Doctor Who: The BBC Books #97 – Dark Progeny by Steve Emmerson

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#48

Dark Progeny

By Steve Emmerson

Colony worlds. Gotta love ’em. Apparently.

I’m not going to pretend that all EDAs are like this, but boy this seems like a popular setting. There have even been a few baked-in reasons to keep going there. Colonies gave Sam an easy way into activism, seeing how humans had progressed and, more often than not, how they’ve done it “wrong.” Compassion was mostly fleeing the Time Lords so was unlikely to visit the Doctor’s favourite planet for a chunk, ergo alien worlds, and humans-in-space is easier to write each month than The Web Planet, hence colonists. And would you look at that — Anji can’t go home. What’s the next best thing, I wonder?

None of which is to say you can’t do a good colony world story. That’s like saying you can’t do a good base under siege. (The Web Of Fear called.) It’s just that with such a well-worn format it’s tough to avoid diminishing returns, and Dark Progeny doesn’t so much avoid them as get beaten up by them in a dark alley.

The story has promise. Ceres Alpha is being aggressively terraformed by pesky old humans in vast, mobile cities. (That’s slightly different to Kursaal, at least.) The planet has ancient ruins that the uncaring WorldCorp is threatening to demolish. (That’s a bit more like Kursaal.) Related to this, presumably, is the synchronised birth of multiple unusual-looking psi-powered babies. The corporation immediately swept this under the rug, telling all the parents their babies had died but in reality keeping them hidden away to experiment upon. Into all this arrives the TARDIS, seemingly driven mad by a psychic force, and Anji along with it. The Doctor must fetch help while also inevitably coming to the aid of those children.

Right away there’s potential for something weird and emotive, which were the watchwords of Steve Emmerson’s earlier Casualties Of War. Instead of the pain of shell shock and survivor’s guilt we’re looking at children in danger and the loss of a child (even if that turns out to be a lie), which is perhaps even more potent. It’s odd, then, that Dark Progeny seems so uninterested in the kid storyline. A gaggle of alien-headed youngsters are indeed being held in a lab somewhere, tortured and supposedly driving their captors mad with mind-powers… but that’s not really the meat of the novel, which is far more interested in the military bureaucracy of the city, the Doctor getting pressed to reveal who he’s working for, and the general irritated back and forth of an archaeologist (Bains) trying to hold back the bulldozers. In other words, all the stuff we’ve definitely done before.

And so much of it is just stuff. There are loads of characters in this, and with no opportunities for the Doctor, Fitz or Anji (in any combination) to pal up we’re forever cutting between micro-storylines. Yes I know that you know that I hate this approach, and to be fair Emmerson is quite adept at it, for example cutting away from character combo A because one of them answered the doorbell so now we’re following character combo B; it’s thinly spread but at least it’s not too all over the place. But each section of this is barely moving, with e.g. Bains’s attempt to get another look at the dig site needing practically the entire novel to take off. (At one point he gives up and goes to a bar to reminisce about his sad romantic history. We cut away and then return to find him still there.)

Even the Doctor’s outrage at the mistreatment of the kids isn’t a prime mover: it’s just A to B, well of course he’s not going to be pleased about that, followed by well-he’s-not-going-to-be-able-to-do-anything-about-it-until-later-on. By the time he is, bundling the kids and Bains into a helicopter — two birds with one stone there — we for some reason skip and summarise the bit where the Doctor rescues them and Bains is introduced to them, which might have been quite interesting. Similarly, shortly afterwards the Doctor plucks the answer to the psi-kids and the ancient ruins seemingly out of thin air. That’s not the most satisfying conclusion to a mystery, but then if you will spend the entire book on “the Doctor pretends to be someone they were expecting” and “military mind probes” then what else can you do at the climax?

It’s just maddening how the “psi-kids” thing feels like a book that’s happening next door. There are references to how they’ve responded to and attacked their captors — they can’t have done too much if you think about it, since they’re still captive — but not enough is done to support the flimsy idea that no one working here thinks it’s remotely iffy to treat them like this, calling them “evil” and “monsters” when they’re just very unusual two-month-olds being, y’know, tortured. A bit of nuance would be nice when the story’s already so black and white that it’s about child torture — it won’t exactly need to work overtime to get the reader on the kids’ side, will it? So why not try to understand the bad guys?

To be fair, Emmerson puts the time in there, marooning us with Foley (military), Perón (military doctor) and Tyran (head of the operation and one letter away from “tyrant”, so I’ll let you guess whether he’s a nice boss). There are flashes of maybe-they’re-okay-actually with some of them, but a violent return to form is always on the cards, so those end up feeling a bit pointless. As for Tyran, he’s actually got a compelling reason to force through the development of Ceres Alpha in that Earth is close to uninhabitable — we could definitely do something with that, but no such luck. We do however tie his story into Bains’s woes, but it’s done with as much care and setup as the Doctor’s “eureka!” moment with the kids, i.e. suddenly and very near the end, so to call it unconvincing would be kind. We don’t do a thing with it afterwards, naturally.

There isn’t much connective tissue between the “military bulldozing the planet” plot and the psi-kids, at least until the Doctor checks his magic 8-ball, but there are a few things on the sidelines. The parents of one of the kids, Veta and Josef, refuse to believe what they’ve been told and go on the rampage to find their baby. Promising and potentially powerful stuff here, and it lets the mother take the lead with all the clever problem-solving stuff, which feels like a turn up. (I don’t care much for Foley, Perón or Ayla, but at least all these prominent characters are women. Dark Progeny does quite well at the Bechdel test.) It might have been better if there was a genuine link between them and their child — this is surely possible, given his powers — but as it is, when they’re reunited it’s as dramatic as the plot demands, yet not exactly a punch the air moment. There’s nothing to really tell the kids apart, there’s no scene of Veta and Josef’s kid going “has anyone seen my mum and dad?”, and the Doctor doesn’t even know his parents are around. As to any others out there, god knows.

We also have Anji, who (as you’ve probably sussed) is under the psychic weather because the kids reached out to her too hard. (They did this to her and not the Doctor or Fitz because she is a woman, and not because she has ever expressed maternal feelings, which is perhaps half a step backwards on the whole Bechdel thing. Ah well.) Giving the companion a link to the tortured kids feels like a neat way to get the book’s emotions straight into our veins, but alas, that’s not the plan: Anji spends about a hundred pages unconscious, another third of it stuck in hospital, and the in-between bits trying fruitlessly to find the Doctor. Emmerson writes Anji well enough when he does it, bringing up her young brother for the closest comparison to all this, but like the kid stuff generally there seems to be an open goal where there should be substance.

Don’t even get me started on Fitz. I think it’s safe to assume there wasn’t room for another guy in Emmerson’s outline, because Fitz is separated from the others at the start and they spend the rest of the book acting on the assumption that he’s dead, so never mind. When (like Anji) he is resuscitated he’s stuck on the planet’s surface, nowhere near the plot, so there’s nothing useful for him to do. He subsequently (deep breath) gets captured, escapes, gets recaptured, escapes, is briefly recaptured, escapes, is then recaptured again, escapes again, and then meets up with the Doctor, at which point they’re all captured. (I’ll leave you in suspense about what happens next.) Fitz also flirts a bit with his rescuer Ayla and at one point he has a shower. Solid gold. This whole thread feels like an unintended parody of how little plot the book has. At least, I hope it’s unintentional.

There isn’t much to tell Dark Progeny apart from your Kursaals or your Face-Eaters, but Steve Emmerson’s writing stands out a bit, as it did in Casualties Of War. Unfortunately this isn’t always to the good: he tends to over-do it for effect, giving us curiously overwrought statements like “An immense silence stretched between them, like a cold dark ocean filled with fear” and not-meant-to-be-funny ones like “The room was filled with a screaming baby.” Physical descriptions try slightly too hard and become a bit disembodied, such as “She insinuated a wry smile into her face,” and he’s entirely too fond of adverbs, leading to the occasional awkwardness or traffic jam like “Josef shook his head sorrily.” / “Now the electrical activity in the brain was flatlining extremely worryingly.” / “Ultimately, he invariably got his way.” / “Carly Dimitri wondered what he had in mind for this poor man who had somehow inadvertently, most probably quite innocently, crossed Tyran’s path.” That last one sounds like he’s keying up the Lollipop Guild.

It settles down after a little while, and then the prose bounces along harmlessly enough. There are nice moments like the aforementioned link to Anji’s brother, the Doctor doing a spot of ventriloquism, and this enjoyable Tom Baker-ish non sequitur when he meets the baddie: “‘Mr Tyran. It’s a very dubious pleasure to meet the man responsible for the atrocities I’ve witnessed down in your so-called medicare unit.’ The smile was up full volume, as if [the Doctor] were genuinely complimenting Tyran on an exceptionally well-run operation.” There are also some moments of horror that recall Casualties Of War, such as telekinetic attacks, a zombie (for a split second) and Tyran hallucinating a dead relative who behaves very inappropriately. We could have done with more of this (as in the horror, not the creepy mum) to more consistently inform the novel’s tone, but those bits at least made it not entirely a sci-fi runaround. It’s bad luck, though, that he goes all in on the scariness of rats, as I’ve been an enthusiastic keeper of pet ratties for years now. My main negative emotion about them is that one of the little sods may have stolen my dinner. Otherwise they’re cute little beans that don’t, in fact, hiss.

I can’t help rooting for Steve Emmerson after that joyous initial reading of Casualties Of War, so I feel a bit mean for not enjoying his follow up very much. I’d point the finger at the editors too, however: there should be more pushback on books that sound like we’ve already read them, there should be somebody to spot the lack of forward motion in the plot (as well as sudden wafts of it towards the end), and “is it horror or isn’t it” was a question worth asking earlier in the writing process. As before, there’s a better book in here somewhere, but it needed to commit to its more compelling parts, and perhaps leave the mind probes and the escape/recaptures in the recycle bin. As it is, Dark Progeny is an “another one” book for completists only.

4/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #77 – Casualties Of War by Steve Emmerson

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#38

Casualties of War

By Steve Emmerson

This is another of those books that I’ve read before. A few years ago I was kindly asked to talk about it on the We’re All Stories In The End podcast (recommended!) and for reasons that made sense at the time I read it in a day. As that conversation showed, I loved Casualties Of War; I was swept away by its grisly imagery and emotive storytelling.

I think the self-enforced time crunch must have helped, because revisiting it now with no deadline and a much shoddier attention span I’ve spent a lot longer with it and… it’s not great.

I know that’s a very negative way to start a review, and I’m not about to slate the thing, honest — it’s still a pretty good book. It’s just so weird having such a different second opinion. (Sort of wish I’d written a proper review the first time. Ah well.)

Let’s start with the good. It’s another in the amnesiac Doctor arc (“I thought you were starting with the good,” yes, ho ho) and the Eighth Doctor is once again a pronounced and compelling presence. He’s enough of a charisma wizard to enchant everybody he meets, including the villain, despite a back story even flimsier than psychic paper. He still has no idea about his past but little bits squeak through, whether it’s monster encounters or future Earth culture. He once again causes romantic palpitations just by being there, but he maintains a slightly frosty indifference about it (and about everything else) that he picked up in The Burning. He still lacks some of his usual forward planning; while not directly endangering any companions, he lets one of them stray into danger, and while not actively killing the villain during a moment of weakness (otherwise known as murder) he sure seems to terminate the bad guy here.

I noticed similarities with The Burning the first time. (Back then I read The Burning as homework. I know right, what a conscientious podcast guest!) Both novels are set in rural towns in the early 20th century; both open with a mysterious hole in the countryside; both feature a noticeable class gap between a wealthy man and the rest of the townsfolk, and he’s the baddie in both; both feature monsters in human form, often taking the form of the dead; both have the Doctor strolling along and inveigling himself in everybody’s business to surprisingly little pushback. It’s enough to raise an eyebrow at least, especially where Steve Emmerson thanks Justin Richards for his Whovian inspiration in the acknowledgements.

Where Casualties Of War diverges — apart from the amusingly up front identification of the Doctor, no “who’s Who” this time — is its very specific setting. The Great War isn’t exactly present on the page but the absence of fit young men in Hawkswick makes it very clear. There’s a ghost town quality to the place, with a reverend, a farmer and his wife, a widower policeman and a spirited young woman forming practically the whole population. The only other people of note are in Hawkswick Hall, now a recovery centre for the war wounded. (So there’s a good reason, if you need one, for the easy acceptance of the Doctor’s cover story. There simply isn’t enough going on around here for anyone to assume otherwise.)

The war instantly adds meaning to the story. Casualties Of War is all about the horrible lasting effects of trauma, with a few moments directly relating incidents from soldiers’ pasts. There’s a brutality to the novel as a whole, which is never far from a grisly set piece, that speaks to the sort of everyday awfulness witnessed by these men. Whether this strays into bad taste is perhaps up to the reader; personally I enjoyed Emmerson’s horrific gags more as nightmare fodder than as a reflection of any specific nightmares. The “blessing tree,” adorned with the heads of animals and people, is genuinely upsetting, as is the moment when a zombie soldier removes a pitchfork it uncomplainingly finds embedded in its leg only to lick the blood off its prongs.

Perhaps the best evocation of the theme of loss and the secondary effects of war is Mary Minett. Lonely but headstrong, Mary misses her brother (killed in the war) and her father (away on business) but is otherwise a force of nature in the little village. She falls into easy lockstep with the Doctor when he arrives, as well as (you knew this was coming) falling head over heels. The Doctor is a kindred outsider, also touched by war; it doesn’t feel too easy to present him with a could-be love interest like Mary. Their questioning energy really does sync up, with the novel noting that between them is “something of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object”, to such an extent that I could easily imagine her working as a less doe-eyed companion akin to Grace Holloway. Alas, there’s too much feeling on her end for that to ever work, espoused beautifully when we see her goodbye letter at the end, and with a gut-wrenching laugh when his innocent “I think it’s time we went to bed. Don’t you?” is followed moments later with a cheery “Goodnight, then.”

As much as I like Mary — and I do, she’s the highlight of the book — I can’t help feeling that the effects of war should be demonstrated more strongly elsewhere. Hawkswick Hall and its patients form the obvious outlet for all this, with the seemingly squeaky-clean Dr Banham encouraging a unique form of clay therapy to get the aggression and trauma out of these men. There are certainly poignant moments to be found, such as the prologue which does a fine job of making us care about two men before killing them, and the aforementioned war flashbacks. But when it comes to the actual soldiers and what they’re going through, Casualties Of War overall defers to being a monster story.

The monsters are a bunch of mud soldiers going around committing mostly random acts of violence. They’re clearly an outlet for the psychic trauma at the Hall, but whose outlet exactly? Several soldiers are murdered in the course of the book; when the finale arrives they don’t even take part, the action shifting instead to a New Adventures-y mind battle/trench warfare recreation with non-human soldiers blowing each other up around the Doctor, Mary and the constable. Poignant imagery, yes, but it feels a bit more like a gnarly action sequence, especially in a denouement that zig-zags back and forth to a farmer battling zombies in his somehow-exploded-several-times barn.

None of this is helped by Dr Banham, the man at the centre of things whose evil plan turns out to be… not entirely articulated, actually, but the gist of it is using a magic book he got from somewhere (?) to elicit psychic energy from men with shell shock to give himself telekinesis, second sight and a mud monster army. Bonzer. All of this we find out right at the end, after he’s been a much more intriguing character early on, at points breaking down both mentally and physically into a sort of Clayface monster. We otherwise don’t delve into Banham’s emotional stake in all this, or how (if at all) he feels about his horrifying mistreatment of his patients. By the time his cards are on the table he’s stopped behaving like a character at all: after a brief bit of moustache twirling he barely has a say in the grand climax, dying more or less off screen as a sort of secondhand trauma-fuelled Mr Blobby. (So, a regular Mr Blobby, then.) On second reading I just couldn’t help wishing the story had pivoted around one of the soldiers instead.

A clunky finale and some debatable horror impulses are unfortunately not the only issues. The writing is also quite variable. Plenty of it is enjoyable. Pretty much all of Mary’s dialogue zings against the Doctor’s; his quixotic nature is on full display and all of that rings true, even without his memories. Some of those horror shots hit their grisly targets, but there are subtler moments too, like this description of undead soldiers that jabs you at the end: “No fidgeting, no gestures, no smokes, no jokes to pass the time. No motion. No boredom. No breathing.” Emmerson nicely juggles his themes with the ongoing arc by showing the Doctor intrigued by Hawkswick Hall. The observation that he longs to believe damaged men can return to their former selves makes a virtue of his arc without making a big deal out of it. Mary’s loneliness also feels real and not gone on about. It’s a small point but her dad doesn’t return from wherever he is at the end, which would have been a nice (but obvious) button on things.

The wonky stuff is mostly towards the end. Emmerson has a fine (and foul) imagination, but some turns of phrase err on the downright strange side, such as “The canopy opened and splattered the dead men with grotesque splashes of moonlight” and “Then there was the flight. The last response of the human mammal.” Dialogue is one of the book’s stronger suits, but some characters are lumbered with a strenuous country dialect, leading to awkward lines like “I did see one o’ these before” and “Ey, where yer goin’ now?” The aforementioned finale goes overboard on the dun-dun-DUNNN scene breaks, which is made more apparent by some unfortunate last-line repetitions that could have been caught in editing: “He landed with a crash and darkness zoomed in.” / “Darkness came.” / “Blackness rushed in and there was nothing at all.” The plot lacks complexity, relying on action and horror beats; there’s a lot of traipsing back and forth to Hawkswick Hall, Banham telling them to go away with increasing exasperation, interspersed with mud soldiers jamming guns against people’s necks or lurking or rampaging or attacking the proto-TARDIS for no reason until the book finally feels like exposing the truth. And we all know how that went.

It’s hardly a write-off. With a vivid imagination, in short bursts anyway, and a knack for character writing (for Mary and the Doctor) that makes you genuinely look forward to scenes, Casualties Of War really works at points. With stronger editing and guidance it could have been more consistent. There is clear promise here and I’m keen to read Steve Emmerson’s next book, but I just can’t go home again to my initial enthusiasm. This one’s rough around the edges and it could have sharpened its focus and themes into more than a way into the Grand Guignol. I want to love it, but like the Doctor at this point in the run, I lack a time machine.

6/10