Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #62 – The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#44

The Also People

By Ben Aaronovitch

Blast.  It’s one of those books.

I almost prefer reading stuff that everyone hates.  The worst that can happen is you find positives other people have ignored, and then you can disagree with popular consensus in a nice way for once.  Failing that you get to join in and have a jolly good moan, and who doesn’t love that?

But then you get books like The Also People, which are beloved by most Doctor Who fans that have ever picked up a book on the subject.  It’s like watching a famous movie: you’re objectively wrong if you don’t like it.  But what if it’s rubbish?  What if, therefore, I don’t really appreciate good things when they come along?  What if I don’t even get it?  Okay, we’re discussing a Doctor Who book and not the Sistine Chapel, but come on, some of them are a bit obscure.

Ben Aaronovitch wrote the seminal kick-up-the-posterior Seventh Doctor story in Remembrance Of The Daleks, and its stellar novelisation.  But he also wrote Transit.  A weird, grungy cyberpunk story that takes ages to introduce the Doctor, throws away Bernice Summerfield and gives people names like Ming The Merciless and Credit Card, Transit had very good prose and clearly knew what it was doing, but it never let me in on the plan.  Now we have his follow-up novel, which opens with “Notes on the Pronunciation of Proper Nouns”, a concerning guide to saying names like “aM!xitsa.”  I can’t tell if that’s worse than having to memorise a map, but it’s definitely up there.

I suppose I was gearing up for a fight.  This was going to be me shaking my fist at a famous thing (well y’know, relatively famous) and saying “Oh yeah?!”  But it was for nought.  I got nothin’.  The Also People is exactly, tediously, as absolutely bloody wonderful as everyone says it is.

Ugh.

Trying to explain why made me realise something absurd about it, which is that technically there’s not much to it.  Fresh from the physical and psychological traumas of Head Games (aren’t they always recovering from the last book?), the TARDIS crew go on holiday.  Yes I know, that old chestnut, but for real this time.  Not for a bit early on, like in Shadowmind, or just saying they’re going to have a nice time and it never really coming to pass, like in every other Doctor Who story: the Doctor takes his friends to a peaceful place full of interesting people, some of whom are spaceships, and they really, properly relax.  It’s lovely.  Okay, there’s a murder that needs investigating and the Doctor is up to some deviousness, which is why he picked this place to put their feet up.  But all that feels complementary.  The Also People is the fabled Mostly Character-Driven Book.  It finally happened!  And it worked!

You couldn’t get away with putting your plot on the back-burner if you didn’t have something special to replace it, and in his Dyson Sphere – to pick just one aspect of the book – Aaronovitch has prepared nicely.  The idea’s a fairly old chestnut in the sci-fi community (although I only found out about it recently from the TNG episode where Scotty shows up): an artificial atmosphere built around a sun, it’s theoretically cool, but it’s only as interesting as what you fill it with.  The Also People goes nuts, creating an inside-out planet too vast to see a horizon, with its own planets hovering above.  I honestly don’t know if I pictured it correctly, and I don’t mind if I’m wrong.  I like the imagery the book made me come up with, which extends to the accommodation, a madcap hotel possibly designed by children; inside is a floating 360 degree bath, force-fields that tidy up after you and a bedroom that zooms through the sky while you sleep.  My mind boggled delightedly at the idea of looking up and seeing more land.  Without a doubt, The Also People joins the ranks of Lucifer Rising, Parasite and Sky Pirates! as one of the great world-building Doctor Who stories.  It’s not just a great addition to the series, but a seriously unshabby work of science fiction.

And whoa, back up, what was that about people who are spaceships?  This is where the title comes in.  “People” refers to anything with intelligence and feelings, which totally extends to household items, mobile drones and spaceships of unlimited size.  There’s people, and those things over there… also people.  Such non-biological folks can move their intelligence around if they like, extending their lives and developing a rather philosophical perspective.  There’s a jolly parachute with a lot on its mind, an adorable bit where several spaceships attend a fancy dress party, and a hilarious paragraph where aM!xitsa (ammkzitza?) swims entire oceans of thought, writes and discards entire theses, all while Roz replies to a simple question.  I love anthropomorphic machines.  I’m.  In.  Heaven.

(It’s worth mentioning that along with the Dyson Sphere, the “People” concept had already done the rounds.  Fans are quick to point to Iain M. Banks as a source of “inspiration”, while Aaronovitch says cheekily in his Acknowledgements that New Adventures writers “get ideas off the back of a lorry, no questions asked.”  I haven’t read Banks but it definitely sounds like Aaronovitch has, and at the risk of triggering a Double Standard Alert, I’m fine with that.  The Also People isn’t a cash grab – it’s absolutely a Doctor Who story, and any Banks-ian ideas are put to good use enhancing the Who-ian characters.  Sometimes it’s not whether you made up the source material yourself, it’s what you do with it.  Anyway, in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, Aaronovitch says that Banks knows about all this and is flattered.  So there.)

Much like the names and some of the locations, it’s possible I’m not seeing this stuff exactly as Aaronovitch intended – no amount of fun anthropomorphism is going to make me learn a new sub-language just to enjoy a book, I’ll just wing it with the names, thank you very much – but duh, it’s more important what they’re like, and who they are than what precisely each spaceship looks like.  I felt like Aaronovitch left a good amount of the physical detail up to the reader’s imagination, while still filling in loads of other cool stuff like the crazy hotel and the market that sells figurines of Chris and Roz.  The book is character-based after all, and the whole point of it (if I can be pompous enough to assume I get it) is that there’s more to people.

Roz shines for that reason.  It’s still relatively early days for her and Chris, and unlike his first New Adventure finding a sudden unwanted companion on its plate, Aaronovitch takes his time to chip away at Roslyn Forrester: he never shies away from her unpleasantness and prejudices, if anything magnifying them, but (through the cheeky device of a drink called flashback) has her recall her past and try to reconcile it.  She begins a relationship with a man, and ultimately comes to terms with her life as a law enforcer, and how much that means to her.  She also goes for a nice swim occasionally.

Chris gets relatively short shrift, jumping into a relationship with a girl called Dep (although gender and age are somewhat fluid), as entranced by her physical beauty as he is by her interests in building flying machines.  (Okay, maybe it’s 60/40.)  Their relationship is quietly observed and tolerated by everyone, ultimately building to consequences he’s completely unaware of.  Aaronovitch seems just as happy to write Chris as a loveable, handsome goof as his contemporaries, but he encourages the idea that his innocence can’t last forever.  It’s quite dark to let him leave oblivious at the end.  We have a pretty good idea how Dep’s life will go from now on, but she makes her choice regardless.  She’s a more rounded character for having, and keeping secrets.  The penny will drop for Chris some day.

The Doctor and Bernice circle each other, she suspecting he’s up to no good, which is of course accurate, and he knowing she’s onto him, and thus frantically steering everyone holidaywards.  In an unexpected (though obviously planned!) turn the Doctor tells Bernice about his life-or-death mission on the Dyson Sphere and leaves the choice in her hands.  Head Games also dealt with the idea that the Doctor doesn’t relish these responsibilities, brutally so when it came to his parting from Mel, but The Also People is considerably more deft.  It often observes that he’d rather be a daft little juggler than Time’s Champion; it lingers on the dread that his lies might push his friends away forever, counter-weighting it by having him yearn to make them happy, or interrupt Roz just to tell her he appreciates her.  Despite being open about what he’s really like, it’s clear that his mission isn’t as heartless as it appears.  He wants to believe the best in people, he just has rather devious methods for getting it out of them.  Before they go, he encourages one of his friends to see someone they’re about to leave behind, and just be with them for a while, even though they’re guilty of murder.  You only live once, some more literally than others.  (And as he admits to himself, he’s guilty too.)  That moment of perspective seems gloriously par for the course here, as colossal intellects are reduced to petty smallness, and parachutes can be profound.

Bernice comes to understand the Doctor a little better, and Roz too.  The Also People achieves this organically, along with loads of beguiling moments that juggle the Doctor’s Machiavellian nature with, well, juggling, thanks to its unique pace and how it handles its priorities.  Much like the heavy emphasis on character, which also feels like A Thing You Mustn’t Do, there is a true positivity to The Also People.  While bad things still happen and lives are lost, the overall triumph of good feels spectacular after so many gloomy analyses of the Doctor and his friends, as does the generally friendly tone of the prose.  (When the Doctor are Bernice are attacked by something decidedly nasty on page 231, take a moment to wonder how often anyone has been in mortal peril so far, and whether that makes a blind bit of difference to your enjoyment of the book.)  When it’s time to go the characters race into the TARDIS in a great mood, rested and optimistic, and they have absolutely earned it.  I guess it says something about the New Adventures that this feels so original.

The Also People, in essence, nails it.  Which given the scarcity of these books and the unlikelihood of a reprint is sort of annoying, really!  But nope, I can’t turn this into a moan.  It’s a beautiful piece of work and I don’t know how it could have gone any better.

10/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #61 – Millennial Rites by Craig Hinton

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#15

Millennial Rites

By Craig Hinton

What’s this?  Something I have read… before?  But such decadence is impossible!  The Before Times were only a myth.  There was, and only ever shall be The Marathon, praise be to Virgin Books.

Okay, if I squint hard enough through the mists of time, maybe I did read Millennial Rites once, before I had any intention of ploughing through sixty more of the buggers (and then the rest).  Picking a random Missing Adventure is actually a good litmus test for them as there’s no continuity between books, or so you’d think, and Millennial Rites worked pretty well that way.  Fast forward to now and the things I liked most about it have stood up to a second reading.  Fair warning, there’s some other stuff that maybe isn’t so good, which I either didn’t notice or gave a free pass the first time; if you read it once and liked it well enough, maybe stick to one-and-done?

Millennial Rites concerns the Millennium (surprise?), and it’s fairly tech-heavy, with computer hacking quite prominent.  Going overboard with modern tech can unhelpfully date a story, like the slightly-too-enamoured-with-CD-Roms System Shock, but Craig Hinton keeps the details vague enough and sprinkles on enough fantasy touches that it doesn’t sound embarrassing 20 years later.  It is another of those dreaded sci-fi-meets-arcane-wizardry books, although it has a dash of originality that keeps the genre mash-up from being too groan-worthy.  And there’s quite a bit of continuity, but most of it’s done with flair, so it isn’t only rehashing stuff for geek points.  I think it’s fair to say that Millennial Rites does a few things well.  Most noticeably the Doctor.

One of the things I loved about it the first time was the distinctly less brusque Colin Baker-shaped Time Lord.  Hinton mentions “redeeming” Sixie in a BBC interview and name-checks Big Finish, where he’s a cuddly old uncle in space.  The first time we see him in Millennial Rites, he’s well on his way there.  Suavely dressed and dropping by to see an older Anne Travers on her birthday, he’s keen to see how she is.  He’s caring and considerate, a good listener – if anything too good, as an invitation for her to kip in the TARDIS is taken to mean considerably more!  Hinton isn’t just mashing the Random Characterisation Button here: Baker always intended to mellow his Doctor.  Following his self-exile in Time Of Your Life, he’s keen to avoid becoming the Valeyard.  This means accentuating the positive.  (Which is an achievement, considering he was not able to avoid Mel Bush indefinitely.)

It’s pretty good timing that all of this follows Head Games, which concerns the Doctor’s struggle against his own dark side, as seen from the other side of his regeneration.  There’s a sad irony to this warmer, happier Sixth Doctor, knowing his life will be cut short and a kind of darkness will win out after all.  But all the same, I’m not certain Hinton hits the issue squarely on the head.  And there’s a curious deficit of Doctor in this.  When the muck hits the fan at the halfway point, it’s the work of Anne Travers, Mel and the villain of the piece; when things go back to normal at the end, the same applies.  The Doctor sort of floats through the story.  But… nicely, I guess?

Tobias Vaughn’s protégé (and therefore obvious rotter) Ashley Chapel is planning some kind of technological horror at the turn of the Millennium.  Anne Travers is very concerned, not to mention still obsessed with the Great Intelligence, and she is convinced the two are linked.  The Doctor has missed the Intelligence’s third coming in Downtime.  (Which in an odd piece of timing was not yet novelised.  But you don’t need to have seen or read it, since I haven’t.)  Here is some of that not-too-shabby continuity I mentioned earlier: The Great Intelligence disappeared from Doctor Who (rights issues?) with no particular plotty reason not to come back, so it feels only natural to revisit it.  Millennial Rites tends more towards the idea of those earlier stories than literally sequelising them, which is refreshing.  But the continuity has its ups and downs, with the Doctor info-dumping all about the Intelligence’s real name (Yog-Sothoth) and where it came from.  (When did he find all that out, then?)  It’s also rather disappointing how Hinton writes Anne Travers, piling on reference after reference to her bitterness, sterility and generally wasted life.  And incidentally, you’d better get used to monotonous character beats.

Mel, who “looks for the best in people” while also being rude to everyone she meets, finds herself investigating Chapel’s “Millennium Codex”, a computer programme of mysterious import.  She is soon hacking into it (at the behest of Chapel’s second-in-command, who wants to stop him but never really clarifies his plan beyond Power Grab); before long, she’s debugging it for free.  Which is good news for Chapel, who in a pretty definite lift from The Invasion (the bit where Vaughn gleefully watches Zoe talk his computer to death) lets her get on with it.  I wondered why he was so confident about his plan if the Codex was in such a terrible state the day it goes live, but that’s mad villains for you.  Chapel isn’t the most interesting bad guy, effectively copying Vaughn’s modus operandi with the mystical Saraquazel replacing the Cybermen, armed with one lackey (not including monsters) and, apart from a mental link with Saraquazel, not much motivation to take over the world.  His dialogue is humdrum.  If this was made for TV, the actor playing him would have his work cut out.

Meanwhile a couple of Chapel’s employees have been laid off, only to find themselves embroiled in the countdown to disaster.  A stolen computer programme literally transforms Barry’s computer, then summons a co-worker-turned-winged-monster: enter this book’s monsters, “cybrids”.  This literal fusion of technology and fantasy is an arresting one, and very visual.  And that’s not the half of it, but before we get to the book’s trump card, a few words on Barry and Louise, the couple (or are they just friends?) on the periphery of the action.  Hinton based some of Millennial Rites on his own job experiences, not unlike Justin Richards in System Shock, and it shows.  A lot of their gripes rings true of people who hate their day job, but that doesn’t make them interesting characters.  Their dialogue, including endless references to going to the pub, getting drunk and having a ciggie, sounds like soap opera filler, and it’s even worse when they get emotional.  (Even then, Barry caps a tearful speech with “As soon as this is over, I’m going to take you to the White Lion and we’re both going to get totally plastered”!)  We’re meant to have our hearts in our throats when Barry dices with death, but the relationship with Louise is all talk and no substance, most of it due to her improbable decision to have his baby, never tell him it’s his and then stay close friends.  Much is said about Louise’s baby and her disability, but it’s mostly a convenient sore point for her and Barry, and then an unbelievably hackneyed addition to the plot later on when a sacrifice is needed.

Speaking of which, the Millennium happens, and this is where the book shines: you go into it expecting a gradual slow burn of technology and fantasy having at one another, the plot unfolding as these things do, only to find the whole story transforming at the halfway point.  Chapel’s plan works more or less, and we’re suddenly in a parallel version of London.  Some of the landmarks look the same, but dangerous magic rules over them, cybrids have the run of the place, and the people are not what they were.  Anne Travers is now the powerful Hierophant, lurking in the Library of St. John The Beheaded (where she attempted to abort the disaster, wrongly thinking it was all to do with the Great Intelligence); Mel is the Technomancer, brilliant and in charge, but utterly lacking Mel’s positivity; Ashley Chapel is the Archimage, ruling from the Millennium Hall (ooh, so close!) and consulting with his gods.  The Doctor is the only one who can see that everything is wrong, and a change is overcoming him as well, albeit slowly.

When I first read Millennial Rites, this was the bit I took away from it: a story neatly and excitingly bisected, which could work really well if it was made for modern Doctor Who.  There’s something uncannily prescient about the whole thing, what with the slightly Big Finish-ish Sixth Doctor as well, and the pseudo-London is evocatively weird.  But on closer inspection, Hinton’s party trick mostly just works on the surface.  There are about half a dozen humans in the post-Millennial world, a lot of indistinguishable cybrids and other monsters besides.  Comparing these people to their original counterparts, personalities have mostly just dulled.  Fragments of their past lives come back to them later, but we’ve only got half a book to get on with it, so this happens in sudden clumsy spurts.  The writing itself seems to get worse in the second half, with hokey fantasy dialogue like “Walk with me awhile, stranger.  Tell me of whence you came”, and that trope of making a character sound genuine by having them stutter a bit, mid-sentence.  “The information we need is, is...”  /  “Doctor?  What’s wrong?  Why are you being so, so horrid?”  I wonder if a fast-approaching deadline made things decidedly woollier in the second half.  I’ll take any explanation I can get for the line “Anastasia watched the display of emotions with conflicting reactions.”

In “Part Two”, the Doctor comes into the story more – but then, does he really?  Flitting between other characters, he more or less inspires them to take action, all the while suffering his own transformation into you-know-who.  But Hinton achieves this by the most simplistic means possible.  His costume literally gets darker as the book progresses, until a random mood swing signals that he is no longer himself.  It becomes apparent that any use of his magic powers (which he didn’t know he had) will bring forth the Valeyard, who promptly throws his lot in with Chapel and offers to sacrifice Louise’s baby (!) to make the transformation apply to the whole world.  But the Doctor is able to overcome this almost immediately (cue brighter clothes, phew), until he has to use his powers again (uh oh, black robes).  The Valeyard comes and goes at the drop of a hat, which trivialises him, and worse, Hinton has created a Catch-22.  Writing the Doctor so he is nicer than usual means there’s no deeper reason for him to become like his darker self, but that’s the journey of his character in this novel, as well as his reason for being nicer!

And what of the Valeyard?  He wanted to kill the Doctor, his past self, to sustain his own existence.  The Seventh Doctor did essentially the same by bringing forward his own regeneration, although he did it for different (supposedly good) reasons.  It’s a valid comparison, nicely fleshed out in Head Games, but I don’t think we know enough about the Valeyard to draw a much deeper comparison than that.  Millennial Rites makes broad references to game-playing and putting his companions in jeopardy, all of which sounds like Seven, but less so the sinister bloke in the black garb, don’t you think?  Did he ever really care about the Doctor’s companions, even as pawns?  We know from Head Games that the Seventh Doctor doesn’t play with people’s lives entirely guilt-free.

The book makes certain grand gestures, redeeming its unpopular hero and handling its novel-length genre mash with unexpected wit, but there’s an absence of depth.  It’s debateable whether you should even look for that here: certainly there’s enough atmosphere and action-adventure to turn the pages, and plenty of references to please the die-hards.  The book is, overall, enjoyable.  But Millennial Rites has ambitions beyond that, trying to ask meaningful questions about the Doctor and the Valeyard, anchor them in an emotional story closer to home and offer up another, sideways chapter in the Great Intelligence story.  The prose, more fannish and pedestrian as it progresses, isn’t up to anything fancy.

Clearly it worked for me once, and the best I can suggest to replicate that is to lower your expectations.  Millennial Rites is enjoyable as a random, unexpected treat; much less so as an answer to the Valeyard question, or anything especially deep.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #60 – Head Games by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#43

Head Games

By Steve Lyons

It’s a sequel to Conundrum.  Of course it’s weird.

My Conundrum-tinted spectacles have slipped a bit since reading Time Of Your Life.  While nothing technically to do with his first book, Steve Lyons’s Missing Adventure was, for me, a let-down.  An odd jumble of satire and “Do we really need to do this again”-isms involving the Sixth Doctor and video nasties, it left a bad taste; I’m sure some people liked it, but I’m not at all surprised he went back to the Land Of Fiction for Round #3.

Luckily we already know he can do imaginative sequels, as you-know-what was itself a sequel to The Mind Robber.  In the same vein, Head Games isn’t even set in the Land Of Fiction: the Land is having adverse effects on the real world.  Which is a bloody fantastic idea you could do almost anything with – you get the same bizarre freedom with the fourth wall, only it applies differently.  Jason, the previous Master of the Land Of Fiction, gains limitless powers thanks to a hole in space that leads to the Land Of Fiction / Gallifreyan incompetence in erasing his memories / magic.  (Delete where appropriate.)  He also has a travelling companion and partner in crime you may recognise, his imaginary hero, Dr Who.

The two of them travel the cosmos righting wrongs, comic book style.  Alas, Jason’s moral compass has exactly two settings and Dr Who is his id, so entire alien races get wiped out willy-nilly, planets are blown up on a whim, and he decides the Queen of England must be a tyrant because things aren’t perfect, and kills her with exploding projectiles.  Everything is black and white.  It’s a demented parody of Doctor Who, but it’s not quite as literal as that sounds: it’s a parody of how you might view the Doctor, and what the Doctor really isn’t.  The contrast between how he is viewed and what he really is lurks behind the book at every turn, making a goofy premise into something dark and character-driven.  Hey, I said it was weird.

You go into this expecting oddness and Land Of Fiction-isms, but even so it can seem all over the place.  The Doctor, Bernice, Chris and Roz are mid-adventure when we arrive, trying to shut down The Miracle: a Fiction-powered hole in space, now surrounded by crystal and providing light and heat for the nearby planet Detrios.  This has changed Detrios’s balance of power, resulting in heightened inter-species tensions.  We chop between humans and lizards trying to co-exist on the surface, their human despots trying to tip the balance, Jason and Dr Who zipping through space and Bernice, Chris and Roz trying to accomplish something they’ve forgotten, as the Fiction energies invade their minds and throw up personal nightmares.  This is the first 30 pages.  Soon things settle down, almost terminally: tensions on Detrios aren’t helped by Jason and Dr Who getting involved, but they soon leave to “right wrongs” on Earth.  The Doctor and co. follow them as they vaguely plot to overthrow the Queen because… well, because Jason’s an idiot, he doesn’t really have reasons.  A lack of direction and maturity is the whole point of Jason, but even bearing that in mind his story is a bit half-hearted and random.  There is much wandering around and trying to accomplish something or other.

The situation on Detrios and the madcap stuff on Earth just aren’t that arresting.  The Detrians are a dull bunch, despite a bit of Romeo-and-Juliet affection between species; I kept hoping they’d all turn out to be bland fictional creations.  (Or at least more so.)  We don’t meet anyone interesting on Earth, despite the chaos of the (promptly reversed) Queen’s assassination.  Reversing his own magic seems to be the main surprise in Jason’s arsenal, which is annoying when you’ve got a character marching around with bonkers make-anything-happen powers.  Decidedly less than “anything” happens here.

The fourth wall stays more or less in tact, but there are some to-be-expected (and actually pretty great?) references.  Prepare for, among other things, a literal recreation of Original Sin (may you never forget it!), gags about the bad green-screen in Invasion Of The Dinosaurs, a nicked line from Dimensions In Time, cameos from Sabalom Glitz and Brigadier Bambera (confirming that yes, she married what’s-his-name from Battlefield), more mentions of Daleks than these books usually get away with plus – cherry on the cake – future references.  The plot of Millennial Rites comes up a few times, as does (I am assuming) foreshadowing for The Also People.  Fanwank some of it may be, but Steve Lyons does it with confidence.

Besides, it’s more than just references for the sake of it.  The Doctor’s guilt is a theme, so we hear about the destruction of the Seven Planets again (from that book everyone totally loved!), and Tanith and Gabriel, creatures who exist because of the Doctor’s interference in time (from that other book that everyone etc.!).  Also the Land Of Fiction hangover is giving the Doctor bad dreams about his sixth incarnation, and the fact (introduced in Love And War) that he killed him off to hurry his own regeneration.  It’s a barmy, utterly New Adventures idea, and probably only could have happened back when people thought the Sixth Doctor was akin to a fart in a lift.  But it adds weight to this Doctor being “Time’s Champion,” as well as an unpredictable not-that-nice person to know.  It’s been a while since he felt the weight of guilt for that, and for ruining his companions’ lives, and lucky us, Head Games is as nostalgic for all of that as anything else.

You can guess from the front cover that Mel is involved, but this isn’t the Sunny-D-in-human-form as pictured, whom the Doctor left in Dragonfire.  We find her years later on an all-but-abandoned entertainment complex in a lonely part of space, which all seems like an ironic form of punishment.  Despite her reputation in fandom, which is hard to forget with that front cover (a murderous McCoy looking as ready to rewatch Time And The Rani as you or I), it’s really cool to see an old companion again, even if circumstances have not been kind to her.  She’s soon whisked away by Dr Who and Jason, seeking to punish all the Doctor’s known associates, and despite that she is pleased to eventually see the Doctor again… but then the penny drops.  He’s not the spoon-playing insert-random-characterisation-here she once knew and liked.  The Cartmel Masterplan and the New Adventures have done considerable damage, and when she realises he manipulated her into leaving in the first place, only to wind up ditched by Glitz and miserable on a space rock, it’s all over for their friendship.

Her complete meltdown over the course of the book isn’t easy reading, especially when she realises that destroying the Miracle will all but doom Detrios.  She 100% blames the Doctor for this and refuses to understand why he has to do it.  Then she storms out of his life.  Her reaction here is important for the themes in the book, and it’s arguably justified, but yikes, is it monotonous: like all the most annoying Ace tantrums happening at once.  Difficult to miss her after that, and debateable whether the characterisation fits the character.  (It could be worse: BBC Books killed her off altogether, retrospectively, on a different space rock, still unrescued by the Doctor.  She truly was the Sixth Doctor of companions.)

The contrast between the halcyon (albeit bloody odd) days of Season 24 and Doctor Who circa 1995 is brutal, but it’s the heart of Head Games.  Things aren’t simple any more.  The Doctor must destroy the Miracle or the universe will blow up (etc.), and while this means taking away light and heat from Detrios, sending those that survive back underground, things only got warm and bright in the first place because of the Miracle.  The people survived before, they can do it again; it’s not his fault he has to restore order.  He can no longer blunder into situations like the Sixth Doctor, or his own caricature Dr Who.  In time, his friends accept that.  Or those that stick around, anyway.

Chris is heartbroken when an attempt to rescue a friendly Detrian fails – and fails for no particular reason, which is just more of life’s sad complexity.  He’ll come around, and Roz is grateful the Doctor let him try.  (Both of them have low-key material in Head Games, especially Roz, but there’s a distinctly human edge to it all.)  Bernice – who bounces off the page in her usual style, duh – won’t pull her punches, but understands and sticks by him.  Even (spoiler) another old friend, who I was surprisingly happy to see again, gives him a reassuring cuddle when Mel can’t accept what’s happening.  “‘Oh, come here!’ she said, embracing him affectionately.  ‘You might be a bastard, but you’re still our bastard.’”

And it’s not like he’s happy about all this.  Mel’s outburst, the latest in a succession of broken friends, take a heavy toll.  Even worse, his Fiction nightmares result in an ersatz Sixth Doctor, a ferocious encounter ending off-screen when Sixie gets (presumably) bludgeoned to death, spattering his successor in gore!  (Why yes, this is a New Adventure.)  No more shying away from his nature now, as these events literally rub his face in it.  For good measure, and to underscore that maybe he isn’t a morally dubious bastard down to his DNA, we hear of his good dreams, which involve just the sort of black-and-white Good Vs. Evil scrapes that Jason and Dr Who got up to.  Deep down he’d rather have an easy decision, a holiday or maybe just a lie down, but those days are as assuredly out the door as Mel.  It certainly isn’t easy being him.

Head Games is an odd duck.  There’s tons of interesting character stuff, mostly of the “everyone is miserable” variety, some of it lending a sympathetic weight at the same time.  I haven’t even mentioned the nifty undercurrent of villains not being simple any more: Jason isn’t a bad guy, he just has a lot of power and hasn’t grown up; Dr Who’s destructive acts are clumsy attempts to make things better (and he occasionally tries to be Jason’s conscience); Enros, a crazed cult leader on Detrios, genuinely believes his death will mean the end of the universe; a bunch of fighty Detrians try to stop the Doctor and have good reason to do so; and well, look at the Doctor, and what he has to do here.  (Admittedly this fan theory wobbles when you get to the political in-fighting on Detrios, which really is just some bastards out to help themselves.)  There’s loads to chew over, and yet the story itself is often either frenzied or lackadaisical, all interesting premise and nowhere to go, hence the characterisation pit-stops.  It’s a good refresher on the New Adventures mission statement if you needed one, but it’s more here to remind us where these characters stand, rather than push them forward.  With a lot of funny, weird, not-weird-enough and slightly boring bits on too.

7/10

Coming soon: books 61–65, starting with Millennial Rites by Craig Hinton.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #59 – Managra by Stephen Marley

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#14
Managra
By Stephen Marley

“It was at this point Sarah jumped forward and kicked the head into the orchestra pit. ‘You’re not my dad!’ she screamed.”

Love it, hate it or can’t make head nor tail of it – Managra is probably the most interesting Missing Adventure yet.  Among other things.

The most popular thing about it is the world Stephen Marley creates, so we’ll start there.  Some time after Original Sin (and I am loving the continuity of New and Missing Adventures in the wake of that), Earth found itself in chaos and needed remodelling. “Reprises” led the way: recreations of historical figures, cloned from fragments of the originals (including, in one unhappy case, a toenail), as well as recreations of fictional characters based on actors (e.g. the Four Musketeers led by Michael York), not to mention imaginary creatures like vampires and haunted trees, with whole regions and continents mish-mashed together with favourite bits, and a few bits of obvious future-tech like mechanical horses – although the “rules” suggest they should stick broadly between the fourteenth and nineteenth century. Oh, and behind the scenes there’s a shape-shifting bad guy somehow entwined with an ancient horror from Gallifrey, and he hates Shakespeare.

Sarah likens all this to a theme park, and she’s not wrong.  I was reminded mostly of a Red Dwarf episode, Meltdown, about a forgotten theme world full of waxwork historical figures.  Left to their own devices they went to war, and the result was a rather obvious and unenjoyable Gulf War satire.  Managra follows suit, at least as far as the historical figures descending into chaos.  Absent the excuse of being on an otherwise uninhabited planet, Managra never feels like it actually is set on Earth, and save for a few crowd scenes in bars and a theatre, there aren’t a lot of bona fide people about.  As such, despite all the imagination and colour, and the occasional nudge back to Original Sin, the stakes are decidedly wiffly.  But how much does that matter?

Stephen Marley only wrote one Who book that I know of, and we should all feel very sad about that.  He’s an absolute whirlwind at this, finding interesting idioms all the time and indulging just as much in posh verbiage as he does in hilarious dialogue.  I didn’t know a significant percentage of the words he used, but context usually took care of it; elsewhere he pokes fun at his own juggling of ye olde and modern wordplay, as the reprises never seem sure which to use.  The sheer bonkers conflagration of Europa is something to behold, though some of his best ideas are arguably underused: there aren’t that many fantasy creatures or fictional characters on the rampage (perhaps there isn’t room in the cast list), and the villain of the piece has a quill that writes on thin air, in blood, and whatever he writes will come true – which criminally only seems to come into play in the last act.  Then again, some ideas pleasantly double up, like how multiple reprises exist and occasionally meet: Byron is split into Mad, Bad and Dangerous for ease of recognition, and they don’t get on.  (I might be the only one who chuckled at “Dangerous Byron”, which sounds quite a bit like Brian Conley’s hapless stuntman character.)

While the imagination left me a little bit in awe, there is a lot of it, besides which the pile of higgledy-piggledy historical references does become a mountain; I felt woefully unprepared.  I just don’t know that much about Shakespeare, the Vatican or the half-dozen sinister figures vying to be the next Pope, and while each of Marley’s characters held my interest, even the duplicates, they are all of a kind.  Save for the Doctor and Sarah, everyone is a snarky, duplicitous sod to some degree.  Coupled with the peculiar absence of Earth’s hoi polloi, it’s hard to care what happens to them.  As with Terry Pratchett, you begin to suspect it’s just the author’s sense of humour trickling through the book.  Certainly it’s present in the prose.  And it’s enjoyable – see Pratchett – but makes it difficult to really invest in the story.

Honestly, there isn’t a lot of story anyway.  Sort of.  The Doctor and Sarah arrive, realise they’re in a planet-wide madhouse and try to get off it, losing the TARDIS (of course) and then falling in with the reprises.  They, in turn, are trying to wrest power away from the cadre of villains surrounding the job of Pope – including Cardinal Richelieu, a reprise who has murdered all his other duplicates – and they in turn are killing each other off to get the top job, while Persona / Managra, a villain / evil entity is attempting to use an old, bitterly unpopular playwright’s work to wreak havoc.  I know that sounds like a lot, but in practical terms it means the Doctor and Sarah trouping around with a bunch of famous names, only to get split up, meet up again at the Globe Theatre and fight the baddies.  The plotting isn’t half as complex as the setting, yet it’s still hard to follow, thanks to the number of slippery villain characters, double-crosses and all the outright weirdness going on.

To think, I haven’t even mentioned Miles Dashing: a naïve adventurer and friend to Byron, on a mission to pursue the Doctor (I think?) and avenge his family (who hated him anyway, not that he noticed), with the aid of his manservant Crocker, who feigns ignorance because it’s the only way to get work as a manservant.  The two of them are rich and hilarious enough for their own story, which unless I’m much mistaken is what they appear to be in.  There’s just so much stuff here.

And at the bottom of the pile, we have the Doctor and Sarah.  I’ve heard them described as out of character in Managra, and I sort of agree.  While Sarah gets generous helpings of back-story re her dead parents, which is always a bit odd in the middle of an ongoing series because it hasn’t come up much before or since, she’s also at her most irritable, sniping at the Doctor like mad.  She’s taken away and hypnotised for much of the novel, privately obsessing over her parents and considering the Doctor’s role as her surrogate uncle (while being given a new name, Shara, for some reason), but she’s so out of the story that it feels like random window-dressing; she probably should have capped it all by speaking to the Doctor afterwards, or having some kind of moment to reflect.  There’s also a… shall we say, preoccupation with her body, as she is dressed for a visit to an interstellar seaside (where of course she hasn’t arrived) so must parade around in a bikini for what seems like ages.  Meeting someone like Byron only makes it more of a thing.  When she finally puts some clothes on she rebuffs the legendary figure with: “From now on, you’ll just have to dream about my body.”  Getting kind of awkward by this point.  At least it isn’t Peri?

The Doctor is harder to pin down.  He is technically like himself, the usual descriptors vastly improved by Marley’s thoughtful aphorisms: “...a brown fedora planted on the coppery bramble of his hair”; “His energetic tone boomed in the cavernous space as he hurled his personality in all directions”; “...exposing his habitual tomfoolery for what it was, the froth on the surface of the ocean.”  But there’s a spark missing; he’s doing all his usual Fourth Doctor stuff by rote.  Sarah even calls him on this, and the answer is supposedly that he is haunted by Managra (a Gallifreyan thingummy, because of course it bloody is), as well as a tragic encounter that, unless I’ve missed it, Marley has made up.  But I think it’s more fundamental: Managra is exploding in all directions with bohemians and weirdos, and the usually bizarre and most incongruous of Doctors just isn’t that unusual in that context.  There’s a muted feeling of “Oh right, him” when we return to the Doctor, which sort of extends to Sarah and the TARDIS.  All three lead the heroic ending, or one bit of it, by which time Europa has more or less sorted out its own troubles, regardless of Managra.  I suspect this could have been quite a happy sci-fi/fantasy novel without Doctor Who, which may explain why it’s Marley’s only one.

It’s probably just the context of Doctor Who that makes this sort of book sound like it was beamed in from Mars.  Sky Pirates! was much the same, revelling in its ideas with a confidence and a deliberateness you just aren’t expecting from a tie-in novel.  Managra isn’t quite as good; for all its wit and wonder, the story is a bit of a vague slog, and the supposed main ingredients feel like (albeit in places, very well crafted) afterthoughts.  It’s still a delight to read from page to page, with no sentence or turn of phrase taken for granted.  But it seemed so caught up in its own world that it didn’t entirely grab me, too.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #58 – Toy Soldiers by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#42
Toy Soldiers
By Paul Leonard

War.  Hmm.  On second thoughts, shall we give it a miss?

Books about war tend to make that point, as do poems about war, movies about war, and any dishcloths about war you might come across.  It’s a worthy point to make, but there comes a point where I just don’t feel the need to hear it again.  A glance at Toy Soldiers suggests I am yet again to be told that war is, on balance, not a gay romp through a bouncy fairground.  But it’s by Paul Leonard, whose last two books showed he was a real find for Virgin Books; he can even take a ropey setup like a Pertwee actioner and give it some class.  A War Is Bad story is just as much glittering potential in his hands.

Right from the start he’s taking familiar things and making them special.  We begin at the end of the First World War, in a dug-out where the Tommies either can’t quite process that it’s over, or what’s been happening to them at all, or – in the case of CO Charles Sutton – simply don’t want the burden of caring any more.  War stories are always in the thick of it, or in the dreadful shell-shocked years that follow; rarely do we see the moment of transition.  And then it all starts up again, with the ghostly appearance of man-sized teddy-bears.

If you’re reading these in order, you’d be forgiven for thinking back to Invasion Of The Cat-People.  But whereas Gary Russell wrote a book that featured space mercenaries that happened to look like cats, tossing in a couple of lame kitty litter gags to make something of it, Leonard fully grasps the weird incongruity of this bizarre sight.  And soon it’s apparent why he’s chosen bears: they’re here to steal children, and what animal does every child trust?  The otherworldly creepiness of a giant bear arriving on a steam-train or an airplane, chosen to appeal to the youngster they’re here to abduct, and somehow stopping time in the process, gives us a series of very striking moments early in the book.  You’ve seen alien abductions, but not like this.

And there’s an emotional element, as each child is at a time in their life when escape would be desirable.  Josef, a young Jew in post-war Germany (another unusual note) is desperate to feed his family, but also weary of the responsibility; Gabrielle has lost her father, but is a child through-and-through so just wants to escape the rigmarole of a family wedding, plus the incessant attention and grief of her mother.  Grief haunts these children and their families in different ways.  Mrs Sutton has lost her husband and her son, Charles; she has taken to consulting a medium, even though she is not convinced.  Gabrielle’s mother dotes (perhaps too much) on her daughter.  Josef’s mother can barely cope as her remaining child slips further into illness.

It’s at these critical moments when the main characters pop up, and in another refreshing move, we find them mid-investigation.  My favourite New Who episodes are generally the ones where we arrive in the midst of things, as there are only so many ways to land the TARDIS and inveigle the crew in local matters.  That’s all gone and we get right on with what’s happening to these children, where they’re going, and how to stop it.  The subject matter is obviously emotive – not just abductees, but children – leading to a very emotionally charged first third of the novel.  And Leonard absolutely shines here.

Toy Soldiers is his first New Adventure, but he “gets” all the main characters, and shows them off one by one.  Roz and Chris are in the French town of Septangy, comforting Gabrielle’s mother and piecing together clues; they must overcome local prejudices (as Roz, she begins to realise, falls afoul of racism herself) and investigate local connections, making great use of their Adjudicator past.  (I get a geeky rush from having actual policemen in the Doctor’s police box.)  The Doctor meets Josef’s fragile mother with the intention of just gathering information, but before long he’s offering up medicine for her daughter and food for them both, as well as their first bit of hope.  He almost fights against this, knowing he has a bigger picture to address, but caves instantly.  It’s a beautiful vignette, and very him.  Bernice meets the Suttons, and the séance she attends is filled with rich, knowing silences between her and Mrs Sutton – both are sceptical, but they must indulge the others.  There’s a desperate pragmatism to those left behind which, like the Doctor and co. being mid-flow, allows the story to move briskly: when the time comes to talk about alien abductions, they won’t have to endure the usual accusations and red tape.  (Or not as much.)  Leonard still manages to pepper it with character and meaning.  The prose is thoughtful and wonderful, throwing out neat little phrases like a grieving house having a “clean white silence”, and not being remotely afraid to stick with a situation through multiple paragraph breaks.  After many books that can’t resist switching scenes, this kind of attention span is a relief.

Nonetheless, we do zoom off elsewhere, and not just between the desperate austerity of Germany and the quaint, deceptively lovely France – where tragedies take place in vineyards and toyshop owners commit atrocities for a greater good.  (Hats off to the level of richness we get in all these places.)  There is also an unnamed world where the children have gone, where war is afoot and more worryingly, the children are okay with that.

A seasoned Doctor Who fan might put up a bit of resistance here, as we’re encroaching on The War Games – another story where people are stolen from different places and put in a pointless war.  It’s hard to shake the suspicion that all of this is ultimately for nothing, as the kids are clearly placed on opposite sides of a conflict that holds no more specifics than there being another side that need wiping out, with each side defined only by a couple of colours.  It’s not the same story as The War Games, but that suspicion proves correct.  Writing war as a literally pointless endeavour is quite low hanging fruit, especially for at least the second time in Doctor Who.

I’m still not sure if Leonard’s writing really puts a twist on “pointless war brainwashing”, but what he does is grimly interesting.  The children believe utterly in what they’re doing, their past lives are forgotten and they enjoy their jobs; they’re convinced the opposition deserve what’s happening to them, and don’t give a second thought to eating their enemies afterwards.  As Charles puts it – himself one of the few older soldiers, there to help with recruitment and equally brainwashed – “war is a permanent concern”.  Concepts like peace are not just unfeasible to them, but unheard of.  There is only war, and the scary possibility that they may never go back to “normal”, even when they’re “fixed”.  When Bernice befriends and possibly begins to deprogram one of them, they offer to take Benny (her prisoner) to another camp: “‘They’ll kill me, Gabrielle.’  Gabrielle nodded.  ‘At least I won’t have to do it.’”

I can’t stress enough how good most of this is.  Those early scenes of grieving families and the TARDIS team working to put it right, and even the horrors of war exacerbated by a brainwashed determination to do this forever.  Even when said brainwashing extends to the main characters, it’s just another way to highlight who they are: Bernice is changed with disturbing ease into a recruiter, but her personality blips through now and again.  (“‘Not good enough,’ she muttered.  ‘Must have a word with the costume department.’  Then she frowned, wondering why the remark seemed funny.  What was a costume department?”)  Her first sight of an atrocity on the battlefield brings the walls right down again, and another tragedy later on is even worse, as she loses a friend while unconscious, their killers no more upset than they would be about taking out the dirty laundry.  But the story must ultimately answer its war riddle, and it’s here that Toy Soldiers finally lets something give.

The “Recruiter” is a machine, of course, and is locked in a thoughtlessly destructive loop for reasons that would fit Star Trek like a glove; on top of that, targeting Earth will finally allow it to complete its mission, at the predictable cost of all life on it.  Lurching from the likes of “What’s it for?  What could possibly be worth all this?” to “oh no, not the Earth!” is somewhat clumsy, and quite uncharacteristic for a novel as adept at emotion and character as this one.  Ditto the Doctor’s (typically?) quick resolution.  Frustratingly, all of Paul Leonard’s books so far have conceded and lost something; it’s usually the plot, when you get down to it at last.  Perhaps that’s the moment where Leonard, apparently not a Doctor Who fan (although come on, what’s the difference at this point?), finally concedes that he’s not just writing a book, but a Doctor Who book.  Despite a sudden inrush of tragedy right at the end, the fight seems to go out of Toy Soldiers just when it should be bringing it home.  The (usual) point is made that you can never go home again even if you return, using a very minor character I’d all but missed earlier.  Only one of the three “main” children gets a reunion.  (I would prefer to see all the survivors reunited.  Again, the “main” ones.  So the other one as well, spoiler alert.)  Then suddenly it’s over.  I was hoping for a softer decline.

Also, as is customary at this point in the NAs, Leonard has four main characters to contend with, and that’s a little much for anybody.  He puts enough effort into Roz and Chris’s investigations that they don’t feel irrelevant, even though ultimately their contribution is of the “coincidental help at a vital moment” variety.  (I still don’t fully understand how they survived their apparent doom at the end of Chapter 15.)  Roz shines here, doing her best to conduct a thorough investigation and save lives in amongst the petty racism of the time.  (There is also an undercurrent of Roz failing to notice how this parallels her own mistrust of different species.)  Chris… is also there and is very nice.  I suspect the authors all felt the same as I do about the guy.  You surely couldn’t hate Chris Cwej, but what does he have going for him, other than being the perennial “good cop” to Roz’s no-nonsense alternative?  I don’t exactly blame Leonard for this one – Chris’s easy-going nature and quick acceptance among the locals gives Roz’s frustration a greater contrast – but I’m eager for someone at Virgin to take the leap and really justify Chris being here.

Once again I raced through a Paul Leonard novel wanting to shout about it from the rooftops, only to find myself oddly hesitant afterwards.  Frankly, it’s spectacularly well-written: the kind of proverbial Good Stuff (like Lucifer Rising and Sky Pirates!) that you’d show to anyone even considering reading a Doctor Who novel.  But it falls short of greatness in the end, suddenly absent the patience and consideration that made its earlier highs so evocative, and saddled with a conclusion that you’ll find a little too familiar.  Heck, I’m not sure he fully explained the teddybears.  But I’m not one to turn away a gift, and a Paul Leonard book, painting moments that stay with you even if there’s something off about the machinery beneath, is something to be recommended and savoured.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #57 – Invasion Of The Cat-People by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures

#13

Invasion Of The Cat-People

By Gary Russell

Well this one just had “Classic” written all over it.  If the goofy title and unnervingly ridiculous front cover aren’t enough to draw you in, take a look at that by-line.

Seriously, what could go right?  Just by virtue of being Gary Russell and not, for example, latter day James Goss, you know the title doesn’t signal a rich postmodern piss-take: Gary’s just going to write a load of cobblers about evil Cat-People in deadly earnest.  Still, Invasion (let’s abbreviate) has some other ideas, and some of them are quite interesting.

Of course, in order to find them you’ll have to climb over the bad stuff.  And let’s start right away with the absolutely mind-bendingly bad science.  We open on Earth, 3978 BC, when we are told the molten core of the Earth is “still cooling” (?) and the spaceship-exploding death of the dinosaurs occurred “within the last million years”.  A small group of aliens is inadvertently stranded here when their mothership explodes, and we later learn they left a series of “buoys” all over the planet to aid their rescue; these buoys have moved significantly since then much to their annoyance, due to continental drift.  To recap, that’s continental drift happening in the last 6,000 years.  Once we pass the first page, however, 6,000 years becomes 40,000 and Gary doesn’t look back.  Whoops.  At one point the Doctor offers this helpful nugget to patch it all up: “In cosmic terms, a few million years is a blink of an eye.  The core energy would still be powerful enough way back, or when the Euterpians arrived, now or in 1994.  The lessening of power would be negligible.  Satisfied?”

Er, given that you can’t tell the difference between 6,000 and 40,000, and think that geologically speaking we’ve only just missed the dinosaurs… not exactly, no.

He might have got away with it (at least until the numbers mix-up) if he hadn’t felt the need to bung in nods to Earthshock and City Of Death, which put the death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and the start of life on Earth about 400 million years ago respectively.  And right there is the most obvious reason not to expect much from this book: Gary Russell’s serious fanwank problem.  It is novel and interesting to write a story about the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly, a period of the show’s history that lasted for little over a month.  It is the opposite of interesting to then have the Doctor blether on about his youth in the Academy and regeneration – the latter being a word the show didn’t even use until the mid-seventies, yoinking us right out of the period he’s supposedly trying to establish.  And that’s peanuts to the unbelievably wankeriffic bit where the Doctor says he’ll need to re-work the TARDIS’s interior once he reaches his Fourth incarnation.  What the hell does that have to do with anything?  Gary, I am thrilled that you’ve seen Logopolis.  I’ve seen it too.  Not strictly relevant here though, is it?

With steaming continuity dumps like the above, it’s a little surprising that the Cat-People aren’t something he found in his Doctor Who annuals.  Oh, he draws a direct line between them and the Cheetah People in Survival – of course he does! – but they’re essentially new monsters, which is a good sign.  Then again, look at the name.  That is literally what they are called throughout the book.  Nyurgh.  Did you take them seriously for a moment?  Well stop it, because they sound ridiculous, cough up hairballs, love milk and use litter trays.  They’re like cats, you guys – I’m not sure I made that clear enough.

Even when the writing isn’t making them look and sound ridiculous – two of them are called Nypp and Tuq, LOL? – it’s giving them nothing to work with.  These are dull, violent space jerks that happen to look like cats.  You could replace them with people and they would only be marginally more boring to read.  They have some back-biting politics going on between them, but since none of them are interesting or sympathetic, what’s at stake?  Oh, and they’re not here to invade.  They specifically want to destroy the Earth and use its energy.  So, the title’s kind of incorrect.  Wizard.

It’s, ah, not very well written.  Like a lot of fanboy writers Russell is adept enough at the trademark characters, as there’s so much footage and other stuff to work with; not so much everyone else.  The Doctor displays just the kind of devious “clumsiness” you’d expect, and generally has a frantic and fun energy that rings true.  The villains lean towards tired condescension, as do the barely-qualifies-as-ambiguous characters that turn out to be villains, at which point they promptly begin acting like it.  Nuanced lines such as “What I say, Godwanna, is that you are totally and utterly insane!” and “I’ll get you for this, Doctor!” rear their heads.  Meanwhile everyone else spends their time either asking what’s going on or explaining it, sometimes more than once.  His knack for dialogue hasn’t come very far since Legacy, although the characters seem less irritated at having to talk to each other this time, which is something.

Once again there is a tendency towards firing random details into the prose, as if that adds colour and doesn’t just make it more like work having to remember it all: “Barely held together by rust and flaking paint, the vehicle was being driven at a vaguely insane speed by a sullen-looking man with a streak of pure white through the centre of his jet black hair.”  /  “Peter, the other student, a second generation Trinidadian from Wood Green, tugged at his seatbelt which was creasing his precious Ice T T-shirt.”  /  “He straightened the bow-tie attached to the collar of his sky-blue shirt with a safety pin and grasped Bridgeman by the hand.”  He tries to use the colour of the Doctor’s eyes as a sort of theme, as nobody’s sure what they’re looking at cos-he’s-all-mysterious-innit, but it mostly ends up as an irritating repetition.  Elsewhere his dull obsession with what people are wearing leads to them sounding strangely disembodied: “A scruffy black ankle boot poked through, stopping the movement. … Following the ankle-boot was a leg in oversized checked trousers and then the body of a middle-aged dark-haired man in a long black frock-coat.  He carried himself as if the words brush, comb and ironing board were alien gibberish and smiled benignly at Kerbe and Bridgeman, seemingly unaware of the Mauser.”

It’s strangely infuriating when sentences get it right, like at the end of that last one, suggesting he has some glimmer of understanding that it’s more evocative to focus on what people are doing and why.  Nonetheless you have to wade through all the other irrelevant chaff first.  But at least you get the odd accidental laugh out of the Separate Body Parts Effect: “Thorsuun’s right hand slapped him across the face.”  How is it relevant which hand it was?  What was the left one up to?

Hey, I said it wasn’t all bad.  What was all that about?  Well, there are times in Invasion Of The Cat-People (nope, still hate the title, did he want people to back away from the book in embarrassment?) when you can see something interesting going on.  The Euterpians, stranded aliens whom the book is secretly all about, have the power to sing matter into being.  That’s a pleasantly weird idea with a lot of (violent) potential, which Russell then ties into Aboriginal culture.  He also tosses in a bit about ley lines, which gets a bit muddled when you try to make sense of the continental drift dating, but contributes to a pretty cohesive spiritualist theme.  Out of body experiences come into play, along with Tarot readings and strange existences between one world and the next.  I mean, in real life I think that’s all bollocks, but it’s an interesting back-drop for a story.  It is pretty ridiculous to suggest that all humans (such as Polly) have latent magic powers, however, since we know it will never come up again.

There are moments, sadly quite fleeting, when he digs into the emotion of his characters.  Bridgeman is a stuttering university professor with a genuinely tragic back-story, and a none-too-happy experience in this story: there’s no magic reset button, or not completely (they earn the one they use), but he does come to terms with things.  Similarly a couple of Euterpians have been enduring life on Earth (probably best if you don’t try working out how long!) and they carve out quite an affecting love story.  There’s an arguable theme of living with disability linking them with Bridgeman, but frankly I’m not sure what Russell was getting at there.

There’s a villainous character (who never develops much, despite his best efforts) who gets to live part of her life all over again.  This is a little confusing until you realise He’s Doing A Thing and hasn’t just forgotten which order the scenes should go.  (It wouldn’t surprise me.)  The whole thing is a bit of a non sequitur, but still, it’s pretty cool.  You also get the impression Russell’s having fun with a scene in (let’s just say “Ancient”) Baghdad, which is seen through the eyes of a young man who can barely articulate what he’s looking at; again, it’s a more or less random burst of creativity, and he can’t quite keep it in check as he uses anachronistic words like “cash”, but it’s a welcome addition.

And hey, check out Ben and Polly.  This isn’t a defining book for either of them, but it’s rather moving when they wander around town trying to make sense of the “modern day”, wondering if they still have a place in the world.  This snowballs into a bit of a theme, especially for Polly.  Her story with Atimkos, a maybe-good-but-probably-not Euterpian who keeps her around for some reason, isn’t as effective as her occasional private horror that she doesn’t belong here.  For all the banging on about magic powers, she doesn’t do much with them, but she does seem to get something out of the story.  I’m not convinced Anneke Wills read the book before writing a Foreword, but she’d probably have liked the Polly stuff.

As with Legacy, the good stuff comes along in random splodges.  Ditto the bad stuff.  I liked Bridgeman’s back story; I didn’t like having a sudden four-page flashback about it because he saw a wheelchair.  Russell is coming along as a writer, but slowly, tentatively adding his own ideas to the litany of trivia he’s memorised.  A tedious need for details might explain the bizarre post-script, when he lists his ideal cast for an Invasion Of The Cat-People Virgin Film, featuring Jude Law!  Hey, if you can be bothered to dig through the book, there are things to like.  But this probably isn’t the sort of result that will have Jude Law kicking Gary’s door down.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #56 – Zamper by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#41
Zamper
By Gareth Roberts

And we’re back to normality.  We’ve had an unusually good run with Human Nature, Original Sin and Sky Pirates!, and to be fair to Zamper, somebody had to buck the trend.

I’ve been picking away at it for over a week.  Zamper isn’t ghastly, and it has most of the hallmarks of a Gareth Roberts book: comedic tone, whiff of satire, whimsical prose, Chelonians.  But all of that’s saddled to a story that takes more than half its page-count to get going.

The Doctor and co. experience a TARDIS malfunction (imagine that!) and arrive on Zamper, a difficult-to-reach planet that manufactures out-of-this-world spaceships.  (Given Roberts’ influences, let’s just say “Magrathea, again?” and leave it at that.)  Zamper is a bit odd, though even that feels like a stretch: half a dozen people live there, and all the work is done underground by the mysterious, telekinetic “Zamps”.  They can literally create spaceships using thoughts, which has the Doctor intrigued.  All of this is overseen by The Management, a strangely anthropomorphic computer system experiencing unexplained power failures.  The few people working there, mostly against their will, either long to get away or have agendas not related to their jobs.  A couple of Chelonians are there to purchase a ship that will revive their ailing war effort – seems a bit optimistic, but it’s a really good ship I suppose – and must tolerate working with “parasites” rather than enthusiastically murdering them.  A quiet level of intrigue is had all around.

And… so?  That’s a collection of mildly diverting things happening in a dull place, but it’s not much of a plot.  And Zamper is dull: the “complex” includes a gaming facility where you can play Bingo, some offices and bedrooms, but if this were on TV we’d just be seeing the same corridor from a few different angles.  As for the underground bit, imagine a cave, any cave, and you’re there.  Never mind the staff, I nearly got cabin fever.

Zamper might have an unusual secret, but aside from vague curiosity about it there’s no particular need for the Doctor to investigate right now.  Yes, it’s the sort of thing that would catch his eye, and yes it ultimately turns out something alarming is going on, but there’s no driving sense of mystery behind it.  The Zamps are odd; okay.  But that’s not sufficient to still be asking “How does all this work, then?” after 100 pages.  I really didn’t care that much.

Meanwhile The Management keeps going awry.  Who’s that going to inconvenience besides half a dozen typically Roberts-esque jerks?  I can’t be the only one noticing a pattern among his characters: his need for satire lends them a certain misanthropic edge, leading to unsympathetic people you won’t miss when something horrible (inevitably) happens to them.  While it’s probably deliberate, because comedy, it’s nonetheless odd that the Chelonians – war-obsessed tortoises who would literally kill you as soon as look at you – engender more sympathy and interest than their victims.  The elderly Hezzka spends a portion of the book with Bernice, and consequently softens his attitude towards “parasites”; their scenes are easily the high points.

There’s literally not much else to write home about.  The Doctor potters through caves with a zoologist named Smith (bit unfortunate so soon after Human Nature, but oh well), raising questions about Zamps and then in due course, answering them.  Bernice doesn’t find her feet until she stumbles across Hezzka, wounded by a devious Zamper worker.  Roz and Chris fall squarely into “that other one” territory, especially Chris – seen comically in his pants, or resembling an enthusiastic dog, or a small boy, the sum total of him is a quite affable hat-stand that moves.  Roz displays the hard-nosed unsociability of a Dragnet cop and little of the wit.  There’s something rather sad about her, as this capable and no-nonsense woman struggles to find her place within the TARDIS team.  Some of which is deliberate and all of which I know we’re going to have to like or lump in these post-Original Sin books, as the authors try to find a use for them.  Let’s just be grateful Chris and Roz aren’t competing for the job.

All this pottering about and vaguely wondering why the lights keep flicking on and off does culminate in A Bad Thing That Must Be Stopped, thank goodness, i.e. the evolution of the Zamps into something malevolent – but there’s a note of just shrugging and doing what’s expected here, as it turns out the Doctor was wrong to look for the best in this emergent species, and the villainous “loops” (difficult not to picture a lot of snarling lassoes) talk in the time-honoured manner of a really insufferable “hilarious” bad guy.  (It’s all “nincompoop” this and “toodle-oo” that, combined with bloody rampaging, because unexplored-realms-of-space-and-time.)  A moment where the Doctor appears ready to sacrifice himself and an entire Chelonian fleet is almost dramatic, until it’s undercut by the strange observation that “in the universal scheme of things he was important, and owed it to others as well as to himself to stay alive”.  (That’s how the reader and, I suppose, Doctor Who feels on the subject, but him?)  It doesn’t feel so much like nodding towards the Doctor’s Machiavellian schemes as saying “that Doctor guy sure is a weasel, apparently!”

Once again I sound more miffed now than I was when I read it.  I almost longed to be really, properly annoyed – anything to get those pages turning faster.  I don’t know what’s more of an issue: the way Zamper can’t rouse a care for anyone it’s about, suggesting the cold and overpopulated nadir of the Eric Saward era, or the dandelion-picking pace.  They make an unfortunate combination, holding Zamper back from the jolly romp its short-and-silly name suggests, and making me grateful that Roberts is sticking to Missing Adventures from here on.

5/10