Gareth Rafferty's Blog, page 17

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

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#43Head GamesBy 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 gooddreams, 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 Dwarfepisode, 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, nota 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#13Invasion Of The Cat-PeopleBy 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 Whoannuals.  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 goodship 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

I Don't Want To Glow

Doctor Who
Twice Upon A Time
2017 Christmas Special

Here we are again, huh?  Another era over.  And just like last time, there doesn’t seem to be anything left to say about it or to cap off.  Steven Moffat seemed ready to follow Matt Smith out the door when he wrote The Time Of The Doctor, filling it with references and sort-of-but-not-really tying up loose ends, but the fiftieth anniversary Special went better than expected and he got a second wind hiring Peter Capaldi to follow Smith.  At that point, things seemed like they might get interesting again.
Day 1, practicing his David Bradley.And they... sort of did?  The Twelfth Doctor (also the Thirteenth, Fourteenth or First Mk II, cheers Steven) was abrasive, rude and difficult.  He consequently spent Series Eight wondering if he really was a good man after all.  When it turned out this was in fact still Doctor Who, so duh-on-a-stick the Doctor is still a goodie (despite inexplicably being a prick now), things went sharply the other way: he got a hoodie, a guitar and (nyurgh) sonic sunglasses.  A softer, like totally rad Twelfth Doctor was born, one who could dazzle a room and change people’s minds with Youtube-worthy speeches.  It wasn’t subtle, and it made the whole Year Of The Douchebag seem curiously pointless, but Capaldi was still too good to pass up.  He waded through imperfect scripts and usually got something good out of them.  (And he finally got a hands-down classic episode, though for me it remains his only one.)
Sure enough, the scripts stayed largely flimflam and balls.  Did anyone think recasting the lead would fix that?  We still had a showrunner obsessed with cool-sounding, ultimately dead-end arcs, a Mary Sue companion who held ridiculous sway over the Doctor and a permanent reservation for Mark Gatiss, no questions asked.  Moffat continued to put his mucky stamp on the show’s history at every opportunity, ask silly questions where we can guess the answers, and the stakes only seemed to get smaller.  Series 10 refreshed some of these elements, particularly with a new companion who was recognisably from Earth, but other shortcomings remained the same.  It wasn’t much of an era for Capaldi (who still seems like the new guy to me), and now he’s off, which just seems like the thing you do after three series rather than a natural progression for him.  (Not that he has been here three years; let’s not forget 2016, The Year Of One Episode.)  He’d have already gone in The Doctor Falls if we didn’t need a Christmas Special, so here we are again, putting his golden jazz hands on hold for one more hour.  As it happens, “on hold for one more hour” is a fairly accurate synopsis for Twice Upon A Time.
The Doctor doesn’t want to regenerate.  “Ah,” I hear you say, “this again.”  For the Tenth Doctor famously Didn’t Want To Go, which seemed overly dramatic at first but was actually in character for him.  (Even that time he was a different species.)  It’s a fear of death, and we can all relate.  But that kind of psychological scaffolding isn’t in place this time.  The Twelfth Doctor never seemed like he had an issue with change (ahem, hoodies), if anything he’s quite pragmatic and unsentimental, so he’s probably quite likely to just get on with the switch.  Alas, it’s not just a new Doctor he’s got a problem with, it’s continuing to live at all.  Eh?  He wants to die?!  Not so relatable.  There’s nothing wrong with him making a principled stand, but it would be nice if they’d set it up first.  Transparently the only reason he’s stamping his foot now is that we need to squeeze another episode out of him first.
Speaking of transparent: the Testimony.
Delivering the best pain relief on New Earth!To help said foot-stamping along we have a juicy parallel: the First Doctor himself, sort of, pottering around the South Pole and also refusing to regenerate.  This doesn’t fit what we know about him – our Doctor even points that out! – but I can see how having another Doctor suffer the same crisis might give it some credence.  It’s cheating, but what else is he going to do?  It’s also somewhat redundant as we knowboth of them are going to regenerate, but it could be compelling to watch them come to terms with it.  However, there’s bonus redundancy: the First Doctor is played by David Bradley, who dramatized William Hartnell’s exit from the show in An Adventure In Space And Time.  Hartnell, too, didn’t want to go.  (Thanks to Mark Gatiss’s mawkish and revisionist script, he even said David Tennant’s final line to ram it home.)  In other words, you’ve seen David Bradley go through these motions – and more affectingly so, as the stakes made more sense for the actor than they do for the character.  (The Doctor’s a Time Lord, and while regeneration must be scary as hell, especially the first time, a figurative gun to his head is not obviously more appealing.  And that’s what not going through with it means.)
If peculiar characterisation of the First Doctor is going to be an issue for you, locate your nearest exit.  Twice Upon A Time has some odd ideas about William Hartnell’s time on the show, knotting together his real life irritability with certain red flag moments like threatening Susan with a “jolly good smacked bottom” to create an embarrassing, frequently non-PC stereotype.  This Doctor is so out of time – chuckling at remarks about women being “made of glass”, casually explaining that Polly is there to clean the TARDIS – that Capaldi-Doc keeps having to apologise for him.  As with his shared refusal to regenerate giving us a convenient “this totally makes sense you guys” comparison, it’s a lazy straw man to show how far we’ve come, and it’s astonishingly unearned.
In the first place, Hartnell wasn’t like this: he could be equal-opportunities blunt with people, but some of that was the actor rather than the character, and any of this sexist rubbish would have rightly earned him a black eye from Barbara or an intervention from Verity Lambert.  More importantly, if any era of the show has given us sexism and a juvenile obsession with stereotypes, it’s Steven Moffat’s.  We’ve had the Eleventh Doctor lusting after Clara’s arse, Amy wanting to shag her duplicate, River Song highlighting The Differences Between Men And Women – Am I Right, Girls? and a general sitcom-esque objectification of females.  (No, making them magically better-than-men is not a compliment.)  It’s the reason I’m very grateful Moffat isn’t the guy writing the first female Doctor, as it would likely be about as empowering as Roy Chubby Brown.  Considering Bradley-Doc is largely here for the fan-service, it’s an utterly bizarre move to then insult him, especially for things either misunderstood or taken out of context.  (The “smacked bottom” remark came right before his granddaughter left the show; infantilising her probably came out of desperation to keep her.)
"You'll not mind me saying this, since lots of my friends are black..."As for Bradley, his obvious talents and accolades notwithstanding, I wasn’t convinced by him as Hartnell in the docudrama and I’m still not.  His cadence is quite different, he’s breathless and vaguely amiable, the loveable waspishness is absent; he holds onto his lapels as if his life depended on it, which ends up looking a bit desperate, like Churchill always having a cigar in his gob.  Between him being mischaracterised and Capaldi having his unearned end-of-life crisis, the whole thing has roughly as much depth as Time Crash.  We get the same level of gags with a Classic Doctor mocking new Who tropes, such as the screwdriver, the sunglasses and Capaldi’s rock star grandstanding; Bradley is right to mock them, but it’s no good just serving up your own shortcomings if you’re not able to rise above them.  All it does is make Capaldi look like a collection of stupid habits.
The entire episode can’t just be a refusal to regenerate followed by a shrug and an “Oh well, I guess I’ll regenerate then”, particularly as it’s instantly obvious to Capaldi that Bradley snuffing it would erase him anyway.  Sure enough, there’s no real discussion to be had on the subject: they admit they’re a bit scared, cheer up and then it’s time to go.  So time goes a bit wonky, and Mark Gatiss arrives as an unintentionally Hitler-esque First World War soldier, who is also about to die.  He’s been taken out of time, or rather some aliens are trying to put him backin his proper time because of the Doctors not dying, possibly – it’s not very clear what he’s doing in the South Pole, but the Testimony are keen to get things moving deathwards.  They are a futuristic database who come to all of us when we die, for reasons the Doctor immediately assumes to be sinister.  He is keen to keep the Captain alive, which provides a sort of parallel to his own situation.  I’m not sure it’s needed with Bradley having literally the same crisis right next to him, but let’s face it, it’s a gig for Gatiss.  He’s rather good here, although the repeated “I’m not really following all this” gag doesn’t appreciate in value.  The notably nameless character does end up in fanwank territory, inevitably, retconning the Doctor’s relationship with one old friend as something he always intended; like all of Moffat’s retcons, it doesn’t actually fit and you’ll instantly file it under “Nope”, but hey, it’s his last episode!
Also here: Bill.  Sort of.  Because this is Moffat Who and nobody ever dies, Bill already survived her own demise in The Doctor Falls, flying into space with Heather.  This isn’t the same Bill – it’s a collection of memories created by the Testimony, which she argues is exactly the same as Bill anyway.  (There’s a bigger discussion to be had there, which we of course skip.)  Much like Clara hanging around with Smith before he regenerated, Bill is a latecomer and doesn’t have that strong a bond with the Doctor, and there’s not much left to say besides her telling him to regenerate, and also having some awkward downtime with Bradley-Doc.  In some of Pearl Mackie’s most forced dialogue, she quizzes the First Doctor on why he left Gallifrey and what he was running to, which Bradley/Moffat promptly points out is a brilliant question and not just a nothingy way to ask the same thing again.  Yes, we get another examination of the Doctor’s history, followed by another summary of how wonderful and cuddly and gumdrops he really is.  (Provided you ignore all the sexist comments.)  It made me realise just how much time Moffat has spent revising and repeating the basic tenets of the show and obsessively trying to own them, and not for the first time, it made me clock-watch.
"I left Gallifrey, of course, to get a bit of peace and quiet!  Women, you see.Also they can't drive."Bill also restores the Doctor’s memory of Clara, i.e. gets Jenna Coleman in for a cameo, which is also a bit like Smith’s exit – sorry Clara, Amy’s calling!  This chucks away whatever lingering relevance Hell Bent might have had, with its confused amnesia resolution, but it’s not the first time Moffat’s made a big stink about something, got bored with it and then binned it altogether.  For example, he seems to have forgotten that Clara erased the Doctor’s memory, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for her to complain about it here.
As the episode draws to a close, it’s awkwardly clear there’s been almost no plot.  The Testimony are apparently a nice enough bunch, so there’s exactly no danger here: they want to store memories so we don’t truly lose people, i.e. they do exactly what Gallifreyans already do with the Matrix, which the Doctor has no problem with.  (It also recalls the “Heaven” stuff from Series Eight, probably unintentionally.)  The Doctor needs to look them up first on “the biggest database in the universe” for some reason, which shockingly-not-shockingly involves the Daleks, and gives him a weird excuse to go and see Rusty from Into The Dalek.  Then it’s back to the war, somehow skipping forward in time to the Christmas Armistice in order to save the Captain’s life, although time was frozen when they left so how does that work?  Both Doctors agree it’s time to cark it, and the First Doctor successfully pilots his TARDIS for the second time this episode, after reminding us it’s something he can’t do.  Because Christmas.  Capaldi-Doc talks to not-Bill and not-Nardole who implore him to regenerate, so he does.  While this whole journey could be seen as a fourth-wall bothering look at a TV show that must go on and on like no other, in that arena it’s scuppered by Heaven Sent, which said all of that already.
But you can hardly blame Moffat for having nothing left to say.  This episode, after all, is stalling.  With no great threat to kill the Doctor (it happened in The Doctor Falls, and frankly it was disappointing), this is the over-extended farewell tour from The End Of Time, stretched to a whole episode.  You’re here for the regeneration scene.  Finally, it comes, and it’s just as noticeably out of puff as the rest of it, not helped by treating regeneration as something you can virtually ignore, save for one scene where Capaldi gets a slight cramp.  When it comes to the famous last words, Moffat already wrote a beautiful speech about regeneration in Matt’s (otherwise pretty wretched) send-off: all about looking at your past and accepting that was all you, but it isn’t you now, it was poignant and apt, and troubled the fourth wall only a little.  What else is there to say, especially with no one to say it to?  So Capaldi, a Doctor now known mostly for speeches and grandly pointing at things, reels off an overcooked confection of Terrance Dicks, Bertrand Russell and Capaldi’s own remarks at a convention, which merrily puts a fist through the fourth wall.  (Granted, “only children can hear my name” probably sounded great in front of adoring fans, but it’s doolally coming from the Doctor, who is not prone to self-mythologizing.  It also sidesteps that River knows his name, although if we can now go forward and pretend she didn’t happen, I’m all for it.)
First drafts included: "Fandabbydozy!""Eh bah gum, I got new eyebrows I 'ave!""They're pickin' us off, one by one!"Push finally comes to shove and we’re reminded how far Peter Capaldi has come from the unpleasant guy of Series Eight.  Or possibly we’re just ignoring it; they didn’t have to write him that way in the first place, and they just twisted him 180 degrees afterwards.  His era was consequently all over the place.  But he’s a ferociously good actor, and while the mean stuff was a bad fit for the Doctor, those pricklier moments were always interesting to watch.  (Look at Dark Water when he coldly ignores Clara’s threats, or Face The Raven when he brutally snaps at Ashildr, or any time he smiles, looking like a dinosaur on the hunt.)  Capaldi has always been better than the material, sometimes sailing above it (“I am the Doctor and this is my spoon”), but Twice Upon A Time doesn’t give him enough to deliver anything heart-rending.  A vague moral wobble complete with standard issue terrible jokes (“You’re the very first Dalek to get naked for me”) and a handful of good ones (“I assumed I’d get… younger.”  “I am younger!”), it’s as empty and twee as its title.  So long, Angry Eyebrows.  We’ll always have Heaven Sent.  And toodle-oo, Moffat.  Cheers for the good episodes.
Over to you, Chris and Jodie, for the one bit of the episode people will be talking about for the next year.  What of the new guy?  (Gal.  Person.  The new Doctor, right, there we are.)  Jodie Whittaker makes a likeably goony face on seeing her reflection, which some have taken to point us in a David Tennant direction, but her first words are about as inspiring as Capaldi’s last: “Oh, brilliant!”  (Hey, at least we’re spared the “I’ve-got-new-[blank]” gag, but this is still barely above a pleased grunt.)  The scene itself is such a repeat you could call it a parody: the TARDIS crashes again, this time with the Doctor falling out of it.  So that’s every New Who regeneration, plus the opening of The Eleventh Hour, with less grip?  Would it be possible, once in a while, for something else to happen during a regeneration?  But let’s leave the fears of unoriginality to Series 11, with the appropriate ducking and covering that entails.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #55 – Decalog 2: Lost Property edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker

Doctor Who: Decalog 2: Lost Property
Edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker

It’s that time again!  Collecting a gaggle of authors, some you’ll know from the New and Missing Adventures, others who for whatever reason only show up for the short stories, Decalog 2: Lost Property differs from its predecessor in one obvious way: there’s no linking story.  And hooray, since the first Decalog had an almighty task stringing tales together with another one on top, only to end up adding useless links between them.  This time, it’s just a theme of the Doctor’s home.  That seems like a good enough excuse to collect a bunch of short stories, and it could lead to some interesting places.  Such as…

*
Vortex Of Fear by Gareth Roberts

As with the first Decalog, we begin with the Second Doctor.  Gareth Roberts delivers a surprisingly dark vignette about a hotel suspended in the time vortex, where you can exist just long enough to evade certain tax laws.  The TARDIS bumps into it and the Doctor and co. get out to investigate, only to find a complicated paradox playing out ad infinitum.  It doesn’t exactly dwell on the subject of home; a reference to the vortex being where the Doctor belongs is sufficiently throwaway that it could have been added later.
This works really well as a short piece, as the premise is something that is naturally going to repeat itself and so probably shouldn’t outstay its welcome.  Roberts has an immediate handle on the characters, from the Doctor’s scruffy busy-bodying to Jamie’s keenness not to be shown up.  Zoe is developed nicely, with her photographic memory and logical mind troubled by the shifting world they find themselves in.  When the Doctor determines there’s no real hope for these people as it’s a closed, deteriorating loop, he just leaves them to it.  As a commentary on this seemingly bewildered Doctor’s darker side, it’s a lot more effective than The Menagerie, where he just causes deaths through befuddlement; it’s still surprisingly callous, even if he is affronted at people mucking about with the time vortex, or by the general air of decadence pervading the hotel.  (Darker still, Zoe figures out that since this is a paradox loop a version of them will always be there.  Yikes.)  For good measure, the nefarious sniping between the guests is written with colour and bile, the characterisation of the main trio is enjoyably apt, and Roberts gets in a jolly good Pat-and-Frazer double entendre at the start.
*
The Crimson Dawn by Tim Robins

Well you can’t fault his ambition.  This has a fight for Ice Warrior rights on Mars, a sinister agenda to undermine it, a traitor, a monstrous lab-grown figurehead whose entire life has been a delusion based on The War Of The Worlds, a huge revelation about Ice Warrior history/a plot resolution bundled onto the last page and heaps of satire on commercialism.  (Also, rather originally, barely any Ice Warriors.)  I’ll bet this was an idea for a full novel; you could certainly stagger it out a bit.  All of which happened the last time we saw Tim Robins.  Just commission the dude and be done with it.
Thanks to the time constraint, it’s all a bit frantic and farcical – sometimes deliberately, as the Doctor and K9 zoom away from armed guards, the robot dog blasting away at them as he reverses at full speed.  The action is in technicolour, and the tone (looking at you, War Of The Worlds bit) rather goofy.  For something allegedly out of Season 14 or 15, it’s a bit too silly.  I wonder if Robins was really thinking of the Douglas Adams era: “My arms!  My legs!  My everything!”  And speaking of eras, there are probably too many continuity references; big fans of Mire Beasts will give a little cheer.  All two of them.
But never mind all that: it’s only ruddy Leela!  In what is, for all I know, her only appearance in a Virgin book, she displays all the obvious violence and lack of civilisation you’d expect, but little of the questing intelligence that makes her really special.  I suspect we needed a Leela renaissance when Big Finish came along, if she was once looked down on by fandom.  That might explain her absence from these books; there’s a note of parody about her, of “Can you believe this was once the companion?!”  And K9, who showed up considerably after Leela, is referred to as the Doctor’s best friend!
The satire is a little heavy-handed, as we tour the commercialised regions of Mars including a Mars Bar (oof!), a dessert called an Achocalypse Now, and the sad revelation that Peladon has undergone a financial crisis that “forced the Pels to turn their monarchy into a toiletry franchise”.  That stuff’s not a million miles from the quirks of Transit, so there’s a precedent, but Robins still must have been in an odd mood when he wrote this.  Oh, and the Doctor’s “home” in this is a flying houseboat.  Not so much exploring a theme there as picking a noun out of a hat.  (It’s all about the Martians’ home, I suppose, but if so doesn’t that get the theme slightly wrong?)  Altogether it’s an odd, madcap jumble.
*
Where The Heart Is by Andy Lane

Few Doctors are as concerned with their home as the Third, who would hate to admit he belonged on Earth.  Andy Lane attacks this sideways, never outright saying the Doctor belongs here but focusing on the home of the UNIT Family instead, which he helped build and which, of course, belongs to him.  It also plugs a continuity gap that has never occurred to me: how UNIT suddenly ended up with a country house for its headquarters.  But don’t worry about it disappearing into fanwank, despite the plethora of references.
Lane puts the Brigadier in a tight spot when UNIT’s funding dries up and the government threatens to hand the whole thing over to the Marines.  The Doctor and Jo have captured a flamboyant alien masquerading as a doctor (draw your own inference!), and despite its murderous crimes it may be able to help.  The writing is sublimely character-based, particularly as the Brigadier stares an uncertain future in the face and the Doctor (in a testy mood) tries to get one over on him by capturing the alien as easily as possible.  Both characters are fleshed out more convincingly in 20 pages than The Ghosts Of N-Space managed in an entire novel.  Jo’s determination and shortcomings are also brought spiritedly to life.
This is short, sweet and does a clever job with the theme.  A highlight.
*
The Trials Of Tara by Paul Cornell

“I want to do a sequel to The Androids Of Tara,” said Paul Cornell at one time, presumably.  “In iambic pentameter.  Guest starring the Kandyman.”  Well if you’re not hooked already, what else can I say?
Mind you, I can barely tell iambic pentameter from balsamic vinegar, and I have a naturally sulky dislike for all things Shakespeare, so when I saw that The Trials Of Tara really was going to be like that for all of its fifty pages I groaned in horror.  But I soon forgot any objections as Paul Cornell indulged in Shakespeare references even I get, as well as some delightfully nerdy in-jokes about Holmesian double-acts, a jaunty plot that doesn’t just repeat the original story and – of course – Bernice Summerfield absolutely knocking it out of the park.  One moment where she realises she’s cocked up her delivery and it completely implodes in a single stanza made me hoot.  That, and the Kandyman frustratedly brushing off a bewitched lover.
It’s one of those where you could spend so long listing fun little moments, you just end up reading the thing out.  In summary, it’s easily as demented as it sounds.   Despite its poetic leanings it feels like an outlet for Paul Cornell’s love of panto – bawdy jokes and all – and that’s no bad thing if you’re in the right mood.  It zooms along, every bit as sugary as the Kandyman and just as brilliantly odd.
*
Housewarming by David A. McIntee

Meh.  Housewarming ought to drum up a bit of atmosphere at least, being set in an apparently haunted house over a short time.  David A. McIntee drops in as many gnarly adjectives as he can find, as ever, but he makes the odd decision to overpopulate it and frequently chop between his characters.  It’s consequently difficult to build anything up and none of the guest characters stand out.
Sarah and K9 are a welcome addition to the book world – I’m not sure I needed a sequel to K9 & Company, or K9 & Company for that matter, but you could at least improve on it.  Alas, it stars Mike Yates.  Has he ever been very interesting?   They’re all reasonably characterised, apart from a slightly too excited Pertwee-ish sword-fight that frantically tries to liven things up at the end.  It nevertheless finishes with a damp squib and makes the villain (spoilers) look a bit small potatoes, although that’s not a new experience for them.  Of ghostly terror, there is none.
The plot’s small and simple and it holds together, but while I really ought to go “Ooh!” at the surprise reveal, it’s not enough of a surprise to warrant it.
*
The Nine-Day Queen by Matthew Jones

I only know Matthew Jones from his New Who story The Impossible Planet, but it’s an open secret that Russell T Davies wrote most of the finished product, so I guess this is a first.  Based on The Nine-Day Queen he’s got a knack for characters, and the ending is something else, but overall it falls into some familiar traps.
First, this is a bigger story than just 30 pages: an important first scene aboard the TARDIS is summarised, and months fly by like turned pages.  The pace is absolutely crazy for a Hartnell story in particular, with things like the reader’s knowledge of history being expediently assumed.  Second, following on from that, this type of story – a historical period beset by a special effects-y alien influence – is quite unlike the Hartnell era.  You’d never have got this particular kind of sci-fi/history mash up, the more roundabout Time Meddler notwithstanding.
Still, Jones makes it sound just about right.  The destructive Vrij is affecting history, which could mean Jane Grey lives longer than history allows, but will spell disaster for the future; this leads to some very traditional worrying about what all that means.  (Then again, the idea that it canhappen goes against what that era said and even underlined – that it cannot happen!)  Barbara’s knowledge and concern shine through, and the Doctor’s complicated and irascible nature are ultimately betrayed by his sympathy for Jane, all of which rings true.  (See Cameca and the brooch.)  Ian imitates the Doctor in a fun scene, winning over a couple of guards with sheer confidence, though admittedly he doesn’t do a lot else.  And the unseen TARDIS bit might sound completely batty – Barbara losing her mind and strangling Ian – but it’s something we’ve more or less seen in The Edge Of Destruction.  (As for the rather odd bit where the Doctor insists CPR might do him fatal harm, uh, I guess we didn’t know one way or the other back then?)
There are numerous good bits, but the story is at its best on the final page when (spoiler) the Doctor helps Jane achieve some dignity in death.  That’s a heart and a darkness you’d expect from McCoy, which effortlessly works for Hartnell.  On the flip side, apart from another throwaway use of the theme, i.e. the Doctor owned a house once (gee, really pushing the boat out!), there’s that frenzied short-story-in-name-only approach.  This is possibly best evidenced at the start, in the by-line beneath the epigraph: Barbara Chesterton.
*
Lonely Days by Daniel Blythe

This one at least feels like a short story, as it has a much smaller focus.   The TARDIS drops in on an asteroid/planet the Doctor owns (Daniel Blythe interchanges the two words – annoying!), where it finds a lonely worker going slightly mad, and a planet (let’s stick with that) undergoing changes.  There’s also a hint of a ghost story to do with the hologram of a woman he (Sebastian) once knew.
The writing is at its best when Sebastian is pottering about on his little world, thinking he’s seeing things.  As the plot progresses his moods and actions get weirder, all of which is somewhat nullified when it turns out there’s just been a breakdown in communication.  Still, you can believe it wouldn’t take much to push this man to randomly pull a gun on strangers.
The regulars are more problematic.   Nyssa is mostly fine, apart from an odd bit where she seems eager to mess with time in order to test the laws of gambling.  (?)  The Fifth Doctor is way off.  Somewhat irreverent, at one point apologising individually to some plants, namedropping the death of Adric just to make a trivial point and coming out with general bursts of eccentricity, this just isn’t him.  (Although I could forgive Blythe for wanting to liven him up a bit.)  The whole concept of him owning a planet is rather bizarre, but then Craig Hinton wrote a novel about him owning a restaurant, which made about as much sense.
Latterly there’s an attempt to underscore it all with Nyssa’s loneliness after her father’s death, but that seems like an afterthought.  Despite that and a melancholy ending where two lonely souls learn to co-exist, it’s a bit of a non-event.
*
People Of The Trees by Pam Baddeley

Well look at that – Bonus Leela!  Newcomer Pam Baddeley is another one taking the “home” theme literally, as the Doctor revisits some land he once bought (in order to protect the indigenous people) which is under threat again.  The theft of ancient statues is putting the “People” in danger, but the Doctor will soon need to barter the remaining statue for Leela’s life.
The idea of a civilisation that revolves completely around acquiring and protecting land is a good one for the theme, and it adds an unusual motive to the Dascarians, who don’t give a fig about the tree-dwelling primitives they’re endangering.  The plot is the right sort of size and the writing is quietly clever, adapting equally well to the People and the Dascarians.  The Fourth Doctor is in a more pensive, respectful mood than his earlier story, and Leela... well, I’m still not convinced the writers of the time knew what to do with her other than act like an overbearing bodyguard with a pocket full of Janis thorns, but she’s less a figure of fun here, and she’s in good company with the trusting tree folk.
It’s not spectacular, but I liked it well enough.
*
Timeshare by Vanessa Bishop

Over at Big Finish, the Sixth Doctor didn’t so much evolve as hire a drastic new PR guy.  “Old Sixie” is the cuddly uncle of Doctors, his Peri-strangling days buried beneath wistful monologues and Evelyn’s chocolate cakes.  If you’ve got used to all that, Timeshare might be a bit bracing.  This is original, unsweetened Doctor Six; about as gentle as a lorry reversing in the middle of Swan Lake.
Discovering a mysterious set of coordinates and refusing to believe Peri has read them correctly, the TARDIS arrives by a timeshare flat – only it’s a time-travelling arrangement outlawed by the Time Lords.  It begins to malfunction, in a way weirdly reminiscent of the earlier Homecoming, due to the Doctor putting too much money in the meter.  It’s a bit of a farce, which somewhat suits this Doctor’s blustery nature.
Even so, there are a few issues with this.  The Sixth Doctor giving both barrels at Peri is an acquired taste – you begin to wonder what she’s getting out of it – and the two of them can get annoying.  The comedy is a little much, particularly when another Time Lord appears with a small collection of random idiosyncrasies, just to dole out some exposition.  Despite generous amounts of effort, I never fully understood how the timeshare worked.  And the story’s a little long, especially when time “echoes” start to repeat and repeat.
But the writing occasionally suggests that Peri does find her companion endearing, and his flaws – such as trying a little too hard to catch his own reflection – do ring true to the era.  It’s probably a good idea for a story, unknowingly mixing Vortex Of Fear with Homecoming, but it could maybe have been shorter and clearer.  It’s all about a fun getaway being dragged out for too long and then becoming a mess, and well, now that you mention it...
*
Question Mark Pyjamas by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

If you made it all the way through the last nine stories thinking “This is all well and good, but what about the House on Allen Road?”, you’re in luck.  In a surprising and canny move, that’s the “home” to round off this collection.   Back we go to another time, when it was the Doctor, Benny and Ace.  (I get a kick out of that being in the past, as ripe for a revisit as any old Doctor.)  They find the Doctor’s residence on an asteroid, in a “Heritage Centre” of stolen homes that strangely mirrors the book’s overall theme.  That’s nice work.
Quite soon the Doctor and co. are unwilling exhibits, living out a strange domestic life in “Allen Road” with Bernice and Ace as his wife and daughter.  They plot an escape and it plays out somewhat amusingly, with perhaps a few too many references sprinkled on top, not all relevant.
It’s fun to be nostalgic about the New Adventures, and sure enough Ace takes a moment to remember some of the upsetting things that have happened to her, including helpfully placing this after No Future.   (PS: did you know she has mummy issues?)   That’s pretty much all it sets out to do, but the humour is winningly strange – Russell T Davies would love the bit about “We only had the atmosphere fitted a few days ago” – and there’s a lovely observation that aboard the TARDIS, every morning feels like a lie-in
My only real gripe is almost an achievement: could Robert Perry and Mike Tucker be the first writers not to get the appeal of Bernice Summerfield?   She likes archaeology and wine, but only in a dry, tick-things-off-a-list way.  Her effervescent wit, the thing that makes her jump off the page, just isn’t happening for once.  It’s hardly a new experience for Bernice to get nothing to do, especially with Ace around, but the contrast has never been quite so black and white.
Apart from that it’s a colourful trip to the recent past, and a nice send off for Decalog 2.
*
My main gripes about Decalog were writers not knowing a short story from a novel summary, and the awkward linking theme.  Decalog 2 still has lapses on the first front; I kind of wish they’d get Tim Robins to do something full length just to see if it helps.  But these stories are mostly well suited to the quicker pace, and some – Trials in particular – really make it count.  As for the theme, while there’s nothing as unwieldy as a running plot, it’s a little uncanny how many writers took it literally or just tossed it in there as a garnish.  But I suppose it’s a hard theme to tackle, as they’re dealing with a lifelong nomad.  (Odd that nobody wrote about the TARDIS, the obvious winner.)
It’s best to remember the theme is just an excuse for ten stories.  As a collection, it’s a colourful improvement.
7/10

See you again for 56–60, beginning with Zamper by Gareth Roberts...

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 anothercastle; 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 tooprescient 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