Gareth Rafferty's Blog, page 22

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #27 – Legacy by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#25
Legacy
By Gary Russell

At last!  That third Peladon story we've all been waiting for!  Well, some of us.  Well, Gary Russell.

There's really not a lot to say about Peladon, judging from our two previous suspiciously similar visits.  Medieval planet tries to join or get along with the progressive Federation, superstition and xenophobia get in the way, the Doctor mediates and gets sentenced to death for his troubles, just add Ice Warriors, rinse and repeat.  Legacyisn't a heck of a lot different to The Curse or The Monster Of Peladon, except that it uses Peladon more as a back-drop to Russell's own plot, which is about a world-dominating diadem and the murderous plot to possess it.  You still get all the regulation Peladon-isms: affable Royal, psycho-religious vizier, stoic guards, secret passages, loveable old Alpha Centauri, the-alien-who-looks-like-a-penis-in-a-cloak.  You even get Aggedor, despite being dead, thanks to a flashback.  Honestly, it's less of a retread than The Monster Of Peladon.  But the particular Macguffin/murder plot we're getting instead of the usual Peladon power struggle is underwhelming at best.

Set up in a flashback featuring a past Doctor, which has happened in two books running now (along with revolving the story around a small object – weirdly, both Decalog-isms!), the Diadem was found on the planet of the Pakhars, otherwise harmless hamster-people who crop up in later Russell works.  It's your standard mind-controlling Big Bad, but for all the effort that goes into finding it and transporting it to its next master on Peladon, and all the bodies left in its wake, it doesn't actually do a lot when it gets there.  Legacyends on a Flash Gordon-esque question mark, with the Diadem ready for Round #2.  Steady on, we haven't had Round #1 yet.

Perhaps this is more of a story about the effect these things have on people than the things themselves...  except highlighting your inner bad guy is a fairly simplistic route for an evil bauble to take, and the guy working to possess it is 100% evil and/or mad to begin with, so that's a bit of a non-starter.  He's one of those tedious villains who attacks and kills with impunity, and whose identity nobody guesses despite a thin list of suspects.  The book takes its sweet time dropping the penny.  It's not so much a "Whodunit" as a "Just tell me already, so I can go home."

Incidentally, when you finally discover his plan you'll probably wish somebody had spared you the wait, so, kind soul that I am: he wants to implant his mind-control in all the tourists visiting Peladon, and in their little Aggedor souvenirs when they leave, so they can spread it about when they get home.  Of course he could just go out and control the universe proper, set up camp somewhere major like Earth or something, but no, it's random tourists visiting Peladon or bust for our man, and don't forget your evil stick of rock at the gift shop!  I giggled like a drain when this particular penny dropped.  That is some plan you got there!

It's hard to be enthusiastic about Legacy.  We've been to Peladon once too often already, and although Russell does show us something new – its early days, when young Sherak wrested control from the brutal Erak, and first found Aggedor – it doesn't enhance the story to know this stuff, since it's really a book about the Diadem.

Legacy is, superficiallyat least, another chapter in the Peladon story.  None of the current brood of Kings, Guards and Viziers make much of an impression – it's all too seen-it-all-before, like for goodness sake, has there ever been an Aggedor-worshipper who wasn't a raving nutter?  – but Russell has at least said he had the (surprising) ending in mind for years, where King Tarron finally tells the Federation "Thank you, but no thank you."  The narrative offers a cursory "It made sense" to sell this, but I'm not convinced.  Not only are the King and his peers so wrapped up in The Diadem Murder Files that it never feels like they're considering the bigger picture anyway, but so much of the previous two stories is now a complete waste of time.  With the added olive branch of "See how you feel in fifty years?", it feels even more pointless.  What will it be like for Peladon to stand on its own two feet?  Well, just a wild stab in the dark here, but it'll probably be like a bunch of people going on about ruddy Aggedor in the dark.  We've already seen what they're up against, since the plot of the last two stories was somebody help them get away from that.

(Maybe I'm just sore about the story's entirely coincidental EU Referendum timing.  Legacy is nowhere near as politically prescient as The Curse Of Peladon, which had roots in Britain's relationship with Europe to start with, but it still stings to hear characters talking about a greater co-operative whole and whether they're better off without it.  Think, you fools!  Alas.)

All of this might sing a bit sweeter if Legacy was better written.  It's Gary Russell's first novel, which is so obvious it might as well come with a Warning: First Novel sticker.  Aside from a generally annoying ease with cliché, with characters crying solitary tears and entering rooms "like the cat who got the cream" etc., by Page 2 we're knee-deep in embarrassingly over-eager gore.  Heads are lopped off, murderous hands plunged straight into victim's bodies, squirty blood geysers sputtering afterwards... Throughout Legacy, it's never enough for somebody just to get bumped off.  They have to go out like it's a Sawmovie, all viscera and lingering detail.  It's hard to buy the idea that the New Adventures are supposed to be "grown up" when the route taken is to add a bunch of silly murder-splat.  Such an approach is easily more juvenile than The Curse Of Peladon, to pick one totally random comparison.  It reeks of eagerness to show off the lack of a TV watershed, and that has nothing to do with maturity.  It's also damned schlocky.

And oh, rejoice, because gore and cliché aren't Legacy's only problems.  Russell doesn't seem at all comfortable with dialogue, which is a shame as there's a lot of it.  Every conversation is between people who are either quite irritating or find each other irritating: in particular Kort (a spoilt brat whom everybody hates – surprise, Irritating Character Is Irritating) and Keri (a Pakhar who for no bloody reason ends every other sentence with "Yeah" – well gosh, how could that possibly get annoying?).  An enormous number of smiles and looks busily come and go during each one, as well as noticing other tedious details about people's appearance, their clothes etc., as if the participants are all busily making notes.  My favourite was the Ice Lord Savaar saying of Bernice: "Her trousers, chinos he had heard her refer to them, were loose-fitting, a complete contrast to her top garment." How the hell did that come up in conversation?  Hello, I'm Bernice and these are called chinos?  Why would he make a note of that?

Bernice is terrible for this.  Apparently she's "a student of human behaviour" who prides herself on "her instinctive and detailed examinations of everyone she met".  I don't recall her auditioning for The Mentalist in previous books, although on asking around this is apparently somewhat present in Love And War.  Here, she goes on and on inwardly noticing things like whether a person is smiling, yet still misses bloody obvious stuff like Whodunit because (nyurgh) she fancies him.  But then, characterisation is another of Legacy's weak points.  Russell appears to have broadly understood what makes Bernice who she is – she's articulate and funny, and sometimes gets short shrift because of Ace – and somehow translates that into a never-endingly petulant little sulktrumpet.  She refers to Ace, with whom she is on good terms, as "Attila the Hun".  When the Doctor recounts his first meeting with the Ice Warriors, which ended in them trying to kill all humans and the humans inevitably retaliating, she says: "You of course had no part in this murder."  Finding out about some famous ruins that have been excavated since her time, she flies into a rage because the Doctor didn't immediately tell her about it and drop her off to investigate.  Christ – what did she have for breakfast this morning?

Meanwhile, at the other end of the ever-imbalanced companion rota, Ace has so little to do she might as well take the week off.  Broadly speaking, I'm in favour of Bernice getting more to do, as it always seems to work the other way round.  But marooning Ace on an ultimately redundant fetch quest so Bernice can fill the Sole Companion spot is an inelegant way to go about it.  What little there is of her is also woefully, often hilariously clumsy: the Doctor discovers her battering a teddy-bear for "betraying her", then finds "Mike Smith" written on it in felt tip.  Oof!  Also in her bedroom, Ace's past and present jackets are "strategically placed, as if to underline her two very different lives."  Erk!  Discovering a dead student, she finds out his name is "Julian.  Just like herJulian."  Ouch!  Paul Cornell this ain't.  Plus there's a scene where she both gets her kit off and gets her end away, because it just wouldn't be New Ace otherwise, would it?

You'd think he could at least get the Doctor right.  You'd be wrong.  Rather significantly back in his question mark pullover, performing conjuring tricks and never for one second putting the bloody umbrella away, this is a bit like Target novel characterisation running amok, rather than anything resembling the New Adventures Doctor.  I suppose you get a pre-occupation with chess sets, which is at least a bit more Season 26.  But then you also get an apparently irrepressible xenophobia about Ice Warriors.  Sorry, no.  The Doctor embarrassed himself with this in The Curse Of Peladon, learned his lesson and moved on.  Yes, he's met dodgy Ice Warriors since then – including the sequel to Curse, and then Mission To Magnus, which is canon according to Gary – but that's no reason to tromp around assuming the worst.  You're the Doctor, for feck's sake.  Believe the best about people.  Also, apropos of nothing, I hate the bit where Bernice commends Alpha Centauri for his* diplomacy skills, and the Doctor says "Oh very smooth, Professor Summerfield.  Why not add some strawberry jam and be really sickly?"  Why not be nice to people, you all-of-a-sudden rude git?

(*Alpha Centauri is a hermaphrodite, and voiced by a woman on TV, so it's pretty weird that Gary defaults to "he" throughout.  That never sat right with me, even if he is copying Curse or Monster in that respect.  I can't be bothered to check, but do correct me...)

I don't want to bang on and on about the bad writing, but it's bad in so many ways.  There's the schlock violence, the clichés, the strained and tedious conversations.  (And the scenes that exist solely to enable them.  Why, for example, don't we go to Peladon in the TARDIS?  Instead the Doctor opts for a relatively slow voyage, where it's all she-wore-chinos-he-smiled-then-he-stopped-smiling, which is exactly the sort of redundant faffing the TARDIS is supposed to prevent.  Was Gary running under or something?)  But there are also moments that are just plain weird.  When Sherak finds the home of Aggedor...  the Aggedors...  whatever the plural of Aggedor is, he notices "the grass was short, the trees not unkempt.  Something looked after this paradise."  Keen gardeners, are they?  There's a bit where Sherak's body talks to itself: "'Give in and die,' his ribs seemed to say.  'Let the beast eat,' pleaded his arm.  'No,' Sherak's inner strength replied, 'not without a fight.'"  And there's a bit where this king of an ancient medieval world is "convinced that what happened next was in slow motion."  Watch a lot of movies, does he?

I suppose it's a sign of a first novel.  Amid all the familiar mistakes, he's at least trying things out.  Like commenting, editorially, that a character unconsciously echoed the actions of another, or if they had done a thing differently they'd have seen the killer or something, but they didn't, so never mind.  It's a million light years from Douglas Adams, but if you squint you can at least see some omniscient effort in there.  It's not enough to imagine a really good draft of Legacy, but maybe with enough red pen you could steer him right on another story.

This being Gary Russell, it would be remiss of me not to mention continuity.  Loves his continuity references, does Gary, though he has apparently said that the repeated nods in Legacy were encouraged by his editors.  I find that hard to believe, as no other New Adventures author has gone to such lengths to remind us of other Doctor Who stories, and Gary has done it in most of his other work since.  (Has Peter Darvill-Evans been whispering orders in his ear this whole time?)  As well as the obligatory The Cliff Notes Of Peladon, I spotted oblique-or-direct references to The Mind Of Evil, Colony In Space, The Trial Of A Time Lord, The Stones Of Blood, Carnival Of Monsters, The Ice Warriors, Mission To Magnus, Kinda, Revenge Of The Cybermen, City Of Death, The Robots Of Death The Dalek Master Plan, The Tomb Of The Cybermen, The Keeper Of Traken and The Creature From The Pit.  Most of this is just aliens showing up, and you could argue he's only trying to contextualise Legacyagainst the world of Doctor Who, and make it all seem like one thing.  We actually have non-fiction books for that, but at least it explains his apparent need to explain how Peladon got its Aggedor, and why the Time Lords occasionally go against their own non-intervention policy.  Trouble is this approach can end up being nothing more than a fan-boy grinding his axe.  Is it a better story because it shows how Peladon slots into the Dalek invasion of the galaxy, and Mavic Chen shows up?  Not really, no, but that's our Gary.

Legacy isn't a very New Adventures book.  Perhaps it would have been better off as a Missing Adventure with an earlier Doctor.  Certainly a sequel to stories from the early-to-mid-'70s seems like an odd starting point for a range that tends to look ahead, but hey, there weren't any Missing Adventures yet, and they'd only recently had an anniversary.  There was probably still confetti on the carpet.  Regardless of the pros and cons of continuity, Legacy isn't a good book.  The plot dawdles and ultimately stalls, the characters yammer and die, the regulars hardly cover themselves in glory and the whole thing needed a few more drafts.  I've had more unpleasant Doctor Whoreading experiences, but this is still one that I'm glad to see the back of.  Done with Peladon; I don't mind waiting fifty years for Round Four.

4/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #26 – Tragedy Day by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#24
Tragedy Day
By Gareth Roberts

It may seem over the top, but I've been viewing Tragedy Day as a little milestone in the New Adventures.  We're finally emerging from the double-whammy of Birthright and Iceberg, the ongoing Alternate Universe Cycle, the emotional turmoil of Ace and the diversion of Decalog.  Now it's back to singular New Adventures, self-contained novels.  And with a track record of one unchallenging but fun book, Gareth Roberts seems like a good pick for the first slot.  This should be a laugh.

To his credit, he doesn't rest on his laurels.  Tragedy Day does things a little differently from The Highest Science, in that it's not another outright comedy, or not the same kindof comedy.  We're in satirical territory, with cross-hairs on the mindlessness of pop culture, the rich-guilt relief of telethons and the easy brutality of people who build their homes on other people's land – and on the people themselves.  Unfortunately I'm not a big fan of satire because it puts a distance between the audience and the characters.  You recognise that the things they're saying are about your world, but then it's harder to invest in the characters because they're more obviously mouth-pieces.  There are lots of people in Tragedy Day, a wide variety of deluded phonies, bitter failures, faceless victims, mindless robots and ridiculous villains.  Most of them die, and I can't say I was all that bothered.

Roberts culls his dramatis personae like he's Eric Saward on a mission.  There are gas attacks, insatiably violent killer beachballs (I've somehow confused the dubiously-named Slaags with the thing from Dark Star), brutally murderous policemen, an anti-matter disco that vaporises people (wait, what?) and at least two assassins.  Also there's showbiz luvvies and a plot-relevant whiff of 20th Century pop culture (because hey, making it deliberateis one way to avoid the we've-seen-it-all-before criticisms – except we stillhave, e.g. Star Trek).  There's a definite black comedy to the whole thing.  Except it's not very funny.

Possibly out of sheer comedic desperation, one of the assassins is a man-sized spider with a cowboy hat and a bawdy northern accent, and the villain is a moody and pathetic adolescent – a plot development mocked in the final few pages as too far-fetched.  I suppose none of this is really a million miles away from the Chelonians, who thought nothing of wiping out whole armies of humans just so they could get on with their flower-arranging.  But somewhere along the line, that all-important charm has done a runner.  What remains is a weirdly callous story full of bad stuff happening and nobody caring.  Yes, ho-ho, that's the point of Tragedy Day itself and everything, and you could rightly argue that it's a good fit in '80s Doctor Who, but...  I dunno.  Yuck.

Think of all those displaced Vijjans, who (apart from one gung-ho lunkhead in the early chapters, and some silent spokespeople, mostly on posters) never make their case.  Or the general denizens of Empire City – not the famous ones, the schlubs who queue for death because it seems like the right thing to do.  Or the all-too-briefly mentioned slaves of the Friars Of Pangloss – mighty Big Bads somewhere out in space – who are so miserably subjugated that in over a thousand years they never noticed their bosses' magic powers stopped working.  There aren't enough real people raging about what's happening here, just the author taking shots at the apathy of everyone else.  (And those aren't especially well-aimed.  The satire, for all its character-blanding silliness, never really makes its point.)

Still, if the people suffer, at least Roberts builds his world.  We begin with a prelude that's a short story unto itself, which (as it involves a past Doctor and a random object) could almost have gone into Decalog.  We skip through a few centuries on Olleril, getting a good feel for the history of the place even before the TARDIS turns up.  But getting a feel for the place, with its repetitive pop culture and its sinister puppet-masters, is pretty much all we do for more than half the book.  On Page 127, Bernice says: "All the Doctor and I have done is meet a film star and book into a hotel." Well, yeah.  Meanwhile Ace is whisked off to a deadly testing ground, meets an assassin and her son, and then the Doctor and Bernice pick her up again.  They all seem to be marking time while they figure out what's going on which, okay, is every Doctor Who book ever to an extent, but it's decidedly dull in this particular case.  By the time the villain's (silly) plan was finally unveiled, I was just glad to be approaching the end.

I found it hard going.  Despite the author's obvious interest in this world, it's still not an especially fun or interesting place to be; like the main trio, I was keen to get back in the TARDIS and go.  But they are on good terms, at least.  Gone (for now?) are the intense tantrums of Ace and the I-don't-belong-here worries of Bernice.  They all get on famously, which I'm not taking for granted.  It's still almost amusingly difficult to handle the three characters, with Ace (rather than the more usual Benny) conspicuously wandering into her very own subplot after 20 pages.  I'd like to see this done better, but for now, no longer trapped in the funk of yesterbook, I am grateful.  Not enough, however, to recommend thisbook.

Tragedy Day grabs at a sort of Andrew Cartmel or Ben Aaronovitch brand of doomy futurism, and it makes for either an altogether grim comedy, or a rather silly sci-fi parable.  Take your pick.  Neither seems to work.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #25 – Decalog edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker

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

With the Virgin Doctor Whorange a success, and its editors casting their eyes at writing past Doctor books as well, it seems – if this was indeed its purpose – a neat way to test the waters, giving them a bunch of short stories first.  Or maybe they just fancied seeing old Doctors again because the anniversary had arrived, and short stories were quicker to produce. 

Whatever the reason, we have Decalog: a bundle of ten stories with a linking theme (sort of), courtesy of some of the voices of the New Adventures, not to mention of the wider Virgin book world as well.  (Messrs Howe, Stammers and Walker all contribute; they basically taught me everything I know about Classic Who via the Doctors’ Handbooks.  Great reads, if you’ve somehow missed them.)  So, Decalogbeing all about the short stories, let’s get to ’em.

*

Fallen Angel
by Andy Lane
This is a jolly romp.  The Second Doctor joins forces with a witty, somewhat conscientious art thief to battle some robots.  It’s straight out of a comic strip.  The Doctor is very much his scruffy, apparently clumsy self, at one point strapped helplessly to the top of a biplane (and screaming for help), at another delivering an ominous back-story in deadly seriousness.  His art thief pal (the titular Angel, according to his calling card) is an amusing, if improbable figure.  The robots are just a thing that needs sorting out.  I imagined the Krikkit robots from Hitchhiker’s.

There’s very little plot here – there isn’t time.  But Andy Lane stuffs it full of action, and finds room for a cheeky bit of Time Lord mythologizing without spoiling The War Games.  It’s fun, but it makes me rather dubious about this format.  Can you get very much done in thirty pages?  Then again, maybe that’s why it’s the first story.  It eases you in with a bit of thin, madcap fluff.

*

The Duke Of Dominoes
by Marc Platt
Meanwhile in Prohibition Chicago, the Master is trying to gain control of an ancient weapon, and having about as much success as usual.  There’s something inevitably sympathetic about him when you upgrade him to a main character.  Marc Platt writes a very Roger Delgado Master: a sharp-suited man of influence with, just underneath, a petulant need to be followed and admired.  There’s a bit when he’s down on his luck and starts working in a mission, and scorns any form of gratitude from the hungry tramps; he could just as well resent our own sudden interest in him.  He has an apparently doe-eyed “companion” whom he just can’t seem to hypnotise, and there’s a moment when a malevolent force controls him.  Things never seem to come up trumps for the Master.  Despite yourself, you want him to do better.

We get more insight into the mischievous bearded one than we’re used to here, including his personal view of the difference between himself and the Doctor.  The Master plans and works at his goals, whereas the Doctor just turns up and causes chaos.  (True to form, the Doctor shows up and helps put the world to rights without even noticing!)  The story’s gangland atmosphere errs on the corny side – with a Guys & Dolls moll and some rather suspect dialect – but this is still a well-paced look at how the other half lives, boasting bonkers imagery (such as a rampaging statue of Abe Lincoln) and a few well-judged little moments.  It’s memorable, and worth your time.

*

The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back
by Vanessa Bishop
Taking place shortly after The Silurians, this one finds the Third Doctor and the Brigadier at loggerheads.  The Doctor is doing his best to resolve a potentially dangerous alien situation as quietly as possible; naturally he’s concerned that the Brigadier will intervene and blow it up.  The Brigadier, conversely, has no idea if he can trust the Doctor any more.  Liz Shaw tries to build a bridge between them, but neither of them is co-operating fully.  Picking up towards the end of an adventure, rather than blustering through or neatly summarising it as with the previous two tales, this gives us a succinct snapshot of the Doctor’s emotional state.  It’s a poignant little piece of UNIT Family tension, and it’s not especially interested in happy endings.  It made me suddenly aware of just how often that seemed to happen in the Pertwee years: he often seemed so disappointed.

It builds to a compelling moment and cuts off there.  For better or worse, it left me wanting more.

*

Scarab Of Death
by Mark Stammers
Throwing the lever the other way, this is a rollicking adventure that could probably fill a book, or at least four episodes on the telly, if all the filler material hadn’t been marched out of sight at gunpoint.  It’s a breathless pseudo-sequel to Pyramids Of Mars, jammed with murder, villainy, espionage and potential inter-galactic conquest.  It’s spectacular and fun, boasting some difficult-to-achieve-on-screen special effects as well as a pleasantly corny moment where the Doctor escapes a gangster’s lair inside a dinner trolley.  (The washer-woman’s outfit was presumably being cleaned.)

There’s not a lot to say about it from a character point of view, although Tom and Lis are convincingly brought to life.  It’s the best indication yet that we could be reading full-length Past Doctor books as well as New Adventures (what might have been, eh?), and while it’s probably not a very interesting story so much as an exciting one, Scarab Of Death is still just what a lot of fans are looking for.  I enjoyed it.

*

The Book Of Shadows
by Jim Mortimore
At a stately fifty pages, Jim Mortimore’s addition to Decalog has the most room to work.  But don’t expect a leisurely stroll: The Book Of Shadows is as jam-packed with story as anything else here.  An ambitious pseudo-historical set around the Library of Alexandria, giving (inevitably) an account of its demise, it’s foremost an emotional story for Barbara, beginning as a sort of echo of her interference in The Aztecs but… no spoilers… taking that idea in a new and exciting direction.  She goes through a lot – and although this stuff’s twenty years old, I really don’t want to spoil it.  Also, I can’t help it: this is one of my favourite eras of Doctor Who, so I was having a good time right away.  The Doctor is fabulously crotchety, and has a whale of a time observing famous scholars bickering.  Ian ends up in a fight.  It all fits the characters and settings we know, despite pushing everything in a more sci-fi direction than this era went on screen.

It shows neat restraint in its use of the characters (no Susan, scarcely a word out of Ian) and darts skilfully between time-periods to tell its story, but it’s really Barbara’s tale, and literature suits her.  Altogether the sort of thing you could adapt into a thrilling Companion Chronicle – indeed, there’s already a Big Finish play about the Library at Alexandria, which is also excellent.  My only complaint here is there isn’t more of it.  Easily the highlight so far.

*

Fascination
by David J.  Howe
Yikes.  This one is on shaky ground with me from the start, as it involves the Fifth Doctor and Peri – not a pairing with a lot of mileage and my least favourite Doctor to boot.  It sends the twosome to a hot medieval village.  There are magical spells everywhere (there’s even a pentagram under the Doctor’s bedroom carpet), all barked about with little to no explanation in order to advance the plot.  That’s not the real problem, however: the gist of Fascination is one guy using his magic powers to woo Peri.  And he’s completely successful at it, reducing her to his simpering and yes, bedded girlfriend in no time.  Ick.

The short story format is particularly brutal in Fascination, frogmarching Peri into what should be emotional turmoil but is presented like a crass faux pas.  A guy uses magic to rape her a couple of times, and his punishment (besides an inevitable slap) is a few flimsy “Expelliarmus!”-isms from the Doctor and Peri, and a promise of fewer magic powers from his elders in future.  Justice is served?  At the end, as the Doctor and Peri stride towards the TARDIS, his ditzy young companion contemplates how if he were a bit younger, she might fancy the Doctor.  Teeny bit too soon, maybe?

It’s far too reliant on magic gubbins that we know little about, but the added horror of well-of-course-it’s-all-about-sex-I-mean-come-on-it’s-Peripushes this into hideously creepy fan territory.  Flimsy and regrettable; bin it at once.

*

The Golden Door
by David Auger
Multi-Doctor alert!  Sort of.  The Golden Door juggles the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo, the Sixth Doctor and a duplicate Steven and Dodo, as well as a shape-shifting murderer and a bunch of obsessively bureaucratic aliens.  It sounds like it should be loadsa fun, but it’s not quite got the wherewithal.  It’s often unclear and it’s too long, which isn’t surprising as the prose is so florid at times.  Then again, this almost suits the Sixth Doctor, the Vogons-if-they-were-bloody-boring Bukolians, and even the waspish First Doctor.  Chucking in exclamations marks doesn’t magically liven it up, however, and at the end of the day we’re still dealing with the slightly toxic combo of Steven-and-Dodo-and-Sixie, hence a lot of pointless loquaciousness and bickering.  The First Doctor seems oddly moot for much of it; no, it doesn’t make use of having two Doctors.  David Auger writes Hartnell quite pleasantly when he’s got something to do.

It’s ultimately a rather worthy tale about ethnic cleansing, with another token dollop of Time Lord mythology added at the finish.  Looking back, all the mistaken identities and bureaucratic processes were just an inefficient way to kill forty pages.

*

Prisoners Of The Sun
by Tim Robins
Here’s another short story that badly wants to be a book.  And come to think of it, one book in particular: showing us the Third Doctor’s world gone all to hell, and a Doctor out of time trying to save it, you’ve got to wonder if Decalog’s editors sent back the first draft with “Blood Heat 2?” jotted on it.

Still, you could rightly argue that it’s what you do with an idea that’s important, and Prisoners Of The Sun is crammed with quite interesting stuff about the (exiled) Doctor’s impact on Earth, the Time Lords’ double standards regarding interference, and the untapped potential of Liz Shaw.  There’s a ruined London quite unlike Jim Mortimore’s, but there isn’t time for the horror to set in.  Ditto most of its big ideas: brought up far too quickly, and discarded just the same is another piece of Time Lord mythos that feels significant, but is just a necessary pit-stop of explanation, and then it’s gone.  (I think there are also too many continuity references, but then some people love that sort of thing.)  The same happens to Liz Shaw’s leaving scene: a genuinely important piece of Doctor Who footage-not-found, it’s bundled away in the story’s last gasp, and takes the rather odd form of a telling off from the Doctor.  It’s a shame they didn’t save the idea for a Missing Adventure.  (Okay, they did that as well.  Let’s wait and see how Gary Russell handles it.  Hold your breath, everyone!)

As for Liz, her ambitions don’t have time to take on three dimensions, but it's nice that both Third Doctor stories decided to spend time with her, as opposed to the two-brain-cells-to-rub-together Jo, or the really-Tom's-companion Sarah.  The Doctor is himself enough, apart from an odd moment where he abruptly analyses his personality and costume, suggesting the uncomfortable idea that each newly regenerated Doctor has to have a little think about what kind of Doctor he’ll be.

It’s entertaining, but simultaneously too big and too small.  Another awkward baby-step for the Doctor Who short story.

*

Lackaday Express
by Paul Cornell
Chopping between the first-person adventures of somebody lost in time, and the Fifth Doctor’s attempts to figure out what’s going on and rescue her, Lackaday Express is a nicely focussed little piece.  It’s got a decent theme about the importance of the past weighed against the future, and it’s very evocative and human.  Also complicated.  There are elements here that must have appealed to Steven Moffat: being complicated, tumbling through a person’s time-stream, love being the pivotal event in a person’s life, and the Doctor being seen as an imaginary friend.  It also features old cricket-features using a machine gun, which is probably the oddest image in this book.

Once again in Decalog, I felt like this could have been a bit longer and perhaps landed more firmly.  Everyone involved moves on a smidge too fast, particularly the Doctor and Tegan who return in an instant to a recurring conversation about the fate of Adric.  (It’s less poignant than it is eye-rolling, although it does fit the story’s theme.)  So it’s not quite the perfectly-formed gem it could have been, but it’s clever and sweet, and suits the format better than most.

*

Playback
by Stephen James Walker
Okay, so this is technically the first story of the bunch, but then it’s also all of the middle bits and, more importantly, the end of Decalog itself, so I’m doing it last.

A first-person tale of a private detective meeting a strange amnesiac man with capacious pockets (guess who), this is little more than a framing device for those other stories.  And okay, it’s not a bad framing device.  It reads just like a first-person private eye story ought to: the guy’s a healthily suspicious American wiseass, and the Doctor is an apparently unsolvable mystery.  Not knowing where else to start, he takes the Doctor to a psychometrist and has him “read” the objects in his pocket.  Each object has a story to tell, and presto, Decalog.  Two major points to pick on here, I suppose:

1) Walker’s portion of the story has a few arresting scenes, in particular an eerily out-of-character moment where the Doctor goes to bludgeon a man with a rock.  There’s a certain atmosphere to the psychometrist’s home.  And putting all the Playback bits in bold type is a neat way to tell the stories apart.  But it’s filler, no getting away from that, with all those in-between bits being especially flimsy.  They’re the narrative equivalent of getting up to change discs.  In the end, when it turns out one of those bits heralded a clue, I went back and read it again to make sure I hadn’t missed it.  Turns out it was pretty low-key after all, but even so, it’s difficult to engage with one-and-a-bit pages stuffed between obviously unconnected stories.

2) They are unconnected.  I’m guessing each writer had a brief of “Write a story with an object in it,” but that’s as far as the link goes, with the object often being the most forgettable aspect.  So when the ending rolls around, and it does reprise some ideas from earlier – spoiler alert, none of my favourites – it still doesn’t pay off the rigmarole of telling a bunch of stories about the Doctor.  Only one of stories was relevant, and goodie, it was the ethnic cleansing one.  (Spoiler – oh, dang it.  But I guess I don’t mind spoiling bad bits.  “The Holocaust Was Aliens” is an embarrassingly silly kind of revisionism, especially when you rush it like this.)

Playback is fine for what it is: the somewhat thankless job of getting us from A to B.  As for Decalog, it’s an experiment, and it’s neither entirely successful nor a failure.  The stories are mostly enjoyable (with the notable exception of Fascination – too late to send it back?), although they tend to struggle with the format.  It must be hard to go from writing full-length novels to cramming this stuff into a fraction of one, and it would perhaps be unfair to expect them all to land on their feet first time.  I’d still recommend Duke Of Dominoes, Scarab Of Death, Book Of Shadows and Lackaday Express to varying degrees, and I’ll approach the next batch with optimism.  This could work.
6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #24 – No Future by Paul Cornell

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#23
No Future
By Paul Cornell

Okay, so we've reached the end of another New Adventures arc: The Alternate History Cycle, or the Oi, Who's Been Fiddlin' With My Timeline? Saga.  And who better to close it than Paul Cornell?  He finished the Timewyrm saga in memorable style, offering an insight into the Doctor and Ace that was at once psychologically bracing and sweetly fannish.  Full of awesome ideas and charming optimism, his book was an indicator of what a New Adventure could be.  Then he wrote Love And War for an encore.  So, yeah, if the Alternate Universe Cycle needs finishing: him, please.

And damn and blast, it turns out he's human after all.

In his introduction to the reprint of Human Nature, Cornell calls No Future"a shoddy collection of in-jokes and continuity references."  I hate to say it, but he's not far wrong.  Possibly urged on by thirtieth anniversary celebrations and a desire to write The Celebratory Novel, No Future eschews the pointed character writing and unique imagery that made his previous books so rich in favour of, well, as per a note at the start, Action by HAVOC.  It's ostensibly quite fun, but as the resolution to a multi-book arc, not to mention a particular character's journey, it's something of a bodge-job.

Who's been manipulating the Doctor's fate?  A perhaps unfortunate choice of word gave that away back in Blood Heat; can't say I'm surprised now, although I am taken aback that the Doctor would need this long to figure it out.  Said character works reasonably well, and has not been over-used to exhaustion elsewhere in Doctor Who, which is often the way with even vaguely promising baddies.  But their motivation is, as would be your first guess, revenge, which hardly seems worth all the fuss.

Returning Baddie #A is in cahoots with other agencies, none of whom you'll find in a Want To See Them Again list.  I mean, was it a rights thing?  Okay, no one's expecting Daleks – although the Cybermen do rock up for a four-page cameo at the start – but pinning a somewhat "important" New Adventure, and by extension its four predecessors on an alien race laughable even to Bernice just does not seem like a great idea.  Some effort is made later on to rescue them from "Remember that crap Doctor Who monster?" spoof territory, adding ideas and background to them as a society, but revealing them amid a protracted tongue-in-cheek reference to 1970s telly puts them at an immediate, fatal disadvantage.  Hey, I love comedy, and I have a fondness for fourth-wall-bothering provided it's done well.  (It's done verywell in Conundrum.)  But there's a time and a place, and the big finish to an epic arc would be, at a guess, neither.

No Future just doesn't seem sure what it's about.  There's a sense of very personal investment in the late 1970s, particularly its politics and music, which is quite interesting even if it's a bit lost on me.  There's a recurring idea about anarchy and control which is tied to that.  There's surely a novel in all of the above, focusing on the grim nightmare of people hurting each other en masse without rhyme or reason, and the Doctor struggling to prevent it.  But the actual plot is a somewhat, well, shoddy bunch of stuff about aliens and terrorists and spies – oh my!  – with virtual realities and dream sequences chucked in (if I'm honest, these are a bit of a Cornell staple), all cloaked in a slightly naff fascination with music and panto.  Here is a novel in which the Brigadier, apparently amnesiac or possibly even mind-controlled, orders his men to shoot the Doctor dead.  Which is gritty, right?  And then later on, he openly references Nicholas Courtney's Eyepatch Joke.  (As for the double-whammy of "Chap with Wings, there", I winced.)  When it's inevitably time for the Doctor to explain what's been going on all this time, the supporting characters all say "There's just one thing I don't understand" in unison.  Are we ready, boys and girls?

Despite eyebrow-raising ideas like unprovoked mass violence, and moments of shock and betrayal between familiar characters, No Future often feels like a goofy charity special; familiar faces go through the motions and have a good laugh but never really put their heart into the substance of the thing.  You might say it's not the first fannish Paul Cornell novel, and you'd be right, but the sheer divergence between this and Revelation is like two different authors.

But there are still some solid Cornell-y character beats squirrelled in here, particularly concerning Ace.  All right, I'm sick to death of this "I hate you!" thing she has with the Doctor, and am over the moon that it looks to be resolved here, even though I thought it already was in Lucifer Rising.  (Ace apparently betrayed him, and the Doctor had to unambiguously take a life, putting him on an equal footing with Ace.  For a bit.)  But her journey in No Future is another dark and ultimately satisfying one, even though I'd say too much of it happens off-screen and towards the very end.  She and the Doctor go through some memorably rough patches; it's a pity so much of this is trapped in an ungainly action-adventure mostly about punk rock, but at least the story goes somewhere and, as usual with Cornell, ends on a smile.

Bernice has her moments, although as one very meta exchange tells us:"Don't get a lot to do in this, do I?"  "No," the Doctor agreed, "but you get all the best lines."  Ho ho and all that, but there's a definite sense of disappointment when even Bernice's creator can't find much for her to do.  Yes, she goes undercover, joins a band and does a bit of army stuff, but she's still a very minor part.  I'm still waiting on this series graduating to just the Doctor and Bernice.  Guys, you can do this.

The Doctor falls somewhere between archetypal game-player and rat in a maze, literally running for his life on several (forcedly breathless) occasions.  There's a moment where he witnesses a scene of senseless carnage, which really ought to resonate more than it does, but the plot's going in too many HAVOC-y, Time's-Champion-y directions for that to land.  It's just the wrong story for this sort of paused introspection.

It's like Paul Cornell tried to write something meaningful for Ace and the Doctor, but got a bit merry celebrating the anniversary and added a bunch of old bad guys and references to ventilation shafts.  I just couldn't help missing that sense of investment in the characters, which is still attempted in No Future but never carries much weight.  It's a difficult book to really dislike, with the aforementioned good humour (albeit not consistently good jokes) just about carrying it through.  It's undeniably nice to see the Brigadier and co. under better circumstances than in Blood Heat, and I'm excited to see the series heading off into the relative unknown, telling fully singular stories, untethered by yet another multi-book wait for...  something or other.  Going by No Future, it can easily turn out to be a long wait for not much.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #23 – Conundrum by Steve Lyons

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#22
Conundrum
By Steve Lyons

Be careful what you wish for.  Looking at The Left-Handed Hummingbird, I said "I'm not about to give up on books that side-step linear storytelling.  Keep it varied and don't be afraid to go odd, I say."  Then along comes Conundrum, which is narrated by the villain and almost completely removes the fourth wall.  I'm loving that these books feel able to do this stuff: mess about with time, re-imagine familiar worlds for the worse, or (in this case) virtually deconstruct what it means to be a Doctor WhoNew Adventure, or even a novel, full stop.  And make it look easy.  My hat's not so much off to Steve Lyons as it is wrapped up and mailed to him.

What, you need more?  Okay.  Whilst it is a sequel to one of the more popular (and odd) Doctor Who stories, Conundrum avoids the route of repetition.  That's no small feat.  Having heard Big Finish's The Queen Of Time, which virtually sequelizes The Celestial Toymaker (which is, when all's said and done, pretty much the same format as The Mind Robber – albeit less good), it's alarmingly easy to fall back into the pattern of "Arrive in fantasy realm, go through trials and tribulations, win, leave." The actual number of trials and tribulations has no particular effect on the overall story in these three cases; love The Mind Robber as I do, it could hardly be said to have a massively coherent story so much as a get-from-A-to-B narrative.  Conundrum doesn't even go there, stranding the Doctor and co. in a coherent novel (aka the one you're reading) with one major setting and a plot to resolve.  It allows for a great many pokes and prods at the format, and oh, the in-jokes.  Suchin-jokes.  (No surprise there: I'm primarily familiar with Steve Lyons from his co-authoring of The Completely Useless Encyclopaedia.)

Arandale is a quaint country village not a million miles away from Witch Markor Nightshade.  (I doubt the familiarity is a coincidence.)  Its denizens are in the midst of a series of murders, as quaint country villagers are wont to be, only there's something odd about these people: they're very obviously characters in a book.  There's a retired superhero, a prowling supervillain, a paranormal investigator, a private investigator, a figure in the criminal underworld, a witch, a troubled vicar, and a band of Enid Blyton-esque Adventure Kids.  Under different circumstances, half of them could be the lead character, and indeed they seem to think so.  The Adventure Kids scarcely seem to interact with anybody, so determined are they to get on with their plot; paranormal investigator Matthew Shade lurks on the side-lines, his allegiance an intriguing grey area; P.I. Jack Corrigan is terrible at his job and suspiciously bad at his American accent, but his entire criminal-underworld bit seems, well, like it walked in from another novel.  As for the superhero bit, as shown on the front cover, that's in the wrong medium.  Conundrum feels like a sneaky commentary on all these types of story, and Doctor Who's ability to plonk its lead character(s) down in the middle of any of them.

The Doctor, Ace and Bernice each get a fair share of the action, although they're rarely in it together.  The Doctor keeps to himself: the Master of the Land Of Fiction can't hear his thoughts so there's no inner monologue for him, which is good a reason as any to delay a few revelations, but also ensures that in such a crowded story the Doctor stands out.  Bernice is seriously contemplating a life out of the TARDIS; Ace, as ever, goes through the same thing, only angrily.  The dialogue is pretty fabulous for all of them, although the reliably witty Bernice is in her element.  "Norman sighed, and turned his attention back to the sky above.  'Anyway,' he said softly, 'you really wouldn't understand.  You couldn't know what it's like to have been out there.' Benny followed his gaze.  'Out where?'  'Out there!'  Norman's finger stabbed upwards.  'Out amongst the stars, visiting new planets, new galaxies...'  'Oh, out there!'  Benny inspected her fingernails nonchalantly.  'Just came back from there a few hours ago, actually.'"

As for Ace, eyebrows will raise.  There's a dream sequence (well, of coursethere is!) wherein shadowy figures question not just her bad language ("...in a book deemed suitable for consumption by minors!"), but her continued relevance.  "...modified for your new genre, and granted with a limited potential that you have long since outlived ... You are no longer of interest.  Your audience are bored."  For good measure, she is able to glimpse her journey over a few book spines – Dragonfire, Love And War and Deceit being the main landmarks.  I'm not sure if any of this means the writers of the New Adventures feel like I do about Ace (some good stuff, but we're done here, right?), but it's lovely validation to see it written down, even in jest.

And what of the Doctor?  Well, the scenes which cheerfully canonise TV Comics' John and Gillian, including a reference to preferring "the real McCoy", were so audacious that I burst out laughing at the sheer nerve.  And that's just the completely on-the-nose stuff: see also this timely and sly nudge-wink to Nightshade.  "You know, when there was that big 'Nightshade' nostalgia thing, the videos, the books and the repeats and all that."  Happy 1993, everybody!

It would be wrong, however, to paint Conundrum as merely a wicked smart spoof.  Those are in-jokes, not the whole show.  When the book is really flying, it's playing with your understanding of narrative structure: "'Even time doesn't move right here,' she said as he rushed to catch her up.  'You whacked Mel over the head about ten minutes ago, and suddenly it's morning and I don't know what happened in between.'  'We were at the station...'  'Bollocks we were!  I don't remember any of that.  I know it – but it's like I've just heard about it somewhere, like somebody's just decided that that's happened and written it down in my memory or something.'" Spot the spectral form of Steven Moffat, once again taking notes.  (Mind you, spectral Russell T Davies is here too, when Ace points out a floating village in space can't be what it looks like or all the air would be sucked out.)

I love to see a narrative skilfully mucked about with.  Sometimes it's just audacious fun: "The significance of all this I don't yet know, but as we hadn't seen that particular character since chapter one, I thought I'd better remind you that he existed." And sometimes it's thrillingly unconventional: "'Go ahead,' [the Doctor] said, jerking his thumb to indicate the corridor behind him.  'He's down there.'  Wait a minute...  I didn't write that!  'No, said the Doctor.  'I did!'"

It's easy to take this sort of narrative conceit and not make very much of it.  The movie Stranger Than Fiction fell short of its eccentric potential, never really capitalising on the author and the creation having a dialogue, and revolving around a novel-within-a-movie that actually sounds utterly tedious.  Conundrumis simply a great example of this: what with the already malleable format of Doctor Who, the medium of a novel and the setting of the Land of Fiction, it's such a mind-bogglingly right idea that it almost seems inevitable.  Nonetheless, we're lucky Steve Lyons wrote it.

But before I get completely carried away, a quick word on Conundrum as a New Adventure, with its feet on the ground and continuing the arc plot of someone interfering with the Doctor's past.  How does it fare?  Does the plot progress at last?  At last, yes.

With the narrator talking to a mysterious Big Bad all the way through (with no response, of course), it's sort of like the prologue and coda to The Dimension Riders, only it's not tacked on.  It feels like the concept isn't being taken for granted this time, with this plot in particular coming about because someone wants to ensnare the Doctor.  The previous parts of this saga were all entertaining in their own right, but could still be adventures that happened to the Doctor without much deliberate interference.  Conundrum is a trap, plain and simple – well, it's neither of those things!  – so it felt like an escalation.

The characters are also going places, trying to find time to talk to one another and get things out in the open.  Even the Doctor, though he hasn't got anything like enough free time for that.  None of them really succeed, with Ace in particular seemingly doomed to go in angry circles.  But with a few nudges and winks to past novel events, and even a few moments to catch their breath and chat about things, Conundrumadds to the feeling of the New Adventures as an ongoing universe.  I'm intrigued to see where their relationships, as well as that pesky arc baddie, go from here.

Conundrum is a novel after my own heart, but as with many of the really good New Adventures – and the really bad ones, come to think of it – reviewing it comes dangerously close to just photocopying huge chunks of it.  So before I end up locating a PDF and lamely pointing at it: I loved it.  If you haven't read it, do.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #22 – The Left-Handed Hummingbird by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#21
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
By Kate Orman

Where do you start with a novel that goes backwards and forwards at the same time?  When the Doctor, Ace and Bernice show up in The Left-Handed Hummingbird, the plot's already laid out before them, other characters being fully briefed; they go to various locations later on purely because they meet someone who was there.  It's ambitious.  Not for the first time reading a New Adventure, I imagined Steven Moffat taking notes.

Kate Orman is one of the more talked-about New Adventurers, and I can see why.  I was immediately impressed.  (And a little relieved.  You never know with hype.) The prose is thoughtful and confident.  There's a lovely bit right at the start as the Doctor stands on a street corner trying to pick up a psychic trail, that toys effortlessly with second-person-past-tense.  ("You might have wondered what he was doing there, standing alone and unnoticed.  But if you happened to be Huitzilin, standing at the window of the hotel room with one ghost hand pushing back the curtains, you would have known.  And you might have smiled.  There you were, a mere eight flights above him, winning a game of hide and seek.")  We're frequently privy to trains of thought, each of which tumbles convincingly on.  ("She didn't want to leave him alone.  She had to leave him alone.")  And there's some apt character development, as Bernice wonders if three's a crowd, and considers getting out.  There's some lovely Bernice writing dotted around here; much attention is paid to her being a woman out of time.  ("She imagined the horrors of twentieth century medical technology and didn't want to know.")  I love when writers give her something to do, even when it's pointing out that she can be a bit of a third wheel, but especially when they highlight what makes her different from the rest.  Mind you, I could do without "Cruk!", for the same reason "Frak!" makes me giggle in Battlestar Galactica.  But there's a "Smeg!" in here for good measure, which I don't mind, so I guess I should pipe down.  (I doubt I'm the only one who has adopted "smeg" in everyday parlance...)

A story about an intangible, bloodthirsty god of war, there are plenty of evocative and even horrifying moments.  ("If Ce Xochitl had looked back, he might have seen his strange guest start to shiver, his blue eyes locked on the temple.  He could not move.  He shook with revelation.  The temple was lookingat him.")  There are also quaint little funny ones.  ("[The Doctor] was the one everyone thought was Quetzalwhosis.  God knew he probably was.  He had turned out to be weirder people.") But as I dipped in and out of it over a few days, I found The Left-Handed Hummingbird more like a collection of moments than a single, coherent story.  Despite the marvellous prose, I didn't love it.

A complicated timeline is a sure way to impress a Doctor Who fan.  It's the sort of thing we ought to see a lot more of.  But knowing the Doctor and co. must visit points A, B and C makes it all seem a bit perfunctory.  There's a line early on stating that, since Christián Alvarez (a man who met them decades ago, whom they haven't met yet) has summoned them, they must survive whatever is to come or he wouldn't have asked.  Just knowing that makes a dangerous visit to ancient Mexico, or an emotive rendez-vous on the Titanic, or a strangely underwhelming but-apparently-the-scariest-bit sojourn in the '60s feel like bus stops on the way back to the first chapter.  The villain, Huitzilin, toys with fear and death and comes dangerously close to absorbing the Doctor.  Except he won't, will he?  Okay, we all know he won't succeed because it's an ongoing series – we must suspend disbelief or there'd be no point tuning in at all – but laying it all out like that from the start really took some of the fun out of it for me.  Yes, time can be re-arranged.  That's the point of the arc that began in Blood Heat, and it's not like we know everything from the start.  The book's coda underlines that despite the rules, it was all to play for.  But there are limits.  I felt like the story was constrained by them.

And there's another problem with this sort of wibbly-wobbly globetrotting: just when you're settling down, you're off again, briefly wondering if anything was achieved besides ticking off another locale and the Doctor having marginally more of a clue what's going on.  Perhaps the best sequences are the opening in Mexico City (where catastrophes befall our heroes right from the off) and the trip to Aztec times (which is terrifying and emotive territory, as John Lucarotti showed).  But I was often looking back at these or other sequences and feeling like they were other lives, or at least other books.  At one point, pretty much just to raise your eyebrows, three weeks gallop past.  Orman cuts and runs with characters, too; she makes a decent fist of Christián, who appears (out of sequence) throughout the story, but other characters can find themselves not as nuanced (the frustrated paranormal investigator Macbeth) or barely written at all (the hippies).  Again, Orman is skilled enough to bring it home with the occasional sock-to-the-solar-plexus, especially when it's directly tied to the leads; there's a stunning, tiny moment where Bernice clutches a list of Titanic survivors and weeps, because moments earlier she caught a man's name and it isn't on there.  And there are some delicious passages about the TARDIS, including its tendency to play "musical rooms".  But on the whole I had to strain at The Left-Handed Hummingbird to fathom where we were going, and what was at stake.  It was probably written with considerable thought and much excitement, but there's also a kid-in-a-candy-store element.  Somehow there's too much and too little to it.

For the first time since Transit, another odd book, I'm thinking this may work better the second time.  (Certainly once I'm no longer checking my watch and willing this arc to end, or even progress.)  Like Aaronovitch, this is a writer to reckon with, but the story takes a form which doesn't quite hit the spot – for me, anyway.  I'm still excited to read more by Kate Orman, and I'm not about to give up on books that side-step linear storytelling.  Keep it varied and don't be afraid to go odd, I say.  But each book is its own thing, and despite the rich authorial voice, this one falls short.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #21 – The Dimension Riders by Daniel Blythe

Doctor Who: The New Adventures#20The Dimension RidersBy Daniel Blythe
A mysterious foe manipulating events.  A dark Time Lord presence.  A spaceship in the future.  An old English university.  Monsters.  To quote an elderly Biff Tannen, there's something veryfamiliar about all this.

But then, it's too easy to say The Dimension Riders nicks its ideas from Shada.  Daniel Blythe more-or-less acquits himself of outright plagiarism, offering knowing nods ("I should have known there were other Time Lords lurking in those ancient colleges") as well as direct references (The Worshipful And Ancient Law Of Gallifrey appears; "that business with Skagra" is recalled).  I've even seen this referred to as a Shada sequel.

Anyway, it's not just Shada that'll trigger your spider-sense.  Ancient horrors from beyond the universe practically jostle for space in the Doctor's memoirs.  Time being fatally sped up is, if you'll pardon the expression, as old as the hills. (Time Destructor much?)  As for the army of faceless zombie things, the time paradox at the heart of events, and the metaphysical race through the TARDIS at the end... how long have you got?  Any astute Doctor Who fan and New Adventures reader would blot his Bingo card into an inky mess.  It even ends with the companion(s) doubting the Doctor and going off in a big, who-are-you huff, just like, oh what am I thinking of, ah yes, the previous novel .

Gloves back on: Blythe isn't naïve, or at least not entirely.  The prose is unshabby, even quite witty at times. "Bernice was not to know that St. Catherine's College had been founded in the 1960s, and was a glorious example of what should not be done with glass and concrete."  /  "Her voice was like unpolished silver."  /  "'This Doctor fellow – qualified, is he?'  'Suitably,' she answered, with ice and lemon."  The characters enjoy occasional blobs of backstory, like a spaceship captain's strict adherence to The Peter Principle, or the subtle twinge of romance between two doomed lovers.  ("It sounded as clear as if she were whispering close in his ear.  As clear as the time when she had, in fact.")  And there's a keen awareness of cliché, particularly when we hear from the villain of the week.  (Or the one manipulating the Big Bad Of The Week, secretly at the behest of a something under the control of another Big Bad.  Keep up!)

But when your novel is as all-round familiar and, when you get down to it, unspectacular as The Dimension Riders, cracking wise doesn't make that much of a difference.  Take the ostentatious baddie.  A weak-sauce replacement for the Master, the Rani or what have you, he's only as good as his evil scheme, and that rests on the assumption that the Big Bad will cut him a fair piece of the action, and won't – like every other bad guy's scary boss – simply chuck him in the bin.  I mean, duh, dude!  Watch a movie some time!  Then there is said Big Bad, the Garvond.  (Which sounds to me like the sort of embarrassing first name a baddie is deathly afraid his mother will yell, followed by orders to clean his room.  "Garvonnnnnd!  Where do you think you're going?!")  Not-so-metaphorically set up as an oogly-boogly from Time Lord lore, he/it proceeds to do exactly what the spooky prologue promised, with just the kind of booming voice, evil throne and army of faceless drones you'd expect.  There is talk of raiding the entire universe and then much killing of random folks on a spaceship, which is all a bit... Tuesday afternoon, Doctor Who-wise.

And there are times when Blythe's snappy style deserts him.  One crewman barks her entire horrible history at the Doctor, much to the weirded-out surprise of bothof them.  There are some inevitably pretentious epigraphs, including such get-me-I've-read-a-book lah-de-dahs as Milton – but it's not a constant, so it just looks like a random quirk.  And while this is personal taste, I don't think the author has much of an ear for names.  I've already complained about Garvond ("You've not even ironed your shirt!  Wait 'til your fathergets home!"), but then there's the not-exactly-evocative Time Soldiers, the not-exactly-anything Time Focus, and a gaggle of characters with pseudo-science-fictiony monikers like Vaik, Quallem and Romulus Terran.  Much of the book's forgettable middle is them, asking questions and getting bumped off. I've forgotten much of this sub-Star Trek stuff already.

The book moves at a relatively spry clip, apart from some of that drab stuff that's gone walkabouts in under 24 hours.  (I try to review these things immediately on finishing.  Clearly I should stick to that!)  The setup ping-pongs from portentous bad guys in the dark (which is all very The Five Doctors or The Deadly Assassin) to a super-efficient lady assassin who kills people with a magic briefcase (which is... wait, what?) to the cosy world of Oxford, and Bernice enjoying herself while the Doctor and Ace stick their noses in some trouble.  Pretty soon we're bouncing to the future as well, at two separate points, and things get pleasingly complex.  Still a bit dull, if I'm honest, what with one future setting being much like the other, and the Garvond and the repeated trick of ageing you to death, but you've got to admire the I-used-diagrams cleverness of it all.  (Also, the ageing gag doesn't entirely wear out its welcome.  The fate of a pregnant crewman is one of the few things I wish I had forgotten.)

The Oxford stuff is probably the highlight.  Some of that may be leftover Shada/Dirk Gently/Unseen University nostalgia.  Much of it is Bernice.  I promise I'm not trying to damn a dozen authors with faint praise here, but she seems genuinely easy to write for; her dry humour and honest curiosity practically bounce off the page.  I'm still amazed more isn't made of her.  ("Patience," said the vast array of Bernice fiction that came later.)  Meanwhile, poor old Ace fights, sulks, broods and comes back for more, ever ready with her list of Nasty Stuff What's Happened To Me Before.  She even has a pseudo-romance into the bargain.  (Yep, it's definitely Tuesday.)  The plot holds together well, but there's a hell of a lot of technobabble in the finale.  And as for the Doctor and Ace's climactic, metaphysical journey through trust issues, not to mention their trek through the tumultuous TARDIS, I just rolled my eyes.  We've done this, haven't we?  I wonder if the Doctor is getting over-familiar too.  It would explain why he's in such a foul mood throughout.

Hey, it's not a bad book.  If you're less familiar with Who canon, and crucially aren't reading all the New Adventures in a row like a damn lunatic (ahem), you'll probably find much to recommend.  It is pretty clever and there are good ideas and images.  (The TARDIS depositing a spaceship in one of its rooms is pretty natty, excepting its materialisation around an entire planet one book previously.)  But I'm stuck looking at the bigger picture: not only a story made up of very well-worn bits, but an arc that shows up at the end to shrug and point out the Doctor "was never meant to lose".  Oh.  The best case scenario there is a villain lamely protecting his pride.  The result is the same even if he is: 240 pages rendered inconsequential.  Or at least, more so.
6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #20 – Blood Heat: Director's Cut by Jim Mortimore

Disclaimer time!  19 reviews ago I mentioned reviewing New Adventures, Missing Adventures and miscellaneous.  Well, here's some miscellaneous for you: a new version of Blood Heat, only it wasn't published by Virgin, and not at all until 2015.  I still think it counts as part of the overall Virgin Books experience.

I'd like to say cheers to Jim Mortimore who kindly sent me a free review copy.  So: cheers Jim!

If any of you would like to read it, either as an e-book or paperback, you can get it direct from Jim.  E-mail jimbo-original-who@hotmail.com, or search Facebook for Jimbo's Directors Cuts.

Now then: let's go back to 1994, and a world gone familiarly pear-shaped...



Blood Heat: Director's Cut
By Jim Mortimore

The more I consider it, the more appropriate it seems to have an expanded-and-alternate version of Blood Heat, of all books.  It's already about a different version of reality – why shouldn't there be a different version of the book?  And make no bones about it, this isn't the same thing with the deleted scenes put back in.   Jim Mortimore makes it clear a.s.a.p. that we're dealing with a different Doctor Who altogether, where the Doctor's past is different, TARDIS stands for something else, half the names are changed and the back-stories aren't how you remember them.  Okay, so this likely began as a copyright-avoidance wheeze – it's Joanne Grant, okay?  Friends don't sue friends! – but it all serendipitously adds to the odd parallel-ness of the book.  Here is a new version of Blood Heat that could very well exist alongside the original.

But don't panic: it's still Doctor Who and it's still Blood Heat.   If you've read the original, you'll know your way around.  Until the roads change.

It would be redundant to discuss the plot at length since I've done that already, but I might as well recap: Blood Heat is a Worst Case Scenario sequel to The Silurians, and it gets considerably greater mileage out of the man vs. reptile dilemma than you'll find in most of their televised appearances.  There are parallels and differences between the species, both want to reclaim the Earth, both are right, but also wrong since neither is going about it peacefully.  There are still consciences on both sides, but they're in the minority; vendettas and mistakes speak the loudest.  There are plenty of echoes of that Malcolm Hulke mentality that made such a good story in the first place.

But let's cut to the chase: how's it different?  Well, I'd say the changes come in three main categories.

1) Nips and tucks.  There are tiny alterations which might be imperceptible if, unlike me, you haven't read Blood Heat recently.  Things like taking a minor character and giving them more flavour.  Doctor Meredith goes from a relative non-entity to an ex-drug addict; Geoff, prize-winning scientist and leader of a Nut Hatch-esque commune, was always quite a bit like Cliff Jones, so now he is.  And then there's taking bits of back-story and going in a slightly new direction.  The truth about Liz's late husband is different; the version we previously got is now the lesser one, the one she'd rather believe.  Also, there are times where we look at a scene, or a moment, and just turn it slightly.

One of my favourite examples is early on: the Doctor needs a dinosaur to act as a distraction, so he attaches some clothes to it, smacks its rump and sends it on its way.  Only (this time) that doesn't work, so he has to sneak up and whisper to it instead.  It's such a delightfully Doctorly thing, like several bits we're rightfully seeing again verbatim, like his apparent failure to accrue dirt in a swamp, his way of not making a sound when he approaches, his flighty, not-quite-on-the-same-plane-as-us-ness.  And there are more added to the mix.  When the Doctor (spoiler?) leaves the humans to see how the other half lives, he leaves flowers behind.  We don't know where he got them; no one's seen flowers in more than a decade.  But of course the Doctor can produce some.   It's a little bit of hope in an apparently hopeless situation, and it speaks to the Doctor's (surprisingly?) positive attitude to this whole situation.  Maybe because the rules are different now, and mankind's murderous supremacy can't cancel out everything else – as it used to, seemingly every week – this is the only version of The Silurian Dilemma that can end another, better way, on a different world altogether.

2) The extra goodies.  Because hey, it's a director's cut, you want more, right?  It's difficult not to imagine Jim Mortimore scrolling through his old manuscript, reaching a moment where Character A goes to Location B and announcing: "Of course!  There's the problem!  I have neglected to include a spectacular, balls-to-the-wall action scene there!"  And fair enough.  So instead of Ace escaping a stampede of dinosaurs just sort of... between pages, now it's a roller-coaster ride of teeth and bones that'll probably knock you out of your chair.  When Ace and Manesha escape a collapsing building, well sure, that's pretty exciting, but is it as exciting as a T-Rex and a Triceratops fighting to the death?  NO IT IS NOT, so in that goes.  When Sergeant Benson [sic] traverses a dead London on a mission for the Brigadier, he'll have to contend with worse things than dinosaurs.  No spoilers from me, but... yikes.

3) The new stuff.  More dinosaurs are awesome, and I love the thoughtful little touches, but I'm betting this was the real reason for the Director's Cut.  As any New Adventures reviewer will tell you, the elephant in the original room – and in a bunch of adjacent rooms as well, if I may stretch a metaphor to death – was Bernice. She was a late addition to the story, so she was bundled off into a subplot for more than 150 pages.  This was disappointing, because she's a great character and she brings out something very enjoyable in this particular Doctor, but there was also a surprising oh-is-that-it-ness to where she'd actually got to.  We didn't really need to be ignoring her for a huge portion of the book.  Similarly, the Doctor and Ace didn't seem all that bothered about missing her.  (Not for the first time in the New Adventures, there seemed to be no argument about who the third wheel was.  Of course, if you'd asked me...)

Well, that's (partly) fixed now.  Rather than inserting her into the main action, which would be difficult as the original plot is fairly tight, Blood Heat 1A: Silurian Boogaloo pushes her even further out, which sounds like a way to add fuel to the fire but actually makes a point of her absence.  Snootiest sentence I've ever said: it's a good use of negative space.  The Doctor and Ace's attitudes aren't much different, of course, but now they've actually forgotten she was ever there, which at least explains why they're like this.   As for Ber[e]nice (away with your lawsuit, good sir!), she contributes meaningfully to the story in a way that adds to, but does not interrupt the flow of the original.  Without going into spoilers (which is tricky when the whole point of a review is what specifically is different about this book), she is displaced in time and witnesses the original end of the Silurians, first hand.  In a story about two races fighting for supremacy, when we naturally bias towards the one we are, this is all to the good.  Heaps of extra information is added to the Silurians as a species.  They feel more rounded, more like people.  Berenice's empathy is an essential ingredient, just like the Doctor's, and – pointedly in a dream sequence, where she remembers her husband as one of them – Liz's.  It enhances the characters, and adds new angles and consequences to the plot.

Speaking of plot: there was a somewhat episodic quality to the original, somewhat necessarily as it was part of an arc.   I wasn't crazy about that.  You didn't know what instigated the whole mess but it was more or less resolved anyway (in time for Round Two) by the end.  As it happens, I was fairly disappointed by the explanation given in No Future.  (Er, spoilers.)  Well, there is a new one here.  Fortunately spoilers prevent me from going into detail; I say fortunately because there is a lot of information and I'm not sure I've digested it.  Between Berenice's canon-skewering discoveries in ancient times, the Doctor's increasingly complex theories in the now-plot and certain trippy interludes featuring familiar characters in new guises, the book teeters over a rabbit hole at times.  (From what I've read about his other works, though, it's probably very Jim Mortimore-y.  Mortimorish?)

I was thrilled to find Jo(anne) Grant's role expanded.  I called her "little more than a haunting What-If" in the original, and that couldn't be further from her reprise.  Introducing Jo in a cheeky lift from Mac Hulke's Doomsday Weapon novelisation, we promptly traverse the Silurian Nightmare from a 28 Days Later... perspective, cutting back and forth to Jo long before we met her, feral, in the jungle.  It's gripping, but ultimately quite dreamy and trippy and narratively timey-wimey stuff.  This is personal preference, but I don't handle really out-there writing terribly well; I'm not sure what it all meant.  There are numerous poetic echoes and callbacks throughout the main story, but this apparently builds to a... well, I can't describe the ending because you should read it yourself, but suffice to say it's a "Wait, what?!" development, albeit one I had considered somewhere on my periphery.  If this was written in the '90s, when books were all the Who we had, it would be a huge talking point.

There was less closure than I expected.  But that's sort of fair in a 22-years-later shot-in-the-dark rewrite, isn't it?  This isn't part of a series, it's not beholden to whoever's next in line.  It can dive into the unknown and leave it there if the author feels like it.  And I shouldn't moan: after all, I didn't like the bit in No Future (uh, spoilers!) when the characters all sat around asking the Doctor to explain everything in Etch-a-Sketch English.  (Can you tell I read this one later?)  Blood Heat 2: Blood Hotter is obviously a work that's been thought about in great depth, quite possibly in a cave with writing all over the walls. It's a bit of a mind-boggler.  I'm still not sure why the Doctor and Ace forgot about Berenice – come to that, I'm not sure Ace met her, post-forgetting.  But perhaps I'm just seasick from scrolling through a PDF every day for a week.  (I have since got a Kindle.)  In any case, any brain-ache I have should be alleviated with a second read.  Although I guess that's technically a third read.

The new Blood Heat is an intriguing anomaly.  If you've never read the original, or come to that never read a New Adventure, I think it's sufficiently robust that you can dive straight in.  Berenice's origins are obligingly reproduced, though of course the details are new; a more broken and more human story, her introduction to the Doctor is different too, which is fitting for an altogether different iteration of the man himself.  Ace you'll recognise from her TV persona, only with added grit.  Another neat addition is a consistent harking back to her days in the (space)'fleet; it tells you all you need to know about why she's different now, without going into the specifics of why she went away and came back.   That's for other books.  But after I found her increasingly wearying in the other, later (earlier?) books in the Cycle, I liked this Ace a great deal.  It still felt like a bit of a random quirk for her to look up an old friend on Beta Earth, but people are full of random quirks, and this relationship too is somewhat beefed up.

As for those of you who've already read (and probably own) Blood Heat, there's even more reason to give this a go.  Everything is richer and fuller.  (Well, that bit with the Doctor and Jo entering the Complex still plays out off-screen – but maybe I'm just not missing anything that can't be summarised in a sentence.)  The Silurian society is much more detailed.  Human society, particularly the ways it copes with near-extinction, is even more poignant: such pettiness as racism has disappeared, while pencils are as valuable as Picassos.  If you're like me, there's a nerdish glee to be had in flicking between one version and another, seeing if something really is a new addition or you just forgot it was there all along.  (Like the references.  I'd forgotten that Ber(e)nice handles a heroic moment with a cheeky lift from Caves Of Androzani.  Come to think of it, there are a lot of references in this.  Well, it was the thirtieth anniversary; at least it never feels like a Gary Russell ref-fest.  They're harmless.  If you get them, they're there.)

It's altogether a bolder, fuller story.  Save for the significantly different ending, as the original was a necessary building block in New Adventures canon, this is the definitive version.  It's worth the return journey.
8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #19 – Blood Heat by Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#19
Blood Heat
By Jim Mortimore

Doctor Who and the Silurians.  The show's writers seem inexorably drawn to that subject, and quite literally that plot, and it's almost always the same: Silurians want the Earth back, man won't share, tragic consequences, regretful comment from the Doctor, credits.  There are variations on the theme – sometimes it's Sea Devils instead of Silurians, and Chris Chibnall ducked the tragic finale by, uh, not bothering to resolve it at all – but it's always an imitation of Malcolm Hulke's original, rather grown-up story.  It was Doctor Who of a different sort, and we were clearly impressed.

Blood Heat represents, if still not an all-new story for the Silurians, at least a new spin on Hulke.  What if the Silurians had succeeded in wiping out most of humanity?  What if the Brigadier didn't bomb Wenley Moor at the end?  What if the Doctor died and what was left of humanity had to fend for itself?  Absent the restrictions of an ongoing television programme, where even sci-fi can't rock the boat that much (or not for long), Jim Mortimore has the chance to craft a world where this is the norm: where this abominable future can still be made into something good, and is worth fighting for in its own right.  Blood Heat still can't resist underlining that there's a main universe and an aberrant one, and that Universe B's days are numbered, but it comes pretty close to escaping the let's-just-get-out-of-here trap of most parallel universe stories.

The Silurians' world is like a Doctor Who Unbound story tinged with Day Of The Triffids, Planet Of The Apes and Jurassic Park.  (Speaking of Unbound, it's quite specifically like Sympathy For The Devil, which is set in a world where Jon Pertwee's Doctor never turned up to help UNIT.)  If I'd read this when I was a bit younger, it'd be absolute mana: there's something weirdly satisfying about seeing a familiar world gone to hell, and consequences for characters we recognise.  The world itself is splendidly haunting: all of humanity's progress is rusted and useless, and apart from the Silurians' brutal control of the climate and of the hodge-podge of dinosaur species roaming the wild, even the more familiar animal life has got it in for us.  There's a grimly spectacular scene involving a pack of ravenous dogs, and it's by no means the only example of bloody horror here.  Dinosaurs feast or get ripped apart; Silurians murder or get the same in kind; even humans (inevitably) turn on one another, for a variety of reasons.  The body count is a bit like watching a clock in a time travel montage.

Probably the strongest example of "Universe B" is its alternate characters.  Let's face it, that's usually the highlight of parallel universe stories – a surprising rarity in Doctor Who, we've at least seen a world of dictators and eye-patches, where Nick Courtney got to be The Bad Brigadier.  He's not quite so clear cut "evil" here: still the recognisable military mind of Series Seven, except the warmth of the UNIT Family was never lit, so he's determined to protect humanity at any cost.  He doesn't especially like the new Doctor (who is even more unpredictable than Pertwee), and he has no qualms in asking Liz Shaw to do terrible deeds.

She's amazing, too: utterly world-weary but still buggering on, her characterisation here is the closest to what we knew on-screen, and it made me realise we wuz robbed with just four Liz stories.  She's the conscience of the new, beaten-down humanity.  And she is very alone.  Then there's Benton, stripped of all the cuddly warmth you'd find on TV: a coldly efficient killer, loyal to the Brig but driven by a hatred of the "reps", this is not someone who would kindly offer a mutant maggot its din-dins.  And finally there's Jo Grant.  Little more than a haunting what-if, poor Jo has lost her mind – and a baby.  A feral mess, she's an acute reminder to the Doctor of what's been lost.

The established characters fare better than the new ones.  The way the narrative moves, in hurried chops between the Doctor and Liz over here, Ace and Benton over there, Bernice over in... somewhere... doing something, there isn't really time to build anyone new.  Even the Silurians benefit from familiarity, as their leader turns out to be a reformed Morka (aka the mutinous Young Silurian), and one of their cruellest lieutenants is Ichtar (who hasn't changed a wink).  Conversely, there are plenty of people working in UNIT's Cheddar Base, and a bunch of Nut Hatch-esque land-dwellers who just didn't leave an impression on me.  That choppy narrative style is the root of a few problems, if I'm honest; it occasionally feels as if we're missing some plot point or moment, be it the Doctor's discovery of the human HQ, or an initial conversation with Liz about parallel universes, or any kind of grounding for the Doctor's eventual, barmy-even-by-his-standards plan to save the day.  It reaches a head as the finale thunders towards us, which is fair enough as jumping from one bit to another is a way to wring tension, but a lot of the novel felt like that.  It was hard to settle, or for people and settings to breathe.

There are still great, evocative moments like seeing the ruined cities, and quaint little ones, like when Ace is hungry and the Doctor pulls sandwiches and a hot thermos from his pockets.  And there are brilliantly disturbing ideas aplenty: we get a first-person view of the alt-Doctor's death, and Ace finds his corpse, complete with rusted sonic screwdriver.  Nothing says "NewAdventures" quite like murdering the old ones!  For good measure, the Doctor adopts his predecessor's TARDIS – a somewhat head-spinning switcheroo that, thanks to spoilerriffic Wikipedia (grr!), I now know will be with us for quite some time.

In all the parallel universe excitement and twisted old characters, you could almost overlook the "New" aspects.  An intriguing arc has begun about the Doctor's timeline being manipulated by someone – I'm dead curious who, although it's difficult to think of really more than three suspects.  (Or one, if a certain synonym for "interference" means anything.)  The original TARDIS is having as bad a time of it as ever: sunk in tar on a soon-to-be forgotten world, it deserves a rest after the continual falling apart and blowing up that the New Adventures throw at it.  The Doctor himself is still contemplating hanging up his hat (yeah right, Doc), but can't resist taking another roll of the Silurian dice.  Mortimore poignantly articulates his dilemma wherever possible.  "I should think the edmontonia's got at least as much right to live as either of us, wouldn't you?"  /  "I'm not the Brigadier, you know."  /  "The Silurians aren't monsters, are they?"  /  "You can begin by helping me."  The Doctor said quietly, "To restore Mankind to its position of supremacy on this planet?"  "That's correct."  "And the Silurians?"  "They can be–"  There was an urgent knock at the door.

Ace and Bernice fare less well.  Once again, it wasn't clear if Bernice was even in this until late in the writing process, and sadly it shows: not only is she absent, but it scarcely occurs to the Doctor or Ace to go looking for her.  Consequently she was barely on my mind.  When she finally shows up (p.160) she's as rich and funny as ever, but it's a shame she's still in the bizarre what-to-do-with-you world of, to pick one example, Transit.  Aren't we past that?  I wonder how there was still so much uncertainty around her, since Lucifer Rising (co-written by Mortimore) was apparently written, complete with Benny, before Blood Heat.  Then again, for all I know, maybe Blood Heat was waiting on Jim Mortimore's hard drive beforehand.

As for Ace, I'm wondering if there's much you can realistically do with her any more.  She's got her badass space training and her smart-bombs, and she more or less trusts the Doctor these days, but then again she's still haunted by Manisha (which at least she can do something about here in Universe B) and, by the book's end, we're right back to not trusting the Doctor again.  The constant ping-pong of are-Ace-and-the-Doctor-okay cannot help making her look like an indecisive kid, which surely – following her Love And War time-out – she is not.

Blood Heat is a big, satisfying action story that offers a genuinely different resolution to The Only Silurian Story Ever Told.  You know throughout the book that you don't know how this is going to turn out, and that lends an extra sense of excitement to it all.  Nonetheless, there's an odd feeling of summary to the narrative, which seems logical given the existence of a new Director's Cut.  Despite the spectacular bangs and splats that pepper the story, there isn't a particular dense plot, or any characters that I felt greatly concerned for.  Although people are the most important thing here, that term thoughtfully applying to human and Silurian alike, it's still a case of savouring the vistas and enjoying the set-pieces more than pondering the lives involved.   Sign me up for the longer cut; what's printed here is a cool parallel universe What If, but not a great deal more.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #18 – Iceberg by David Banks

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#18
Iceberg
By David Banks

If there is a purpose to the New Adventures, besides simply putting more Doctor Who out there, it may be to add weight to certain elements of the show.  The Doctor and Ace are both deeper and richer prospects on the page, or canbe in the right hands, and there are aliens and "monsters" that could benefit from the same treatment.  If you're going to write a New Adventures novel about Cybermen, for example, it wouldn't do to trot out the things we've seen before.  You have an opportunity to explore and expand them, possibly improve on them.

Iceberg sort of does anddoesn't do that.  David Banks, of playing-the-Cyber-Leader-throughout-the-'80s fame, invokes the history and the threat of the Cybermen with real flair, taking them back to their creepy roots and away from the bland "Ex-cellent" stormtroopers of the '80s.  He knows his onions, and the Cybermen are a palpable menace (for the first time in years) as a result.  But they are still essentially up to their old tricks again, so the novel as a whole isn't very impressive.

It gets off to a strong start, taking us through the events of The Invasion and The Tenth Planet (in chronological order!) from a more human perspective.  A young woman, Jacqui, is innocently preparing for her exams when the Cybermen march through London in The Invasion; her husband, Philip, is later struck down in a motorcycle accident while the First Doctor discovers Mondas in The Tenth Planet.  If you're going to revisit and revise continuity, this is an offbeat way to do it.  These events impact people's lives, albeit indirectly: Jacqui and Philip have a daughter, Ruby, whose life will be touched once more by Cybermen, and General Cutler – the military curmudgeon who once faced off against the First Doctor – has a daughter, also a general, eager to know what happened to him.  Icebergis a sometimes thoughtful book, positing the emotional world of people against the cold logic of Cybermen.  For good measure, during their greatest hits we are also treated to a Cyber-POV: a stilted running commentary of events collapsing after the betrayal of Tobias Vaughan.  It's a neat contrast that sums up the book.

And yeah, about those Cybermen.  Banks plunges into the body horror aspect that seemed all too muted in the televised series.  With no watershed to worry about, we witness the torn-apart bodies of prospective Cybermen, watch as they are dissected and stuck back together, listen as they impassively decide who will be converted and who will be recycled.  They're a frightening force, all the better for lacking a stereotypical sense of evil.  Iceberg is a good example of their belief that they are helping anyone they convert.  That's a chilling (ahem) and canny assessment of the Cybermen, tinged with the occasional murmurings of memory and emotion that only serve to torture them and push them further away from what they were.  (This aspect perhaps should have been played up even further, but oh well, I'm glad it's there at all.)  There are also some more conventional dollops of Cyber-continuity, such as background on the Cyber-Controller and the Cybermats, which will no doubt satisfy the list-keeping contingent of Who fans.

My main issue with Iceberg is the amount of time it takes for things to happen.  Not just the Cybermen, whose slow reveal could be a nod to creepy tension-builders like The Moonbase if they weren't sign-posted from the beginning.  (And on the cover!)  I mean the plot as a whole.  The Cybermen are interfering with the FLIPback project – an Arctic research station that aims to reverse an environmental disaster.  They also have a vested interest in the SS Elysium, a cruise liner heading for the South Pole.  The Doctor, having sent Ace and Bernice on their way to the events of Birthright, uses a back-up TARDIS to go and help out.  There's not a lot going on here (including yet another attempt to invade Earth via a Base Under Siege), and the book is relentlessly padded until well over halfway.  Simple inciting incidents like FLIPback scientists going missing and the Doctor arriving take ages to occur.  Meanwhile?  Pages happen.

Specifically: General Cutler (junior) tries to whip the FLIPback team into shape; Ruby enjoys the Elysium and writes an article about the trip; and the Doctor stumbles slowly through the TARDIS.  He doesn't achieve anything or meet anyone for almost 150 pages.  We just cut back to him every so often pottering through corridors, vaguely reflecting on how he needs to get away from it all.  It's an utterly bizarre choice right after the nearly Doctor-less Birthright – indeed, it takes place simultaneously.  I often wondered if Banks knew he wasn't writing a Doctor-lite.

The main thrust of the novel seems to be Ruby investigating odd goings-on below decks, but even she spends most of her time socialising with a couple of actors, learning an ancient form of relaxation from a friend and reading Lao Tze.  (The latter in particular.  A lot.)  In fairness, she's quite an interesting character: following her parents adds a certain groundwork, her journalistic instincts are endearing and when she comes close to joining the TARDIS crew at the end, it's not entirely unwelcome.  (Although seriously, enough with the possible-companions.  The Doctor even mistakes her for Kadiatu!)  But she's not strong enough to justify a lot of narratively flaccid sitting-around-on-a-cruise-liner – which, it eventually transpires, has sod all to do with the plot.  She's also not the brightest bulb, marching into obvious danger more than once and all-too-easily believing the Doctor has sold her out.  Thanks all the same, but I'll keep Bernice.

At least Ruby's story has an ending, frustratingly doomed TARDIS trip notwithstanding.  General Cutler's "closure" comes via a madly rushed and largely off-the-page conversation where the Doctor instantly convinces her he's telling the truth re Cybermen, regenerations, etc.  We don't hear much from her afterwards, apart from some base-wide Cyber-hypnosis.  What a joy to know all the time we spent with her and the FLIPback team butting heads and bonding was, er, well actually I don't know why Banks bothered, to be honest.  It goes nowhere.  The Doctor doesn't fare much better, apparently seeking some sort of renewal (hence the Tenth Planet echoes) but going through the motions like it's any old Doctor Who episode.  Admittedly he's quite jolly and sporting for the duration, but he's utterly unfazed when Ruby fails to get aboard the TARDIS.  The image of him returning at the end of Birthright, nonchalantly brushing snow from his shoulders, pretty much sums up his emotional investment in Iceberg.

David Banks is a generally good writer, especially when he has a handle on the characters.  Those early twists on continuity and the latter unashamed grisliness of the Cybermen make obvious highlights.  But so much of Iceberg is just stuff.  Ruby ponders and reflects, either on the state of the environment or Lao Tze or (obsessively!) The Wizard Of Oz, and there comes a point where she (as well as the narrative) is just inwardly rambling.  (The "mistreat the environment" theme had more room to breathe, and worked a lot better, in Warhead.  Also: pleasetell me the whole Wizard Of Oz thing wasn't just because Tin Man = Cyberman.)  Some of the organic-vs.-mechanic stuff is insightful, but some is just a bit odd, like this introspective moment over a ship's engine: "It felt no compunction dismembering a Cyberman.  It owed no allegiance to the Cyber race.  It had one job to do.  To power the ship.  To drive forward.  That was its goal.  Implacable.  If anything got in its way, man or machine, it was a struggle for supremacy.  Might was right, as the Cyberman knew well.  The strongest always won." (...said the ship's engine.  WTF?)

Perhaps it's the simplistic nature of the plot – once it finally hauls ass and gets going – but the more action-oriented bits can be repetitive and dull.  They usually involve a Cyberman chasing somebody or somebody shooting a Cyberman, and sometimes they just go on and on.  Conversely, thanks to the pacing problem, the ending is a rushed, explosion-themed anti-climax.  The writing includes the occasional drab cliché like "and not a moment too soon", and a smattering of quite annoying typos.  (I think we're past jotting them down.)  It's not a predominantly clumsy or amateur book – these are nitpicks, it's reasonably well-written overall – but combined with the utterly slack pace, I'm left feeling that Iceberg needed at least another draft or two, and a more critical editor's eye.

To my knowledge, this is the only New Adventures novel to feature Cybermen.  (Come to that, there aren't many featuring TV monsters.)  David Banks gets a lot out of them, which is a relief: all too often they've seemed like drab, bipedal Daleks, lacking the uniqueness of their pepperpot betters and easily supplanted by the Borg.  As Spare Parts showed a decade later, they are more compelling when their roots are showing.  But there is more to a story than scary monsters.  Well, look at Spare Parts.  Iceberglacks the momentum, progressive plot and character development needed for a really good book.  While never exactly tedious, I still needed weeks to pick away at it, as if it were an especially large and unappetising dinner.  It was a relief to finish, and then not especially filling

5/10