unrolling party things that honk! BBC Books has a new author for us. And he’s good.

I know nothing about Mark Michalowski other than the fact that I can’t seem to retain his full name. (I keep having to check.) We can surmise that he likes Doctor Who since he, y’know, wrote one. Relative Dementias has enough flavour to tell us that he knows it rather well, too, or otherwise that he excels at doing his homework. This isn’t a mark of quality by itself of course — most of the people who’ve read this book ought to stand a good chance in a Doctor Who pub quiz. But writing something that feels of a piece with the TV show without feeling like you’re coasting is no mean feat.

It gets off to an exciting start with a very singular teaser, using second person dialogue to set up something iffy going on at Graystairs, a Scottish Alzheimer’s clinic. (It feels a bit too easy to say that a vaguely modern thing feels more like New Who than Classic, but damn it, this one does.) We then dive straight into a bit of world-building, which you don’t often see in Past Doctor books.

The Doctor is asked for help by an old friend from UNIT, Dr Joyce Brunner, whose mother is at Graystairs. She does this via a secret PO Box which is monitored by another old/new friend, Countess Gallowglass: a fabulous grand old lady who lives with her cat in a hidden building. (I could immediately see her being an asset to the series, but alas, this is probably a one-and-done.) What an unusual instinct, using the continuity of the Doctor’s UNIT days but not having it be about Liz Shaw, or Mike Yates. And then throwing in brand new lore to boot! It felt like a proper expansion of the series, all tucked away in the range most people consider a chocolate box. Lush.

The story is on potentially shaky ground with Alzheimer’s, a subject you can imagine being done badly — especially with the potential insensitivity of a sci-fi explanation. Michalowski handles it appropriately, give or take some evil aliens on the periphery. The book doesn’t dwell much on the disease itself or its effect on families, but there are thoughtful moments as the residents rely on each other, and some fearlessly dark ones, such as Joyce’s view of her mother following a heart attack: “A stranger that more and more frequently, had reminded Joyce of what she’d wished for that day.” There is a sci-fi plot of course, as doctors somehow reverse the symptoms of the disease — for a sinister purpose, no doubt — but the book still makes time for Joyce to come back and confront what her mother is going through, the bad and the good. I wish there had been room to explore this more from the residents’ or the families’ point of view — more of a Flowers For Algernon thing, or even a Thursday Murder Club (with spaceships). But what we get feels quite decent.

Also very solid: the regulars. The Seventh Doctor and Ace are among the most written-about TARDIS teams, largely thanks to Virgin, so it might be hard to get them wrong. Even with that in mind, Relative Dementias really sells the duo. Granted, it feels like an earlier time in their relationship than the New Adventures or even most of their BBC Books — despite the Doctor’s Season 26 jacket Ace is a little more gung-ho here than she was in Fenric or Ghost Light. She is given reasons to be mistrustful of him in the novel, rather than carrying them over from other media, but they never really threaten to break their relationship. (Especially since Michalowski also gives Ace reasons to sympathise with the Doctor’s machinations.) Ace’s Leela-esque protectiveness is on full display, as is (charmingly) her sense of fun. I loved the bit at Graystairs when she tries to ruin an unpleasant person’s day: “Ducking back to the lounge, [Ace] opened her mouth to call ‘bingo’ as loudly as she could — only to find it smothered by the Doctor’s hand as he dragged her away. ‘Spoilsport,’ she muttered.”

There’s a surprisingly level playing field in this one between the Doctor and Ace and the villains of the piece. The book takes a while to really get into the action, the Doctor spending about a quarter of it mostly just getting something to eat — it feels, implicitly, like An Easy One. When we finally identify the baddies they’re not exactly the galaxy’s most wanted, feeling more than usually like just some (alien) people caught on the back foot. To an extent the Doctor and Ace have earned this sort of indomitable feeling. Michalowski uses it to set them up for a fall, however, when the Doctor’s relative (ahem) overconfidence puts him in the crosshairs of a certain kind of degenerative mental illness. All of a sudden, the less than accomplished villains are looking rather more threatening. Nice work.

This perhaps ought to be the selling point of the novel, if that doesn’t sound too glib; the Doctor losing his mind. (The blurb seems to think so.) I think Relative Dementias largely sleeps on it, however, pushing the Doctor lower down in the mix for a bit but never quite leaving us in doubt that he’ll recover. (Yes, I know that’s always a given, but still: novels gotta suspend disbelief.) It’s a good excuse to give more action to Ace, and it seemingly sets up a mystery about his past, although I might have misread that bit. If I didn’t then it’s hard to believe that anyone else is going to pick it up.

I haven’t said much about the plot, perhaps because I’d end up spoiling it. Relative Dementias keeps a lot of plates spinning and at times requires a bit of thought to piece it all together. One of its mysteries is perhaps not as mysterious as Michalowski would like to think, but I still enjoyed finding out what was going on there and following it through. There’s a decent number of reveals to keep things going afterwards. There are times though when it threatens to get over-ambitious, particularly with (don’t panic) a writing style that favours short sections and scene changes. Combined with some unusually hot weather, this slowed down my reading somewhat, but I don’t think it’s really a massive hindrance. Michalowski keeps his focus on the same few scenes at a time.

There’s a mild feeling of over-ambition in the characters as well as the structure. There are perhaps too many of them to really give everyone their due, with a number of Graystairs residents threatening to blend into the furniture, a couple of young lads on a boat fighting for pages, and even Joyce ending up as second fiddle to her son — him being a walking example of lore-building, there to set up the interesting but perhaps extraneous idea that life in UNIT has more cons than pros. It’s all good stuff, honestly, and it’s grist to the mill once it’s time for Ace to feel less than terrific about the Doctor’s actions. But in amongst a complex plot it becomes noticeably just another ingredient.

“Slightly too ambitious” is a nice problem to have, ultimately. Relative Dementias is my sort of speed for Doctor Who. The plot isn’t a galaxy-botherer, but there’s enough of it to make it spicy. Granted, the characters are a little over-crowded, but everyone’s got something to them. It engages with the TV series, but more with a “Yes, and” than a “What’s your favourite episode,” which tends to be the way. It’s a good example of the Past Doctor Adventures being fine to pick up and read without any context, only to then go a bit further than your expectations.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #98 – Bullet Time by David A. McIntee

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#45
Bullet Time
By David A. McIntee

I wasn’t keen to read this one because I knew a thing that happened in it.

You know how it is with decades-old books and spoilers: if you’re going to read about them then you run that risk. I try to sort of detect review spoilers by osmosis, then jump over them and skim the rest while squinting, but to be honest this has about the same success rate as finding reviews with or without spoilers in the first place. I didn’t have a hope with this one.

Can a Past Doctor Adventure even have a spoilery thing in it? Turns out yes. Received wisdom tells us that as these books are set between TV episodes they can’t do anything major, but first off, they got rid of the continuity links on the back covers a while ago, which perhaps tells us that they give less of a hoot about that now. Second, with the Seventh Doctor and no Ace this one is implicitly set after the TV series wrapped up, so it’s basically a New Adventure and fair game. Third, it’s by David A. McIntee, who wanted to do A Big Spoilery Thing in a previous book (also a PDA) but was talked out of it. We have new editors at this point who must have been more receptive to his grisly pitches, so spoiler warning, if you care about that sort of thing.

We don’t need to worry about it for the majority of Bullet Time, which has a lot of other stuff going on. (Too much, but what else is new with David A. McIntee.) We open in Hong Kong, 1997, near the time of the handover. This was still quite recent when the book came out, making Bullet Time a neat “historical” adventure. (See also the adorable detail that people’s phones keep running out of credit. Aww!) A UFO is shot down; shortly afterwards Sarah Jane Smith, investigating a porn ring, gets thrown out of a plane and rescued in mid-air, pretty much exactly like in the opening scene in Moonraker. Not shy about action scenes, is our David.

Bullet Time quickly settles down into a more low-key thriller with multiple groups — UNIT, the cops, the Triads, Sarah, her rescuer Tom Ryder and the Doctor — investigating alien devices, unexplained cases of spontaneous human combustion and each other. It has the makings of something really paranoid, with overt shades of The X-Files, but it’s more interested in the people involved than what it all means. McIntee is going for a sort of Paul Leonard “people are complex in all walks of life” thing here, except his one is mostly about humans rather than aliens.

The Triads are the most fleshed out examples. We meet a couple of them on their way to remove a man’s hands as punishment, and en route we get wrapped up in their love lives and family concerns. We get to know how they got into the Triad – mostly just to make a living – and we get the impression that they are more than just the awful things they do. Two of the book’s strongest action scenes (McIntee is known for doing these well) concern the deaths of Triad men which happen more or less by accident, inviting us to pity them for the chain of coincidences that rubbed out these otherwise potentially decent human beings. (Okay, they belong in jail, but still.)

We similarly get to know the cops, who have families at home and skeletons in the closet, and UNIT, who have evolved in directions a lot less friendly than the Brigadier, Benton, mugs-of-hot-sweet-army-tea etc. All of which is interesting, but perhaps it’s too much for one novel (or in any case this novel) to sustain. There are simply too many characters here. Combined with McIntee’s favoured writing style of endless abrupt scenes that feel like they’re ramping up to an action scene even when they’re not, Bullet Time is one of those books that always seems like it has somewhere else to be. Picking it up again a day later it can be quite challenging to remember not just what happened before you put it down, but what half-a-dozen plates were spinning at the time. Before long I was getting the different groups confused, especially where they all have quite similar goals.

This seems like a point of personal taste, but I think Bullet Time has an information delivery problem. Quite why the Triad etc are interested in UFOs and alien devices, and why people keep exploding is kept obscure for almost the entire book. Yes, holding back a big reveal is sort of the point of big reveals, but this felt like holding back the entire reason for following the narrative. This is where it’s very handy to lean on the complex lives of the people involved, but then the book’s overpopulation becomes a problem. I’ve seen Bullet Time described as “fast-paced” and that feels way off to me; it was more like channel hopping between filler episodes.

We do at least have a central mystery to pick at: the Doctor appears to be the head of the local Triad, assassins and drug deals and all. What’s that about? As Sarah notes, this can’t be right – not unless he’s “some sort of evil pod-person.” The conceit of a Doctor and companion meeting again at different times of life is a good one, and Bullet Time challenges the idea that they’d even recognise each other – morally rather than physically, since Sarah knows about regeneration. She is used to an adventurous but morally forthright Doctor, whereas the bloke with the question mark umbrella is a devious schemer. It’s a smart contradiction to throw in the path of an investigative reporter, and it lays bare the difference between the two Doctors, as well as the ways in which Sarah has grown and changed.

I doubt any readers seriously thought he’d begun a life of crime in earnest, but that’s sort of beside the point. While he has a compelling reason for getting involved – which is another example of “people not being what they seem,” in this case the alien invaders he’s trying to keep out of everybody’s way – he’s not keeping track of the collateral damage. It seems fair to assume that people are getting their hands (or whatever else) lopped off while he’s in charge; he’s completely naïve about day-to-day Triad practices, almost getting a close friend sexually assaulted in the process; for good measure, he ruins Sarah’s professional life “to keep her safe”; he has done something to the local drug trade to render it ineffective, which seems very “Doctor”, but as the cops note this might have its own deleterious effects; and while it turns out that (ahem spoiler oh who are we kidding) the aliens aren’t so bad after all, they’ve done questionable things that he didn’t know about and then isn’t happy about, which he’ll just have to put up with for the sake of Earth’s safety. This isn’t a New Adventures-y masterplan in action, but rather a man spinning a plate that won’t stay on the stick. This, too, is a character not being what we expect.

Sarah’s disenfranchisement ought to be the heart of the novel, but there’s too much novel for that. It’s essentially without a protagonist – we’re as likely to follow anyone in the Triad or Tom Ryder as we are Sarah. And not every avenue is automatically interesting, with Tom being an archetypal American hero not unlike a Terrance Dicks character, at least until his loyalties come into question near the end, which recontextualises him entirely – again though this is something we don’t have time to get into because a) we keep diving away to look at somebody else instead and b) we don’t find out critical plot specifics until the thing’s nearly over. When we finally understand what’s going on and what it all means it’s genuinely interesting, heightening McIntee’s themes of murkiness, and there’s a tremendous scene of the Doctor (having mostly failed to pull a rabbit out of hat) dressing Tom down for his human ineptitudes, but I couldn’t help thinking: where was all this for the last 250 pages?

It’s time for The Big Spoilery Thing! Just thought I’d mention it. If you like, you can go and put the kettle on and come back afterwards. Or just squint and power through it at your own risk. Patent pending.

Putting Sarah more in the driving seat might have helped with The Big Spoilery Thing, which I’ve no doubt went down like a cup of cold sick at the time. She dies in this, very near the end. For what it’s worth this is both a heroic act and an indictment of the Doctor’s scheming – it underlines the fact that he can’t muck about on this scale without getting his hands dirty. That’s the sort of exploited character flaw that would perhaps make more sense in the New Adventures, where it could meaningfully affect him long term; in a one-off there’s no reason for anyone to revisit it. (And of course the TV series gives us an out for continuity reasons. Cheers guys!) I knew it was coming, I didn’t particularly like the idea, and the way Bullet Time is written (emphasising the messy web of different lives rather than dwelling too long on individuals) means that the story must push on immediately afterwards, hardly eulogising the fan favourite character and perhaps making a point of not doing so. There is a lovely epilogue that makes you think for a moment that things didn’t go as poorly as all that, but then – tee hee hee, I’m sure – the rug is pulled. It’s one of the stronger pieces of writing in the novel and it’s very poignant, even if I sort of wish someone had poked him in the eye for suggesting it.

Whilst I personally dislike this kind of edgy revisited-character arc (I’m still giving Eternity Weeps the stink eye for what it did to Liz, sorry not sorry) I think McIntee does it with enough gravitas that it doesn’t feel token. It’s a cost not normally balanced against a Seventh Doctor “playing chess with people’s lives” story, and in that context it makes the whole thing a bit more thorny and complex. I wouldn’t disagree with anyone saying she deserved better – the novel agrees with you – and I’m not going to get hung up on book continuity anyway if I don’t like it. What else can I say about it other than it’s as horrible as he intended it to be, well done, and now I’ll file it away as an interesting redundant timeline.

That about wraps it up for spoilers!

It’s one of those books where I like what it was going for, but I don’t think I’m that big a fan of his writing style, which for me stifled what he was going for. I want to learn more about these people, but for that to work I need to properly sit with them sometimes. I want to marvel at the difficult choices the Doctor has made, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what they were until 25 pages before the end. There’s still more complexity here than there might have been with exactly the same plot and characters, which is absolutely something to applaud, but in practice it’s too much like story porridge to really come together. You just have to enjoy it in mouthfuls instead.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #80 – Independence Day by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#36

Independence Day

By Peter Darvill-Evans

The prodigal editor returns!

As you probably know, Peter Darvill-Evans helped launch the New Adventures and then edited them for years. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have EDAs or PDAs without him, so it makes a degree of sense to get him in to write something for BBC Books.

Of course the concern here is that his only prior Doctor Who book was Deceit: a plot-relevant but otherwise long, stodgy, vaguely unpleasant and action-heavy entry that introduced the controversial New Ace. (An older, gun-toting Ace who ran away and joined the space army for a bit.) It existed in service of a plot arc and what little you could glean from it about the author’s creativity was not hugely encouraging.

Independence Day* is at least a more measured effort — albeit not in terms of chapters, of which there are only six plus a prologue across 280 pages. Darvill-Evans is no longer saving up all the important bits for 50 page intervals (a weird Deceit tic), and although this one dips a toe in creepiness there’s nothing to rival the Stockholm Syndrome relationship in that earlier book — although the concept of messed up attraction shows up again. It is, if nothing else, an easy to follow book.

If I seem cagey it’s because I spent most of Independence Day convinced that it was Doing A Thing that would eventually pay off. On the surface it looks like the most, well, surface kind of story imaginable: the Doctor and Ace become embroiled in a slave revolt. They’ll light the blue touch paper and then down will come the terrible tyrant. It’s not exactly new ground but it could be satisfying if done well. The way Darvill-Evans positions his players, though, suggests a much murkier story.

Straight off the bat, the Doctor’s past actions have played a part in all this. While travelling with Jamie he landed on Mendeb Two for no apparent reason — rationalising that he always arrives somewhere “for a reason” — so he asked Jamie to pick up a souvenir to remind him to come back. Jamie picked a vital part of the planet’s communication relay, which ultimately caused a critical imbalance between planets Two and Three. (Maybe tie a knot in your hanky next time.) Fast forward to the Doctor’s return with Ace and Mendeb Two is now easy pickings for its sister world; the populace are being used for slave labour. So you have a story about the Doctor fixing his own mistake.

Sat on the ancient space station between the two worlds is Kedin Ashar, a Duke of Mendeb Three who is apparently loyal to King Vethran, whose kingdom relies upon brainwashed slaves. However, he is secretly working against the King. However (part 2) he is also facilitating the King’s slave trade using his own skill as an inventor/chemist. His plan is to invent a new mind-altering slave drug which wears off sooner, and supplant the original without Vethran noticing. Which is… good, but he’s still actively trading in slaves, and has dosed who knows how many people with the permanent version of the drug already. So he’s not exactly the white knight he appears to be, at least to his followers. The question inevitably occurs of whether he’s really any better than Vethran, and his answer isn’t all that compelling: “I can’t claim that I have a grand new vision for my planet, nor that I’m acting from long-held principles. I’m a soldier and a scientist, not a politician.” So there’s a question of whether this coup d'état will turn out to be anything more than a redistribution.

Then you have the slave revolt, which is happening independently of Kedin/coincidentally with the Doctor’s help. Landing on Mendeb Two he finds the slave operation in full swing and meets Bep-Wor, a depressed fisherman whose wife is a slave on the other world. Soon they’re working together on Mendeb Three, with the Doctor hoping to find Ace and Bep-Wor hoping to find his wife. This mini-revolution soon becomes worryingly messianic, with the brainwashed and free slaves alike chanting “Doctor!” Bep-Wor is hugely swept along by this and he begins steering the group away from the Doctor’s plan of finding the King to negotiate; instead they go from place to place freeing slaves, and doing so violently, against the Doctor’s wishes. (For a while he lies to keep this secret from the Doctor.) So this revolution isn’t spotless — there are questions to be asked about their methods, whether Bep-Wor is really better than the villains he’s killed, and how the Doctor squares that with his own moral code.

Then you have Ace. Free of her New Adventures continuity, she nonetheless wants to grow and be independent (geddit), and insists that the Doctor set her down on the space station to fend for herself. Soon she’s breaking up a fight to rescue Kedin, sleeping with him, winding up a slave herself and then eventually breaking her conditioning, assisting the revolution and intending to stay behind and make a life for herself. So you have a story about Ace’s independence and burgeoning adulthood, and the difficulties within that.

Even some bits you’d normally take for granted are presented with a little extra ambiguity. Vethran, our oogly-boogly bad guy, hardly appears in the book at all; he’s such a background figure that I couldn’t help focussing on Kedin’s grey areas instead. Is Darvill-Evans using this to tip the story the other way? Is Vethran’s reputation exaggerated perhaps, and Kedin’s muted? And we have the slaves. Now, obviously they’re not happy. They’re slaves! They’re drugged into forced contentment! But then we meet a slave/master couple who seem sort of genuinely functional, the one filling in the deficiencies of the other. Bep-Wor’s half-crazed army can’t cope with this idea so they kill the owner and liberate the slave; it’s strongly suggested that we shouldn’t cheer them on, which suggests that maybe, I dunno, there’s a grey area in all this.

Maybe I’ve got my charitable hat on but I think there’s genuine promise here. Sadly Independence Day doesn’t follow through on any of it. Which suggests worrying things about my choice of hat.

For starters there’s the Doctor. Yes, it’s interesting that his actions may have doomed Mendeb Two. But you ideally need to do something with that other than have the Doctor go “oh, whoops” and then proceed to get exactly as involved in the anti-villainy plot as he would have done on any other planet. His complicity doesn’t make much difference to the story since at no point does anyone find out or care about the Doctor’s little mistake, and beyond a little early encouragement he barely contributes to their victory anyway, instead spending a fair chunk of the finale dead. (He gets better.)

Then there’s Kedin, our distractingly handsome hero/slave trader — you know, that old combo. Kedin is anything but lily white politically, but he seems sure that he can fix the slave problem. Based on what, though? There’s zero actual plan to restore the slaves to who they were before, since at the time he planned all this he didn’t know the Doctor would turn up to at least have a credible go at it. Did he think setting a load of servile zombies free on their old stomping ground was a win? All his new drug does is confirm that some new slaves will revert back. Some plan!

His personality isn’t much better. We’re meant to believe he’s pining for his kidnapped love, Tevana. It’s a key motivator for him. That doesn’t seem to get in the way of his taking Ace to bed though, does it? Not to get all prudish about it, but that’s some very messy motivation for a guy already dabbling in straight up villainy, and yet by the time the dust settles at the end you’d think Aragorn had returned to Gondor. So I guess just don’t worry about all of that.

It’s clear that we’re meant to pity Bep-Wor, who gets a downbeat ending after hearing some unencouraging news. I nevertheless kept waiting for his bloody revolution and occasional lies to come back on him, but they didn’t. Shouldn’t it make a difference that he goes against the Doctor’s wishes, uses him as a figurehead and eventually (unconvincingly) feigns helplessness when his mob kills somebody harmless? Instead it’s just one of those things the book throws at us as if to go, well, it’s more colourful that way. And it is, but you really ought to put a button on it as well.

Like Kedin, Bep-Wor is lauded at the end. His unhappy postscript might be seen as penance — I dunno, he mostly seems unhappy about one very specific thing there. The best I can come up with is that Bep-Wor’s decay is because the Doctor felt he deserved it for making his earlier mistake, and that’s why he doesn’t do anything to stop it. I know, I know, it’s probably just (debatably) interesting colour.

You can see that Ace’s story is meant to be meaningful, a sort of New Adventures character arc speed run, but it just doesn’t work. For starters, she gets it all wrong: she completely misreads the initial attack on Kedin (she thinks the fancy rich guy is blameless, not the band of angry peasants? Ace thinks that?) and she puts a fatal amount of trust in him, even after he seemingly ejects her into space. The “mindless slave” section is then a very curious choice for the character, effectively writing her out for half of it. (That may be for the best as it’s strongly hinted that she did more than serve drinks on Mendeb Three. A reference to her being “fit for the arena” due to her fight skills is promising but that goes nowhere — perhaps it was from an old draft.)

Although her recovery and rush into action at the end is some of the most direct and enjoyable stuff in the book, her moral flip-flopping over Kedin is laughable. He drugged you and sent you into slavery! He boffed you while supposedly pining for his missus! But because he’s sad about it, Ace reckons she’s all grown up now and ready to go and serve Kedin instead of travelling in the TARDIS. No way: you, sir, are having a laugh. And so Darvill-Evans appears to be with Kedin’s wince-inducing Casablanca kiss-off at the end. At least we can find some amusement in the Doctor failing to entertain her plan for even a second.

Lastly we have the “take for granted” stuff, and no prizes for guessing how much that leaves in the bank. Vethran is described with, of course, thwarted ambiguity: “Bep-Wor had expected — he didn’t know what he had expected. Someone more remarkable, perhaps: a man whose face betrayed an inner evil. Vethran was tall, imposing, with keen, intelligent eyes and a full beard. And that was all.” But he’s clearly studied at the Ming The Merciless school as there’s no doubt of his total nastiness based on his actions; he even does the “try to kill the goodie when he’s not looking” trick! So yes, he really is worse than Kedin after all, because he just is, so there. (And to now put on my nitpick hat: why did he wait so long before brainwashing his hostage? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he just brainwash the world? Seriously, just poison the water supply and bam, no more wars. Why all the faff?) As for the apparent ambiguity around slaves — which I’m not exactly hopping up and down about as a concept — there’s only one scene of it. Another example of our “whew, that was weird, anyway” approach to moral complexity.

I’ve clearly got a bit sidetracked by all the ambiguity or-lack-thereof, so to get back to the book: yeah, I guess it is just a surface level slave revolt thing after all, despite appearances. And to be fair it can be enjoyed on that level. Darvill-Evans has clearly thought a lot about Mendeb Three and its strangely anachronistic society, with dukes and peasants somehow flying rickety rockets to a space station with much better tech. (5 years to get from radio sets to orbit? Yeah, okay.) Independence Day has an ungainly way of unspooling the planet’s lore at us, occasionally pausing just to “as you know, Bob” directly in the prose for no reason, but some of the added colour isn’t bad. Sue me, I got somewhat invested. (Sadly though it’s not just the prose that gets a bad case of the talkies. Ace, seemingly possessed with the soliloquy powers of Spider-Man, at one point announces to herself: “Now then … what was all that about? That Kedin’s a crafty old sod. Charming and very horny, but definitely crafty with it. I suppose he’s trying to find out how much I know about all this futuristic technology. It’s obvious he hasn’t got the hang of it at all. I just wish I knew what he was up to on this godforsaken space station.” Smooth!)

It’s not, without wishing to be mean, the most memorably written book. This is the sort of SF/fantasy plodder to throw out lines like “‘The signal, Tevana Roslod,’ Madok said”, and where “flirting” manifests as “I think you’d better say a prayer to your own deity, young lady. You’re about to sin.” (Oh, Pete.) We’ve established that virtually no one in this is someone you’ll want to root for, and there’s little in the way of interesting interior lives; nonetheless, the simple march of Darvill-Evans’s revolution keeps the pace up pretty well. The finale is exciting, and there are moments of wit along the way, like how Ace’s brainwashed speech and thoughts aren’t quite as flat as everyone else’s: “It’s a good job I’ve been told that I’m happy doing this, [Ace] said to herself, because otherwise I think I’d be quite pissed off.” If nothing else it’s unchallenging on a plot level and quite easy to get through.

I think I liked it better than Deceit. That’s not a very high bar, and it’s difficult to tell how much of my generally-finding-it-sort-of-okay was because I’d tricked myself into expecting a more complex book. I still think Independence Day has the germ of something with all that moral ambiguity, though equally that might just be a tonal leftover from the New Adventures. With a book this eager to comment on the action and tell us about the surroundings, however, I have to doubt there’s all that much hidden under the surface.

5/10

*Not a great title is it? This is a coup, they depose the guy. They’re not becoming an independent anything, they’re just getting rid of their ruler.

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #74 – Prime Time by Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#33

Prime Time

By Mike Tucker

I’ve read this one before, years ago along with all the other Mike Tucker/Robert Perry books. I liked how they all followed on from each other; it felt like finally getting Season 27. (Someone should tell this guy about the New Adventures…)

I wasn’t very impressed with Prime Time back then. I felt that it was a trad exercise and little more. And look, it certainly is that first thing: the central conceit is that the Doctor and Ace end up on a cruel television show broadcast to a fairly apathetic audience. Vengeance On Varos says hi! Revisiting it now though, I found enough odd little touches to mark this one out as, at the very least, Mike Tucker’s trad exercise.

For starters, the landscape of television has changed since Vengeance On Varos. Although there is a TV show in this dedicated to violence, there’s an altogether more psychological nastiness on display too — a sort of dark half of Jerry Springer that breaks people down with awful revelations. The kind of all-pervasive telly culture in Prime Time is also more insidious than Philip Martin’s all-out Orwellian nightmare: people on Blinni-Gaar aren’t forced by violence to watch TV all the time, they were just tempted into it, and now they’re trapped. There are TVs everywhere. Tucker can’t possibly have known this, but the sense of this planet’s citizens being unable to go two minutes without goggling at the box is eerily recognisable now as mobile phone addiction, especially when we see them at dinner. I wish it was a wild stretch of the imagination.

There’s also a meta quality to Prime Time that heightens its ideas. As well as breaking the book into TV “Parts” (pretty standard stuff there) Tucker throws in a trailer, a pre-titles sequence, a tag scene and even commercials. Even better, the story engages with the Doctor and Ace as famous people in-universe: they are desirable targets for a TV show because their exploits have been noticed. Yes, this is a cheeky excuse for Tucker to make reference to stories such as Storm Warning (and in a thrilling bit of intertextuality, The Genocide Machine — Big Finish is canon!), but why not? It makes sense that events in Doctor Who are commented upon afterwards, and it makes a virtue of Tucker’s (and Perry’s) potted history. It’s continuity, sure, but used in a way that you don’t see often.

This is also a neat excuse for the Seventh Doctor to get out-played for a change. His success has led to fame, and that contributes to his being on the back foot for a lot of this: the villains have plenty of evidence and footage to work with, therefore they can predict his behaviour. Hoist by his own petard, for once. Of course it helps that there are two insidious forces at work here, both particularly on the ball — that spells bad luck for the Doctor, however clever he is. Before you start wondering though if Tucker has mischaracterised the fella in the question mark pullover (as if), he pulls a few brilliant switcheroos near the end, having thoroughly re-affixed his manipulator’s hat. The fake-out involving the TARDIS made me hoot.

There’s continuity to spare elsewhere — of course there is, it’s Tucker. (No offence.) For instance, the Master’s in this. At first that feels a bit like token key-jangling for the fans, as the character seems unusually minimised, being manipulated by the same evil TV show as the Doctor. But Tucker manages to use this as a fake-out to then reintroduce the real, meaner Master later on, allowing the reader to get the initial “oh here we go” eyeroll over with first. (The real one has also been manipulated, but it’s a bit easier to see why.) There are some good scenes with the Doctor and the Master(s), the former earnestly wondering if he can trust the latter again, and considering whether a new body and an end to the cheetah virus might finally balance him out. You can probably guess how likely that is in reality, but to be fair, so can the Doctor. For a minute there they somewhat believably work together.

Ace gets a lot of the book’s hard knocks. While the Doctor is trapped in the Master’s disfigured TARDIS (that setting is an amusing bit of convergent evolution after Campaign and Heart Of TARDIS) and on the run from predators, Ace gets stuck with the Jerry Springer equivalent: paraded in front of gleeful unquestioning viewers, she is shown images of her distressed elderly mother, stirring up a familiar source of mental anguish. Then she’s shown her own gravestone. All of this serves to make her into a frayed nerve by the book’s end, almost executing several of the people responsible. And there I was thinking Tucker could have gone further with the TV satire. (He probably still could, to be fair: with the exception of Gatti, Ace’s friend who doesn’t even watch TV, we don’t spend time with any viewers on or outside of Blinni-Gaar.)

There’s somewhat of a theme here about people’s true natures. The Doctor’s heroism leads to a lot of trouble for him and Ace; Ace’s mistrust of her mother is inevitably questioned, and her violent tendencies are severely tested; the Master is still battling his animalistic tendencies (although does he really mind those?) and he must briefly ally himself with the Doctor, bringing out the old question of whether there’s still a friendship underneath; the Zzinbriizi are a race of jackals that have been granted intelligence by the Fleshsmiths, and they’re constantly struggling to maintain it; diminished TV guy Greg Ashby is converted into a monster, again by the Fleshsmiths (we’ll get to them), and now he’s battling to stay remotely human; prominent TV personality and old flame of Greg’s, Rennie Trasker, now does morally bankrupt work for Channel 400, which she eventually comes to question.

I say “somewhat of a theme” because apart from that the book is essentially all incident. There’s not much to unpack and I didn’t make a lot of notes: Tucker is here to move the plot along and if possible, ick the reader out a bit. Being a monsters guy, his imagination gets right to work there, providing us with the slavering Zzinbriizi and the revolting Fleshsmiths. (The latter charmingly depicted on the cover.) Here we have a sort of organic equivalent of the Cybermen, crossed with Star Trek’s Vidiians: ruined by their planet’s atmosphere, they capture other life-forms and use those materials to stay alive. This gives them an impressive aptitude for manipulating living things, as well as an upsetting larder of captured beings and animals. This fact disgusts the Doctor so much that he has no qualms about killing them all at the end. No need for “do I have the right” this week.

The Fleshsmiths and the satirical Channel 400 both make for compelling antagonists, but it would be fair to say that the combination is a bit random. Still, it’s amusing that both are secretly planning to screw over the other — which also applies to the Master, another villain in the mix. Perhaps the unexpected combination is part of why the Doctor is so discombobulated at first. And perhaps that’s being generous — but hey ho, it works.

Once you’re past all the rock-em-sock-em action Tucker turns out to have an ace up his sleeve. (Sorry.) I dimly remembered from reading this years ago that Ace dies in the book. That’s not quite accurate. (Although thinking so made the climax a lot more exciting!) The Doctor is made aware of impending doom for his young protege, and he is determined to investigate and prevent it — even to the bizarre extent of secretly digging up and lugging around her coffin. This is quite bold in terms of that potted continuity unique to Tucker and Perry. It’s a plot gauntlet-throw that demands to be resolved — and it would be, almost two years later in the duo’s next book, Loving The Alien. It’s a nice little button on the Seventh Doctor’s duty of care for Ace, which he knows he has let lapse during these events. (See, that awful TV show dressing her down.) It’s also a nudge away from the somewhat “safe” continuity of Past Doctors, which ironically is just the sort of thing you could point to as a consequence of Interference, a state of affairs that BBC Books had by now done away with.

It’s hard to rate this as Mike Tucker’s first solo novel because, now that you mention it, I don’t know what was Perry and what was Tucker before. It’s tempting to point to the weirder bits of Matrix as being Perry, since there’s little of that here. Regardless, Prime Time is a solid fleshing out (ahem) of its central idea. The writing is often good, with some neat descriptions like “The planet Scrantek hung in the wastes of the Brago Nebula, black and ugly, like an inkblot on a masterpiece.” Tucker’s familiarity with the era is beyond question, and he’s good at layering that in, such as this jolly moment during the Doctor’s TV interview: “[He] suddenly reached into his pocket. ‘Of course it’s not all just about saving the universe. I am quite musical.’ Ace buried her head in her hands. ‘Oh, no.’” There are occasional limits to his descriptive powers — too many references to fingers “dancing” over controls, a popular crutch for TARDIS scenes — and there’s a lot of that short scene writing I hate. However, in a world completely obsessed with TV, that’s almost appropriate. All told this is solid, suitably icky stuff, with a decent bit of promise for next time.

7/10

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

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#23

Storm Harvest

By Mike Tucker & Robert Perry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7/10

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

Doctor Who

More Short Trips

Edited by Stephen Cole

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

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

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

Anyway. Short trips. More of them.

*

Totem

By Tara Samms

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

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

*

Scientific Adviser

By Ian Atkins

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

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

*

Missing, Part One: Business as Usual

By Gary Russell

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

*

Moon Graffiti

By Dave Stone

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

*

One Bad Apple

By Simon Forward

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

*

64 Carlysle Street

By Gary Russell

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

*

The Eternity Contract

By Steve Lyons

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

*

The Sow in Rut

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

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

*

Special Weapons

By Paul Leonard

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

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

*

Honest Living

By Jason Loborik

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

*

Dead Time

By Andrew Miller

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

*

Romans Cutaway

By David A. McIntee

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

*

Return of the Spiders

By Gareth Roberts

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

*

Hot Ice

By Christopher Bulis

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

*

uPVC

By Paul Farnsworth

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

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

*

Good Companions

By Peter Anghelides

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

*

Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle

By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

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

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

*

Femme Fatale

By Paul Magrs

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

*

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

8/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #33 – Matrix by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#16
Matrix
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

This one’s quite ambitious for a Past Doctor Adventure. That’s not to denigrate the ones we’ve had so far — if anything, I’ve found them consistently more enjoyable and better at embracing their format than the Eighth Doctor books. It’s just that the kind of characterisation you get in Matrix feels more appropriate for characters that are the “main” ones in your range, rather than rotating guests of the week. Which I suppose is another way of saying that Matrix reminded me of the New Adventures.

Perhaps that’s not surprising as Tucker and Perry (or in this case, Perry and Tucker — is that significant?) are so far the only BBC writers working in that period after the TV series ended. Similarities will suggest themselves. Their earlier Illegal Alien covered similarly familiar ground after so many other writers had spent time in that sandbox.

The familiarity isn’t quite so literal this time, although for a few reasons Matrix does end up recalling Nigel Robinson’s Birthright. (Another Doctor-lite story set against Victorian squalor with a malcontent Time Lord pulling the strings.) It’s the general sense of weirdness I’m talking about.

We open with a mysterious hooded figure in an unknown location being all ominous. (Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!) He sends a clay fish monster after the Doctor and Ace. It finds them already in odd moods, the Doctor feeling so out of sorts that he expects Ace to leave him at any moment. (Ooh, moody! What does that remind me of…) When the fish guy assassin doesn’t work out, mysterious hooded guy communicates through the TARDIS before seemingly blowing it up, except that was only a vision (weird visions, you say?), followed by a nightmare hallucination of dead soldiers who are all actually Ace. (Guilt about what the Doctor has done to Ace? Interesting…) Around this point the Doctor removes the TARDIS telepathic circuit, fearing it was helping the malign presence.

All of this is in the first 30 pages, by the way, and we’re not done with the setup yet. Next there’s a stopover in 1963 (hey, the 35th anniversary was coming up) where it appears that history is out of whack: there’s no longer a TARDIS in Totter’s Lane, but London does have marauding evil spirits, packs of youths with blades strapped to their fingers and an armed curfew. Initially seeking to leave Ace with his earlier self (don’t even get me started) the Doctor miraculously bumps into Ian and Barbara, who helpfully fill in some blanks. It seems there were now more than five murders by Jack the Ripper, to which Britain responded somewhat excessively thanks to a vaguely-defined spectre hanging over them ever since. The Doctor decides to go back and sort this out.

(We’re nearly done with the setup.) On arrival, the Doctor loses his mind and tries to kill Ace. Tossing the telepathic circuit, the two then separate, Ace to find some degree of safety and the Doctor — now amnesiac — to hopefully find himself. But it’s a particularly nasty Victorian London they find themselves in, and it won’t be pleasant for either of them.

And that’s Matrix, or at least the majority of it: a saunter through a dreary and dangerous city with murder in the air. The bonkers list of events that got us to that point feels like a fever dream once you’re actually past it, which in its way also reminds me of the New Adventures. They often swerved into wonky, slightly overreaching oddness in character and setting, especially in the early days where you were more likely to bring up character beats from TV episodes, which of course Perry and Tucker also love doing. It’s all a little bit messy in that “we haven’t quite figured this out” way.

The pace slows considerably once we’re into the story proper, although the authors keep it moving superficially with the use of short chapters and frequent scene changes. (I think I’ve made my feelings clear on this type of pacing: my attention span no-likey.) Ace has a fairly terrible time, ending up in a circus against her will because of an apparent relapse of the cheetah people virus from Survival. (Ooh, TV continuity! See also London 1963 = Remembrance Of The Daleks, creepy Victorian dresses = Ghost Light, circuses = The Greatest Show In The Galaxy. There are also a couple of Time And The Rani and Paradise Towers refs for the true collectors.) Probably the best stuff here is Ace’s growing camaraderie with Peter, a browbeaten young man working for the dreadful ringmaster Malacroix, along with the freaks and circus acts. Nevertheless, Ace’s animalism never comes under particular scrutiny beyond a surface aversion to behaviour like that — the authors more than once revisit the Survival line “if we fight like animals, we die like animals” and that seems to be the extent of it. Ace committing an actual murder is swept aside in the book’s closing pages; if we were back in the New Adventures there’d be a chance to pick up on that later on, but as it is we’ll have to hope Perry and Tucker find it interesting enough to revisit next time around. (Given the Doctor’s loosey-goosey reassurance that neither of them was in their right mind at all this week, I doubt it.)

As for the Doctor, who in many ways this book is about — well, is it, though? The villain is intensely invested in the Doctor and determined to break him, but after his upsetting swerve into potential homicide (with an honourable mention to his very odd mood at the start) the Doctor practically exits the story, the telepathic circuit seemingly taking on the role of the cricket ball in Human Nature and keeping his Doctorness tantalisingly out of reach. (As in that novel, a secondary character here becomes fascinated with the Time Lord totem. You’ve got to assume Perry and Tucker read that one, right?) Instead we’re in the occasional company of “Johnny,” who is taken in by Joseph Liebermann, a kindly Jewish man of indeterminate age who knows a thing or two about regret. (He thinks Johnny is the Ripper, feels sorry for him and takes him in anyway.) Plenty of hints are dropped that Liebermann is more than he seems, and certainly older than any human, including in interludes sprinkled through the book. It’s a nice idea but I never really saw the relevance. He mostly just keeps “Johnny” out of harm’s way until, due to sheer circumstance, the circuit finds its way back to him and the Doctor is finally back in.

Unlike Human Nature, which to be fair isn’t much of a parallel to Matrix beyond a few loose plot points, the Doctor hasn’t learned much or grown in the intervening time. He just didn’t do the ending yet, and then he did. Which brings us to there not being a lot of actual story here. Atmosphere, certainly: try setting a story in Ripper-era London and not having sickly fog seep through the pages. But I was mostly waiting around for Johnny to get his groove back. Ace, for her part, seemingly does the same. She has no real plan here except to kill time; she doesn’t, and perhaps needn’t fully reckon with the idea that the Doctor might be off his rocker for good. (To be fair, she’s right to have faith, but that’s only obvious to us because we know he’s the main character in a series — in a previous-continuity story, at that.) The only person here consciously moving things along is the bad guy, and even he’s taking his time.

The villain in Matrix is clearly meant as a twist, so I’ll be a good sport and not say who it is. What I will say is that I think making it a twist hurts the book. This is a character you could do more with — this whole thing is a rematch so clearly the authors agree on that — and yet holding back who they are, and holding back any character recognition of who they are until that moment, doesn’t leave much room to work. What can you squeeze into forty or so pages? Doctor, it’s me, I still have my pre-existing grievance but this time I’ll definitely win? All that earlier wiffwaff involving spectres and clay monsters only becomes interesting once the novel puts a name to it — in particular, the identity of the villain’s gang opens a huge can of worms, the contents of which we’re simply not going to investigate. Spoilers in books have value, but this one might have been more effective if they had ripped (Rippered?) the plaster off, stuck the baddie on the cover and kept the Doctor in his right mind. Making it a little bit of a fair fight is surely more interesting than no fight.

The implication that the Doctor to some extent committed the Ripper murders is only marginally more tasteless than writing an SF reason for the murders in the first place, but in any case, thanks to the time crunch it’s as effectively meaningless as the murder Ace commits. Matrix has by this point already shown its quality at dispensing information, with a truly diabolical info dump about Ian and Barbara’s alternate history early on and some clunky exposition about Gallifreyan technology near the end — not to mention the crazy pacing of the first act. You can see the skeleton of a dark and disturbing story about who the Doctor is and who he could be, but the book’s choices simply don’t take us to the centre of that, instead ticking off creepy images and famous murders to speed-run a bit of atmosphere. Matrix is hardly terrible (it has that atmosphere after all) but it makes the sort of awkward missteps that a full series might later course correct. The Past Doctor Adventures simply don’t have that luxury.

5/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #21 – The Hollow Men by Keith Topping and Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures
#10
The Hollow Men
By Keith Topping & Martin Day

This one caught me off guard.

The ingredients are all fairly typical. You’ve got a creepy village with some even creepier scarecrows, some none-too-wholesome villagers in between. All very “British horror movie”, with an eventual link to a Classic Who story to calm the fans. But The Hollow Men feels more rounded than the jolly genre exercise I expected. It is also, for the people excited by the mere mention of horror, a good deal nastier.

The Doctor has been intrigued by Hexen Bridge for some time. This is a mild retcon, but it wouldn’t be the first time this particular Doctor has revealed a body-hopping interest in a place or a thing. Besides, I like the idea that we’re not privy to all of his adventures, and the suggestion that he’s been intrigued by a town very near Devil’s End ever since Jon Pertwee’s Favourite Story (TM), but has been unable to put his finger on exactly why, puts him at a curious disadvantage.

That wrong-footed feeling stays with the Doctor for most of The Hollow Men, despite his efforts. And we see some of them, such as his visits to the town throughout its history. He was on the school board some years ago, in a couple of different guises it seems, and several of the villagers remember him to some degree. This is a level of familiarity you don’t normally see around the Doctor — especially this Doctor — and there’s a vulnerability in that, because the people who remember him are not as awed by him as newcomers tend to be.

Well, he’s waited long enough, and it’s time for answers. But before he can get any he comes across some particularly nefarious locals (one of whom knew him at school) and they bundle him into a car and off to Liverpool for seeing too much. Again, you sort of expect the Seventh Doctor to wheedle his way out of something like this — it’s a car full of normal people, for goodness sake! — and there might be something to be said here about misreading the character. But I think he’s deliberately written out of sorts. He’s confused by the behaviour of these townspeople he sort of, kinda likes. He’s not one step ahead of what’s happening in Hexen Bridge. Why shouldn’t that mess up his routine?

(Just to be clear, I know this was originally intended as an Eighth Doctor novel, so some of that behaviour probably wasn’t meant to juxtapose against the great chess player of Doctor Who. But it’s his book now, and I think it juxtaposes nicely, so if you don’t mind I’ll behave like all humans according to the Eighth Doctor and see patterns that aren’t there.)

Something is definitely iffy about Hexen Bridge, and some of it is just the sort of thing you’d expect. We open with a horrific flashback to not long after the Civil War, with a mad judge executing all the men in the village — clearly a precursor to some very bad things. Later there are glimpses of nightmarish rituals involving people in hoods (well obviously, you gotta have hoods) and what about all those scarecrows hanging about? But there’s an atmosphere here that goes beyond all that. The people aren’t quite right.

A good example of this is Rebecca, a schoolteacher and daughter of the local vicar, whom Ace quickly befriends. Rebecca stands up for the younger girl against the fairly awful pub landlord, and you can tell they’ve hit it off. But when looking at the creepily identical handwriting of some local kids, Ace notices Rebecca’s is just the same. Later, she turns out to be sleeping with the extremely toxic Matthew Hatch, a young politician of some standing with grand evil plans just out of sight. (Think Roger ap William in 73 Yards.) How much a part of Hexen Bridge is she?

That’s a question asked throughout the book, and of course, there’s no easy answer, as the people seem to go back and forth. Something is poisoning the villagers’ minds and ensuring their cooperation. (It is also ensuring a degree of population control — see, rituals and hoods.) This manifests locally in a level of mistrust and violence, mostly aimed at strangers. The Chens moved here to open a restaurant, and the local publican keeps making racist attacks against them. To be fair (well, not fair, he’s a racist) his wife is sleeping with one of them. But even his relationship with his wife seems on-again-off-again, love-hate in a way that’s not quite right, even with the infidelity. Why does she stay with him? How much does she want Steven Chen? Is that Hexen Bridge, or are some people just a bit inexplicable?

Further afield, this strangeness manifests in the schemes of Matthew Hatch, as well as the crimes of his less charming classmate Shanks. It’s mainly these crimes that ensnare the Doctor, forcing him to enter a club strapped with explosives so he’ll plant drugs on an unsuspecting policeman’s daughter, or else. (I expected a clever bit of sleight of hand would get him out of this, but although he does use his smarts while his captors aren’t looking, it doesn’t work. This results in a grimly funny moment where he tries to defuse the bomb by remembering what Ace has taught him about explosives, which is another unexpected moment of vulnerability, him needing her like that.) This whole Liverpool section seems an unusual fit at first, and maybe it is, but the earthy violence of it and the general atmosphere of crime and urban horror — not to mention the laboratory revulsion of Hatch’s plans — made me strangely nostalgic for the New Adventures, so I didn’t mind.

Back in the village, Ace is exercising her social justice muscles to defend the Chens. This is all very Ace, although it amuses me that it was presumably almost Sam. (I think Ace is her closest on-screen equivalent, and likely a major inspiration, hence a certain ease in swapping them out.) There’s a certain I-don’t-give-a-damn experience to Ace in this, which makes sense after the fairly traumatic TV stories set before this one. She seems indomitable in a way many companions aren’t in the absence of the Doctor, even sort of deputising Steven Chen as a companion for a bit. She seems to win people over in that Doctor-y way. Ace does some investigating in his absence — she knows him well enough not to panic when he seems to have just wandered off — and she gets to more closely observe the scarecrows. Lucky her, eh?

It’s surprising really that there aren’t more creepy scarecrows in Doctor Who. The ones in The Hollow Men are nightmarish indeed, being (spoiler?) converted villagers, slaves to the force underneath Hexen Bridge. Like a lot of great monsters there is a sadness to them, as they seem at least dimly aware of what they used to be. Topping and Day don’t make a very big thing of them, despite what the front cover suggests. (Never bet on the front cover.) This sort of heightens the horror when they do appear, and keeps them from feeling overplayed. Besides, the real horror of The Hollow Men is the effect the town has on its people. It’s predominantly not a “monster” story. (Good. I thought the weakest part of The Devil Goblins From Neptune was the goblins. Maybe the authors felt the same way and deliberately shifted the focus away from the monsters? Or maybe not. You know humans, patterns and all that.)

When the violence really kicks off, which it does increasingly through the second half and then like mad near the end, it’s horribly indiscriminate. Some quite nice people end up dying, and at least one certified bastard doesn’t. This seems to speak to the authors’ interest in the murkiness of people, which is also enhanced by the relative absence of aliens and monsters.

The finale is another thing that (probably by accident) made me nostalgic for the New Adventures, since it is (forgive me) all a bit metaphysical and weird. The Doctor confronts the malevolent force in a strange representation of Hexen Bridge found through a mirror, while in the real world scarecrows battle other supernatural manifestations for the souls of the villagers, who are themselves going mad with random violence. (RTD voice: “Marvellous!” Seriously, if you told me this one was written five years earlier I wouldn’t blink.) But it ends on a genuinely sombre note, even apart from the locals living in the wake of chaos, as we see that the Doctor still doesn’t understand these people. It’s not that he was outplayed by a master chess player — the alien intelligence isn’t that intelligent. It’s just that too many humans can make things harder to predict. (Possibly. That’s my reading anyway. Patterns etc.)

For me it’s a good sign to finish a book and still want to turn it over in my mind. The nature of villainy and the apparent difficulty the Doctor faces made The Hollow Men an interesting experience. If I can climb over the (imagined?) 90s-ness of it that I so enjoyed, however, it is a bit messy. Pulling the action apart across the country feels a smidge random, and the finale (for all its earned, “here’s what you paid to see” excess) does go on a bit. The characters are also a bit thin, but maybe that’s a deliberate thing and they’re supposed to be a bit weird and unknowable? It’s a story with unease hanging in the air, even when it’s just me wondering how many people in Hexen Bridge know the Doctor in a dull way like as an old half-forgotten teacher (because how weird is that), so even when it doesn’t entirely work I still want to look at it and wonder what that’s about. Before running away, obviously, from those bloody scarecrows.

7/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #19 – Short Trips edited by Stephen Cole

Doctor Who
Short Trips
Edited by Stephen Cole

Just when you thought Virgin Publishing had been relieved of all their lunch money, BBC Books goes and finds another couple of quid round the back. Short stories with different Doctors seem a perfectly obvious thing for a Doctor Who publishing company to do, but who knows if they would still have done them without the leg up? For what it’s worth, Virgin — who had not long ago concluded the Decalogs with a volume of pure, license-free sci-fi — warrant this oblique little nod from Stephen Cole: “Linking the stories thematically had traditionally proven successful in this area of Doctor Who publishing.” Naming no names…

Short Trips follows that tradition with its own linking theme, albeit not one featured on the front cover: freedom. I like it — it’s nebulous enough that it seems more likely to inspire storytelling than create a nagging obligation for each story to fill.

Cole also mentions in his introduction that the writers were encouraged to write to the length they needed, hence this is the longest BBC Book yet at 340 pages. Will the stories benefit from all that breathing room? We’ll see.

And away we go…

*

Model Train Set
By Jonathan Blum

Jonathan Blum flies solo in this charming vignette about the Doctor’s train set. He uses this for some colourful insight into previous Doctors, such as the thought that the Sixth would rather be a colourful and noisy train that build a train set, and “No matter what else you said about [the Seventh], he made the trains run on time.” As with Vampire Science, this makes some clear statements about the guy with the brown curls, who once again tries to step away from his predecessor’s controlling nature but struggles to get the balance right. The final image of him just trying to save his little wooden people a bit of effort is some quintessential Doctoring.

For continuity enthusiasts, there is no sign of Sam, so this could easily be the Doctor’s next adventure after Longest Day.

*

Old Flames
By Paul Magrs

A couple of very significant firsts happen in this one: the first published Doctor Who story by Paul Magrs, who has continued contributing to this day, and the first appearance of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor’s scraggly half-cut mirror image. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah find themselves at an 18th century ball attended by wayward time traveller Iris and her slightly befuddled companion, Captain Turner. They are soon all investigating a mysterious big cat on the grounds.

Magrs makes quite an impression here, with derring do and striking imagery such as the Doctor being rescued from drowning, or perhaps more notably Iris’s same-size-on-the-inside TARDIS in the shape of a double decker bus. Magrs’s uninhibited sense of humour twists the prose quite jauntily and he keeps the plot tight. This one’s a keeper.

*

War Crimes
By Simon Bucher-Jones

An evocative sideways step during the finale of The War Games, as one of the many unseen non-human experiments of the War Lords is sent (still augmented) back to its homeworld, where it tries to avoid its new programming. It then encounters the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe, still making their last desperate escape attempt. This one ends rather abruptly, but not before relating the creature’s agonies to the story it’s sitting next to. This is good stuff — I can imagine these ideas splintering off into their own book. I’m not sure if it really satisfies as a short story though.

*

The Last Days
By Evan Pritchard

A First Doctor story about not changing history featuring Ian, Barbara and Susan might seem an unfortunate thing to publish in the same month as The Witch Hunters, but The Last Days finds another angle. Evan Pritchard makes this Ian’s (rather than Susan’s) dilemma, and offers a chilling new perspective on letting history take its course: at the siege of Masada, when the Jewish rebels are about to be captured by Romans, Barbara explains that their mass suicide is the best course of action for them in the here and now. Incredibly it gets darker from there, with Ian forced to perform a pivotal role in their last defiance, then make a symbolic statement that throws his struggle almost into mockery.

This is The Romans as seen through a very different lens. The Doctor and Ian are figuratively and literally opposed, so much so that it’s hard to imagine how Ian ever had a spring in his step after this. Barbara believably uses her knowledge of Roman slavery to back up her views, but while I was reading it I wrongly assumed she meant her literal experience in The Romans — before remembering that Susan is still here, so that hasn’t happened yet. (The Last Days makes for a very odd prequel to that adventure, considering their misery here and their later high spirits.)

Possible continuity wobble aside, it’s powerful stuff, and proof that you can revisit the same sort of story and get a different result. If only that were true of history.

*

Stop The Pigeon
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

As you can probably guess from the byline, the Seventh Doctor and Ace feature in this one. It’s a madcap story about a bogus anti-ageing process featuring time anomalies and a talking pigeon. There are plenty of fun moments, such as an aggrieved Ace threatening to bend the Doctor’s spoons, and the aforementioned pigeon puffing a joint. (!) The plot just barely hangs together, and the authors throw in fan favourite ideas in a way that doesn’t feel entirely justified. I’m mainly looking at the Master here, chronologically in his first outing since Survival; as well as the writing being something of a poor relation (the Doctor’s pleas not to give in to his animal self simply recall “If we fight like animals, we die like animals”, only windier), it’s not even the first person-into-animal transformation in this collection (thanks to Old Flames) which lessens his impact. It’s good zany fun, if a little misconceived.

*

Freedom
By Steve Lyons

Perhaps the most literal use of the “freedom” theme comes from the writer who suggested it to Stephen Cole. The Third Doctor and Jo fall into one of the (still captive) Master’s traps, and the Brigadier is forced to ask their nemesis for help in retrieving them. The Master’s freedom is at stake, as is the Doctor’s. (For good measure the Master has also set up a company called Freedom. What was that theme again?)

It was an odd choice to sequence two Master stories right next to each other. This one inevitably echoes The Face Of The Enemy, almost word for word in the Brigadier’s attempted interrogation scene; there is also a sequence at the end that somewhat retreads the Third Doctor’s segment from The Eight Doctors, with him once again willing to hang everyone else out to dry if it gets him out of exile. I can understand this take on the character, indeed we’ve seen it on screen, but it sticks in my craw when it’s drummed up within the tight confines of a short story. It just seems a bit flippant that way. Elsewhere, the Doctor’s “future echoes” are a nifty touch, and the scenes of Jo contemplating her eternal captivity stick out in an otherwise rather familiar tale.

*

Glass
By Tara Samms

Ah, Tara Samms. Much like Michael Collier, she has mysteriously never been seen in the same room as Stephen Cole. Authorities remain baffled.

Glass is from the perspective of a regular person who suddenly finds a disembodied face staring at her through glass surfaces. The Fourth Doctor and Romana II arrive to take care of it — a remnant of Shada — and then they’re off again, leaving our poor narrator a traumatised wreck. It’s the sort of perspective you can easily believe, especially with a TARDIS team this confident and (to most humans) this unrelatable. I’m not sure it’s a perspective you’d really want to see very often, as it suggests a rather unhappy world on the periphery of Doctor Who. As a one-off though it’s rather neat, not unlike a Big Finish one-parter.

*

Mondas Passing
By Paul Grice

Um, so apparently this is Stephen Cole as well? I’m beginning to wonder if he’s ever paid for a subscription service in his life. This is definitely a man experienced in free trials.

This is another downbeat one, but it’s interesting, looking in on Ben and Polly as they reunite briefly on New Year’s Eve, 1986. Reminiscing about their adventures (one of which must have just happened over at the North Pole), they all but acknowledge a shared attraction that never got off the ground. They’re both with someone now and, as you might expect, neither of them has an outlet to discuss their bizarre adventures. This is probably true of most companions after they leave, but it seems especially sad here, with the added tacit admission that this will be their last reunion.

It’s a worthwhile little bite; short and sour. Do we think Stephen Cole was feeling okay when he worked on this book?

*

There Are Fairies At The Bottom Of The Garden
By Sam Lester

As far as I can tell Sam Lester is a real person and not another variant of Stephen Cole. Just FYI. But it’s hard to be sure, isn’t it? I look in the mirror now and wonder if I’m secretly Stephen Cole.

This is a short, evocative piece with the First Doctor and Dodo visiting a smelly world of flowers — and surprisingly, fairies. Dodo’s preconceptions are somewhat challenged, while the Doctor demonstrates an appreciation for beauty that goes beyond the obvious. It’s more expressionistic than anything else.

*

Mother’s Little Helper
By Matthew Jones

I’m always game for more writing from Matthew Jones, so this was a nice surprise. “Nice” is of course relative, as Jones seems drawn to explorations of emotional and physical violence, and this story continues that trend. A young girl named Nanci crosses paths with a boy who seems able to take away people’s pain, as well as a severe woman controlling him. The Second Doctor is in pursuit. (No companion is mentioned so I dunno when this is set.) Nanci is inexorably drawn to help him.

It’s one of those stories with interesting ideas but not enough time to delve into them. It’s good and it works, but it feels a bit like a summary of a story.

*

The Parliament Of Rats
By Daniel O’Mahony

A strange bit of swashbuckling from the author of the divisive Falls The Shadow, this shares with that novel some wide and interesting ideas that speak to the Doctor and Gallifrey, along with a certain bewildering dreamlike execution. I don’t entirely recognise the angrily dour Fifth Doctor in this, although Nyssa gives him a bit of analysis to show that a lot of thought has gone into it. It could probably benefit from a second read. Right now, I’d definitely call it interesting, but it’s perhaps not my cup of tea.

*

Rights
By Paul Grice

Okay, break’s over, it’s Stephen Cole time again.

We return to the Fourth Doctor and Sarah in a rather heated situation involving a non-bipedal species faced with environmental disaster. (Inevitable shades of Venusian Lullaby there.) The main avenue of research against this seems, for some reason, to require foetus harvesting, which understandably is causing disagreements. It’s a contentious story idea, perhaps with its roots in stem cell research, and the way it’s handled leaves a bit to be desired, at times reaching into black comedy. There is some good reflection here on the Doctor’s limits when interfering in other cultures, and Sarah gets to think like a journalist and weigh up the good and bad of this situation even beyond the foetus science. But no two ways about it, this is an odd duck.

*

Wish You Were Here
By Guy Clapperton

The Sixth Doctor! And it seems not a moment too soon…

This one would slot neatly into Colin’s era. (There’s no companion so if you had to place it, it’s probably some time after Trial?) Visiting a holiday resort run by robots, where naturally things have gone awry, the Doctor encounters a young female operative sent from the company. They have very different ways of investigating.

The reason things are going wrong is a neat one, very pleasingly childlike in its logic. The ending works nicely around the Doctor’s compassion for all forms of life, even artificial ones, and the very ending brings us back to the kind of black comedy that a malfunctioning holiday resort naturally suggests. It’s a fun, clever story that makes good use of this particular Doctor.

The only niggle for me is the continuing insistence on highlighting the Sixth Doctor’s waistline. His voice breaks through very believably, which is what matters, but there’s something unfortunate about having to preface his adventures with “Make way for fatty!”

*

Ace Of Hearts
By Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Putting the “short” into “short story” (5 pages), Perry and Tucker return for a sweet vignette: the Seventh Doctor goes to a party attended by three generations of Dudmans, ostensibly so he can take a moment to apologise to baby Ace for his later manipulations. I don’t know whether this sort of time transgression is more or less likely given it’s this particular Doctor, but it juxtaposes nicely against his cheery pratfalls at the party. There’s not much to say about it other than it’s a little drive-by poignancy, very rewarding for fans of this era. (So, cool people who know where it’s at.)

*

The People’s Temple
By Paul Leonard

We end on a high note with the Eighth Doctor and Sam — so technically with a Past Doctor Adventure, if you like. Sam wants to see the early days of Stonehenge and the Doctor obliges, landing them in the middle of a very heated power struggle between the slightly mad leader Coyn and the tribe, run by his best friend, enslaved to his purpose. In typical Paul Leonard style the good and the bad refuse to sit still; Sam’s urge to help the repressed tribe ends up backfiring and Coyn might have some humanity in him after all. It’s long enough to warrant a prologue and an epilogue, and it’s a very satisfying piece to go out on.

*

15 stories is good value for money (or was, pre-eBay), and the majority of these are hits. Old Flames is essential reading; The Last Days and Wish You Were Here really jumped out at me; Glass and Mondas Passing provide unusual perspectives; Perry and Tucker display real range; you get a rare sighting of Matthew Jones; Paul Leonard rarely misses. The standard is quite high. Even Stephen Cole’s various aliases manage a distinct variety of storytelling.

As for the theme, it went how I’d hoped: unobtrusively, so you might never know there was a theme at all. It’s a good approach, encouraging writers to really come up with their own ideas. I’m curious what the other volumes will end up going with.

All in all, I remain more of a fan of novels than short stories, but I think we’re better off having Decalogs and Short Trips in the mix as well. I’m glad BBC Books had the same idea.

7/10