Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #54 – The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Christopher Bulis

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#12
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
By Christopher Bulis

Sci-fi and fantasy, together again.  Again.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice isn’t the first Virgin book to smush these genres together, let alone the first bit of Doctor Who.  Witch Mark did it ages ago, more recently so did The Menagerie (more or less).  As you can guess if you’ve read my reviews, it’s not something I tend to go crazy for.

I like sci-fi, obviously.  And I like fantasy well enough, but since it usually manifests as quasi-historical-with-added-dragons, or Bargain Bin Tolkien, I’m generally happier with a comedic version.  Stick the two together and you usually get something too humdrum for fantasy or too silly for sci-fi.  But you’ve got to poke the fourth wall a bit if you’re going to make the comparison, which is why comedy is a good fit, so there’s some promise.  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is sort of critical of its fantasy tropes, but mostly in that way where you take a fantasy thing and just explain it with a sci-fi thing.  Well done and everything, but since it’s all flim-flam, have you really put fantasy in its place?

New Who is an absolute sod for this.  Ghosts?  Try ethereal aliens.  Werewolves?  More like alien werewolves.  As for vampires, uh… space fish?  These things don’t suddenly become more interesting when you use a different kind of made up thing to explain them.  (Or come to that, when you explain them at all.)  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice drops our heroes into an obviously fantastical world, complete with fire-breathing dragons and wizards, immediately gives all of it the sceptical stink-eye and then spends ages building up to what is, when all’s said and done, a cod science explanation just as straightforward and typical as the fantasy one.  Of course there’s some kind of mega technological thingummie at the heart of Avalon, powering the wizards and helping the dragons to fly.  All that does is make the fantasy world seem more ordinary – especially since this is Doctor Who and not The Lord Of The Rings, so you’re totally expecting it to go that way.  Besides, it’s not even as if peppering a (pseudo) historical world with technology is a novel experience, what with virtually every Doctor Who story set in history since the 1970s doing precisely that.

Part of the reason I’m so unreceptive to all this, apart from having gone through much the same song and dance in Witch Mark, is the writing.  I’ve enjoyed Christopher Bulis’ books in the past, more so than most with Shadowmind.  I thought that was well paced and quite witty with its mind-control plot; I also found State Of Change refreshing and pithy, especially in its historical back-biting.  But there’s no such wit here.  After yet another What The Hell Was All That About prologue, Bulis introduces the regulars with all the finesse of Terrance Dicks novelising at 3am.  “Hope and apprehension mingled on [Barbara’s] concerned, intelligent, strong-featured face, crowned by her bouffant of dark hair.  She was wearing a simple loose jumper and slacks, with sensible flat shoes, having already learned the value of practical dress when travelling with the Doctor.”  Spot the bit where that stopped being relevant?  Are there Bingo cards for us to match up all the relevant bits of her outfit?

He gets into an even greater detail-obsessed lather later on, describing the hell out of a banquet.  Hey, atmosphere’s great and all, but it can feel like there’s going to be a test afterwards.  The writing in general is of the serviceable, then-this-happened-and-then-that-happened variety.  It’s fine, in other words, but “fine” is not going to propel you enthusiastically through 300 pages.

Quite soon we meet the fantasy denizens of Avalon, including (but not limited to) an elderly wizard, a benevolent King and his dutiful Queen, an evil wizard (aka the sorcerer’s apprentice), a heroic knight, a scrappy dwarf, a supercilious elf, a mystical leprechaun and a grotty witch.  Every single one of them acts just as you’d expect, and while the book does eventually produce an excuse for this, and for the narrative following the archetypes of fantasy like seriously co-dependant tracing paper, that doesn’t transmogrify the schlocky obvious bits into shiny new ones.  We also cut back and forth to some spaceships in orbit, where the people sound equally fresh and interesting.  If you’ve seen an episode of Star Trek, you can fill in the dialogue.

I wonder how much of this is just the result of mixing two genres, not to mention bunging four regular characters on top: it’s inevitably going to spread a bit thin.  Before long you’ve got the Doctor and Ian questing with Sir Bron, the Unsurprisingly Brave, and his (as Ian points out!) Lord Of The Rings tribute band; Barbara, injured and stuck in the castle with a King, Queen and wizard, researching the problem and hunting out a spy; Susan and Princess Mellisa kidnapped by the nefarious Marton Dhal, and stuck in another castle; the people up in space tightening their grip on the planet below, planning to steal its mythical technologies; various crewmen sent to Avalon for just that purpose; and at one point, a curiously intelligent cat sneaking about.  (There’s also a bunch of knights staking out Castle Dhal, hoping to rescue the princess, but we mercifully ignore them.)  Bulis is soon chopping and changing like his keyboard’s getting a bit hot, and since every main character or setting has to accommodate its own batch of smaller characters, there isn’t enough interesting stuff to go around.  The closest anybody gets to being memorable is the witch, who arrives far too late and inevitably encroaches on Pratchett territory just because he’s written the hell out of witches already.  (I didn’t particularly mind Dhal, obvious as he is, but I think that’s because I decided that’s the sort of part Philip Madoc would have played.  I had fun imagining him glowering at everybody.)

The regulars are true to themselves, and goodness knows I’m glad it’s them.  This is my favourite era of the show – I’m still convinced they should never have sacrificed the unpredictability of the TARDIS – but Verity Lambert and co. are rather more to thank for that.  Bulis at least plays up the oddness and cleverness of Susan, and gives the Doctor some imperious little victories and a nifty costume change.  (Hartnell would surely have approved.)  Barbara suffers a bit from “Go and get the useful guest character” syndrome while Ian, on a boat full of mystics and warriors, seems pretty redundant for much of it, but then none of that’s too far off the mark.  They sometimes had to make do with tiny subplots on the telly.

One thing I did like – I didn’t expect to slate it, but here we are! – was the continuity between books.  This follows on from the world of Original Sin, with Earth’s Empire in tatters and plenty of humans, particularly the avaricious ones in orbit, at a loss.  Presented with the might-as-well-be-magic technology of Avalon, they have the opportunity to rebuild what they’ve lost.  This is very neatly done: if you haven’t read Original Sin you could just take it on the chin that Earth is in a state, and if you have it’s a clever little twist to follow it up with William Hartnell and co.  Mixing up time and space like that is a very Doctor Who thing to do, and nicely illustrates just how all over the place the Doctor’s travels can be.  (It’s also a neat little Easter egg if you happen to be reading every single buggering one of them.)

Also, keeping my charitable (wizard’s) hat wedged on for a moment, much of the fantasy stuff is perfectly serviceable.  There’s an encounter with sea monsters, an attack by flying monkeys (!), obviously the scene on the cover with the dragon, flying broomsticks, and a climactic battle between wizard, witch, leprechaun, Doctor and all manner of zoomy, flashy things.  It ticks those boxes all right – with, of course, conventionally exploding sci-fi stuff on the periphery.  It just uses an excuse, however plot-relevant it might be, to never exceed your expectations with any of it.

While it’s hardly a surprise, since I read half of it years before this marathon and couldn’t be bothered to finish until now, it’s still a bit odd being on the other side of fan consensus.  Christopher Bulis is generally quite unpopular in fan circles, but to look at the reviews, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice did well.  I can’t tell anyone they’re wrong for liking it, but it didn’t work for me.  It’s never an egregiously bad read, and in a way that makes it more of a slog: when you read and read these things, the very good is intoxicating, the very bad is at least interesting, but there’s no burning desire to read anything that’s ordinary.  I’m sorry to say, a dutiful load of fantasy archetypes rubbing shoulders with stock sci-fi stuff is very much in the latter category.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #53 – Sky Pirates! by Dave Stone

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#40
Sky Pirates!
By Dave Stone

Oh no, not Dave Stone.  In the modest annals of New Adventures discussion, no author is discussed with as many awkward sidelong glances or nervous fidgets as this one.  To read the reviews you’d think he was a one-man marmite factory, a purveyor of books so bizarre they’re not so much “written down” as “mashed into existence with fists dabbed haphazardly in hundreds and thousands and mud”.

As it happens I’ve felt like that for years: my first experience of a New Adventure (and possibly my first Doctor Who book) was a Dave Stone.  I’ve owned Death And Diplomacy for decades (plural – Jesus!), and I dimly remember the bewilderment of trying to read it.  Just what the hell is this, anyway?  Who are those people on the cover?  Where are the Daleks?  I was still working through all of David J Howe’s non-fiction books at the time and oh, dear lord, those endless lists of things from Doctor Who… bliss!  I really enjoyed learning about it all and, as you might have guessed, wasn’t so hot on going outside and doing things, so Dave Stone’s solitary New Adventure, with its somewhat adult humour and reams of weird stuff made absolutely no sense to me.  It still might not when I get to it later.  Fingers crossed.

But before all that, there’s Sky Pirates!  And oh boy.  I’m almost grateful for all the hushed, couched “Careful, now”s from kind fellow readers, as none of that prepared me for such a good book.  Stand down red alert!  Sky Pirates! is properly good and fun and written in totally comprehensible words!  Well, mostly.  But if anything, it’s better written than most of the books in the range.

Yes, it’s a bit bizarre at times, if not constantly.  There’s whimsy encrusted in its DNA.  You don’t get “Chapter One”, you get “The First Chapter”; you don’t get song lyrics at the start of each section, you get bad jokes (mostly courtesy of Bernice Summerfield); the narrator is someone transcribing it long after the fact, though they keep a merciful enough distance to be both amusing in their own right and a barely noticeable, not at all insufferable device, as they could have been; the language is florid and considered and dense, such that you sometimes need to take a few runs at a sentence, but all that extra detail is colourful and fun – so what if you begin to suspect that with all the bizarre ideas and bubbling befoulments it contains, if you dropped Sky Pirates! from a good enough height, it would splat?

Even so, I can’t help thinking people get a bit over-excited about it.  That’s not to denigrate the book – as must be obvious, it’s one that I liked – but to pinch a bit of Douglas Adams, well, it’s just this book, y’know?  Dave Stone hasn’t written anything as incomprehensible as Time’s Crucible or Strange England.  Sure, some of the words maybe don’t super duper exist, but he carries them off so well and makes it all so enjoyable that I didn’t have the nerve to question them, or any of the typos, of which there may have been one or two.  Unless that’s a gag, which it might well be.  Put simply, this one knows what he’s doing.

He’s often been compared, much to his chagrin (according to the Discontinuity Guide), with Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.  I can see what the comparisons are getting at, and also why he might roll his eyes.  There are many New (and some Missing) Adventures that wear their influences on their sleeve, because after all they’re written by lovely, well-intentioned, mostly naïve young writers.  Sky Pirates! creates worlds filled with grimy and unpleasant people a bit like how Terry Pratchett does it, and plays havoc with physics and good manners a little in the style of Douglas Adams, but he also has his own style.  There’s an anarchic quality to it, a shaggy dog quality to the story a little like (but more focussed than) Adams, and the sense of humour – intrinsic to Adams and Pratchett – never veers as close to outright satire as either of them.  Sky Pirates! is a fantastical sci-fi comedy with many funny ideas, but it isn’t half as concerned with avatars for real world things.  I love that in said (more famous) authors, but I greatly enjoyed the absence of it here.  One aspect I’ve seen gently criticised is the book’s take on religion (it’s not a major fan), which also draws it towards the parallel-evolution jibes of Pratchett, but I found it quite harmless and somewhat open minded and far less This Is Like That Thing, You Know, That One than Pratchett.  In any case, I’ve read worse takes.  (Looking at you, St. Anthony’s Fire.)

Stone has a reputation (see above, etc.) for writing very silly stuff, and while there’s plenty of that, it’s far from the only ingredient.  Take the Sloathes: amoral shape-shifting tentacle-ish blob-ish things, they honestly believe they’re the only really living things in the cosmos (and all other life is “pretending to move”) and exist to gluttonously collect and consume.  They look like a variety of utterly ridiculous things and some of them talk in an outlandish and silly way.  But they’re also a source of immense creativity, and as the book goes on the other characters realise they’re much more reflective than evil, and might actually be examples of absolute, malleable promise, waiting for the right encouragement.  The various crewmen of the Schirron Dream, the piratical ship that inspires the title, are a bit of a random assortment collected from the various planets of the bizarre (and therefore rather Sloathe-like) System, but the main two – nefarious Nathan Li Shao and warrior woman Leetha – develop considerably as the book goes on.  (Their story sort of goes where you’re expecting, but Stone refrains from rubbing it in, which is a relief.)  Admittedly some of the more minor ones are much more minor, sadly including the second-in-command Kiru.  The crew also seem to pick up new people between adventures, which stretches characterisation a bit.

The whole “pirate” side of the story really only gets going around halfway, which ought to be a criticism, and yet I can’t complain about the stuff that happened before.  The System, a sun surrounded by four diverse planets and assorted planetary bits, is falling apart: Planet X, home of the Sloathes, has thrown the natural decline into overdrive, devastating worlds and peoples.  The TARDIS is ensnared by an ancient horror from the Time Lords’ past (oh hi, cheeky bit of mythology) and the Doctor and Bernice are separated from Roz and Chris.  The former find themselves with Leetha on the dank space station-esque world of Sere, scarcely aware of Leetha’s quest to save the System; the latter are trapped in a Sloathe hell on Planet X.  Both situations are rife with detail and colour: Bernice observes Sere and becomes convinced the place is about to fall apart, while Roz lives through a bizarre drug-addiction and struggles to stay alive amid her terrifying, ridiculous captors.  In the middle of all this, the quest to find the Eyes – one gem per planet, which united may save the System – is suitably at the back of everybody’s mind that it sort of recalls the quest for the Ultimate Question, so I suppose that’s another Douglas Adams echo if you’re looking for one.

It’s the confident juggling of silliness, richness and thought that really made it for me.  While I needed a few goes to make absolute sense of Planet X, it was completely worth it, as their bizarre and preposterous dialogue leapt off the page.  Leetha’s world falls into chaos as she makes her way to save it, and this is unquestionably a time of tragedy, yet Stone turns a mystic ritual to “discover” Leetha (and so prove she is The Chosen One) into a heartbreakingly pathetic game of Hide And Seek.  (I was giggling for ages at that bit.)  Later, when Stone gives into the perhaps inevitable impulse to revisit the ancient horror from Time Lord history and make it the focus of the denouement, the Doctor really comes into focus, after being written brilliantly as someone who can fade into the background at will and be convincingly ridiculous or serious.  His sheer conviction when he faces “the thing inside”, the being behind it all, hefts more weight onto what could, at a glance, look like a daft jaunt around some goofy planets on a weirdo spaceship.  This is the Doctor at his most grave, struggling against the innate violence of his people and himself.  (Which neatly echoes the Doctor and Pryce’s discussion about murder in Original Sin, deliberately or otherwise.)  Bernice shows light and shade throughout, with perhaps more emphasis on shade: she’s utterly cynical about the Doctor at times, as she’s got a bee in her bonnet that he’s doing one of his “stand back and manipulate” jobs on the whole affair.  She has every reason to be suspicious: we know, as she does, that the man quaintly pottering about the kitchen in a chef’s hat is not what he seems.

There is, I suppose, a feeling that Chris and Roz are bundled into a subplot, as you might expect right after they’re introduced.  It’s hard to pinpoint if this is a “good” Roz and Chris book, as they’re in such completely alien surroundings compared with Original Sin.  However, Stone convincingly handles inter-novel continuity so it feels like he’s at least read the one before, and the story eventually takes the stance of putting them through the wringer to see if this is even something they want to do.  It’s meant to leave them a bit bleary-eyed.  It’s not a Roz-and-Chris-apalooza, especially on the Chris side, but nor is it a betrayal of either of them.  I enjoyed their story.

As far as other criticisms go, there is a sense of cutting bits and briskly accelerating the pace after halfway, but it’s a long-ish book by New Adventures standards, so I get why the quest to find each Eye becomes truncated: one is a deliberate and hilarious anti-climax related after the fact by Bernice.  Again, what could be a problem (and maybe is) is tackled head on and then smartly juggled.  Along with other bits, like the too-numerous crew, it’s not perfect.  And yet reading Sky Pirates!, I never got over the sheer delight of a fully-realised author.  I’ve read some very good books since Genesys, and discovered some fabulous authors like Paul Cornell, Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane, but let’s face it, there’s a higher proportion of dross.  There have been times when Sky Pirates! would seem like the first two-eyed monkey swaggering into a one-eyed tribe.

To sum up: don’t panic.  Sky Pirates! is as fruitsome and odd as some of the other really good comedic sci-fi novels you’ve read, including (and perhaps especially) ones that aren’t Doctor Who.  It’s also good Doctor Who, and if it sometimes seems to go on a bit, take your time.  I’m still not certain I understood every word, and I honestly don’t mind.  Call it an excuse to come back.

9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #52 – System Shock by Justin Richards

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#11
System Shock
By Justin Richards

Throughout this one I couldn’t help thinking of Futurama.  Just after Fry wakes up bleary-eyed in the Year 3000, a mischievous guy at the cryogenics lab keeps the lights off and bellows at him, “Welcome… TO THE WORRRRLD OF TOMORROWWWWW!”

Brace yourself, gentle reader from 1995.  Can your imagination withstand the horror that is… 1998?

It’s actually quite novel of System Shock to look so near ahead, and even more so to use the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane in the story.  Beloved and quintessentially 1970s characters, there’s fun to be had in marooning Sarah in a near, yet technologically different time.  (The Doctor, of course, fits anywhere.)  It’s not the same as her arriving in the past, or in the Year 3000, or on an unrecognisable alien world.  She’s in the same place, but just out of step enough to be completely lost.  It brings home how quickly these things change.

Indeed, by the time actual 1998 rolled around things weren’t exactly how Justin Richards envisaged.  The internet (no need for that capital I or N, bless!) had a much greater hold, and mobile phones were getting ubiquitous; far more so than the occasional cursory reference to a “cellphone” here.  This, of course, is not the author’s fault – he’s writing a novel, not mapping the future!  (And anyway, he’s too prescient about 24 hour news and online shopping.)  But you risk dating your story when you make such a fuss about modern technology, hence movies like Hackers drawing giggles from smart audiences, and System Shock’s many references to “information superhighways” getting chortles from me.

Richards (unlike Hackers) obviously knows what he’s talking about, dropping plenty of detail into the computer stuff, rolling his eyes at his own IT background in the blurb, and even opening the book with a programmer’s joke.  (The prologue is “If…”, and shows us a world going to hell because of technology; the story that follows is “Then…”)  However, revolving System Shock around the perils of computer chips and the limitless capabilities of a humble CD (!) gives us something that probably worked very well in 1995, but not so much beyond.  Besides which, Self-Aware Technology That Kills You may be as old an idea as technology itself.  It had certainly done the rounds by 1995.

System Shock opens with a series of exciting set-pieces.  After the dramatic If… prologue, a man is kidnapped in a car park; a car seemingly comes to life and crashes, killing the head of MI5; a terrorist siege comes to an end thanks to the SAS and their mysterious planning program, BattleNet; and a man on the run for his life slips a CD into the Doctor’s pocket before being murdered, thus entangling the Doctor and Sarah in this chain of events.  Despite following the heady action movie heights of The Seeds Of Doom (no, really!), the Doctor and Sarah look as out of place in all this as they do in the ’90s.  Also it’s worth noting that all of these events are in the first flurry of pages… as well as the first paragraph of the blurb.  A fast-paced action adventure it may want to be, but it isn’t for very long, as we discover the part-robot-part-lizard Voracians are posing as terrorists in order to control Hubway (a country house / information hub), and the majority of the book is a hostage situation therein.  The potential for world-changing techno-disaster is kept mostly to a few asides; Sarah gets stuck with the hostages and the Doctor tip-toes through the house outsmarting the Voracians.  For most of it, the baddies make their plans and the Doctor frowns at a few monitors, but it never has the corkscrew tension of The Man Who Knew Too Much or (more relevant for its hilariously out-of-date tech) Enemy Of The State, both of which it resembles with the fatefully pocketed CD.  The story gets into such an SAS funk in its second half that, while intermittently exciting, it’s actually rather dull.

I often wondered why a thriller (that happens to be dressed up like Doctor Who) should be such a slow read.  Partly it could be the subject matter – computers and programs and CDs, oh my! – which I simply don’t find fascinating.  More importantly, I suspect it’s the characters.  Excepting the regulars, almost nobody stands out.  One of the hostages, the Duchess of Glastonbury, shines a little like Amelia Rumford in Seeds Of Doom, aka a charming bit character who gleefully courts danger to help her new friends.  There are loads of other hostages / bit parts, mostly male, few with any colour.  A few of the Voracians – who as well as being lizards and robots are also masquerading as humans – have (understandable!) identity issues.  There are too many of them, however, and the point Richards is trying to make with them speaking in a kind of meaningless business-babble, i.e. humanity-not-included, doesn’t work as intended.  System Shock isn’t a particularly funny book, so having a large number of characters talk dryly all the time just looks like a lack of colour.  The prose occasionally falls into the same trap, tediously relishing the brand of car or type of gun a character is using, or getting way too carried away with the authentic techno-speak: “The first chip to trigger into operation was at Hampstead.  It had been connected to the central processor of the output control systems of the electricity substation.”  With Theatre Of War and with this, Richards is good at writing what he knows, and with meting out the relevant details; it just isn’t always fascinating to read.

Where System Shock works best, outside those well-executed early bits of action, is with the regulars.  An authentic Fourth Doctor is always a delight to read, and Richards has him pegged, from the nonchalance in the face of doom to the moments of sudden gravitas.  He’s hilarious pitted against the generally emotionless Voracians, adept at getting out of trouble with a yoyo or with a reasoned diatribe, and he runs rings around their computer system of doom, Voractyll, just by talking to it for long enough.  He’s also quick to call Sarah his best friend.  Their rapport is mostly suggested, as they are predictably split up when she goes undercover, but Richards has them gently thumping each other or chiding one another in a way that brings both actors, and their lovely on-screen chemistry to life.  It’s a good story for Sarah, relying on that nose for trouble that got her into the Doctor’s life, and the undercover thing is a nice throwback to her UNIT days, even if the Voracians are irritatingly several steps ahead.  Her occasional bewilderment at 1998 also gives us a unique look at a Doctor Who companion, seldom seen by stories that always go further afield in time.

And there’s something heartening about reading a story for Harry Sullivan as an older man.  It’s not just delightful to show a companion having moved on with their life, still treasuring their memories and falling into an easy rhythm when the Doctor returns; it’s also beautiful to give Ian Marter a role he was no longer around to play.  The final moment, with the older Harry talking to the Sarah of his time, both still friends, holds a kind of sepia appeal now they’re both gone.

The Missing Adventures occupy an awkward spot.  Should they be too much like the TV adventures, they’re derivative; should they veer off to the side, they’re wrong.  System Shock is the kind of thriller you just wouldn’t get in the show circa 1975, never mind the technology involved, but Richards is savvy enough about Doctor Who to tick the right boxes, writing the regulars brilliantly and having the Doctor ultimately outwit the evil computer, bringing it more or less down to Earth.  (The penultimate scene, cutting from the explosion to the Doctor and Sarah immediately departing in the TARDIS, certainly rings true!)  But as it juggles The Man Who Knew Too Much, Spooks and Doctor Who, it’s ultimately rather an odd fit, and occasionally dry and dull for its genre, not to mention Doctor Who.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #51 – Original Sin by Andy Lane

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#39
Original Sin
By Andy Lane

Well that was a stone cold belter, wasn’t it?

Forgive the haste.  Sometimes I like to build up to that – since it’s a rare-ish occurrence, maybe it’s worth a bit of ceremony – but it can be such a relief to sit back and enjoy reading that I just want to get on with it.  So: yep.  Original Sin is One Of The Good Ones.  Thanks for reading!

Perhaps it’s not surprising, as Andy Lane is hardly new to all this.  There’s a confident spring in his step that no doubt comes with experience.  Yes, there’s a Prologue – it’s the law! – but you can forget any wiffly metaphysical guff.  Lane begins breathlessly with the tail-end of another adventure, one that leads directly into Original Sin.  I love stories that forgo the obvious “Arrive, ask questions, investigate” rigmarole, and this is a great way to circumvent it.

The prologue also displays some of the book’s overall strengths, things it generally shares with Lucifer Rising (co-written by Lane): world building and plot, working together.  Writers often get bogged down in one or the other, and both create their own challenges all by themselves.  The Menagerie came up with an interesting setting filled with lots of different life forms, but it couldn’t quite carve them out from each other or make them live.  Original Sin introduces us right away to the Hith, a lizard-like species with unusually poetic names like Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone, a permanent reminder to other species of what happened to them.  This one has been shot, and whispers (Hitchcock-style) a gloomy pronouncement to Bernice about the fate of Earth.  Right away we’ve got an unusual species (whom we’ll see a lot more of) and something pressing to attend to on Earth.  Both these things get progressively more interesting.

The Earth Empire is prospering, but that really depends what species you are.  Lane takes a pessimistic (though perhaps not Transit pessimistic) view of our future, where humans have “offered assistance” to countless planets including Hithis, so in other words taken over, turfed them out and stolen their technology.  A current of xenophobia runs through humanity, even among the “nice” ones, as they regard displaced aliens (e.g. the Hith) as lowly or disgusting.  A Hith named Powerless Friendless allows us to explore this idea further, particularly as he lives in the Undertown.  Earth is divided into the prosperous and everyone else, which in itself isn’t a very original concept, but it mixes with Lane’s climate of speciesism to make something new.  The humans, ever self-loathing, have taken to “body beppling”: a means of transforming into anything they can think of, which is all the cosmetic rage.  This adds yet another dimension to the strange, sad cloud of conflict that surrounds this story, all of which explodes because of the plot, which involves a series of random and unprovoked murders that snowball into riots.  There it is again: a rich seam of world-building which you could almost take for granted, since it’s colourful and interesting, only the plot then finds a use for all of it.

Admittedly it’s a simple-ish plot, but there’s nothing wrong with that so long as it’s well executed.  A good murder mystery can be as satisfyingly simple or complicated as you make it, and the trail of death is not just unpleasantly memorable (as Lane must find new ways for people to dispose of each other) but also poignant, as the deaths have consequences, both personal and on a larger scale.  We do not, admittedly, see the full effect of the Earth Empire tearing itself to pieces – though there are newscasts that give a flavour of it at the start of each chapter – but this is ultimately one story that impacts on those wider issues, and it makes sense to keep our focus there.  Focus is another of those things that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Speaking of personal consequences, then: Powerless Friendless is as cheery as his name suggests, but we have no difficulty in getting inside his slug-like skin, or feeling the scorn of almost everyone around him.  Perhaps more familiar to passing readers are a couple of law-enforcing Adjudicators named Chris and Roz (or in the latter case, Forrester) who are not only investigating the murders, but growing more aware of deception in their peers.  Forrester (I don’t really feel right calling her Roz – mind you, I’m still sticking with “Bernice” over “Benny”, as I don’t like the automatic masculinisation of companion names) is fighting her own personal battles as she copes with a new partner, having lost her previous one and mentor in unhappy circumstances.  Again, this is not brand new territory – you can see Lane’s keenness for pop culture in his references, which go beyond Doctor Who into adamantium and planets named Riggs and Murtaugh! – but it’s executed cleverly, drip-feeding us information over the course of the book.  Forrester runs the risk of being a tough, no-nonsense cliché, but there’s enough self-loathing (to do with her privileged upbringing) and begrudging humour to make her more.  Her long-suffering dialogue with the enthusiastic and adorable Chris is worth the price of admission.  “Hey!” said Cwej suddenly.  Bernice turned back to face him and Forrester.  “I've got an idea!”  “Treat it gently,” Forrester murmured, “it's in a strange place.”  She’ll fit right in with Bernice.  I’ll wait and see with Chris: he’s sweet and funny, but he’s got “write as a moron” written all over him.  The joke about his surname, which looks like Cwej but should be pronounced Shvey but he sticks with Cwej because it’s easier for everyone, takes so long to explain that it isn’t particularly funny.

Surprisingly, for a story gagging to show off world-shaking ideas and grisly murders, it’s also got character development for the regulars.  Bernice, mostly in terms of sympathy.  There are some clever reflections on her life with the Doctor, and how she constantly wants to A) get back in the TARDIS and B) get out of the damn thing, which make us aware that for a box that’s bigger on the inside, it’s still a box.  In the main though, she’s mostly there to field the plight of Homeless Forsaken (whose death starts it all) and Powerless Friendless, to whom she obviously feels an obligation.  There’s still plenty of delightful Bernice stuff, and her scenes with the Doctor (until, inevitably, they take separate paths) only make me more confident that these two belong together, and any writer not revelling in that is on the wrong bus.

Much more thoughtful, and perhaps more disturbing, is what this says about the Doctor.  You might not expect another book to delve into his thoughts straight after Human Nature, which was surely the definitive book on the subject.  But Original Sin shows there’s still plenty to needle at.  The Doctor, for all his whimsy and heroism, is quick to scoop out the brain of a dead man to examine the cause of his insanity.  In his fearful moments, which the plot provides in abundance and without cheating, he thinks darkly of the Valeyard and when he’s close to death, his eighth incarnation “waiting to take over”.  It’s his conversations with a psychopath, Professor Pryce, that provide the most sobering look: Pryce believes there is no truly solid argument against murder other than we do not want to be murdered, and realising that people can easily condemn and rationalise murder in the same breath, the Doctor sees sense in that.  He must prevent it simply because it’s what he believes is right.  He applies the same logic to time travel nearer the end, when another villain holds a mirror up to him; he is Time’s Champion for no particular reason, it’s just his lot.  It can be cool to mythologise the Doctor, but it’s refreshing to peel it back and show a guy just doing what he can, and must.

If you don’t know who the villain is lurking in Original Sin, well done; I wasn’t able to avoid it.  Fortunately, knowing does not take much away from the book, although it’s surely more fun not to know.  There is simply reams of other stuff to enjoy, and plenty of story to follow, leaving the late reveal of [redacted] more a treat than a vital ingredient.  The handling of said character (oh, all right, it’s wee Jimmy Krankie) is relished and doesn’t trample on the previous stuff, although a good deal of retcon is involved, turning them into a shadowy menace behind numerous other stories as well.  If you are a fan of their earlier appearance(s), I doubt you’ll be disappointed.  If you do know it’s them, be aware it’s not the all-singing, all-dancing Wee Jimmy Krankie Show as the reveal is a last-act thing.

On top of all the other spectacular (and yet focused, plot-driven) stuff going on, this is of course an introduction for new companions.  The Doctor pats the TARDIS and says it’ll be just like old times.  I have no idea how this will affect the dynamic, but they’re interesting and fun, and it doesn’t appear they’ll get in Bernice’s way, so I’m all for it.  Original Sin doesn’t read like a typical introductory story, with the twosome barely meeting the Doctor throughout, but there’s a lot to be said for doing things differently.  Whether or not they were always intended to depart in the TARDIS, they arrive in a rich story you’re likely to read compulsively.  It’s not as dazzlingly unusual as something like Human Nature, but what it does, it does in relentless style.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #50 – The Menagerie by Martin Day

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#10
The Menagerie
By Martin Day

Ah, sweet completeness.  Better late than never, the Missing Adventures have added the Second Doctor to their ranks.  If I can be a box-ticking, list-making nerdlinger for a moment (quiet, you), it’s nice to have got a book in for every Doctor just as this marathon reaches its halfway point.  That’s everyone now.  Ahhh.

Martin Day’s first novel (yes, it’s obvious) does a good job with this Doctor, which isn’t something to take for granted.  He often takes the time to inject a bit of fussiness or irreverence, both integral to Patrick Troughton’s take on the character.  At one point he is contrasted (perhaps too literally) against the First Doctor, as he lacks that immediate sense of authority, though he generally makes up for it later.  There’s a scruffy anti-establishment quality to him that’s just delightful; my favourite bit was the Doctor’s theory on convincing people that you have already paid for your drinks.  When he tries putting this into practice to convince a guard he has paid his fine (with perhaps what he imagines is the authoritative clout of a Jedi mind trick), it goes belly up instantly.  Few Doctors fail quite so charmingly as this one.

Day is also adept and thoughtful when writing Jamie.  Finding himself in a technologically primitive age, Jamie feels in his element for once.  The unnamed city is “like real life” to him, with dull-witted guards reminding him of Redcoats; conversely his wealth of experience with the Doctor allows him to think a few steps ahead.  Another perfectly apt moment is when Jamie accompanies Zoe in a hover vehicle, nodding and agreeing matter-of-factly as she explains things he can’t possibly grasp, and delighting in the responsibility of pressing a button.  That refusal to be outwitted by different technologies, even when he’s just pretending not to be, is one of the reasons the character is so popular.  Doctor Who often (unwittingly?) takes the stance that people from the past are intrinsically thicker than us; it’s something Rose is rightly derided for in The Unquiet Dead, but that’s generally the way it goes, with Jamie being a smart, inquisitive exception.  Leela is another.  (There are no Missing Adventures with Leela.  For shame!)

Zoe is the least impressive of the three, perhaps because putting her in a primitive context doesn’t create the opportunities for her that it does for Jamie.  There are just fewer ways for her to put her brain into action, although she is able to trick a dangerous alien and save a few lives.  Once the story stumbles onto some higher technology, then it’s effectively Zoe Time; her photographic memory makes a return appearance.  Overall this is the colder, more analytical side of Zoe, with her more ebullient side (perhaps best evidenced when she talks a computer to death in The Invasion) a no-show.  You would think The Menagerie could provide some emotional stuff for her, as she finds herself being sold into slavery, but she remains utterly pragmatic about it and circumstances get her out of it anyway.  Besides which, this isn’t a very emotional book.

It’s not a new thing to use sci-fi as an excuse to write a fantasy novel, and that’s effectively what The Mengerie does.  Martin Day creates an interesting setting at least, swirling his primitive (nameless) town in fog and drizzle, adding a few dashes of technology (aka a power plant) and something dangerous underneath (the menagerie of the title); I didn’t have trouble picturing it, but the underlying conflict of technology vs fear of progress never amounts to more than some people wailing doomfully about the evils of science, over and over.  You can be sure they’ll shut up or get over it by the book’s end.  Besides which, finding high technology in an otherwise primitive society is not going to win points for originality.  It’d be a turn up for the books if there wasn’t any.

The story gets off to a perfunctory start, splitting the TARDIS trio up more or less at random when a pub is raided by the “Knights of Kuabris”, technology-fearing rulers of the place.  The Doctor and Jamie both fall into an investigation of the menagerie beneath the town, but there isn’t much driving them to it besides circumstance and vague curiosity.  As for Zoe’s aforementioned slavery, dumb luck strikes again.  She ends up working in a travelling freak show (and not, praise be, as a prostitute) before an attack by a ravening monster forces the survivors back where they started, including her.  There are a few examples of business occurring just to make it all last a bit longer, like a dangerous encounter for Jamie followed by some memory loss.  Why does he forget?  So he can remember it later on, I guess.  The story rumbles on, with some action set-pieces especially near the end, but there’s little wind in its sails.

The book’s greatest strength is the regular characters, and by a considerable distance.  Nowhere else is the studied nuance of the Doctor spending a few moments fumbling through his pockets before finding something useful, or Jamie nodding thoughtfully at some technobabble.  The rest of the cast don’t have an idiosyncrasy between them.  Defrabax is an old wizard with secrets; Cosmae is his impressionable ward; Kaquaan is Cosmae’s would-be girlfriend, and local prostitute; Zaitabor is the leader of the Knights, a ranting fanatic at the centre of the trouble; Himesor, Araboam and Oiquaquil are other Knights; Diseaeda runs a travelling freakshow (and owns Zoe briefly); Reisaz and Raitak are conjoined twins that work there; there’s also a golem-esque homunculus and various Web Planet-esque races living beneath the town, all with equally weird names.  Reading tedious and difficult lines like “I want you to warn the Dugraqs and the Rocarbies about the Mecrim”, I wondered if Day comes up with names by attacking his keyboard at random.  Repeating the names all the time does nothing to breed familiarity, or add colour.  Everyone just seems very fond of reciting them.

As is often the case with first novels, there’s little authorial voice here.  Day’s denizens sound like generic fantasy archetypes, with some unnecessary attention given to the prostitute side of things (with one of the guards giving Kaquaan’s breasts a thorough groping, and numerous others calling her “slut” and suchlike).  It adds determination to the headstrong young woman, but combined with some occasionally broad language, I wondered how much the Virgin editors were bothered that kids read these books.  Certainly this stuff wouldn’t find its way into 1960s Doctor Who.  When the time comes to let his monsters have at one another, Day then falls into the habit of turning the gore up to 11, simply because he can: limbs and viscera fly, yet again pushing the Missing Adventure remit awkwardly to one side.  It’s not as if I want books that are identical to the TV stories, or I wouldn’t bother reading them; I’ve got videos and DVDs for that.  But it stretches disbelief that all the sex and swearwords just happened to occur between episodes.  And why beat around the bush: hitting the Sex And Violence button at all where it wouldn’t ordinarily be hit is schlocky.  At least Dancing The Code made a point of it.

The Menagerie is mostly just indifferent and dull, failing to make its various alien/monster races worth the effort of distinguishing them.  Some have quirks, like one bunch that doesn’t use individual names, or another with an odd speech pattern, but it’s work to add this stuff up.  The plot progresses mostly with a lot of thankless question/answer “dialogue” no matter who’s talking.  It more or less holds together, but by the end it runs the risk of ruining one of the good things about the book: the Doctor’s plan involves murdering a (dangerous) species wholesale, just as Zoe earlier rescued some people by (inadvertently?) sacrificing a harmless animal.  A more seasoned writer might comment on this seemingly befuddled Doctor apparently having a cold heart, but this is all just random action stapled to otherwise pleasant characters.

The Menagerie is fan writing.  Yes, these books all are to an extent, but there’s a difference between recreating familiar things and creating new people, worlds and stories for them, and this book clearly doesn’t have the skill for both.

5/10

NB:  Another blog-week bites the dust.  See you again for 51-55, beginning with Andy Lane’s Original Sin...

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #49 – Human Nature by Paul Cornell

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#38

Human Nature

By Paul Cornell

I know it’s obvious, but my favourite thing about the Seasons Cycle – Paul Cornell’s four loosely themed Doctor Who books – is the way they end, each with more or less the same sentence.  Yes, as sentences go it’s sugary sweet, but I’m a sucker for an ending that makes me smile.  I still revisit the final page of Revelation because, well, look at it:

“‘I don’t know if I can reach the vicarage, I’m so tired…’

   ‘Then sleep here,’ Saul murmured.  ‘I will keep you warm.’

   Trelaw curled up in a pew, pulled over a prayer mat for a pillow, and closed his eyes.

   ‘Goodnight, Saul.’

   ‘Goodnight.  All is quiet.  Sleep with pleasant dreams…’

   And, smiling, the reverend did so.

   Long ago in an English winter.”

The seasons theme was a clever and low-key way of putting these trademarked characters in different lights, testing who they are and what they want.  It worked brilliantly two out of three times; even Cornell didn’t seem sure what he was going for in No Future.  (I’d guess an anniversary piss-up.)  Well, nuts to that.  Human Nature shears away No Future’s clumsy fan-bait and tries to do something meaningful again, and along with Revelation and Love And War it’s utterly accessible as well.  The whole novel seems to occupy the same reassuring, Christmassy space as its familiar final sentence.  No wonder people loved it.

A plot summary might be redundant, since it’s such a popular book that it warranted an equally popular New Who episode.  (To date the only Doctor Who novel to make the leap, which seems incredible.)  Ah well, since we’re here: the Doctor takes a very unusual holiday in 1914, from himself as much as from the universe, and becomes a human called John Smith.  He’s a school teacher, and a very different man who remembers another (fictional) life.  Bernice watches over him, quietly appreciating the rest after recent ordeals; the Doctor’s mind and essence are in a Pod, waiting.  The aliens who made this possible turn up, as they had ulterior motives all along.  They find the Doctor becoming a little too fond of human life.

It’s often the way of New Adventures that the Doctor and co. need to recover from some awful ordeal.  (Which tells you what sort of books we’re dealing with!)  This time, much of the focus is on Bernice losing Guy de Carnac, perhaps to his death.  Sanctuary wasn’t a novel I loved but the ending worked, as did the Doctor and Bernice’s weary yet civilised reaction to it.  (He could take her back to find out if Guy made it, but then she’d know, wouldn’t she?)  This is all good fodder for Cornell, and not for the first time: if you recall, Love And War followed a similar event with Ace being torn away from her new flame, only to put her through it all again with Jan.  Yes, stacking these two next to each other created two reasons for Ace to leave, but to virtually replicate that ending straight away was unfortunate, as it made Nightshade look like a dry run.  No such awkwardness here: Bernice sincerely needs the rest and Cornell lets her have it, even when aliens are rampaging and other things remind her of what she’s lost.  Bernice often pulls the narrative into diary entries, remembering Guy, but she is always moving forward, always her irreverent self until a poignant moment when she screams that no one else will die.  I love inter-novel continuity done right.  When the Doctor (such as he is) needs to remember an unpleasant event, Cornell has plenty of other authors’ work to draw from.  (So it’s hello again, Warlock.)  In the end, he is more comfortable with who he is.

It’s here we find one of the big divergences between the book and the adaptation.  (And okay, a word on the TV adaptation – which for simplicity’s sake I’ll call The Family Of Blood, and which I reviewed here.  I wish I didn’t need to compare the two, as it’s unfair on the book.  The book was first, the book is how it goes.  But I can’t help coming to this the wrong way round, and I won’t be the only one what with the recent History Collection reprint.  The TV episode was on my mind as I read the book.  I think it’s interesting to note what was kept in and what was changed so, as discreetly as possible, I will observe the differences.)  In The Family Of Blood, the plot is serendipitous: the Doctor encounters some aliens and desperately needs to hide from them, so he uses (as a last resort) the Chameleon Arch to become human.  This says something about his effect on other people – touching their lives, unable to be close to them, leaving destruction in his wake – and the New Who Doctor’s tendency to be a force of nature.

In Human Nature, the Doctor is much more deliberate.  He wants to be human for a while.  The aliens in question (the Aubertides) are selling that technology and, in something of a lapse of judgement, the Doctor takes them up on it, but he’d go through with this whether or not they turned out to be bad guys.  (I wonder if the first version of the story, which apparently needed Kate Orman to kick it, left out the bad guys.)  After so many dark times, it’s a way to step aside from himself and see what really makes him the Doctor.  Is he a dark, manipulating force – a bully – or a good guy?  He will remember it all afterwards, because “‘What would be the point otherwise?’”  Much is revealed by Smith and how he acts, most of it good.  But then, befitting the New Adventures Doctor, this is still a form of game-playing, with John Smith as the chess piece.  He may be a part of the Doctor but he’s still being used; despite his very private tears in the TARDIS at the end, or possibly even evidenced by them, it’s worth wondering how much the Doctor has really learned from all this.

Smith himself is very different in the two versions.  In The Family Of Blood he’s a prim, sort-of-nice gentleman who’s more than happy to uphold all school traditions, such as flogging.  He resents the idea that he is the Doctor and his moment of heroism – becoming the Time Lord again – is entirely coerced by Joan Redfern, off-screen.  In Human Nature he’s so like the Doctor that I had to remind myself it isn’t supposed to be a secret.  He comes out with malapropisms, performs magic tricks, keeps his accent.  He’s an altogether sweet man, and when faced with the school tradition of punishment he circumvents it by offering a soft pink slipper instead of a shoe.  He likes to sneak into other teachers’ lessons and challenge – no, he interferes with their teaching methods.  He challenges the schoolboys’ sense of morality during a heated lecture about Boudicca, and though he at one point feeds ammunition to a boy’s Vickers gun, he is soon utterly horrified by it and seeks a more Doctorly way out.  He accepts that the Doctor is real when he’s heard enough, and wants to learn from him.  Then he chooses his fate, whether or not the Doctor really decided it for him, because it will save Joan’s life.  The Doctor and Smith both love deeply but in different ways.  Smith will save Joan, the Doctor would only worry about the world.

Smith is an intriguing spin on the Doctor, essentially the same man but always missing something.  Sometimes literally, like his “perplexed search for a non-existent hat”, or the bit where he “glared at a pair of juggling balls he’d pulled from the case, threw them up in the air, tangled his arms and missed catching them.”  At one point he sees a dangerous event unfold, squirms and says “‘I feel like I should do something.’”  Control and the will to act are missing ingredients; he loves Joan, so he’d rather spend time with her than fight the alien menace.  That’s another thing changed in The Family Of Blood, where 90 minutes is all you’re getting, so the romance is more or less curtailed by the aliens’ arrival, and the tragedy is that it never really got off the ground.  The novel has no such constraint, so it lets them get on with it, lets him have his own priorities for a while, even lets them get engaged.  On a fundamental level, this carves out a bigger difference between Smith and Doctor.

Of course I can’t blame The Family Of Blood for hurrying things up, or even for making John Smith such a comparatively weaselly proposition: I consider the Tenth Doctor the most human Time Lord even without his magic fob watch, and (TV) Smith’s utter refusal to believe in the Doctor, and his fear of disappearing, fit the then-Doctor’s zest for life.  Just look at Tennant’s finale; that was in him all along.  In book form, this whole thing began as a rest for the Doctor – Smith – and he means to enjoy it.  The character has more shades, the romance has more time.

That’s one area where the book trounces the adaptation: Joan.  We know this isn’t going to work out for the same reason the Doctor isn’t going to drop dead of a heart attack or get a permanent job in a shop somewhere, but Joan is an altogether brighter person on the page.  On TV, not so much: she’s prim and austere, she needs more thawing than we’ve time for, and the presence of Martha puts up a wall of contemporary racism which makes it a bit too easy to want this to fail.  In print, an off-colour joke leads Bernice to call her a “wrinkly racist,” and of course she dislikes her on principle because she doesn’t want her designated driver to strand her in 1914, but in time Bernice accepts that the two might be happy together, and she’s right.  Joan is ebullient, passionate and giddy to have found John, and they’re very sweet together.  It’s all the more harrowing not just that this cannot ever work, but that the Doctor – post-Smith – would simply bugger off in the TARDIS without telling her Smith was no more.  Again I wondered if he had learned so very much.  Bernice rightly puts her foot down and makes him tell her.  His matter-of-factness, somewhat patronising, does make you momentarily miss Smith.  Alas, all that’s just something he can’t have, or you wouldn’t have Doctor Who.

Despite the above, Human Nature isn’t a gloomy treatise on what the Doctor is.  All that stuff is sprinkled into the (rather concise) story with wit.  Despite the oncoming misery of war, which a few characters become sadly aware of and which adds to the theme of joining a fight when you’re needed (but y’know, it’s okay to conscientiously object), it’s actually a light and enjoyable read.  Everyone seems to be as witty as Bernice Summerfield – and that’s a dangerous line, which has blurred some Terry Pratchett novels for me so that everyone in them is such a comedian they might as well be one wizard talking to himself.  Human Nature keeps a note of sadness and horror befitting Doctor Who even when it’s fun.  The Aubertides can be cutting and witty, but they still commit horrible murders, and acts that seem normal to them but are outwardly revolting.  Conversely, even when war hangs over them all and we learn specific awful things about their future, it turns out nothing is completely pre-ordained for these characters and there’s always a bit of hope.  This is definitely one of the things I love about Cornell’s better books: they push Doctor Who to dramatic and unhappy places, but they never settle for that or wallow in it.  Like Bernice, they move forward.

And oh, Bernice.  Now, hand on my heart, I do think she’s a little too unflappable in this, although that “No one else dies!” moment does redress it a bit, as does her gradual weakening to the idea of Smith and Joan.  I’m still waiting for the effervescent front to fall away completely just once, but this will do for now.  She’s wonderful, heroic, acid-witty, and if you’re worried that the setup keeps her and the Doctor apart, forget it: she’s Smith’s “niece” and they meet for lunch every day.  I don’t think they’ve ever spent this much time together, and he’s not even him!  So obviously I love this.  From the Doctor’s consideration at the end of Sanctuary, to his utter reliance on her here, we seem to be building proper bridges between them at last.  (Let’s face it, if you can’t count on her creator for that, who can you count on?)

The rest of the cast are pleasantly colourful: bullyish headmaster Rocastle becomes a hero, lunk-headed school captain Hutchinson doesn’t, a polyamorous teacher named Alexander begins as a bit of a wag and ends up having some of the most emotional scenes in the book, and Tim, the-boy-who-steals-the-Doctor’s-brain, gets to live out some Doctorly traits as he discovers his own personality.  This makes more sense than it did on TV, where Thomas Sangster nicked the fob watch because “the time wasn’t right”, except there was no real reason for it and people just kept dying until he returned it.  Here the Doctor intends to experience his holiday, so he can wait.  Tim’s journey, “regenerating” after a cruel prank kills him and also becoming precognitive, leads him to realise he’s like the Doctor in a different way; when the war comes, he joins the Red Cross.  It’s another interesting spin on who the Doctor is.

One area that I do feel The Family Of Blood improved on, or at least came up with another interesting spin on, is the Aubertides.  A family of shape-changers from an otherwise peaceful species, they have dreams of conquest which a Time Lord system will grant them.  And this is perfectly fine for what it is, but on television – where the march of minutes meant they had to trim away everything non-essential – they’re a lot simpler.  There’s only four of them (to the novel’s six), and they mirror a family unit with more creepy exactness.  They also have no specific plan to rule the universe, just a desire to live.  Even in the novel it’s said that they do not live long, but it’s not the sole basis for what they do.  There’s something very beautiful about making that their mission.  They want the Doctor because he lives so long and they don’t, and John Smith – the let’s face it, wimpy version – in a roundabout way wants the same thing.  It’s a wonderfully succinct bit of theme, and it adds a sadness to an otherwise horrifying bunch of bad guys.  But hey, The Family Of Blood also has that dappy bit about the Doctor being like fire, ice, lollipops and jam sandwiches, so y’know, swings and roundabouts.

The books haven’t done anything very interesting for a while now, and things have been getting grim.  It’s a relief to take stock, just as the Doctor does, with a relatively bite-sized plot (with fannish touches like a heat-shield!) and a story that says something.  Once again we’re at a turning point, excitedly looking ahead.  Certainly I am; this is the most (relatively) famous book for a while now, and I’m looking forward to lifting the weight of expectation next time.  I’m still not certain how I rate Human Nature because my head’s buzzing with another version of it and with its own reputation, but it’s obviously something special, and it deserves to be so thought about afterwards.

9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #48 – Dancing The Code by Paul Leonard

Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures
#9
Dancing The Code
By Paul Leonard

Oh cool, Paul Leonard’s back.  His first Missing Adventure gave us a fully rounded alien civilisation; it was about the end of their world and, rather poetically, about death in general.  Venusian Lullaby wasn’t perfect, but it made a hell of an impression.  I’d be lying if I said I had any idea what to expect from him next.

I definitely wouldn’t have guessed “Pertwee-era action movie”, not that there’s anything wrong with that.  Then again, the author has said (over on Terminus Reviews) that he isn’t really a Doctor Who fan, but that he did watch the Pertwee years.  I can well believe it.  (At least the bit about Pertwee.  Writing more than one Doctor Who ought to make you a fan by default.)  Dancing The Code is authentic, even to the point of nostalgia for that particular era.

By now, the Doctor had got his TARDIS working and was losing interest in threats to home and hearth.  UNIT were old and increasingly distant friends, showing little of the militaristic grit we saw in Season Seven; the Brigadier in particular seemed permanently bemused, sadly living up to the Doctor’s complaints about his intelligence.  Jo had been to outer space several months in a row, so naturally she was about to leave the show forever.

There’s an opportunity for growth here, and Leonard doesn’t miss it.  Rather like Venusian Lullaby, which looked at the emotional void left by Susan and how it affected her friends and grandfather, Dancing The Code adds substance to Jo’s impending departure.  It also gives the “UNIT family” a last hoorah, ditching that cuddly befuddlement and making them, or at least their job, considerably more dangerous.  The Brigadier at one point observes that he knows the number for the morgue off by heart.

Kebiria is a (made-up) nation torn apart by civil war, and if that’s not bad enough there are aliens in their midst.  A British journalist sees a horrific, bloated copy of a UNIT soldier as it dies, and summons Mike Yates and co. to investigate.  The aliens fit the legend of Al Harwaz, mysterious beings who will give you what you ask for, which obviously turns out doomier than expected.  Meanwhile, the Doctor has mocked up a prognosticating device that shows (with complete accuracy) the Brigadier shooting him and Jo dead.  He sees only one way out of this: stay the heck away from Jo and the Brigadier.  He zips off in the TARDIS until he’s needed, and Jo goes to Kebiria.

She’s immediately arrested for no particular reason.  No problem for Jo, whose escapology skills exist for just such an occasion.  Her enthusiasm for tricking her captors and bopping them over the head looks positively insane to Catriona, her fellow captive (the journalist), but moments later when things have escalated and people are dead, those antics look unbelievable and childlike.  Companions rarely see such a brutal shift in their perspective; it’s almost cruel.

Not for the first time, we have a Doctor Who book that uses violence in ways you’d never see on television.  Here, though, that escalation is part of the story.  Jo is well used to marauding aliens, blobby things with tentacles and ray guns.  She’s seen people die, but there was always something unreal about it.  (Well, it’s Doctor Who!)  In Dancing The Code Jo sees people murdering people, the horrible consequences of war, and she begins to feel that she could do more to help.  That by no means is a clear transition to The Green Death, where an interest in the environment and a romantic development will push her away for good, but it adds to that process.  It’s a relief to provide an actual reason for gratuitous violence in a family show, besides the obvious lack of a watershed and novel-writing fandom’s itchy trigger finger.

And the violence isn’t celebrated – there’s a theme of guilt about it.  Jo witnesses violence and horror, she feels complicit, even ignorant for having to be woken up like this.  By the end of the book, when it’s possible she might be an alien copy, she’s quick to suggest Mike Yates should put her out of her misery.  Catriona is the one who shoots a guard (or guards?) dead, and things only get worse for her until – trapped in the alien ship and mutated almost beyond recognition – she decides it is “time to pay”, and gives her life to save Jo.  Benari, Prime Minister of Kebiria, has committed atrocities not limited to the deaths of children, and used the aliens for his own ends, so he suffers a pretty brutal execution.  His executioner, Vincent, enjoys it a little too much, so he dies too later on.  Meanwhile the Brigadier is haunted by the idea that he will kill his friends; in some wonderful character writing, Leonard has him lock his gun away and bin the key, hoping it will at least delay him long enough to come to his senses.  (Of course the Brigadier is innocent, so no comeuppance is needed.)

As for the aliens, the improbably-named Xarax, they’re surprisingly innocent.  More like “tools” than living things, they can imitate anything and follow instructions, only they can’t work out pernickety things like which humans they should kill and which they shouldn’t.  Humans, this book seems to say, are the real problem here.

Where is the Doctor in all this?  Well, even apart from his mysterious TARDIS jaunt (which could be a novel in itself), he’s a little on the side-lines.  He’s still very Pertwee in this, with a love of gadgets, technobabble and vehicles; the Brigadier has to endure the passenger seat not just on the road with him, but in a loop-de-looping jet-plane!  The Doctor argues for a non-military solution to the Xarax, and naturally fails because humans are the worst.  He’s integral to the plot, stumbling on the solution in the closing chapters (as always), and yet he doesn’t seem to be in it very much.  This serendipitously fits with what Jo is going through.  (In The Green Death her interests are already diverging from the Doctor’s, as if they’ve been spending time apart.)  It’s a well-written Doctor, though I’m not 100% sure about his plan to avoid his and Jo’s deaths by simply avoiding the future.  Part of me thinks he’d be morally and intellectually outraged by that; another part thinks “get away in the TARDIS” is about as Pertwee as it gets.

Despite all the above, Dancing The Code isn’t exactly a character study.  The focus is on action, especially towards the end as Kebiria is torn apart by Xarax and doubles of Jo and the Doctor kill almost comical numbers of UNIT soldiers at home.  It’s hardly a chore to read, with Leonard commanding a decent pace and keeping the chapters nice and short.  (I know I complain about short sections, but that’s different.  These chapter breaks give a lovely sense of progress, rather than a frequent disorientating change of scenery.)  A lot of the novel rests on the Xarax, however, and in a surprising twist Leonard doesn’t develop them in great detail.

Apart from their general insectoid nuttiness, they’re more like the Sou(ou)shi than the Venusians, i.e. a strangely blank force that feeds on your worst impulses.  Also like the Sou(ou)shi, they’re hard to picture*, interchangeable and just a bit dull.  (*Yes, there’s a “helicopter” one on the front cover, looking so much like a giant scorpion and with such nearly-invisible propellers that I kept wondering why people kept mistaking them for helicopters.  But they’re not wholly representative, if I understood correctly; the rest seem mostly to be blobby, and have lots of mandibles?)  They also raised a couple of questions which I didn’t spot the answers to: I never got how they are able to copy people they’ve never met (such as the long-suffering Sergeant Osgood); I never figured out what “dancing the code” was actually in aid of; and I wasn’t sure what happened to Jo at the end.  One minute she seemed pretty sure she was a copy of herself, bleeding what appears to be Xarax material and not human blood, but presumably she isn’t?  Apart from the nitpicks (which I’m sure are just me missing a bit – do let me know!), there is something a little too familiar and Pertwee era-ish about alien copies taking over; once it’s apparent that’s where the plot is going, my enthusiasm sunk a bit.

The writing is reassuringly thoughtful, though it becomes mostly a catalogue of action as it goes along.  There’s a neat use of inner monologues, bursting into the prose Stephen-King-style at first just for Catriona, and eventually for others including Jo.  It ends on a bravely incomplete yet satisfying note, with the Doctor suggesting they leave the Kebirians to sort out their own mess, and Jo saying “We’ve got to do something.”  Jo is growing up; not coincidentally, this puts a fork in the road between her and the Doctor.

Reading this back, I’ve talked myself around a bit.  I didn’t really love Dancing The Code as I read it; there was much to enjoy about it, but the plot isn’t deep or original.  It’s mostly there to prop up some interesting themes, and the end result looks at the Pertwee era in ways both typical and strangely offbeat.  It’s honestly a struggle to remember some of the story beats now it’s over, but despite everything it leaves a meaningful impression.  That’s fast becoming Paul Leonard’s trademark.

7/10