Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Ghost Devices by Simon Bucher-Jones (or, “The Future Dictates the Past”)

In November of 1997, as was the pattern of the time, Virgin Publishing and BBC Books both put out new instalments of their respective series of “present-grounded” Doctor Who – or, perhaps more appropriately in the case of the former, Doctor Who-adjacent – novels.

Of these two books, one offered up a complicated and timey-wimey tale, rife with paradoxes and discussion of atypical weaponry and warfare, with the Time Lords operating on the periphery of the narrative. Not to be outdone, it also saw the introduction of elements that would go on to play a pivotal role in its overarching series’ subsequent brushes with big, show-stopping epics that kept one eye firmly planted on the idea of serving as a literary “event.”

The other was Alien Bodies.

This is not, as it may initially appear, a purposeless bit of facetiousness on my part, but rather a revealing snapshot of the deeply confusing nature of attempting to review Ghost Devices. Let’s not beat around the bush here: this is the New Adventure which had the bad fortune of being published in the exact month in which the Eighth Doctor Adventures finally managed to conjure up something sufficiently interesting to allow them to command their audience’s long-term attentions.

One can, handily enough, see this gap in relevance reflected in even the most cursory examination of the authors on hand for the month. Alien Bodies, as should hopefully go without saying this close to my review of it, was the product of Lawrence Miles, and was indeed largely responsible for Miles’ rapid ascent to the position of Doctor Who‘s leading artistic light.

Even if that ascent was curtailed less than three years later by an equally rapid decline in the wake of Vanessa Bishop’s high-profile slagging off of Interference in Doctor Who Magazine and the subsequent erasure of every trace of the writer’s ideas in The Ancestor Cell, several of those same ideas went on to exert a strong gravity over the programme’s eventual revival in 2005, most obviously in the general notion of a vast temporal conflict culminating in the destruction of Gallifrey.

Granted, Miles cannot strictly lay claim to being the sole originator of these basic concepts. To pick just one example, the legendary planet of Ardethe in the original Audio Visuals production of Gary Russell’s Deadfall was explicitly meant to be a ruined Gallifrey after its destruction by the Daleks in Planet of Lies, and that’s saying nothing of Alan Moore’s DWM backup strips in the early 1980s. All the same, it remains true that Miles was the most visible proponent of said concepts within the Wilderness Years.

On the other side of the present/past Doctor divide, meanwhile, readers could sample Mark Gatiss’ The Roundheads. Gatiss has been an infrequent presence around these parts for a little over five years at this time, even if he hasn’t actually written a full-length novel for somewhere in the ballpark of three, and he will hang around for a good twenty years or so more come the revival.

It’s almost certainly a bridge too far to credit Gatiss with being a pivotal architect of the New Series or anything quite so dramatic, but for better or worse he serves as something of a unifying thread across the first ten series of the revival. All told, he ended up penning at least one script each for Doctors Nine through Twelve and was even afforded the privilege of writing the final, past-focused part of the series’ opening “present/future/past (change order where applicable)” triptych, a structure which ended up sticking around for so long that he was eventually asked to pull the exact same duty again on Victory of the Daleks.

(This much, at least, we can pretty firmly place in the “for worse” camp.)

Which just leaves us with Ghost Devices, the sophomore effort by Simon Bucher-Jones, who had previously written The Death of Art some fourteen months prior. Whereas Miles and Gatiss loom large in the post-Alien Bodies history of Doctor Who – and ironically enough, the two even infamously crossed paths more directly in 2005 when Miles took Gatiss’ The Unquiet Dead to task for its alleged status as a xenophobic anti-immigration screed aired in the heat of the Iraq War – Bucher-Jones’ career ends up taking a somewhat different path from this point on.

To see just what I mean by this, let’s go through that career in a reasonable amount of detail. Past this point, we’ll be talking about Bucher-Jones on no less than three separate occasions, with his 1998 short story War Crimes, and his two co-writing stints for the EDAs with The Taking of Planet 5 in 1999 and 2001’s Grimm Reality. Beyond the remits of the blog, he also contributed Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield short stories to Big Finish’s The History of Christmas and Collected Works anthologies, respectively.

More instructive by far, however, is the vast array of credits for spin-off series with an even more tenuous claim to “legitimacy” than that enjoyed by Bernice’s adventures. Over the years, Bucher-Jones has racked up short stories for everything from the Iris Wildthyme series for Obverse Books, through to the same company’s 2021 Build High for Happiness anthology set in the world of Stephen Wyatt’s Paradise Towers, and even Arcbeatle Press’ Cwej.

But the most consistent ancillary world in which the writer has distinguished himself is ultimately that of Faction Paradox, and this can hardly be considered especially surprising. Even at this early stage, it’s clear that Bucher-Jones and Miles enjoy some level of creative harmony, with The Death of Art being the only other book in the latter-day NAs’ loose Psi Powers Arc to so much as mention Christmas on a Rational Planet‘s Shadow Directory. In Ghost Devices, this thematic unity ends up proving twofold, with the novel’s plot not only echoing eerily forward towards Alien Bodies, but also following up on Miles’ reintroduction of God and the People in Down.

Past this point, you’ve also got The Taking of Planet 5‘s status as one of the most direct engagements with the War arc outside of Alien Bodies and Interference themselves. Really, one suspects that the only reason Grimm Reality isn’t quite as straightforward a riff on an existing Miles novel might simply have something to do with its being the rare Bucher-Jones book to come out in the months before one of the EDAs’ regularly scheduled Miles outings rather than in their immediate aftermath.

When Miles eventually ended up storming over to Mad Norwegian Press, Faction Paradox license in tow, Bucher-Jones followed him, writing the second-highest number of entries in The Book of the War. All indications seem to be that a not inconsiderable proportion of these entries were concerned with setup for his eventual 2013 novel, The Brakespeare Voyage, which is rather impressive in a way given the eleven-year gap separating the two books. This was followed up by a number of short story contributions, to say nothing of his performing editorial duties on 2018’s The Book of the Enemy and, as recently as this past January, on the second volume of Obverse’s Worlds of the Spiral Politic sub-series.

A less charitable interpretation of this CV might try and spin this out into a broader indictment of Bucher-Jones’ spin-off friendliness. In this reading, we’d probably posit Ghost Devices, his first substantial engagement with the artform, as the original sin that’s going to see him left behind in the “influence” stakes by folks like Miles and Gatiss as the franchise marches on. The best he can hope for under this paradigm is a kind of “trusted lieutenant” status, forever playing with ideas and concepts created by those with a higher profile than him.

There are a few rather obvious reasons why we’re not going to opt for this route, mind you. To begin with, it’s ultimately somewhat laughable to point to this “trusted lieutenant” status as a failing on Bucher-Jones’ part while simultaneously positioning him in opposition to Mark Gatiss.

I might have a sneaking fondness for scripts like The Crimson Horror or Robot of Sherwood – and even, less defensibly, for Night Terrors, though that’s primarily down to nothing more complex than its having scared the bejesus out of my eight-year-old self – but his being brought back for every season of the Moffat Era was primarily a matter of his general ability to turn in an episode of vague competence on time. The fact that he worked quite closely with Moffat on Sherlock and was thus presumably broadly in tune with his sensibilities as a showrunner certainly can’t have hurt matters either.

Not entirely unrelated is the question of who, exactly, Bucher-Jones would be deferring to in this situation. Miles seems the obvious choice, but in practice his last fully-fledged credit on Faction Paradox came with his spell as co-editor of A Romance in Twelve Parts in 2011, while 2009’s The Judgment of Sutekh marked the final occasion on which he actually wrote a story for the range.

For all that Miles is the one who came up with the bulk of the central concepts that initially animated the series, in other words, the actual burden of writing new tales set in that world has long since been passed on to other people. And if you’re looking at a list of said other people, it’s hard not to single out Bucher-Jones as being among the most prominent movers and shakers in the field.

Certainly, the only other contributor to The Book of the War who might feasibly be said to match him for consistency of engagement with the series over the years is Philip Purser-Hallard, and even he ended up largely drifting away to work on ancillary projects at Obverse like The City of the Saved and The Black Archive.

This leads naturally to my next major point, which is that, as far as Doctor Who spin-offs go, Faction Paradox is probably one of the more intriguing ones. At a minimum, it generally manages to sustain a compelling level of ambient weirdness, even if it doesn’t always translate into transcendent quality. If I’m being entirely honest with you, I’m far more likely to be positively disposed to an author who opts to play around in the slightly surreal, jagged margins of Faction Paradox than I am to one who just wants to try and turn the bloody Dominators into an actual recurring threat, or whatever other brilliant ideas Candy Jar Books have cooked up of late.

(Ironically enough, having only ever read the Faction Paradox stuff put out by Mad Norwegian Press and Random Static, I’m almost entirely unqualified to actually speak to the quality of Bucher-Jones’ work for Obverse. I mean, I know I’ve got a copy each of A Romance in Twelve Parts and Tales of the City knocking around here somewhere, but even if I wrenched my mind away from the blog for long enough to give them a read, he didn’t write anything for those particular collections, so… sorry.)

And at the risk of stating the obvious, dear reader, well… clearly I don’t have much of a problem with spin-offs in the general case. We’re barrelling ever closer to having spilled 120 reviews’ worth of ink on the subject of the Wilderness Years and its various forms of literature, so it’d frankly be a bit rich to turn around and sell that same literature entirely down the river at this juncture. Yes, our foreknowledge of Rose and the revival will always exert a certain inescapable gravity over the project, but we’re not even halfway done yet. Let’s save the teleologies for a later time, yeah?

(Like later in this post, perhaps.)

With all of that being said, Ghost Devices seems practically tailor-made to invite the colouring of one’s reading with this retrospective context, even outside of the purely coincidental resonances it acquires when juxtaposed against BBC Books’ contemporary output. As the very title of the novel implies, this is a work concerned with the relationship between the past and the future, and the intrusion of one into the other in a manner which we might – somewhat ostenatiously but not, I think, entirely unreasonably – term a haunting.

So, if you’ll indulge me, I want to break from the usual format a little here and offer a more free-form preliminary dissertation on that aspect of the work, and we’ll leave it as a test of my general competency as a critic to see if I can manage to satisfactorily tie it back in to the main thrust of my argument.

Cool? Cool.

Going off initial appearances, at least, what this haunting reveals resembles nothing so much as the Third Doctor’s old admonition in Day of the Daleks that the possibility of ghosts from the past also implies the existence of ghosts from the future. But wait a minute… does it? I mean, sure, it goes without saying in the case of Doctor Who, a show which routinely features time travel as a means of getting into and out of stories within the hundred-minute blocks of its serials. Normal service may have been temporarily suspended in that regard during the Pertwee Era, but even there the same season that housed Day of the Daleks would see the production team handwave the TARDIS’ immobility with a handy invocation of the Time Lords on two separate occasions.

In the newly copyright-mandated Doctorless world that Bernice Summerfield now inhabits, however, time travel occupies an altogether more ambiguous position. It has to, if for no more profound a reason than the characters’ basic inability to so much as think the words “TARDIS” or “Time Lords” for fear of inviting the litigious wrath of the BBC.

Perhaps the best illustration of the consequences of this attitude can be found in Jason, who reveals himself to be even more Problematic (capitalisation very much intentional) than we began to suspect last time. In his marriage to Benny, and the Doctor’s gift of the Time Rings, he provides the most obvious “out” for any potential Bernice-focused spin-off to involve itself in time travel. Indeed, when Big Finish decide to go all-out on a time-travelling Benny story in a few years’ time with their adaptation of Walking to Babylon, it’s predicated on that very out, with the story recast as the first instalment in a so-called Time Ring Trilogy.

The couple’s divorce in Eternity Weeps, therefore, ends up causing much greater ructions than one typically associates with such an upheaval, as befits the ludicrously heightened stakes of a Jim Mortimore novel. If a divorce can be conceptualised as a profoundly intimate apocalypse – and since these apocalyptic themes will likely prove of great relevance in this and the next review, we ought to make our obligatory acknowledgement that Glen Morgan and James Wong were in the midst of independently broaching similar ideas on the second season of Millennium – and the end of a world, the separation of the Time Rings denies Benny and Jason the ability to access a multitude of other worlds besides.

(Actually, Paul Cornell acknowledges this as far back as Happy Endings, with Bernice quite pointedly observing that “divorce equates with being marooned,” offering further compelling evidence in the “How far ahead was Benny and Jason’s divorce planned out by Virgin?” debate.)

This leads naturally to one of the strangest “glitches” in Virgin continuity, though it might be something of an overstatement to label it as such. Simply put, there’s a substantial and barely-referenced gap in Jason’s personal history which somehow sees him going from a promise to remain on Earth in 2003 to showing up on Apollox 4 in Beyond the Sun in the late twenty-sixth century.

It’s undeniably odd, and only narrowly avoids rating as an outright “glitch” in my estimation by dint of the fact that there’s a relatively easy explanation waiting in the wings regarding his getting a lift off the Doctor. Which hints, of course, at one of the central fulcrums of what I’ve dubbed the Problem of Jason in a rather shameless nod to this project’s increasingly Sandiferian bent, in that that’s the one excuse that the New Adventures can never actually come out and explicitly state at this moment in time. Jason becomes at once essential to Bernice’s world as one half of an ongoing “Will they?”/”Won’t they?” relationship, and strangely difficult to account for.

But crucially, this elision of Jason’s personal history is seemingly about time travel in the abstract more than it is about Jason in particular. The closest thing to an honest-to-God “time-travelling Bernice” story that we’ve had so far is still Lawrence Miles’ The Judgment of Solomon, which was equally conspicuous in its lacking any explanation for Benny’s ability to go on a casual jaunt to eighth-century Baghdad to prove one of her archaeological colleagues wrong.

It’s here that another piece of Matthew Jones’ coyness on the subject of time travel in Beyond the Sun proves particularly instructive, with a cheeky moment in which he has Bernice’s internal narration relay the information that “time travelling was something [she has] a great deal of experience at,” before seemingly pulling back to clarify that “all archaeologists [do.]” Even so, casual academic pleasure cruises to ancient Baghdad seem to be a case of taking that statement a tad too literally, no?

In short, then, time travel was set up by the new New Adventures as a force that would, by its very presence, impose some measure of distortion upon the narrative and social context in which Benny routinely operates. And while Ghost Devices doesn’t bear that out directly in terms of its sketching an actual bona-fide “time travel story” – again, we’ll have to wait until Walking to Babylon for that – it’s more obviously willing to play around with the mechanics of time and time travel than any of the first six Benny novels. In this respect, the comparisons to Day of the Daleks seem oddly apropos, as no serial prior to 1972 had really dared to engage with time travel as anything more than a generative mechanism for Doctor Who stories, with the possible exception of fringe cases like The Space Museum or The Ark.

There is, once more, no shortage of bitter irony to be found in the observation that the most complex and least straightforwardly nostalgic premise to be found in the four-book run of NAs between Deadfall and Tempest should be the one lumped with the release slot that ultimately ended up permiting BBC Books’ monthly offering in the EDAs to completely overshadow it.

Dave Owen, in reviewing this same stretch of books as a means of welcoming Bernice back to the pages of DWM‘s Shelf Life feature after Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes decided to let up on their NA embargo, seems to nod towards Ghost Devices‘ exceptional status in this regard:

Tempest is dignified and graceful, but only counts as SF by its location, whereas Deadfall uses SF devices in abundance but feels just as formulaic as Mean Streets by using them only as tools rather than themes. Of this quartet, only Ghost Devices really belongs in the SF section, and is coincidentally the funniest too. I’d like to see the ‘wacky’ box filling up faster.

It’s worth returning once more to the numbers, if only to underscore just how extensively and swiftly Ghost Devices‘ aspirations towards relevance were quashed. Per the Shannon Sullivan rankings, Alien Bodies not only wound up becoming the first EDA to score higher than its concurrent NA competitor, but it did so with an astonishing fourteen percentage point lead.

If the priorities of Doctor Who as a franchise weren’t clear enough after Down temporarily became the last New Adventure to be reviewed in DWM, there could surely be no doubt after this. Yes, the Eighth Doctor Adventures had given rise to unfathomable horrors like War of the Daleks, but they’d also provided an outlet for the wonderfully bonkers creativity of Lawrence Miles. One may tolerate a world of Kursaals for the sake of an Interference, and all that.

Under these circumstances, much like the Spire that proves so crucial to its plot, Ghost Devices becomes a curiously malformed and insubstantial thing through no fault of its own, standing as a monument to a possible future that was eclipsed and erased almost as soon as it was brought into this world.

Yet as we must surely be well aware by now, a piece of art can retain a certain power even in its erased state. That is, after all, no small part of our devoting so much energy to the Wilderness Years, to see how the ghostly impressions of novels gone by remain in the larger canvas of Doctor Who. Even if Ghost Devices has an appreciably smaller footprint than most novels of its ilk, that’s no reason to give it anything less than a full hearing.

As it happens, this decision is a delightfully fortuitous one, as I found myself enjoying Bucher-Jones’ second novel far more than his first. It expands upon the writer’s penchant for a wilfully loquacious and colourful prose style, something that was only glimpsed intermittently between the interminable descriptions of Parisian alleyways and catacombs in which The Death of Art was practically drowning. Moreover, it manages to turn this distinctive voice towards a plot that is not only broadly dramatically satisfying, but frequently peppered with dialogic gems and moments of genuine hilarity to boot.

This, by extension, provides the groundwork for one of the more convenient and well-worn critical gambits under the sun. Boiled down to its most essential elements, we can express the central impetus of this gambit in terms of an inquiry as to what makes one novel in an author’s oeuvre succeed where another failed.

On the face of it, the most tempting possibility is to file Ghost Devices‘ merits under the broad umbrella categorisation of “making more sense than The Death of Art,” particularly since that’s a phenomenally low bar for a novel to clear. That was, ultimately, the primary stumbling block for Bucher-Jones’ debut story, featuring as it did the power struggles of no less than three separate psi-powered factions and subfactions vying for control of an English dollhouse that doubled as the dwelling of the Quoth, a delightfully Gothically named race of subatomic beings.

As you can probably ascertain from that summary, things rapidly became more than a little confused, to put it mildly. In fact, the finished novel was so phenomenally incoherent that  I genuinely had to go back and check Cameron Dixon’s Doctor Who Reference Guide to refresh my memory and ensure that I’d got the myriad details of the plot correct just now. And I’m still not entirely certain that I succeeded…

But while there is a certain logic to this line of argumentation, it should be remarked that any attempt to argue that Ghost Devices is an especially simple or comprehensible book is a rather strained one. The difference, ultimately, is not one of complexity but rather of context.

Temporal shenanigans, in all their flavours, are one of those select few science fiction conceits which naturally lend themselves to a degree of impenetrability. Shadowy psionic conspiracies, on the other hand, generally require some more concrete signposts by which the audience may orientate themselves. The biggest exception to this general rule of thumb, by my reckoning, would probably be those works that are simply aiming to tap into a broader and deeper vein of paranoia than can be convincingly painted by most first-time authors, as Bucher-Jones was in September 1996.

This doesn’t mean, as some folks would like to have you believe, that a writer can just plop down any old nonsense on the page, give it a coat of non-linearity with some tachyons to garnish, stand for two minutes and serve up a complete and utter masterpiece. In recent years, it’s become particularly fashionable to level accusations of doing just that against folks like Steven Moffat, usually accompanied by some choice declarations that the audience can’t follow his supposed habitual style of overcomplicated crap.

The fact that my eight-year-old self was quite able to follow such putatively incomprehensible pieces of television as The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and the entirety of Series 6 should give you some idea of where I stand on such claims when applied to Moffat, and they hold just as little water in the case of Ghost Devices.

(Ironically enough, the story I remember being most confused by was actually Davies’ own Last of the Time Lords. For whatever reason, the workings of the Paradox Machine stubbornly refused to make sense within my brain, despite not being especially complicated on reflection. Make of this what you will.)

At the core of this general increase in coherence on Bucher-Jones’ part is the recognition that one can largely trust in the audience’s ability to follow the plot’s convoluted physics-related contortions with the assistance of a few impressively lyrical turns of phrase. Even if Fellows’ rather cerebral explanation of the relationship between tachyons and the speed of light fails to entirely sink in, the basic idea of a device that sends visions of the future back to the inhabitants of the past is evocative enough to make a hazy, dreamlike kind of sense, even once the novel’s denouement starts bandying about temporal paradoxes like they’re going out of style.

Further contributing to my much improved opinion of Ghost Devices in comparison to The Death of Art is the larger sandbox in which the novel’s paradoxes and mysteries have been allowed to play out. If nineteenth century Paris felt like it was much too crowded a landscape for the sprawling story Bucher-Jones clearly wanted to tell, it’s hard to imagine a setting that provides quite as stark a contrast as the Benny novels’ vision of humanity’s spacefaring future. The degree to which proceedings can feel unduly claustrophobic is severely lessened, if not outright eliminated, when the distance between the major players is routinely measured in star systems and light-years. But even more importantly, the nature of Ghost Devices as a book set in Earth’s imagined future is actually crucial when it comes to understanding its themes and ideas.

It’s no secret at this point that the New Adventures have invested no small amount of effort in charting the general contours of Earth’s future history. This process began all the way back in Bernice’s own introductory story, Love and War, which doubled as the first instalment in what was dubbed, in a display of blistering originality, the Future History Cycle.

This being the height of the 1990s, what this meant in practice was a whole lot of generally misguided and clumsy nods to the trappings of the era’s most popular sci-fi television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, much to my repeated chagrin over the course of the blog.

Underneath all these coy tips of the hat, however, there was always a certain strangeness to the manner in which TNG‘s aesthetic was incorporated into the world of Doctor Who. Although it might have aired well over half its episodes in the 1990s – and I’ll leave it to the more Trek-obsessed members of my audience to determine which episode serves as the dividing line between the eighties and the nineties – The Next Generation‘s outlook never felt like a comfortable fit for the more cynical climate that took root in the latter half of the decade.

In truth, the broadly utopian future into which Patrick Stewart and friends so boldly strutted in their gaudy space pyjamas was always more suited to the cheerful optimism of Ronald Reagan’s so-called “Morning in America.” As spin-drenched electoral slogans go, the tagline for the 40th President’s 1984 re-election campaign serves as an uncomfortable reminder of a time in which vast swathes of the United States were seemingly able to convince themselves of the general pleasantness of their circumstances. That the country was actually sliding into a neoliberal hellscape whose full consequences we are still working through nearly forty years later is, in this respect, almost entirely irrelevant.

Early TNG, accordingly, took an oftentimes sickeningly sweet view of mankind’s future and generally presupposed the inherent virtue of the Federation’s liberal utopia. In one of the most infamous examples of this tendency towards an unquestioning valorisation of the state, Gene Roddenberry loudly protested against Melinda Snodgrass’ classic script The Measure of a Man on the basis of his belief that Data ought to willingly surrender himself to Starfleet’s experiments, which shouldn’t actually be remotely surprising coming from the man who brought us The Omega Glory and A Private Little War.

What I’m getting at here, I suppose, is that TNG habitually exhibited an adamantine certainty in the idea that humanity was destined to progress towards a more enlightened and tolerant social order, even as it casually established that the road to that paradise was paved with more than a few scattered atrocities and nuclear wars along the way.

Yet by the time of Love and War in October 1992, there was a sense that a change in the national mood was in the air. Published mere weeks before Bill Clinton’s electoral victory brought an end to twelve straight years of Republican presidential domination, and six months after Neil Kinnock singularly failed to do the same to thirteen years of Conservative government in the United Kingdom, Cornell’s second novel was thus positioned all but perfectly on one of the myriad of tipping points that one could identify as an answer to the surprisingly ambiguous question of “When did the 1990s begin?”

Utopia, in other words, was beginning to look a lot less teleologically assured. In the gap between Transit and The Highest Science, the third live-action Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine, would premiere. Although it was generally a far warmer and more humanist show than its most vocal detractors would claim, it was nevertheless frequently sceptical of the power structures underpinning the larger Star Trek franchise.

Even Voyager, launching a few days prior to the release of Andrew Cartmel’s Warlock, seemed to view the universe as a considerably more hostile place than had been the norm for any Star Trek series since the earliest days of Kirk’s travels, being a series based around the premise of retreating towards the comfort of familiar space.

In its worst moments, this manifested in the treatment of the Delta Quadrant as a region existing for little reason other than to validate a bunch of reactionary beliefs about “less civilised” parts of the world, from the Kazon’s status as blatant allegories for the anxieties of white middle-class Angelenos over gang violence in the wake of the 1992 riots, through to Displaced‘s descending into a forty-five minute Great Replacement tirade.

As time progressed, the ramifications of this general societal uncertainty went on to shape the future history provided by the New Adventures, though any direct causal relationship between Star Trek and the novels remained nebulous and indirect at best.

Accordingly, the period of history which this latter-day stretch of NAs have adopted as their native stomping grounds becomes rather difficult to classify under any sort of ironclad, science-fictional utopia/dystopia dichotomy. On the one hand, the very fact that Bernice needs to hold down a stable employment as a university tutor, with a salary measured in the quaintly Anglocentric currency of “shillings,” puts the series far outside the realm of the vaguely socialist post-scarcity economics of the United Federation of Planets, even as Ghost Devices itself confirms the existence of a technology vaguely analogous to the replicator.

(This fact could also, admittedly, be just as easily surmised from the dominance of monolithic corporate entities like the Spinward Corporation or Krytell Industries, the Federation not generally being big on privatisation and laissez-faire capitalism.)

At the same time, the world around St. Oscar’s seems to be largely free of any of the markers of overt totalitarianism or environmental/social collapse that tend to accompany science fiction of an unequivocally dystopian persuasion. Happy Endings had even made a point of suggesting that the Earth would manage to bounce back from the extreme pollution witnessed in books like Warhead. While I’m by no means possessed of an expert opinion in these matters, I’d wager good money that you could pick out any of the contemporaneous stories from the pages of 2000 AD, say, and the New Adventures would invariably end up seeming far more optimistic by comparison, their reputation for oppressive darkness notwithstanding.

Here, then, we can at last begin to reintegrate our musings on time travel and make a stab at quantifying the scope of Ghost Devices‘ disruption to the established pattern of the NAs. One of the tenets of the Virgin line, after all, has always been a general dismissal of the concept of parallel universes, barring extraordinary circumstances like those occasioned by the Monk’s manipulations in the Alternate History Cycle or the influence of the Nexus on the events of So Vile a Sin.

Coupled with this is the generally unspoken rule that the presence of a TARDIS and its inhabitants at a given point in history serves to “fix” a potential future in place, a theory which probably received its most explicit formulation courtesy of Ruath in Goth Opera. For our purposes, it must surely be seen as significant that the Silurian Earth of Blood Heat is ultimately undone by the Doctor’s use of a Time Ram to presumably annihilate his original TARDIS, only to eventually be reunited with it in Happy Endings, a novel which we’ve already identified as a pivotal turning point in Benny’s conceptual relationship to time travel.

At its core, this is a vision of the future in rough accord with the zeitgeist of the nineties, a long unipolar moment that stretched off into infinity after the apparent triumph of liberal democracy over its numerous challengers ranged across the twentieth century. The Fukuyaman End of History writ large, in essence.

It cannot be taken as a monumental surprise that Bucher-Jones, as a writer with a higher than average affinity for the ideas of Lawrence Miles, opts for a rather more nuanced conception of history. Indeed, the Down/Ghost Devices duology – or, for that matter, the Ghost Devices/Alien Bodies duology – is arguably little more than a reiteration of the Christmas on a Rational Planet/The Death of Art pairing in this regard.

Where Miles used the Carnival Queen’s invasion of Woodwicke as a means to show up the recursive and insignificant nature of the late 1990s’ preoccupation with millennarianism, Bucher-Jones opted to go straight for the jugular of fin de siècle ideology by setting the Brotherhood’s machinations against the doctrine’s origins in Paris at the height of La Belle Époque in the late 1800s. Even the decade’s more extreme flareups of millennial hysteria, The Death of Art seemed to suggest in its more lucid moments, were far from wholly original. For every David Koresh or Shoko Asahara, there was a precedent in the crimes of Sante Geronimo Caserio or Émile Henry.

Much as Down expanded on some of Christmas‘ bolder suggestions as to the nature of Doctor Who and the wider corpus of science fiction literature, Ghost Devices represents a comparable evolution from The Death of Art, threatening the Benny novels with the largest destabilisation of their vision of the future to date.

None of this is especially groundbreaking in the abstract, mind you. The New Adventures have repeatedly proven themselves to be exceedingly fond of an aesthetic of lurking, Lovecraftian cosmic horror dating all the way back to The Pit, of all things, a pet interest which carried through to the controversial reworking of various iconic Doctor Who foes as members of Lovecraft’s Elder Things.

Bucher-Jones himself has already dipped a toe into these proverbial waters with his “Roz tries to convince Montague that the Doctor is actually Nyarlathotep” sequence in The Death of Art. Looking forward to his next novel, he’ll also go on to throw the single biggest wrench into David A. McIntee and Andy Lane’s attempted integration of the Lovecraftian pantheon into the world of Doctor Who with The Taking of Planet 5‘s firm fictionalisation of the creatures.

(The surprising centrality of The Pit to the mythos of Faction Paradox, as execrable a novel as it is, is only further confirmed by Miles’ decision to borrow the Yssgaroth from Neil Penswick for use in The Book of the War, as well as his essay The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic which accompanied Mad Norwegian Press’ 2004 reprint of Dead Romance.)

No, what’s most intriguing about Ghost Devices‘ understanding of the fundamental nature of history is not its mere suggestion of cosmic horror, but rather the particulars of what it’s identified as the source of that horror. Where the orthodox position has been, until now, to treat the universe’s possible unreality and irrationality as the chief instigator of humankind’s existential angst and, in extreme cases, outright gibbering insanity, we’re presented here with an alternative proposition in which the fact of the future’s fixity is treated as anything but reassuring.

Repeatedly throughout the course of the novel, Bucher-Jones stresses the fact of the Spire-induced precognition as a force inherently inimical to the basic functioning of most lifeforms. It’s the foreknowledge of their own descent into a race of warlike, imperialist arms traders that drives the Vo’lach to their grand act of suicide, while Bernice’s brief experience with the Spire’s visions is framed in unmistakably horrific terms, breaking down all sense of comprehensibility in an overwhelming torrent of information.

The implications of the future’s being recast as an object of horror for a book series like the New Adventures, almost perfectly bounded by the lacuna of the 1990s, are inevitably profound and multifarious. This is especially true of the series’ current form, where we’ve been arguing since at least the time of Dragons’ Wrath that the world of the novels is heavily informed by the unique geopolitical status quo as it stood in the nations of the erstwhile Third World between the Cold War’s anticlimactic conclusion and the fresh belligerences of the War on Terror.

On this matter – and many others besides – Ghost Devices is hardly what one could call subtle, but when a novel’s prose style is sufficiently rich and characterful, understatement ceases to be as strong a necessity as it might otherwise be. At one point, Bucher-Jones even dabbles in that old favourite of science fiction authors everywhere, as Bernice directly calls attention to the historical parallels between the attempts of the Vo’lach’s remaining machines at maintaining a galactic balance of power through strategically targeted arms trading and the historical realities of Cold War statecraft.

Indeed, many of the novel’s individual parts will probably be reasonably familiar to any mildly savvy readers of the Virgin books, or viewers of nineties popular culture as a whole. The Vo’lach themselves are arguably just a juxtaposition of the decade’s broader fascination with the immorality of arms trading – having previously fuelled such novels as The Empire of GlassA Device of Death and, yes, going on to be central to Alien Bodies – against the aforementioned post-Cold War trappings of the Benny novels.

Even the finer details of their scheme, having inadvertently set themselves up as gods to the inhabitants of a science fictional analogue for the developing, post-colonial nations of the nineties, bring to mind the Hollow Gods’ manipulation of the Dagellan Cluster back in Death and Diplomacy.

Those of us with an inclination towards unnecessarily grandiose readings of the Benny books’ general thematic arc might fairly view this as a minor gold mine, what with the series’ post-Cold War trappings starting to come undone like this in the very first book after the remarriage and subsequent five month absence of Jason. As the most enduring legacy of Death and Diplomacy, the implication that his presence as a bridge between the early twenty-first century and the late twenty-sixth serves to fix the geopolitics of Benny’s world is a tantalising one, though perhaps not one to take entirely seriously.

But even if we pull back from these more gonzo and outlandish hypotheses, the general impression of Ghost Devices is as a novel that readily proves that most hoary of axioms as to the relative merits of the whole and the sum of its parts. The pleasure of the novel is derived not so much from its individual constituents in isolation, but in their very specific form of interplay. Sure, Andy Lane and Christopher Bulis might have hit upon the nature of arms trading in the 1990s, but would either of them have thought to wed that to a sentient air vent or a living weapons factory that simply wants to change its stock-in-trade and go into the grocery business?

(Dave Stone might have done, but even he would probably balk at the zeal with which Bucher-Jones embraces some of the more esoteric branches of theoretical physics and pseudoscience, namedropping everything from tachyons and the theories of Paul Dirac to the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and convicted fraudster Erich von Däniken.)

Along these lines, one of the more fascinating ideas contained within the novel’s pages is the extent to which the Vo’lach and the Spire quite literally wield the very possibility of an elemental universal teleology as a weapon with which to strike down other life forms. The notion of a race that would willingly eradicate all life on its home planet just for containing the merest hint of the potential that a stray microbe might, through the mechanisms of evolution, bear out the Spire’s predictions of blood-stained, warlike imperialism is horrifying enough on its own.

It’s surely not for nothing that this is essentially the inverse of a similar twist Gary Russell and Alan Barnes will go on to pull with regards to Rassilon and the Time Lords in Zagreus six years from now. Indeed, with the conspicuous presence of a pair of “Watchmakers” – borrowing Matheson Catcher’s name for the Time Lords from Christmas on a Rational Planet – within the narrative, the repeated identification of the Vo’lach as the “capital G” Gods of the Canopusi is especially eyecatching here in the light of later developments in the New Adventures in the wake of Where Angels Fear, to say nothing of Dead Romance‘s suggestions as to the true nature of the Dellahan Gods.

More than any granular theories of continuity, however, no small part of the horror of such an idea stems from its embrace of an overly neat and linear interpretation of evolution. Certainly, human history is already replete with enough examples of the horror that can be wrought by colonialist powers seeking to lean on Darwin et al. as a means of propping up a eugenicist agenda to ensure that these musings aren’t entirely theoretical in nature, lending a pleasant barbedness to the novel to leaven out the hard, mind-bending physics.

On a much smaller scale, however, the presentation of this mentality as a monstrous and warped thing also doubles as a solid rebuke of the oftentimes shonky understanding of evolution demonstrated by mainstream science fiction. Star Trek in particular repeatedly suggests, with dubious appeals to the mechanisms of natural selecton, that the arc of humanity’s development is a straight line leading from the primordial soup to… well, something, the franchise is always a bit unclear on what exactly.

If you’re watching Genesis, it might be a spider – and simultaneously a small, lemur-like primate, because predetermined evolutionary pathways that somehow lead to different outcomes for individuals of the same species is totally a coherent worldview – whereas Threshold, as we all know, favours the chances of the salamander. This once again serves to demonstrate the basic compatibility of Bucher-Jones and Miles’ artistic sensibilities, slotting neatly alongside Down‘s casually answering “Yes” to the age-old fan debate of “Does the transporter actually just kill you?” and thereby reforging the trappings of Trek as an object of dread.

There is, throughout Ghost Devices, a sense that an overly deterministic attitude towards the arc of history is shown up as being fundamentally inadequate. The faux-Tenomi is, going by initial appearances at least, able to survive the attempt on his life thanks to the complex evolutionary advantage of his additional stomachs, even if it transpires that the Vo’lach Negotiator operating under the guise of Doctor Steadman had planned for that eventuality all along.

During his interrogation at the hands of Mandir, Elspet reflects on his captor’s unduly tidy perception of scientific history, formulating a plan to turn the non-linear nature of science’s progress through the ages to his own purposes. As an additional bonus, this also provides Bucher-Jones with the basis for one of the novel’s best bits, as Elspet’s internal monologue lays down the credoes of his new “Liar’s Theory of Science.”

The precociously, psychopathically violent Morry, meanwhile, is the perfect encapsulation of the perennial nineties fear that the next generation of humanity might be little more than a crop of disaffected, cruel-hearted sadists, and we’re still some seventeen months out from the biggest flashpoint of that line of thought in the wake of the Columbine shooting.

All of these anxieties build naturally and inexorably towards the novel’s climax and probably its boldest and most provocative idea, as Bernice allows the Vo’lach’s missiles to travel back along the history of the Spire, with the structure becoming caught up in a vicious cycle of temporal paradoxes. Eventually, the paradoxes resolve themselves in such a manner as to leave the Spire standing, but with its functioning impeded enough to prevent its stream of tachyons from travelling back across the entirety of the universe’s history.

Confronted with the realisation that said tachyons may have been responsible for the regulation of the universe’s rate of expansion, Benny ends up pondering the possibility that she may have doomed the future to an uncertain wasteland of rampant, unfettered cause and effect. Far from fretting over the cosmological implications, however, the main source of her anxiety lies in the prospect of her having annihilated all the possible futures she’d been witness to in the course of her travels in the TARDIS, eventually driving her to attempt suicide in a rather strikingly bleak coda to what has generally been a relatively fluffy book with moments of implicit darkness. Indeed, it’s probably worth quoting a brief – well, relatively speaking – excerpt from her climactic journal entry here:

Now randomness is seeping under the doors of the universe, and outside it is cold and dark.
From the moment the Spire ceased to function, the future began to be affected by quantum drift, by the endless clatter of the dice that so horrified Einstein, the ultimately meaningless causality of subatomic events. Without the Spire’s relentless time pressure tweaking the universe into certain preordained paths, every non-causal subatomic event that happens now points us towards a spread of futures opening out infinitely in a fractal nightmare. I have planted a tree that has branches upon branches upon branches. Everything I do now, every decision I take, every decision anyone takes now, every drop of sweat that in falling hesitates between two equally probable paths upon a lover’s back splits the world. The future is a grey mist of probabilities.

So obviously, this is the point at which our recurring apophenic fascination with the idea of Ghost Devices as some kind of psychic foreshock of Alien Bodies truly breaks through in full force. It’s almost too perfect: in the book immediately before the Wilderness Years make their most explicit and sustained engagement with the notion of a War in Heaven, Bucher-Jones teases the prospect of Benny’s having brought about a complete collapse of the Doctor Who universe’s underlying chains of causality and comprehensibility. This, in turn, also serves to nod towards the eventual post-revival fate of this period as a walled off lacuna within the franchise’s larger continuity.

The implications spanning out from this one seemingly unassuming book, by any reasonable yardstick, are truly dizzying, almost rivalling those of Alien Bodies itself. The fact that we’re needing to lean rather heavily on the “almost” in “almost too perfect” here is, in a sense, largely immaterial, as is the novel’s pulling back from these most Earth-shattering of its intimations.

When all is said and done, Benny can’t ever really be explicitly responsible for the complete teleological unshackling of the universe and the consignment of Original Sin to a nebulous, Ancestor Cell-like haze of non-canonicity, if for no deeper reason than that we’re just one month away from a Raymond Chandler riff starring Chris Cwej. Written by Terrance Dicks, no less, an author who manages the improbable feat of being even less likely than someone like Lane or Bulis to turn out a treatise on the nature of history and paradox.

But in its own way, this feels entirely appropriate. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the period of Doctor Who in which writers are actively playing with the War and all its attendant concepts is defined by nothing so much as a consistent pulling back from the series-demolishing conclusions to their own trains of thought. The prospect of Bernice Summerfield killing herself in a fit of nihilistic dejection is of a piece with the Doctor’s being slain in the first battle of the War in Heaven, in that they’re both potential futures that can never be concretely depicted without entirely disposing of any pretensions towards a novel line based around those characters.

All of this might very well sound as if I’m building up to a criticism of the essential nature of Ghost Devices, but I’m not, or at least not entirely. Taken as a novel, Ghost Devices is an exceedingly fascinating and worthwhile piece of work, even if I could quite fairly point to any number of minor annoyances within it.

To pick just one example, while Bucher-Jones might share an affinity for the ideas of Lawrence Miles, one can’t entirely avoid the sneaking suspicion that he also shares Miles’ weaknesses in the business of creating actual characters rather than individuals with snappily high-concept backstories. Regardless, I’m almost certain that it’ll wind up being my favourite book in the five-month period between Down and Walking to Babylon, all told, unless Dicks and Bulis improbably choose to pull out all the stops for their own efforts.

The bigger problem here, insofar as there is one, is that the tricks Ghost Devices tries to pull simply aren’t sustainable in this particular context, at least in the long term. Even this wouldn’t necessarily be nearly so awkward on its own, especially since the book’s status as a Benny novel largely liberates it from the business of having to be overly concerned with how it moves Doctor Who forward.

For better or for worse, though – and the fact that the War arc ended up giving rise to any number of books which are still reasonably well-regarded among those corners of fandom devoted enough to still be giving them the time of day means that I could definitely see it going either way – we’re about to enter a period of time in which these same unsustainable tricks are going to become standard operating procedure, and it thus behooves us to be a tad more thoughtful in our appraisal than we might have had cause to under different circumstances.

“The future [is] alive,” Bucher-Jones’ final sentence reassures us. Now all that remains is to put that theory to the test.

Miscellaneous Observations

He kind of got lost in the shuffle of my grand game of word association and historiographic musings, but Clarence is a rather nice addition to the NAs’ increasingly robust supporting cast. Having him named by Benny herself in a deliberate reference to It’s a Wonderful Life was a particularly deft touch that manages to fit with her well-established love of twentieth century popular culture while also obliquely foreshadowing his role in saving her from her attempted suicide at the close of the novel.

The most remarkable thing about his character as presented here is just how well his amnesia-clouded backstory fits with the eventual twist introduced by Justin Richards in Tears of the Oracle. (And it was, indeed, primarily a retrospective twist on the part of Richards, at least if The Inside Story‘s citation of an old mailing list message from Bucher-Jones himself is to be believed.)

Lawrence Miles’ “I always intended for the NAs and EDAs to be set in different, bottled universes” claim also continues to take more and more damage ahead of the namechecking of Tyler’s Folly in Alien Bodies, with Bucher-Jones referencing Ordifica a little under two years prior to Interference. Actually, Miles himself got there first back in Down, because this whole situation wasn’t remotely confusing enough.

There’s probably something to be said for Bucher-Jones’ dabbling with simulationism in giving Benny a mild existential crisis over whether she can be sure that she isn’t just another predictive algorithm in the mind of God back. We could trot out the standard roster of late nineties texts dabbling in similar ideas, from eXistenZ and The Matrix through to The Truman Show and Dark City.

One would probably also want to note here Bucher-Jones’ own recurring preoccupation with the particulars of the relationship between art and reality – consider once more the title of his debut novel, most obviously – but this post is getting more than long enough as is, so I vote we put a pin in these ideas and circle back around to them when we do The Taking of Planet 5 and Grimm Reality, yeah?

With that being said, Bernice’s troubled reaction at the prospect of her being handed a God-generated final draft of her eternally in-progress sequel to Down Among the Dead Men has certainly aged uncannily well in this era of AI-generated writing.

Final Thoughts

Welp, that was definitely one of my more abstruse posts in a while. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope it was just as enjoyable to read. All of this could simply be a case of my succumbing to the joys of post-COVID brain fog, but I like to think there’s still something worthwhile to be found in amongst my ramblings. And really, hasn’t that always been the blog’s mission statement in a nutshell?

In any event, I won’t keep you here for too long, since I think we’ve danced around the main event for long enough. Next time we dive headfirst into the War in Heaven as Lawrence Miles makes his first contribution to the Eighth Doctor Adventures with Alien Bodies. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

BBC Past Doctor Adventures Reviews: Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (or, “Life and Limb”)

We’ve already gone over the standard operating procedure for these early reviews of the Past Doctor Adventures in some considerable detail. The crux of it, basically, comes down to a desire to maintain a degree of continuity between the Virgin and BBC Books lines of past Doctor fiction, at least in these early stages where we’re in the business of tackling PDA debuts. It generally helps to be able to use the former company’s novels as a springboard to inform my opinion on these latest efforts, rather than maintaining the illusion of starting completely from scratch.

With Illegal Alien, however, we’re faced with a superficially different situation. For the first time in just over a decade, and nearly eighteen months after audiences bore witness to the advent of Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor on television, we have a past Doctor novel focused on the Seventh Doctor’s tenure as a firmly historicised object.

Even in the case of the nearest comparable story to date, Lance Parkin’s Cold Fusion, the presence of New Adventure lore like the Adjudicators and the Other were very deliberately signposted as unwelcome intrusions by the franchise’s present into an otherwise perfectly normal Peter Davison story, climaxing with McCoy’s Doctor knocking Five unconscious and running back to the TARDIS for good measure.

Those of you playing the home game can perhaps begin to see where we’re heading with this one. For all that I might want nothing more than to drag out the pretense of BBC Books’ Seventh Doctor novels not having any obvious antecedent in the Virgin years, such a premise would rapidly end up descending into the realms of unconscionable falsehood on account of one very simple fact: the existence of the New Adventures.

This preamble, then, serves to capture the strange position that these latter-day Seventh Doctor books occupy. On the one hand, with sixty books headlined by this incarnation of the Doctor, none of the other six Doctors featured in the PDAs could ever hope to compete with the level of documentation and prestige afforded the McCoy years. No matter how BBC Books chose to engage with this period of the show, the mere act of that engagement would unavoidably have constituted a tangible commentary, one way or another, on their recently delicensed predecessors over at Ladbroke Grove.

Yet paradoxically, there remains something liberating in the idea of acknowledging the long shadow cast by the weighty bulk of established precedent. Most obviously, sixty novels is rather too large a number to give the basic PDA review treatment and adequately summarise in the beginnings of this post, even with my prodigious appetite for overextending myself.

(Honestly, without intending to get too far ahead of myself and spoil my Eye of Heaven review, I rather suspect that even the eight Fourth Doctor Missing Adventures published by Virgin will end up being too much to handle in that format. Between Jim Mortimore and the arrival of Leela though, I imagine we’ll have to enough to talk about that we can pick up the slack.)

But more significant by far for the PDAs themselves are the myriad ways in which this precedent is, if not entirely unhelpful, at the very least ill-suited to the comparatively disjointed context of what is effectively one of seven sub-series in a larger line of novels. Which is to say that a not inconsiderable part of what made the New Adventures such a refreshing and, dare I say it, novel experiment for Doctor Who was the one thing that the PDAs couldn’t really be – an interconnected procession of new, original novel-length Doctor Who stories being released every month.

Accordingly, faced with such a conundrum, BBC Books took what was arguably the most sensible course of action to resolve this underlying tension, and chose to roll back the clock some eight years. Rather than trying to grapple with the controversial and oversized legacy of the New Adventures, the Beeb’s Seventh Doctor offerings largely opted to focus on the character’s adventures with Ace at some indeterminate period following the duo’s last televised outing in Survival, but before their initial sojourn to ancient Mesopotamia in Genesys.

Sure, there were one or two exceptions to be found in the form of the odd novel set during the televised McCoy years, like The Hollow Men or Relative Dementias, but for the most part Illegal Alien serves as a reliable indicator of what’s to come from BBC Books and, latterly, from Big Finish.

Naturally, being the sort of person who has spent the better part of six years poring over every last New Adventure in increasing amounts of detail, this decision provokes somewhat conflicted feelings in me. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an instinctive temptation to simply label Illegal Alien as a creative retreat on the franchise’s part, and there exists a reasonably substantial body of evidence to support this argument.

In a very undeniable sense, the novel is in fact a blatantly regressive move. Not only does it resurrect the final Doctor-companion pairing of the original television show – dutifully freed from the more controversial “New Ace” direction in which Sophie Aldred’s character was taken post-Deceit but it even serves as an adaptation of an embryonic script that Tucker and Perry were working on for consideration as part of the programme’s ultimately cancelled twenty-seventh season.

Indeed, the mythos of Season 27 is one which we probably ought to unpack here. The pull that it exerts over fandom’s collective imagination is understandably quite considerable, and that was all the more true in the dark and uncertain times of the Wilderness Years. It provides all manner of fuel for speculation, akin to the act of Star Trek fans picking over the scraps of the abandoned Phase II series to see whether it might have provided a different sort of revival than that brought about by The Motion Picture.

If we fast-forward a few years, that franchise found itself gripped by a much more directly comparable question, as the cutting down of Enterprise after a mere four seasons of life naturally left Trekkies’ imaginations to run a little wild. Witness the fanciful – but not, I hasten to add, entirely unwelcome – suggestions put forth in subsequent years by various creative figures as to the possibility of adding Jeffrey Combs’ Shran or J. G. Hertzler’s Kolos to the primary cast. This kind of speculation is largely just part and parcel of how fandoms cope in the face of the cold, harsh realities of their favourite series’ cancellation.

In the context of 1997, mind you, these musings took on an altogether different tone. Not only had Doctor Who been cancelled for well over half a decade at this point, but it had recently stumbled its way through a high-profile attempt at a revival in association with a major American network. By all accounts, this experiment had resoundingly failed to produce the desired results, with the TV movie commanding only nine percent of the television audience during its original broadcast on Fox. It seemed fair to argue that Doctor Who had, with this manoeuvre, somehow managed to consign any revival efforts to an even deeper circle of development hell than they were in before.

All of which serves as handy background information to explain why, in late July 1997, Doctor Who Magazine felt it imperative to construct an alternative history in which the programme improbably managed to survive Jonathan Powell’s infamous “Fuck off… or die” attitude towards John Nathan-Turner and limped on for two additional seasons. This was, first and foremost, an exercise in the “warm blanket against the howling void of the Wilderness Years” tradition. Unsurprisingly, given the inherently comfort-focused nature of such schools of thought, this came saddled with a hefty dose of nostalgia, complete with the affectation of regular editor Gary Gillatt handing over the reins to Sophie Aldred herself for an issue.

It’s easy, from the perspective of a world in which Doctor Who is less than a month away from the airing of its fortieth televised season, to poke holes in Dave Owen’s vision of the Seasons That Never Were. Actually, by far the more revealing fact is that it’s incredibly easy to poke holes in that vision from the perspective of October 1997, barely two months later.

Owen’s account begins with a description of the cliffhanger to the putative The Last of the Daleks, in which the Doctor and his new companion Kate find themselves surrounded, shockingly enough, by Daleks. The best rejoinder to this is undoubtedly still to be found in El Sandifer’s piece on the 2011 Big Finish adaptation of Marc Platt’s Thin Ice in which she quite rightly points out that “There are Daleks in this story with ‘Dalek’ in the title, folks!” is actually one of the most standard-issue Doctor Who cliffhangers imaginable. For our purposes, of course, coming as we are directly from the truly abysmal War of the Daleks, the idea that such a rote and monster-fixated cliffhanger would constitute a turnaround in the series’ fortunes in the public eye only seems all the more laughable.

(It’s worth reiterating at this point, lest you think I’m making an associative leap too far, that John Peel also claimed to have originally developed War as a script for the television show before its untimely end.)

There are other oddities, too. Owen proves peculiarly enamoured with the idea of Doctor Who‘s survival having been cemented by the production sensibilities of John Birt, whose efforts as Director-General of the BBC to “modernise” the venerated broadcaster were intensely topical at the time. Consider the following excerpt, directly following his extolling of the virtues of Dalek cliffhangers:

The arrival at the BBC of executives with a business-based approach, most notably Michael Checkland and the man who would replace him as Director-General, John Birt, has been blamed by Corporation employees and rival broadcasters alike for much of what is seen to be wrong with British broadcasting in the nineties. Yet it was the politics of localised cost accountability that, in 1990, had just persuaded BBC1 Controller Jonathan Powell to allow Doctor Who to continue for one more year. Specifically, a detailed financial breakdown of the series showed that although it was expensive to make, and performing poorly against ITV’s Coronation Street, it paid for itself twice over through syndication overseas and merchandise licenses.

So in essence what we have here is an apparently broadly sincere argument that Doctor Who would have survived if everyone behind the scenes had been willing to be a bit more Thatcherite about the economics of the situation. In case you’ve missed my general political leanings throughout the course of this project, I’ll note upfront that this is the kind of conclusion that I’m not very likely to entertain all that seriously. More to the point, it’s a conclusion that I doubt the production team responsible for The Happiness Patrol or Paradise Towers were ever going to give the time of day either, so I think we can pretty resoundingly dub it a bit of a non-starter.

It is, naturally, simultaneously wrapped up in the usual tendency of 1990s Doctor Who fandom to assume that the way forward for the franchise was for the BBC to fob it off to an independent production company, probably with the eventual goal of turning it into a movie. That this line of thinking persisted even after the BBC had tried to fob the series off to an international network and turned it into a telemovie that landed with a deafening yet inconsequential thud is proof, if proof were needed, that fandoms don’t always think of these things in the most logical of terms.

In practice, Doctor Who‘s return was eventually secured by methods that developed largely as a counterreaction to Birt’s Conservative-aligned sensibilities, taking advantage of the BBC’s gradually strengthened regional divisions to land a surprise hit for BBC Cymru Wales. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the foundational elements of this approach were already taking root at the BBC.

The first web pages dedicated to BBC Wales were launched in 1997, while the broadcaster began to make inroads into television production with the launch of Boyd and Jane Clack’s Satellite City in October 1996. This would be followed up in 1999 – just in time for a turn-of-the-millennium uptick in Welsh devolution with the opening of the Senedd – with Belonging, affording future Doctor Who and Torchwood alum Eve Myles her first major leading role.

In the accompanying interviews with key creative figures provided by Owen as a means of explaining the reasoning behind his rewriting of history in this particular fashion, it’s perhaps also noteworthy that the closeness of the then-forthcoming Illegal Alien to Mike Tucker and Robert Perry’s original scripts was heavily stressed. As Tucker explained:

Illegal Alien was originally written in script form. When I was writing the novel, the early part of that I was working from our original screenplay to get all the dialogue for the novel, so that was quite nice for me – it was novelising an unmade story in effect. The opening two parts of Illegal Alien, when it finally hits the bookshelves, is damn near what was the scripted version. When it does come out it may show some of the problems, in that it would have been a very expensive production, which could ultimately have been its downfall.

All of these facts, taken in the aggregate, paint a picture of a novel wedded to a rather fanciful and dated vision of the direction from which Doctor Who‘s salvation would come. If we chose to rag on War of the Daleks for representing a particularly nasty dead end for a certain approach to the franchise, then we should admit that Illegal Alien, at first glance, shows all the signs of adhering to that same approach, complete with a starring role for the other iconic Doctor Who alien. Whether the novel in question is riffing on an imaginary Dalek story dreamt up by Dave Owen or an almost-finished Tucker and Perry Cyberman script, there exists the same fascination with the totemic power of that unmade twenty-seventh season.

Certainly, this isn’t an entirely untroubling prospect, but the fact of the matter is that as far as sensible contexts in which this particular artistic preoccupation could sit are concerned, the Seventh Doctor PDAs are probably a much more comfortable fit than the theoretically forward-looking Eighth Doctor Adventures.

Crucially, for all that the two novels might exhibit a broadly similar raison d’être, there remain telling differences. Whereas War of the Daleks never rose above the level of a petty attack on Remembrance of the Daleks, the story most often singled out as the starting point of the Seventh Doctor’s NA characterisation, Illegal Alien takes great pains to avoid an outright erasure of the New Adventures.

Ace might have reverted to her televised characterisation, but certain choice Virgin-original elements of her backstory have been retained. She still worked at the McDonald’s on Tottenham Court Road as suggested by The Crystal Bucephalus and Head Games. Her friend Manisha is explicitly identified as having died, favouring Blood Heat‘s version of events rather than the more ambiguous account suggested by Ghost Light and Ben Aaronovitch’s novelisation of Remembrance. Even the most prominent element of discontinuity, the rewriting of the character’s surname to “Gale” in a nod to The Wizard of Oz, won’t be properly introduced until Tucker and Perry’s short story Ace of Hearts in five months’ time.

There’s a care and attentiveness taken here to avoid completely foreclosing on any future authors that might wish to play around in a more overt fashion with the trappings of the NAs, of the sort that’s completely lacking from decisions like the casual manner of Ace’s death in Ground Zero. I mean, that’s not an especially high bar to clear, but the point still stands.

What’s most interesting about this, really, is the fact that it doesn’t actually seem all that remarkable from the perspective of a 1997 reader. While Tucker and Perry are primarily remembered nowadays as two of the chief architects of a sort of ersatz Season 27 running throughout the BBC Books line – not to mention Tucker’s early contributions to Big Finish in the form of The Genocide Machine and Dust Breeding – that’s largely an image which doesn’t actually begin to take shape until Illegal Alien itself, if not later.

To date, they’ve only had one major writing credit for the series, contributing Question Mark Pyjamas to Lost Property, the second of Virgin’s Decalog series of short story collections. Far from trying to roll Doctor Who back to December 1989, the story offered perhaps the most logical extension of the collection’s central conceit of “homes owned by the Doctor” by centring its action around the house in Kent introduced to the New Adventures by Andrew Cartmel in Warhead.

Furthermore, much of the comedy of its “trap the Doctor and his companions in a cheesy domestic sitcom” premise derived from the fundamentally dysfunctional and jagged edges of the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny as a TARDIS crew. It seems, in retrospect, the type of story one might expect unabashed frock Paul Cornell to write, with Tucker and Perry probably being better suited for something like The Trials of Tara, constructed as it was to serve as an extremely loose sequel to an actual televised Sylvester McCoy story.

But while we could very easily continue to harp on in this vein about Illegal Alien‘s not being as resounding a rebuke of the New Adventures as we might initially imagine it to be, the DWM quotes alone make it apparent that Tucker and Perry aren’t particularly interested in pretending that this is anything that much more complex than a lightly reskinned “Season 27” script. As such, it probably behooves us to put aside all our talk of Time’s Champion and the Other and dust off the Cartmel Era analytical playbook for another trip around the block.

Handily enough, the Cartmel Era calling card which most immediately jumps out is one which Owen devotes special attention to in his What If? feature. Rather than using the Cybermen as little more than generic robots in an equally generic space opera world, as had become the norm throughout the Saward years, Illegal Alien chooses to ground its action in November 1940, at the height of the London Blitz.

This is, going by the standards of What If? at least, a highly significant shift. If the piece can be said to have a general thesis on the way forward for Doctor Who beyond slightly bizarre attempts at John Birt apologia, there are worse candidates for the title than Owen’s repeated emphasis on these final two imaginary seasons’ turning away from the garish space opera milieux of the Williams and Saward Eras. These would have been supplanted, he suggests, by an embrace of more readily comprehensible historical or (near-)contemporary periods of human history, which certainly seems a logical enough extrapolation from the overwhelmingly Earthbound Season 26.

Owen, for his part, partially casts this hypothetical sea-change in precisely the light that you might expect for a writer who seems so enamoured with Birtian accountancy as a valid mode of televisual production:

The production team had realised that a regular cast comprising the Doctor and one young female companion was the most workable, that serials set in recent British history brought out the best from the BBC’s designers, and that odd stories exploring the dark side of human nature were an area it could inhabit without fear of comparison with blockbuster science fiction films.

Granted, this isn’t a line of reasoning that’s been snatched out of thin air by Owen. Marc Platt, in the segment of his interview printed as part of 27 Up‘s commentary on Ice Time and Crime of the Century, seems to allude to it in a particularly choice observation, to give just one example: “You can have resonances within [period pieces], whereas it’s so difficult to create an alien culture in depth on a BBC budget. The designers just want to spray everything silver and light it like a Christmas tree.”

This is, in short, the same argument underpinning Russell T. Davies’ oft-quoted line in his pitch for the 2005 revival on the tedium of having to listen to stories about the Zogs on planet Zog and their turbulent relationship with the great Zog-monster. It’s particularly revealing, then, that What If? chooses to foreground the more prosaic argument as to the believability of the costuming and special effects that one one can achieve in a period drama, even as it does make a few nods later on to what we might call Planet Zog Theory.

(Care should be taken here to distinguish Planet Zog Theory from the ZOG Theory, a dime-a-dozen antisemitic conspiracy theory of the kind that is much less fun than overanalysis of an endearingly hokey British science fiction series. And, for that matter, from King Zog Theory, which I’ve just made up.)

What it reveals, as we’ve already said, is mainly just the unhealthy preoccupation in certain corners of fandom with a cinematic adaptation of Doctor Who. The idea that Doctor Who should even routinely be compared to “blockbuster science fiction films” is itself just a slightly more evolved form of the argument that Warriors of the Deep would have been a perfectly watchable story if the Myrka were a little less dodgy. Which is, y’know, rather unconvincing as arguments go, and also fails to consider that the decision to imitate big-budget blockbusters was in many ways the thing that set the series down the path to the Myrka to begin with.

While Tucker’s comments as to the feasibility of producing Illegal Alien as originally scripted may be seen to nod towards a similar filmic sensibility – and to be sure, one imagines that the Cybermat-heavy set pieces would have been a particularly tall ask, Cybermats never having been one of the more convincing creature designs in the Doctor Who arsenal – it’s clear from actually reading the finished novel that its televisual roots have been meticulously preserved.

Yes, you’ve got the more obvious signifiers like the book’s being split into four “Parts” as a means of keeping up the pretense of its being transmitted as an actual episode. Dutifully, the cliffhanger to the first part is the revelation of the Cybermen, though the novel goes the extra mile and manages the impressive feat of spoiling that surprise not just on the front cover, but on the back as well. And in a story that doesn’t even have “Cybermen” in the title, no less!

Even on a subtler level, though, the book’s origins as a script for the classic series are readily apparent. Its basic structure, with the Doctor and Ace becoming separated and pinballing between the same handful of places as they gradually ascertain the full scope of the plot and encounter as many action set pieces along the way as is necessary to get the job done, should be recognisable to any reasonably adept viewer of the original show. To finally circle back around to my original point, however, it’s really the Blitz that most firmly marks Illegal Alien as a Cartmel Era effort.

The Cartmel Era was, we should point out, not the first era of Doctor Who to be routinely made by people too young to have any meaningful memories of the Second World War; Eric Saward would have been just shy of nine months old when Japan surrendered in September 1945, while John Nathan-Turner was a little less than two years away from being born at all. Yet it was, in Ben Aaronovitch, the first to get a writer who was born after the series had debuted on television, and this proved by and large to be an equally important distinction.

Free from the cultural memory of the post-War, pre-Who status quo – or at the very least, freer than had been the norm for past Eras – there was a sense that that memory could be interrogated and played with in a more probing way. Stephen Wyatt’s Paradise Towers included a memorable – for better or worse – turn for Richard Briers as the eponymous housing project’s plainly Hitleresque Caretaker.

The following season, Remembrance of the Daleks brought the horrors of sixties neo-Nazism home to roost in the form of long-time BUF supporter and Cable Street veteran George Ratcliffe. All of this built logically to the first story to actually be set in the thick of the Second World War, The Curse of Fenric, to say nothing of Season 26’s marginally less direct grappling with fascist thought in the form of Ghost Light and Survival.

(This, incidentally, also hints at the main reason why Illegal Alien was held back from production to begin with, as Aaronovitch quite reasonably pointed out to Tucker and Perry that the production team already had a “Britain in the 1940s” story in the works. Now, with six years’ worth of New Adventures separating it from The Curse of Fenric, the novel can be advantageously reframed as a pleasantly nostalgic throwback rather than a demonstration of the law of diminishing returns.)

Although the New Adventures undeniably went on to broaden their identity beyond their beginnings as an outgrowth of the Cartmel Era, they nevertheless inherited their antecedent’s fascination with Nazism. Exodus saw the series use the horrors of fascism to make some early stabs at moral complexity and maturity, though those efforts were ultimately stymied by the basic difficulty of trying to get Terrance Dicks to write anything that could be described as “complex” or “mature.”

To their credit, the books eventually followed up with Lance Parkin’s Just War, which took the basic brief of Doctor Who and the Nazis about as far as you could feasibly go before forcefully exposing that idea as horrifically broken and unworkable.

If Just War saw the series offer up the most direct engagement with the horrors of Nazism that was tastefully possible within Doctor Who‘s intrinsically British frame of reference – that being the German occupation of the Channel Islands – then Illegal Alien has, with the Blitz, seemingly opted for the second-most direct engagement.

The Blitz, as far as the Second World War is concerned, is a bit of a curious thing. As a matter of course, Dale’s Ramblings tends to react with a certain well-honed scepticism towards parts of British history that readily lend themselves to nationalist myth-making, and there are a couple of searingly obvious reasons for this.

For one, the blog has always been the product of someone growing up in a post-Brexit world, and indeed someone whose adolescence and larger political awakening coincided almost perfectly with the fateful referendum. The Leave result was announced a mere three months after my thirteenth birthday, and is one of the key moments that really whipped me into an utterly confused sense of wondering what the hell had gone wrong with the world, coming just four months before the second such major shock.

Secondly, it’s just the type of thing that I feel it probably behooves me to acknowledge, as a white cisgender Australian man, Australians being a not-so-distant runner-up in the “Which former British colony can make an absolute imperialist hash of its own historical narrative?” stakes to the United States.

(Really, this unspoken competition is the true Commonwealth Games, only considerably more depressing and without the benefit of only occurring once every four years. And with more Americans. Lose-lose, really.)

We will, in due course, get to talking about the shortcomings of that myth-making, but at the same time I’ll concede that it would frankly take a much more foolhardy critic than myself to entirely downplay the sense of the Blitz as a hefty and tangible intersection between the United Kingdom and Nazi Germany. Conventional estimates generally place the number of London civilians killed in the eight-month bombing campaign at somewhere above 40,000, and that’s a big enough number that it would be in exceedingly poor taste to entirely dismiss out of hand.

The nature of this intersection, of course, remains substantially different from the harsh realities of occupation and collaboration which marked the experiences of continental European states, or even, as we’ve said, of the Channel Islands. The very nature of air raids as impersonal military operations provided precious little opportunity for actual, physical interaction with Nazis. Provided one of them doesn’t try to do something stupid like parachute into Scotland and get himself sent to Spandau Prison, I suppose, but that surely falls under the umbrella heading of “exceptional circumstances.”

For the purposes of drama, then, it’s easy enough to see the appeal. It provides a practically ready-made means of getting at the atmosphere of a war raging around the lives of the individuals caught in its wake. In effect, it’s not too dissimilar to the mood of your standard “War in Heaven,” only without the additional obligation of having to hammer in a less conventional sort of warfare.

It is, indeed, such a winning format that it’s hardly a surprise that the revival opted to revisit it for the purposes of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and Torchwood‘s Captain Jack Harkness. I mean, it’s not an instant win, as is proven by the example of Victory of the Daleks and (obliquely) The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, but hey, the nature of an ongoing series like this is that they can’t all be winners.

Illegal Alien, thankfully, largely manages to fall on the good side of this divide. Tucker and Perry manage to create a pervasive sense of eeriness through the imagery of a sparsely-populated London beset by bombs, helping to ensure that the geographical linking tissue between the novel’s numerous set pieces actually has some measure of character to it

Perhaps the most striking idea that arises from this use of the Blitz, however, comes when Ace regards the towering urban inferno from the heights of Hampstead Heath (curiously free, in this time period, of anti-capitalist German shepherds named after Italian Marxists). Rather than viewing the city’s fate as an inspiring moment of British resilience through the so-called “Blitz spirit,” Ace instead sees a testament to the awe-inspiring power of anarchy at sweeping away a rather decrepit social order.

It’s an interesting moment, and one which seems to properly grasp the appeal of doing this particular story with this particular Doctor and companion. Ace’s reaction here is fundamentally tied to her nature as a character, and is all the more remarkable for the fact that the novel initially seems to be giving her an unadorned lesson in learning about the horrors of the Second World War; one couldn’t casually rewrite this scene for Rose Tyler or Amy Pond, because it really wouldn’t make any sense at all in that context without some major tweaking.

But there’s a delicate balancing act to be had here, as an uncritical valorisation of the Blitz as a “good thing” is quite clearly woefully short-sighted. Tucker and Perry are, if nothing else, seemingly aware of this, as evidenced by Ace’s subsequent guilty recollection of Manisha’s own fiery fate at the hands of neo-Nazis.

Granted, the sad reality of these abhorrent ideologies’ historical recurrence is hardly groundbreaking stuff, even if you’re confining the stories under your consideration to the McCoy years, but the novel does at least hint towards something a tad more nuanced.

More than any other Doctor Who story to handle the Blitz, Illegal Alien seems particularly concerned with the disproportionate impact of the German air raids on London’s East End. This is, it probably goes without saying, a demonstrable historical fact, occasioned by the area’s historical status as the home of the city’s main shipping facilities.

Even before the war, the East End had also acquired a longstanding reputation for crime and poverty, the latter of which wasn’t exactly helped much by the whole “houses constantly getting bombs dropped on them” situation. More often than not, this reputation found itself accompanied by a rather unfortunate streak of racism and/or anti-Semitism on account of the area’s sizeable migrant population. To put it in Doctor Who terms, well, all we have to do is ask “Where was The Talons of Weng-Chiang set again?” in order for you to get my point. I hope.

Throughout Illegal Alien, Tucker and Perry emphasise this sense of a much-maligned area of the city which has suddenly found itself the focus of a great calamity, and they just about manage to stay on the side of good taste to boot. Much like Greel’s nefarious activities in Talons, the “Limehouse Lurker” is explicitly likened to the lingering memory of Jack the Ripper, a parallel which also serves to indirectly foreshadow next year’s Matrix.

The guest characters themselves are also rather pointedly chosen. Sharkey is a bit too much of a stereotypical portrait of a shifty, crime-prone and mildly alcoholic Irishman for me to ever feel entirely comfortable singing his praises, but even here there is some minimal lip service paid to his theft-based activities being a response to his impoverished circumstances. The initial tension between Mullen and McBride, meanwhile, is partially fuelled by the former’s distrust of what he sees as the tendency of Irish Americans towards the cause of the IRA, which is a rather more shrewd piece of historical detail than the TV series was typically willing to delve into.

In this light, the scepticism shown towards characters exhibiting stereotypical “Englishness” becomes rather more telling, particularly in a story featuring the only then-extant Doctor not to be played by an English actor. What’s more, Illegal Alien repeatedly draws attention to the sense in which it is essentially moving through the extensive corpus of British, and more specifically English, popular culture to which Doctor Who owes a debt in one fashion or another.

The most blatant reinforcement of this sensation comes in the form of a number of nominal homages to fictional and real personages scattered throughout the novel. It’s hardly the height of critical sleuthing to figure out that Major Lazonby might possibly be named as a tip of the hat to a certain James Bond actor, while Dr. Peddler somehow manages to be an even more obvious nod to the Cybermen’s real-life co-creator.

Of Mullen’s underlings, PC Dixon seems destined to evoke Jack Warner’s eponymous character from Dixon of Dock Green – a series which, we ought not forget, Doctor Who spent an awful lot of its early years scheduled in close proximity to – and I’d be willing to eat my hat if PC Quick wasn’t named in deference to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, particularly with the East End setting and all.

But of the guest cast, it’s George Limb who is most frequently framed as a creature of narrative and of fiction. Ace’s initial trust of him is explicitly positioned as a result of Limb’s resemblance to “dotty old vicars and headmasters in 1970s English sitcoms,” while the man himself later ruefully compares his actions to Doctors Jekyll and Frankenstein.

On the whole, this serves as a sensible extrapolation of Limb’s presentation as a foil for the Doctor. Illegal Alien is hardly subtle on this point, with Tucker and Perry introducing the character by the sobriquet of “the Professor,” which predictably draws Ace up short on account of her own longstanding nickname for the Doctor. Even outside of these more obvious points, the novel makes an unselfconscious return to the “duelling chessmasters” school of adversary construction so favoured by stories like The Curse of Fenric for the first time in what feels like forever.

More specifically, and somewhat predictably for the Wilderness Years, Limb most directly evokes Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. He’s a high-level civil servant with powerful connections – and indeed, Victory of the Daleks retroactively makes it even easier to draw parallels between Limb and the Doctor on account of their mutual friendship with Churchill – and insider knowledge of all sorts of secretive governmental/military projects, who just so happens to have chosen to employ his skills for the benefit of London’s criminal class instead.

What’s most compelling about the inevitable critique of Pertwee embedded in this characterisation, then, is the decision to cast the kind of uniformity promised by Limb – itself a rather natural choice of subject matter for a Cyberman story – as something of a twisted funhouse mirror reflection of the national myth of the “Blitz spirit.” Sharkey’s reflections on the changing nature of the London underworld, as a formerly diffuse structure which has pulled together to the point that the individuals caught in the system are reduced to being “the eyes and ears of a single great organising mind,” prove particularly evocative of the language of solidarity which is often used to describe this period of British history.

The reality, as is so often the case, is rather more complex. Writing in response to renewed calls for the British populace to “keep calm and carry on” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, historian Richard Overy summarised the oftentimes conflicting evidence that is so often erased by the simplistic “Blitz spirit” narrative:

The “blitz spirit” was nevertheless an invention at the time. There was doubtless evidence of stoic behaviour during the second world war. Psychiatrists at the time worried that there would be an epidemic of “air-raid phobia” and hospitals prepared for an influx of psychiatric casualties, but there were fewer admissions to psychiatric hospitals in 1940 than in 1939. One leading psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, published a Penguin Special in 1940 on how to conquer fear. His recipe was a simple pat on the shoulder and some firm words. He suggested carrying a packet of sweets or some biscuits, or a flask of brandy, to cheer up those unnerved by the bombs.

These banal solutions masked the reality of being bombed night after night. In the heavily bombed cities – Plymouth, Southampton, Clydebank – tens of thousands of people trekked out of the city into the countryside or neighbouring villages for shelter and food. Their understandable reaction was fear. Endurance was unavoidable, and survival their chief priority. Exhibiting the “blitz spirit” was not. Government researchers found that what people wanted most was sound information, the promise of welfare and rehabilitation, and somewhere to sleep. The sight of destroyed buildings, corpses and body parts was utterly alien to daily life. The trauma this produced was largely unrecorded, and certainly untreated.

This complexity was similarly reflected in the effect of the bombings on existing class structures in the United Kingdom. It’s perhaps quite pointed that one of the most widely reproduced Blitz-time anecdotes concerns the Queen Mother’s response to the bombing of Buckingham Palace, saying, “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

And sure, that would all be terribly moving if it didn’t gloss over the slightly inconvenient fact that the Royal Family were – and, let’s be honest, still are – the beneficiaries of a financial arrangement that would almost certainly see the palatial home restored at the expense of the taxpayer. Indeed, on her initial visits to the area, she had been met with hostility for turning out in her finest and most expensive garments, which is really only a few rungs above “Let them eat cake” as the kind of thing to which people suffering from an acute case of “having bombs dropped on their houses every night” are liable to respond poorly.

At the same time, however, the carnage of the Blitz did go on to bring about a genuine shift in the attitude towards poverty and social welfare in Britain. In June 1941, about a month after the Luftwaffe’s last major raid on London, the wartime coalition government formed a committee to, in the words of Arthur Greenwood, “undertake… a survey of the existing national schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen’s compensation, and to make recommendations.”

The committee’s final report, dubbed the Beveridge Report after its chief architect, Liberal economist William Beveridge, identified “five giants on the road of reconstruction” and proposed wide-ranging reforms to the nation’s existing welfare apparatus. Following the conclusion of the War and the elevation of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party to government after their landslide victory at the July 1945 general election, the document went on to prove a key influence in the expansion of National Insurance and the creation of the National Health Service, effectively paving the way for the modern British welfare state.

Out of the classist spectacle of the Royal Family bemoaning the loss of their stalwartly safeguarded palaces, in other words, came a marginally better world. Illegal Alien is at least incisive enough to recognise that this cannot ever entirely erase the very real historical suffering that the Blitz caused. Indeed, Tucker and Perry even get in a few token jabs at the state of London in Ace’s time, a world shaped by the twin pressures of Thatcher’s 1986 dissolution of the Greater London Council and the gaudy redevelopment of the London Docklands under the auspices of Michael Heseltine. Just in case you were in any doubt as to the British public’s general appetite for New Labour and the possibility of change at this time.

What ultimately dooms Limb, in other words, is his desire to bypass all that history and skip straight to a point where the arc of time has bent towards a future that is a little less crap. It’s not, notably, an active desire to alter or hasten that arc, which would conceivably run the risk of carrying a slightly unpleasant subtext of “Don’t try and bring about the welfare state before its preordained time.”

It’s a purely self-centred move, prioritising Limb’s own perspective over the experiences of any of the other people involved, and in proving unable to properly encompass the whole scope of history, he winds up spread across all of time and space in a rather horrific fashion that leaves me with a genuine sense of intrigue as to how on Earth he’s going to possibly return for Loving the Alien in about four and a half years’ time.

Where the novel stumbles, unfortunately, is in its final “Part,” which is really one of the more unfortunate places to have your artistic cock-ups. After the first three parts had conspired to keep the horrors of Nazism at a respectful distance, the final act sees very real and heinous figures of the Nazi regime like Reinhard Heydrich drawn into a pulpy runaround involving Cybermen. It’s not a failing unique to Tucker and Perry by any means; like we said, this was basically the tack taken by Dicks in Exodus, and countless adventure stories besides, of which the Indiana Jones films are probably the most salient example.

(Even there, Steven Spielberg at least had the decency, in making Schindler’s List, to realise that he didn’t quite feel comfortable continuing to use the Nazis as pulp villains, explaining the presence of the Soviets in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)

In a post-Just War world, though, this approach feels severely blunted, especially with the decision to set the third act on the Channel Islands. There’s nothing in Ace’s experience of imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis that can even hope to come close to Bernice’s ordeal. Indeed, the fact that this treatment is extended to the TV iteration of Ace, a figure who has always been closely aligned with the spirit of children’s television, sets up a sense of fundamental wrongness which is to a certain extent deeply upsetting, and not even a dramatically satisfying kind of upsetting.

Parkin’s novel ultimately derived much of its power from its status as a rare example of the pure historical in a post-Gunfighters Doctor Who, and this is a power which can never earnestly be replicated in the context of a Cyberman novel. The underlying message of scenes like Ace’s conversation with fellow prisoner Sid Napley – that one should remember the names of the victims of fascism and/or genocide – is a sound one with which it isn’t honestly worth arguing unless you’re, y’know, a fascist, but Napley never really becomes much more than a name, and the whole exercise consequently ends up feeling dangerously cynical.

When your handling of Nazism is less deft than the “intentionally broad sex farce masquerading as standard-issue time travel dilemma” of Let’s Kill Hitler, you’ve made a misstep somewhere along the way. (This maxim also serves as an adequate rejoinder to Spyfall, Part Two, funnily enough, just for those of you who were expecting me to reference The Timeless Children in our discussion of clunky, poorly-delivered retcons last time.)

For a book which seems to aspire more often than not to the basic precis of “Silver Nemesis done right,” the Nazis who populate Part Four of the novel aren’t honestly much more sophisticated than Anton Diffring’s turn as Hans de Flores.

Still, for much of its length Illegal Alien is a perfectly serviceable return to the simpler days of the Wilderness Years, and as someone who admittedly harbours a great deal of baseline affection for the pairing of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, I can’t help but find it a relatively enjoyable time, even as it isn’t the deepest or most consequential work in the world. It’s also helped in no small measure by the juxtaposition of its workable handling of an iconic Doctor Who menace against the travesty of War of the Daleks, leading to a rare instance of a Cyberman story that’s leagues ahead of its nearest Dalek counterpart.

Perhaps, for the moment, that’s enough.

Miscellaneous Observations

The writing style of Illegal Alien is actually strangely inconsistent, with the bulk of it unfolding in a very economical, no-nonsense kind of fashion, only to be interspersed with occasional turns towards a more lyrical and flowery kind of narration. It’s a bit of a fool’s errand to definitively try and separate a given author’s contributions in co-written productions like this, but my gut feeling based on having listened to Tucker’s two Big Finish audio dramas and experiencing their distinct lack of overly flashy scripting is to detect the hand of Perry at work in these aberrations. I could be wrong, though.

One of the more humorous moments to be found in Dave Owen’s What If? piece, barring those I already touched upon, comes in his off-handed description of an alternate New Adventures line beginning with Neil Penswick’s The Pit, of all things. I can only assume, based on the dire quality of that novel, that this is a somewhat playful concession to the need to work in a mention of the unmade Hostage somewhere in the piece, but it winds up sitting at odds with the generally serious tone in evidence elsewhere.

Final Thoughts

Well, that’s another month down. And now, right before we get into the big month that’s going to end up redefining just about everything… I’m going to take a bit of a break. Truthfully, I’m just very exhausted at the moment, so I need to take some time off from the constant business of writing for a little while. When I get back, though, we’ve still got one more roadblock separating us from Alien Bodies, as Simon Bucher-Jones returns to introduce Clarence to the New Adventures with Ghost Devices. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures Reviews: War of the Daleks by John Peel (or, “Battle Skarred”)

John Peel occupies a rather strange position in the history of the Wilderness Years. In a very real sense, he stands at the absolute beginning of the period, having contributed Genesys, the first of Virgin’s New Adventures, in June 1991.

Yes, Doctor Who Magazine might have filled the gap between the close of Survival and the dawn of the Seventh Doctor and Ace’s novel-length adventures with a couple of atypically impactful comic strips. But these were always something of a stopgap measure to tide fandom over in that initial period of confusion when the BBC were refusing to even be drawn on basic questions like “Is Doctor Who actually cancelled?”

There was never any real doubt that the New Adventures were going to be the more substantial continuation of the television programme, provided they didn’t simply flop immediately on release. Even when Peel’s novel eventually hit shelves, provoking no small measure of controversy for its cavalier attitude to sex and violence, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a fan who would have seriously argued for stories like the roughly contemporary DWM strip The Good Soldier, say, as the more indicative portrait of what Doctor Who was to look like moving forward. So Peel’s getting in on the ground floor, as it were, is more than enough to ensure him a passing mention in any history of the period worth its salt.

Yet at the same time, one simply cannot escape the impression that the primary context in which Peel ought to be mentioned lies in his having provided a template from which the New Adventures, and the larger body of Wilderness Years fiction as a whole, could radically depart in short order.

One doesn’t even have to dig too far into the realm of subjective opinion to make this case; on the level of basic, objective fact, it’s plainly self-evident. The standard read on John Peel nowadays, and one that I myself have undoubtedly given voice to in the past, is that he was little more than a holdover from the days of the Target novelisations. That series effectively served as the precursor to the New Adventures, if only in the sense that Peter Darvill-Evans eventually realised that, with no new Doctor Who immediately on the horizon, there were precious few television stories left for his company to actually novelise unless they started digging into tripe like The Pescatons or The Paradise of Death.

The logical conclusion, when faced with this truly horrific possibility, was to try and start writing original novels, and Virgin inevitably ended up tapping the Target imprint’s pre-existing reservoir of writers in order to allow themselves to work from a reasonably solid foundation. This is, in brief, how you ended up with three of the first four NAs coming from people like Terrance Dicks, Nigel Robinson and, yes, John Peel.

But although the basic shape of this argument is generally pretty sound, it does have the effect of erasing the sense in which Peel remains a bit of an odd fit even within the hyper-specific context of the New Adventures’ inaugural “Target trio” of writers, having really only made his mark on the novelisations less than two years before the release of Genesys.

Accordingly, the standard recitation of the authors’ past track records. Terrance Dicks, as we’ve said countless times, needs no introduction, with his association with Target dating back to 1974’s The Auton Invasion, the first of the company’s novelisations not to be a reprint of Frederick Mueller’s efforts from the sixties. Similarly, while Apocalypse author Nigel Robinson might have only penned four contributions to the series starting in 1987, he almost certainly made up for this paucity of writing credits by serving as the range’s penultimate editor.

Peel, by contrast, had racked up three novelisations to his name by the time of Genesys, all of them released in rapid-fire fashion over a three-month period in 1989. After the advent of the NAs, he would gain two more notches on his belt with consecutive adaptations of David Whitaker’s two Dalek scripts in mid-1993, notably leaving the Eric Saward stories of the 1980s as the only Dalek stories of the classic series never to receive the Target treatment.

Labelling Peel as just another Target author, therefore, may be a broadly accurate characterisation of the cold, hard facts of his career, but ends up capturing very little of the writer’s unique place in the unspoken novelisation hierarchy. And as you’ve probably already gleaned by now, his position in the authorial pecking order is linked in a rather inextricable fashion to that most famous of Doctor Who monsters, the Daleks.

This was, predictably enough, reflected even outside of the Target arena – not to be confused with Minneapolis’ Target Center, or Target Arena, which is apparently a dart supply store in Hong Kong – with Peel sharing a co-authors’ credit on 1988’s The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book with Terry Nation himself. This esoteric tome also came complete with the seventy-four page The History of the Daleks, a somewhat foolhardy attempt to bludgeon the thirteen extant televised Dalek stories into a single internally consistent chronology.

In October of 1991, Peel would extend a similar treatment to the Time Lords with The Gallifrey Chronicles, a work whose title ironically served the dual purpose of ensuring that the writer’s spectre would linger over both the beginning and the end of the Wilderness Years, given the name of the final Eighth Doctor Adventure.

Although probably coincidental, the decision to release The Gallifrey Chronicles alongside Robinson’s Apocalypse feels entirely appropriate, coming as it did at the exact last moment before Paul Cornell radically redefined the boundaries of the New Adventures with Revelation. It is here, then, that we begin to see a deeper indication of what I mean when I say that the Wilderness Years exist largely as a rejection of John Peel.

Throughout his work, the model of Doctor Who fandom that Peel seems to best exemplify is the encyclopaedic model, a claim for which there can be no better evidence than the fact that I quite literally just listed two separate encyclopaedias written by the man. This is the kind of fandom, in essence, that sees one’s ability to rattle off every Dalek or Cyberman story as being of paramount importance, with bonus points if you can describe which stories played host to which redesigns.

In the main, knowledge of this information functions as little more than a shibboleth, a means of separating the “real” Doctor Who fans from the rather substantial chunk of the British populace who merely have fond memories of watching that funny guy with the long scarf and the robot dog when they were growing up, but who couldn’t honestly tell you how or if that slotted into the period in which they were looking for that pink plastic cube.

It’s particularly telling, in this respect, to cast one’s gaze back to Peel’s earliest contributions to the franchise, back when he was writing the backup strips for Doctor Who Magazine – or Doctor Who – A Marvel Monthly, as it was then known – in the early 1980s. We might perhaps want to note that the period in which Peel started filling this capacity coincides almost perfectly with the departures of bona fide comic book legends Alan and Steve Moore from the publication (insert standard “no relation” disclaimer here). This is, obviously, one of those artistic trade-offs that cannot be sincerely viewed as anything other than a massive downgrade, but we should at least attempt to put all of that aside for the time being.

It’s tempting to take aim at Peel for the rather shallow and fan-pleasing nature of his strips’ premises, and he has indeed provided us with plenty of ammo in this regard. The Greatest Gamble brings back the sodding Celestial Toymaker, clearly adhering to received fan wisdom as to the character’s classic status even if the strip predated the most visible formulation of that argument in Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration.

The Gods Walk Among Us, apart from having a title that all but invites some particularly lazy attempts at humour on my end, tells of a Sontaran’s being mistaken for a god by the people of ancient Egypt Devil of the Deep, meanwhile, unfolds in the wake of a sixteenth century Spaniard’s encounter with a Sea Devil.

Finally, these impulses ended up reaching their show-stopping conclusion in The Fires Down Below, in which UNIT come face to face with their most deadly foe yet: the Quarks, and the Dominators that control them. Truly, more spine-chilling shoulderpads were never known to humankind. Incidentally, it’s surely a complete coincidence that DWM promptly did away with the concept of backup strips altogether immediately after The Fires Down Below. Surely.

Yet with all of that being said, one must acknowledge that there seems to be equally compelling evidence to suggest that the monster fixation evident in these strips can be just as sensibly ascribed to the nature of the DWM backup comic as an institution in general as they can to Peel’s own shortcomings as a writer, if not more so.

After all, the first two examples of the form could be found in Steve Moore’s The Return of the Daleks and Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman, a crystal-clear case of the magazine simply trusting to the audience’s interest in the two most famous Doctor Who monsters in existence, which is pretty much the definition of a safe bet.

No, the aspect of these strips that ends up proving most damning of Peel’s entire approach to Doctor Who isn’t his use of continuity in and of itself. Rather, it’s the use of continuity in service of a vision of storytelling in which drama is treated as secondary to the concoction of a tale that might feasibly end up as one of the more granular answers to a question along the lines of “Name five stories featuring the Celestial Toymaker” at a particularly uninspired pub quiz.

And frankly, at the risk of being inordinately petty, the bitterest irony in all of this is that none of Peel’s strips have even achieved that status in any meaningful sense. This, at least, cannot be seriously argued to be a by-product of the backup strips’ limitations. DWM would go on to incorporate elements of those strips in pretty major story arcs throughout the length and breadth of its main comic’s history, from Abslom Daak to Kroton the Cyberman.

The concept of a “Time War” involving the inhabitants of Gallifrey and employing unconventional methods of warfare, as cursorily played with by Alan Moore before his aforementioned departure, would obviously go on to prove a major influence on later writers like Lawrence Miles and Russell T. Davies. Hell, the latter even off-handedly namechecked Black Legacy‘s Deathsmiths of Goth in providing an indulgent magical history tour of the Last Great Time War in the pages of the 2006 Doctor Who Annual.

Peel’s strips, on the other hand, have proven so inessential to the larger arc of the franchise that I can think of precisely two lasting influences with which they can be realistically credited. The first came with the release of Gary Russell’s Divided Loyalties in October 1999, which borrowed the character of Gaylord Lefevre from The Greatest Gamble. Given fandom’s overwhelmingly hostile response to that novel, the results of this experiment can most charitably be described as “mixed.”

Much later, in November 2015, Nick Walters would revisit The Fires Down Below‘s basic “UNIT vs. the Dominators and the Quarks” premise as part of Candy Jar Books’ ongoing Lethbridge-Stewart series of novels, because hey, when you hit upon a winner like that you can’t just do it once.

(It must be said, mind you, that the presence of the infamously naff Dominators in the Lethbridge-Stewart line probably owes far more to their copyright being held by the Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln estates – hey, they need to do something when they’re not writing pseudohistorical bestsellers about the Holy Grail and inadvertently giving rise to such unfortunate cultural artefacts as the entirety of Dan Brown’s career – than it does to Peel, though this is doubly strange in light of Peel’s own curiously Dominator-less work on the Lethbridge-Stewart series.)

In looking at the actual content of his two Virgin novels, however, it’s little wonder that the arc of Peel’s career tends to get boiled down to “He’s the Target writer who did all those Dalek books,” as his encyclopaedia-friendly stylings are rarely afforded centre stage. Yes, there might be some rather extraneous continuity references like Genesys‘ mention of the Chronovores or the centrality of a Rutan healing salve to the events of Evolution. And that’s without even touching upon some of the more glaring errors like his infamous suggestion that Ace was present for the events of Paradise Towers when she… erm, wasn’t.

Even still, there’s little about these throwaway references to distinguish them from the general continuity-flavoured background radiation that the Wilderness Years novels never quite outgrew, even in their moments of genuine brilliance, and it’s difficult to label this a failing of Peel and Peel alone. Love and War‘s primary monsters, chilling though they may have been, were essentially built out from a single line in The Brain of Morbius, while the central threat of The Left-Handed Hummingbird was spurred by Exxilon technology.

If anything, one is struck far more often in the course of Genesys and Evolution by Peel’s clear preference for an extremely traditionalist style of storytelling – when one isn’t being struck by his leering, practically salivating descriptions of women and vaguely uncomfortable predilection for excusing historical injustices with a heavy dose of moral relativism, that is – and it’s all too easy to diagnose these writerly shortcomings as being rooted in his ties to a more habitually unobtrusive era of Doctor Who publishing, however simplistic such a characterisation may be.

Pursuant to that point, it’s perhaps significant that both of Peel’s fellow Target/Timewyrm scribes went on to contribute at least one further New Adventure each, suggesting that there may have been more room for Target veterans within the framework of the series than fans might generally acknowledge.

In any event, all this talk of production minutiae merely amounts to an attempt on my part to dance around the other rather crucial facet of Peel’s peculiar status as a grade A example of what not to do when writing a Doctor Who book, which is that his books simply aren’t very good at all.

Genesys may earn some small amount of leeway as the first real attempt to do proper, novel-length original Doctor Who fiction, but it remains a tiresome slog that manages the impressive feat of making the Epic of Gilgamesh boring. This tedium was leavened only by moments of sheer horror like Ace being told to stop getting so fussy about the whole “being sexually assaulted” thing, or the mildly agonising attempts to show that the NAs could tackle “adult” subject matter like bare-breasted teenage prostitutes.

In fact, I don’t think it’s some wild flight of fancy to suggest that the novel’s status as the first New Adventure is probably almost single-handedly responsible for the series’ gravely exaggerated reputation for puerile sexuality and mindless violence.

Despite these rather inauspicious beginnings, Peel returned some three years later with Evolution, the second ever Missing Adventure and the series’ first foray into the Fourth Doctor’s era. While it was certainly an improvement over his debut effort by any measure, that shouldn’t be construed as proof of anything beyond just how monumentally low the bar had been set.

Ultimately, the novel was largely bog-standard Hinchcliffesque Gothic horror fare, complete with all the requisite tropes and an attempt to homage Sherlock Holmes that couldn’t help but pale in comparison to Andy Lane’s All-Consuming Fire. Honestly, its most noteworthy aspect was a strange and wholly out-of-character propensity for Sarah Jane and the Doctor to casually threaten guest stars with tremendous amounts of violence. Oh, and a rather sleazy obsession with putting Sarah Jane in a swimsuit because, y’know, John Peel and stuff.

This, then, is the status quo as it stands at the start of October 1997. In spite of Genesys and Evolution meeting with tepid-at-best reviews and landing pretty solidly in the bottom ranks of the Shannon Sullivan rankings, it seemed that John Peel was just one of those names that could be counted on to show up like clockwork in the early days of a new Doctor Who range. Even in the quite likely eventuality that the resultant book didn’t end up being all that good, it could at least prove useful as a stumbling block. It could, in short, become a milestone with which to delineate the boundaries of taste and sense and suggest a point beyond which future books would probably be well-advised to avoid crossing.

Until today, that is.

With War of the Daleks, Peel rather decisively and swiftly torpedoes any chance he might have once had of being taken remotely seriously as a major voice to be reckoned with in the context of the Wilderness Years. Whatever else he might have hoped to accomplish, the unrelenting torrent of general ridicule and criticism with which War of the Daleks was greeted on release was precisely the kind of event which fandoms don’t soon forget.

If there is some truth to be found in Star Trek reviewer Jim Wright’s proclamation that Brannon Braga was as indelibly tied to the infamous Threshold as George Lucas was to Jar Jar Binks, then it seems fair to suggest that a similar relationship exists between War and Peel. By all indications, this is the book that was so bad that it pretty much banished John Peel from any sort of position of relevance in relation to Doctor Who.

(War and Peel, of course, was also the title of Leo Tolstoy’s sadly unpublished cookbook.)

What’s more, it’s tough to argue, on the strength of the wordsmithing on display here, that this wasn’t a thoroughly deserved exorcism. Let’s not skirt around the issue any longer by picking apart Peel’s past failings, and instead just say this, even if it’s been said a million times before: War of the Daleks is a terrible book.

If John Peel seemed a trifle out of step with the rhythms of Doctor Who fiction in September 1994, he seems practically antediluvian in the wake of a complete run of New Adventures. After the Eighth Doctor Adventures had begun to claw their way back to a certain respectable functionality following the absolute travesty of their beginning, War of the Daleks brings everything tumbling down.

With a painfully generic portrait of the regular cast and a plot that alternates in a rather slipshod fashion between tedious lectures on the consequences of war and occasional interminable battle sequences, it’s hard to see how this could have ever made for a novel that fell on the right side of general quality. And that’s before you factor in the mother of all retcons, which somehow manages to drag the novel even further down into the depths of calamity and exposes a genuinely nasty and cynical streak underneath the general lack of craft on display.

Nevertheless, the very fact that the retcon is the point that has come to dominate retrospective discussions of War of the Daleks is reason enough for us to opt to start somewhere else, and in view of the need for such a starting point I submit, for the consideration of the Dale’s Ramblings audience… Spider Daleks.

The origin of the Spider Daleks is easy enough to trace, being an invention of John Leekley’s early drafts for the project that would eventually become the 1996 TV movie. As their name implies, they were literally just regular Daleks whose casing opened up into a set of mechanical, spidery limbs for some reason that I’m sure made perfect sense at the time.

Now, the rational and measured response from any remotely well-adjusted adult upon being informed about the near miss that were the Spider Daleks would be to theatrically wipe one’s brow in relief. This would then be followed by a pained admission that, as ideas go, this is probably of roughly the same calibre as casting Borusa as the Doctor’s grandfather in yet another bloody riff on Joseph Campbell, or having the Yeti be descended from Neanderthals, both of which were also real things that Leekley apparently considered. How could the man behind Knight Rider 2010 and a failed pilot based on The Omen ever possibly betray his principles in such misguided fashion?

Actually, it’s worth pausing and examining just how ill-conceived an idea this whole “Spider Dalek” thing was, since we’ll probably never get another chance. All indications, after all, are that these Daleks were to have been primarily rendered through the use of CGI, which seems to betray a staggering lack of thought as to the plausibility of an American network being willing to extend such budgeting privileges to a remake of a crummy old British sci-fi export that was by all indications dead in the water and showing no signs of miraculous revival in the near future.

Sure, shows like Babylon 5 and seaQuest DSV had started using CGI in lieu of the more traditional model-based effects of franchises like Star Trek. Star Trek itself would even begin to take up the practice with the launch of Voyager less than a year after Leekley’s bible was written. Even so, the cost of doing CGI in the context of a weekly hour-long science-fiction programme with seasons of twenty-odd episodes – which, at the time of Leekley’s bible, was most definitely what the powers that be were envisioning – proved exorbitant enough that a show like Deep Space Nine had to resort to repurposing entire action sequences from past episodes in its finale, and even that came from a production team with a good few extra years’ worth of technological advances to pull from.

Tying any potential appearance of such an iconic presence as the Daleks to a cost-prohibitive technology like CGI is, quite simply, a rather thoughtless production decision, and it’s doubly foolish for its inexplicably choosing to forego the extremely well-established methods of Dalek prop manufacture. And all for what? The moderately “cooler” image of a Spider Dalek? Really?

But the loudest voices within science fiction fandoms, by and large, are not what you might consider “reasonably well-adjusted,” particularly in fandoms centred around a cancelled television programme still reeling from a failed and enormously high-profile attempt at a trans-Atlantic revival. Almost before the smoke had cleared from the McGann TV movie, the accessibility of detailed behind-the-scenes information on the production in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine and Jean-Marc Lofficier’s The Nth Doctor made it all but inevitable that elements of these initial unsuccessful scripts would make their way into the franchise mainstream, and the Spider Daleks were no exception.

From April to July 1997, DWM played host to Alan Barnes’ Fire and Brimstone, a five-part adventure which saw the Eighth Doctor and Izzy Sinclair briefly cross paths with a spider-like Dalek from an alternate timeline and thus implied the details of Leekley’s abandoned series bible to be true only within the limited confines of that parallel universe.

War of the Daleks, in typical Peel fashion, opts for the much less interesting option of simply having the Spider Daleks serve as an established Dalek design which is common enough that a random Thal soldier can exposit ruthlessly as to its basic facts. And the thing is, I’m not even all that impressed with Barnes’ “alternate timeline” solution either, so that should give you some idea of the low regard in which I hold this entire endeavour.

Without mincing words, I can honestly say that the action sequence that forms the prologue to War of the Daleks is one of the single most unengaging scenes I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through for this project, and immediately put me in an absolutely horrible mood that genuinely made me put the book down and not feel any desire to pick it up again for a good two hours.

On a very fundamental level, there’s a tremendous sense of dissatisfaction to be found in experiencing a book that seems to truly believe that its pursuit of visual spectacle is remotely worthwhile or impressive in an inherently non-visual medium like prose. Peel luxuriates in protracted descriptions of cool new Dalek designs. Beyond the Spider Daleks, fans can delight in the thrill of Marine Daleks, Strider Daleks (who can basically just be summed up as “Spider Daleks, but even bigger!”) and even an Infiltration Unit Dalek capable of disguising itself as a lectern, seeming to nod towards a later draft of the TV movie in which Robert DeLaurentiis cast the Daleks as shapeshifting humanoids in the style of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Indeed, barring the prologue, this impulse is pretty much the only reason for the existence of the novel’s constant interludes, none of which tie into the plot in any material sense beyond sharing the same underlying belief that it’s cool to see Daleks blow things up and get blown up. Lengthy, destructive battle scenes certainly aren’t impossible to do in a prose-bound setting, but they require a far more lively and energetic narrative voice than the staunchly traditionalist Peel was ever likely to provide. In opening with what he believes to be putting his best foot forward, Peel ironically ends up exposing just how little his sense of storytelling and pacing has evolved in the sixteen years since The Greatest Gamble, or indeed the mere six years since Genesys.

Putting aside all of the basic failures of drama at play here, there’s also a sense in which these sequences actively cut against what one might somewhat laughably term the novel’s sense of ethics. Insofar as War of the Daleks can be said to have a moral, it seems to aspire to a rather broad polemic on the horrors of war and the possibility of a nation becoming just as morally bankrupt as its enemies.

It’s not a remotely groundbreaking theme by any means, particularly when Peel’s grasp of thematic complexity and sophistication basically amounts to having the Doctor quite literally tell the Thals “You can’t defeat the Daleks by becoming the Daleks!” Then again, in that respect if nothing else, it certainly feels like an appropriate enough homage to such stirring pieces of patented Terry Nation Moral Advice as Planet of the Daleks‘ “Courage is when you’re scared but still do the thing.” Unfortunately, any hope of coherent moral outrage or indignation at the horrors of war is almost completely defused by Peel’s taking such evident glee in showing off his shiny, shiny new Daleks and the variety of high-octane ways in which they can kill people.

To be clear, it’s not even that “Dalek story as big, bombastic, loud action movie” and “sombre meditation on war’s tendency to corrode a nation’s ideals” are entirely unworkable ideas on their own. I mean, speaking purely for my own taste, there’s probably a rather low chance that you could actually craft a particularly entertaining or innovative story from either premise, and the chance that you’d get something on that level from a writer with as spotty a track record as John Peel’s is practically non-existent. When placed alongside one another, however, the two impulses wind up jarring horribly, and only serve to heap further indignity upon an already deeply disappointing novel.

In some respects, this sense of internal artistic conflict – of war, even – at the heart of War of the Daleks ends up offering an unintentionally striking snapshot of the novel’s deep-rooted shortcomings as a piece of fiction designed with a view towards furthering the new beginning implicitly teased by the TV movie.

The Spider Daleks may be a subject perfectly aligned with Peel’s own interests as a writer, but when taken in the aggregate they become emblematic of the profoundly confused legacy of the McGann film. The franchise is, in effect, proving itself to be so fixated on its latest brush with renewed pop-cultural relevance that writers could choose to resurrect concepts that were quite rightly thrown out in the course of the TV movie’s development. Forget the sketching of the Eighth Doctor’s personality almost from wholecloth, the most impressive conjuring trick pulled by the early EDAs is to be found in John Peel’s attempts to invoke the spirit of a version of the telemovie that never actually existed in any sort of concrete fashion.

As you might expect, this strange exercise in theoretical necromancy has some rather dire consequences for the general cohesion of the EDAs as a larger body of fiction. Whatever the flaws of the three book run spanning from Vampire Science to Genocide, one could walk away with a solid impression of a novel line that was actively engaged with the TV movie as a living, breathing document, sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of the production in hopes of finding a workable structure with which to generate future stories.

On the vanishingly rare occasion that Peel deigns to acknowledge the established status quo of the EDAs and the telemovie, the acknowledgment is invariably marked by a blistering lack of subtlety. As nods to The Bodysnatchers go, “‘That’s what made the TARDIS disappear when it was attacked back in the 1890s!’ cried Sam, remembering back to an earlier adventure” is hardly going to win points for being integrated in an especially organic fashion, while the acknowledgment of Vampire Science‘s “Old enough to dodge Daleks” line as “one of [Sam’s] favourite retorts to the Doctor’s occasionally overbearing paternal streak” is similarly clunky.

As for the actual characterisation of the Doctor and Sam themselves, Peel largely jettisons all of the more interesting aspects of the characters that had been suggested over the past three novels in favour of reverting to the consciously genericised model favoured by The Dying Days and The Eight Doctors, only without any convenient excuses like “We’re going to focus on Benny this time” or “We’ve given him amnesia.”

It’s surely one of the least original critical takes in Doctor Who history to identify War of the Daleks‘ version of the Eighth Doctor as sounding more like Jon Pertwee than Paul McGann, but it’s only been remarked upon so frequently on account of its being entirely true. Once you get to the scene where the character absently rubs his mouth while speaking in a note perfect imitation of the Third Doctor, all doubt really should be gone from your mind.

Perhaps the only point of note that I feel I can add to this discussion would be to dig up an old interview with Peel conducted by the New Adventures fanzine Broadsword in September 1996, in which he confesses to seeing Eight as “a kind of combination of Troughton and Tom Baker.” In conjunction with the writer’s clarification that he had made an effort to pitch Legacy of the Daleks as a Third Doctor book – not to mention his practically bending over backwards to write for Pertwee rather than McCoy in Genesys it seems wholly appropriate that in splitting the difference between Two and Four, War of the Daleks ends up with Three.

The first scene in the TARDIS shows some hints of promise, and the idea of Eight spontaneously deciding to tinker with the vessel’s lock fits with the suggestion of his tendency to get embroiled in life-threatening situations for no greater purpose than the acquisition of some back issues of The Strand. We even get a nod to his insistence in the TV movie that he was at Puccini’s deathbed, though it turns out that the opera to which he’s listening is in fact Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. As soon as the Doctor and Sam set foot on the Quetzel, though, these hints vanish as quickly as they came, leaving one with little choice but to conclude that Peel simply gave up at a certain point.

By far the greatest casualty of this rather neglectful attitude towards the established world of the EDAs, however – or, as we’ll see in short order, to just about any part of Doctor Who written by people other than Terry Nation from about 1979 onwards – is Sam, who… oh dear Lord. We’ve talked before about Sam’s shortcomings as a companion, while also conceding some of the rather unpleasant undercurrents to be found in fandom’s response to said shortcomings, but one could be forgiven for thinking that the last three novels had been making some headway in building up a version of the character that could theoretically prove to be a workable and even compelling regular cast member.

The common take on War of the Daleks is to suggest that Peel offhandedly jettisons any of the interesting suggestions made across books like Vampire Science and Genocide, and by any level-headed estimate this is certainly at least partially true. Much like the decision to dismiss Peel as just another Target writer, however, this narrative fails to reckon with the very specific feeling of horror with which one is stricken upon being forced to contend with John Peel’s attempts to write from the perspective of a woman for more than a few pages.

If anything, it should be remarked that War of the Daleks has actually retained one of the key suggestions made by the preceding loose trilogy of novels as to Sam’s character. Unfortunately for us, the suggestion in question might just be the weakest of the bunch, as we find ourselves revisiting the rather lifeless “Doctor-companion romance” plot for the first time since The Bodysnatchers.

This being John Peel, the results are, more often than not, rather jaw-dropping in their tone-deafness. For the bulk of the novel’s first half, Sam is confined to shooting spiteful looks at every female guest character who so much as breathes in the Doctor’s general direction, while becoming mired in insecurity over her not being as “technical” or as “drop-dead gorgeous” as said guest characters.

(This provides a marked contrast to the novel’s second half, in which Sam is instead confined to doing nothing at all, really.)

But the worst moment of all comes when Sam finds herself forced to fend off Loran’s entitled, nice guy-esque sexual advances, and Peel has her draw attention to the fact that, on account of her being only seventeen years old, it’s insanely creepy for him to target her in such a fashion. Taken as is, there isn’t really anything in that argument that should be considered objectionable, but it’s yet another instance of Peel’s casual preoccupation with the idea of underage characters having sexual encounters with fully-grown adults.

Between this, Genesys‘ aforementioned temple prostitutes, and a subplot in Evolution in which Sarah Jane discovered that a small-town barmaid was knowingly sleeping with a group of underaged schoolboys, Peel’s books are now three for three for this kind of thing. What’s worse, not once are these intimations of a very serious and tangible crime treated with the appropriate gravity.

Instead, it’s consistently reduced to a cheap signifier of the books’ ability to deal with weightier topics than the television series. But if one’s engagement with such weighty topics is going to end up being so superficial as to tacitly trivialise sexual harassment and abuse – or, in the case of Genesys, to all but excuse the historical prevalence of such actions as being “of its time” or whatever – then one shouldn’t be surprised if I feel well within my rights to label such a vision of Doctor Who as an outright abhorrence.

In War of the Daleks‘ worldview, there are seemingly only three types of women. On the one hand, you have soldiers like Ayaka who are very pretty and just need to learn to embrace their motherhood instead of doing all this military stuff. At the other end of the spectrum lies Chayn, a much smarter woman who’s thankfully still very pretty and can get over her attraction to the Doctor by pairing up with Cathbad at the end. The fact that they have barely any interactions outside of one giving the other a back rub at the tail end of the book is, naturally, wholly immaterial. Any good Doctor Who story needs a solid, red-blooded heterosexual coupling that’s barely developed at all.

And then in the middle you have Sam, who jealously snipes at any woman in range. Her age means that we probably can’t call her very pretty without seeming skin-crawlingly scuzzy. Don’t worry though, Peel will be on hand to dutifully draw attention to the fact that she’s underage, because he simply can’t let such an important chance to be weird slip by.

It’s fine though, we’ll have her subjected to a creepy incel nice guy’s sexual advances and it’s all fine because she responds to the situation with a great deal of pluck. Moxie even. It’s really a shame that Peel never got to write for the franchise after Legacy of the Daleks. By his fifteenth original novel, he might have even featured a woman who can vote and wear trousers!

Heaven above, end my suffering.

The most interesting thing here, actually, is that I seem to be largely alone in being willing to so strongly denounce this aspect of the book. I almost wrote “surprising” there, but that wouldn’t be quite truthful. It doesn’t really surprise me at all that the bulk of the fan reviews of War of the Daleks barely touch upon this aspect of Sam’s presence in the book, especially not when we have more “important” things to discuss like the Retcon™, but it’s certainly disappointing all the same. This is the same fandom that took so long to so much as acknowledge that there might have been dodgier aspects of The Talons of Weng-Chiang than the unconvincing rat, after all.

At best, you might get a critic who comments derisively on the novel’s handling of the whole romance plotline, but as ever it’s all too easy for this to descend into a mindless dismissal of the very idea of featuring “girl stuff” like emotions in a science fiction show. I mean, yes, in War of the Daleks‘ case – and maybe every other book’s case, who knows! – it’s not well-handled at all, but this doesn’t amount to a solid rationale for the banning of romance plots from Doctor Who forever on pain of cooties or whatever. Even if it were, in a post-2016 Ghostbusters/The Last Jedi world there’s something that rankles in seeing a stereotypically male fandom band together to gleefully dunk on a female main character that’s been deemed “poorly written.”

What it comes down to, for me at least, is that Loran’s harassment of Sam and Peel’s subsequent weird highlighting of Sam’s age is only slightly less objectionable than the decision to have the Doctor tell Ace that she shouldn’t judge Gilgamesh so harshly for his “custom” of sexually assaulting random women. As such, I think a reasonable argument can be made for its being called out just as harshly as Genesys is.

For crying out loud, Peel even has Sam proclaim that she’s “mature for [her] age!” And admittedly, one suspects that it’s probably meant to be taken as a joke, but it remains a deeply disquieting line to be written for a fictional teenage girl by a fortysomething male writer with the kind of track record on these issues that Peel has.

The only feasible reason for calling one out but not the other, really, is probably that Ace is a fan-favourite character, while Sam is frequently mocked for being bland or unlikeable, and her being subjected to a similar if more subtle form of predation is therefore seen as being easier to sweep aside somehow.

Hey, I said it was feasible, not that it was actually remotely convincing.

Yet the disappointment runs even deeper than all of that, and I’d actually go so far as to say that the horrific treatment of women and the Retcon™ are, in the end, outgrowths of the same sordid ugliness that lurks at the heart of War of the Daleks.

Ah yes, the Retcon™. We should, I suppose, finally get around to sorting it out, though we’ve actually been gesturing towards it since as far back as A Device of Death. To keep things as brief as possible, then, Peel has gone on record as being strongly opposed to the destruction of Skaro at the climax of Remembrance of the Daleks, an opinion that he also claims was shared by Dalek creator Terry Nation.

Nation unfortunately made any verification of these claims in the wake of War of the Daleks significantly more difficult by rather inconveniently dying of emphysema some seven months before the book saw print. Nevertheless, one certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he had expressed such opinions to Peel at some point.

Although Peel claims to have had the basic idea for the novel knocking about as a script proposal for the television programme’s ultimately canned twenty-seventh season, his efforts presumably got a new burst of wind in light of the TV movie’s prominently featuring Skaro in sequences presumably set after its alleged destruction.

What’s remarkable in reading the finished novel, then, is the spectacular sinking feeling engendered by seeing Peel float multiple possible explanations for Skaro’s survival, only to reject them all and settle on the most convoluted and hare-brained option imaginable.

Has the TARDIS landed before Skaro’s destruction? Have the Daleks simply renamed another world Skaro in honour of their lost home planet? Have the Time Lords underhandedly changed history? No, as it turns out.

You see, upon learning of Skaro’s destruction when they invaded Earth, the Daleks set about hatching an elaborate scheme to avert the calamity. Said scheme involved the forcible terraforming of the planet Antalin in an effort to make it resemble Skaro, where they then relocated the comatose Davros and awakened him to fight the Movellans.

But alas, little did Davros know that the Movellan threat had actually been engineered by the Dalek Prime in order to create a false sense of urgency in their creator. When the Doctor and Romana arrived on the faux-Skaro at the beginning of Destiny of the Daleks, having installed the randomiser to escape the Black Guardian’s clutches, they neglected to check the coordinates. Thus, the Doctor was primed to feed the Hand of Omega false coordinates some three incarnations later from his point of view, and Skaro’s destruction was successfully averted.

So yes, it pretty much goes without saying that this is utter crap by the standards of any self-respecting individual who cares so much as a lick about drama or artistry. It’s so unnecessarily complex that I could almost believe Peel was deliberately veering into the realm of self-parody, if I actually thought that he possessed a single self-aware bone in his body.

Perhaps the most jarring part of his Broadsword interview, in this case, is the apparently sincere claim that he’s undone Skaro’s destruction in a “very sneaky” fashion. Really? This overindulgent PowerPoint presentation masquerading as a story is “sneaky?” Sure, and the destruction of Pompeii only mildly dampened a few Romans’ beach holiday plans. Christ.

What grates most about this utter travesty of narrative, however, is the appeal to Terry Nation’s vision of the Daleks as somehow legitimising all of the nonsense Peel has committed to paper here. As we’ve said before, one of the more interesting things about Doctor Who, especially prior to the 2005 revival, has been its stubborn refusal to adhere to the auteur model of franchisecraft and television. You’re not nearly as likely to hear a Doctor Who fan invoke Sydney Newman’s name to back up their half-baked opinion on the show as you might hear a Star Wars or Star Trek fan pull the same trick with George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry.

And in a very real sense, the Daleks have always been exhibit A in the case for this different approach. Newman stridently opposed the introduction of “bug-eyed monsters” to Doctor Who, only to be immediately shown up by Verity Lambert when her decision to stick by Nation’s scripts led to the series’ first major brush with cultural relevance.

But like all truly revolutionary pieces of franchise media, the Daleks had, by 1997, hit the point at which what was once a representation of the strange and the cutting-edge had become a symbol of the orthodoxy. For comparable examples, one need look no further than the constant aping of polarising-on-release films like The Wrath of Khan or The Empire Strikes Back within their respective franchises.

The problem with treating Nation’s vision as a totalising force with its own internal auteurhood is, frankly, that it isn’t all that good, and hasn’t been good for quite some time. Certainly, it’s consistently lagged behind the rest of the franchise since at least the time when Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had to politely remind Nation during the writing of Planet of the Daleks that Doctor Who had stopped giving individual episodes their own titles some six years ago.

War of the Daleks, then, serves as the ultimate monument to the perversity of copyright in the context of the Wilderness Years. On the one hand, one is loath to argue that Doctor Who‘s iconography ought to be centralised in the grip of a single monolithic corporate entity as is increasingly the norm these days.

But equally, if this is the kind of novel that Nation and his agents were willing to sign off on, then it’s difficult to view this whole exercise as being distinct from the most cynical and nostalgia-fuelled of modern franchise cash-grabs. If Nation had died in 2027 instead of 1997, and War of the Daleks had managed to be made as a movie – a status it clearly aspires towards in its constant prioritisation of filmic action scenes over anything that actually works in novel form – Peel would almost certainly have managed to include some ghastly metafictional CGI recreation of the late author in the vein of Ghostbusters: Afterlife or The Flash.

As it drags on, page by agonising page, War of the Daleks gradually reveals itself to be a hollow, soulless thing. It’s pitifully apparent that nobody, at any stage of development, saw fit to put any thought into this book beyond the bare minimum of being able to slap Daleks on the cover and hopefully make a mint. In this light, the Retcon™ and the awful view of women cannot be meaningfully separated. Both problems betray a staggering lack of care as to the business of making good art rather than cold, hard cash.

In a way, it’s unfortunate that this stands as the last word on the Buffini Era, barring its ghostly return in the form of Legacy of the Daleks. In another, though, it’s entirely fitting. Why shouldn’t it end like this, really? After all, that’s how it all started.

We said in the Vampire Science review that it was tough to lay the blame entirely at the feet of Nuala Buffini, and I broadly stand by that statement. Blame is largely an unhelpful concept here, and if you can indict anything in this situation one suspects that a much more deserving target would be the competition-focused, profit-maximising hellscape that was John Birt’s tenure as BBC Director-General.

Even if Buffini isn’t to blame though, this is how her era was bookended in fandom’s memory. With two books that were, to make no bones about it, bloody awful. The Eighth Doctor Adventures have, between The Eight Doctors and War of the Daleks, inflicted a grievous formative trauma upon themselves, and short of somebody coming in with some endearingly batshit ideas, there’s simply no way forward with the model suggested by this troublesome twosome.

We will, of course, begin to see some of that endearing batshittery in due course, but for now we’re stuck in the shadow of War of the Daleks. It’s a truly reprehensible and ugly book that arguably opportunistically trades on the instinctive good feeling towards a recently-deceased creative figure from the franchise’s history in an effort to cover up its own stunning lack of intellectual worth.

That it completely fails in its task should not be taken as a suggestion that its efforts were lacking, but rather that its ideas ended up being so outstandingly stupid that they simply couldn’t be eclipsed. This is quite simply one of the worst books I have ever read, and I cannot tell you how deeply grateful I am to be done with it.

Done. Next review.

Miscellaneous Observations

I know everybody else has mentioned it, but from the file marked “Nobody Put Any Thought Into This Garbage, Huh?” witness the absolute ineptitude of Peel setting an entire Interlude on a watery planet named Antalin, somehow completely forgetting that that was the planet allegedly remoulded into faux-Skaro.

The centrality of Davros to War of the Daleks‘ thematic arc, such as it is, is rather curious. There are obvious parallels, given Peel’s obsession with “preserving Nation’s vision” or whatever, to be found in his debates with the Dalek Prime over who deserves credit for creating and guiding the Daleks.

At one point, the façade almost drops away entirely as the Prime seems to begin engaging metatextually with an argument for Raymond Cusick’s being credited as a co-creator of the Daleks. “These travel machines we use were created by the scientists of the Kaled race,” he alleges. “You took credit for their work to lend support to your claim of supremacy.” Touché, although it’s a bit of an odd debate to be relitigating in the first Dalek story published after Nation’s death, especially from an author like Peel who was quite obviously on friendly terms with the man.

Then again, the “Davros as Terry Nation” interpretation fails to consider the fact that Davros represents the first major instance in which Nation’s control of the Daleks was snatched away from him, foreshadowing Douglas Adams’ page one rewrites on Destiny of the Daleks. Although Nation did create the character as part of his outline for the story that became Genesis of the Daleks, neither Robert Holmes nor Philip Hinchcliffe were ever that enamoured with the pepperpots from hell, and thus pushed Nation to make substantial changes throughout the scripting process.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, this resulted in what stands as the consensus pick for the best Dalek story of the classic show. Well, give or take Remembrance, I guess.

War of the Daleks also seems to nod towards the idea of the conflict between the Daleks and the Thals as a war in heaven, but for reasons which we’ll see next month the sheer conventionality of the war’s depiction can’t help but seem laughably banal.

In fact, the only thing that apparently constitutes a war in heaven, in Peel’s mind, is when more advanced civilisations wage an entirely run-of-the-mill war on the home territory of less advanced savages. Which is such a shame because maybe one day those planets’ indigenous populations might have even become people like us! I’m so glad we get imperialism with our sexism, this new combo meal truly goes down a treat!

Final Thoughts

Good God, I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t expect this one to be quite as draining as it was. Genuinely, as someone dealing with chronic fatigue in the wake of my bout with COVID last year, there were points at which I found myself having to struggle to keep my eyes open. Not only is it offensive to my tastes, but it’s boring as well!

Welp, I guess the only thing to do now is to swiftly move on to the next book. And what better way to follow up the Daleks than with the perennial second choice for “most iconic Doctor Who monster?” Join me next time as Mike Tucker and Robert Perry take us back to the days of the Seventh Doctor and Ace for the first time since Lungbarrow, as the final televised classic TARDIS team take on a fascist sympathiser who’s set up shop with an Illegal Alien. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Deadfall by Gary Russell (or, “Citizen Kane”)

Because we spent the bulk of the first half of our Gary Russell double feature departing from our usual desperate attempts to make up for my intense castigation of Legacy some four and a half years ago, I’m going to make a point to begin by following the advice of a certain prominent megalomaniacal Time Lady – no, not the one with the very big mice – and attempt to say something nice about Deadfall. So, here goes…

I like the fact that the chapter titles are based on songs from Sparks.

Yes, I know that the Wilderness Years authors naming chapters in their books after pop songs by their favourite artists is apparently one of those things that we’re supposed to get disproportionately annoyed by. Normally I’m quite happy to tacitly abide by that rule, but on the rare occasion that said author’s favourite artist happens to overlap with one of my own, as has apparently happened here, I am more than willing to cast aside any sense of ethical misgiving on this particular point. If this makes me a hack, so be it, but I knew from the moment I first noticed it that I would have to make mention of it somewhere, so I’m mentioning it here.

With that all-important tidbit out of the way, we’re left with the rather pressing question of how to handle the business of a double feature like this in the first place. From a certain point of view, we’ve actually been on something of a streak of double features ever since the time of Down, with the author of one book cropping up in the next in one fashion or another. Until this point, however, the case for such a double billing has required us to perform our usual trick of pointedly referring to “books” rather than “novels,” with half of Lawrence Miles and Paul Leonard’s contributions to their respective doubleheaders coming in the form of short story writing or co-editing duties on the fifth Decalog, Wonders.

Even here, we’re forced to once again concede that any such distinction is purely an arbitrary quirk arising from my decision to preserve the steady, thumping rhythm of “VNA, EDA, PDA” in the course of my reviews. If we were more concerned with adhering to the realities of the novels’ publication timelines, Business Unusual would be separated from Deadfall by a minimum of four whole books.

But if we’re willing to accept my departure from strict chronological verisimilitude, the presence of two back-to-back stories from the same writer throws a bit of a wrench in the blog’s standard operating procedures. Broadly speaking, I like to frame my reviews of established authors like Russell within the tried-and-true structure of tracing their past appearances throughout the blog, with an additional exploration of a given Doctor’s previous outings on the off chance that the book of the moment happens to be an MA or a PDA.

As you can imagine, this creates a bit of a problem when, as here, we’ve already explored that particular road with no small degree of thoroughness in the very last post. Really, the only piece of substantial context I could hope to add to my potted history of Gary Russell from last time would be to note my generally frosty reception of Business Unusual, which feels like a rather moot point that could be more efficiently conveyed by the simple means of “going back by about one post and skimming the previous review.” As such, I don’t feel that this extra informational morsel really merits any sort of wide-reaching reiteration of my thoughts on novels like Legacy or Invasion of the Cat-People, so I shan’t.

Yet still the question remains: How are we to begin talking about Deadfall if we are denied this particular option? As it happens, the answer to this conundrum presents itself with endearing and almost childish simplicity, as Russell’s latest novel represents only his second contribution to the New Adventures, despite being his fourth book for Virgin and fifth book (maybe his sixth, depending on how you count The Novel of the Film) overall.

Indeed, the gap between Deadfall and his debut NA, Legacy, is so substantial that I feel the need to reiterate that I actually reviewed the latter all the way back in September 2019, which means it’s practically prehistory to most ordinary folks given the chaos of the intervening years. Clearly, then, we’ve got quite a few juicy implications to sink our teeth into with this one, so without any further metatextual hand-wringing, I suggest we just dive right in…

As so often happens in situations like these, the least interesting facets are the ones that most readily make themselves apparent. To be more specific, I’m referring here to the basic mechanics of how exactly Gary Russell went some three and a half years without making a single contribution to the New Adventures after his debut, which is the sort of question that can only realistically be answered by a wordless gesture to, well, just about any book the man has ever written. The accompaniment of this gesture by raised eyebrows is wholly optional, though strongly recommended.

Bad jokes aside, Russell’s works are consistently and self-evidently slathered in continuity to the point of excess, whether it be the Peladon homages of Legacy or the tedious pedantry of ensuring that the Sixth Doctor gets a Brigadier story in Business Unusual, even if it happens to be a deeply unsatisfying one in which Lethbridge-Stewart spends the majority of the novel locked in a cupboard. By any reasonable standard of analysis, this is an aesthetic far more suited to the inherently past-focused setting of the Missing and Past Doctor Adventures.

In many respects, the most surprising point in all of this is not actually that Deadfall is Russell’s second New Adventure, but rather that there was ever a first to begin with. Then again, Legacy arrived at a transitional period for Virgin’s output, just one month after the success of Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker’s inaugural Decalog anthology proved that there was a market for stories featuring the Doctors of yesteryear, but still a full three months removed from the dawn of the Missing Adventures with Goth Opera.

To give Russell a reasonable approximation of his due, he is at least remarkably candid in his willingness to admit a preference for the past Doctor fiction published by Virgin and BBC Books as opposed to the more adventurous and wacky stuff found in the ongoing adventures of the Seventh and Eighth Doctors. Whatever else you can say about the man, he is nothing if not consistent. Consider a particularly telling excerpt from Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story‘s entry on Legacy:

‘This novel isn’t going to break down the frontiers of modern fiction,’ [DWB‘s Robert Liddiard] concluded, ‘but contrary to the beliefs of some, that’s not what the New Adventures are there to do.’

His were not so far from Russell’s own views, who ignored the New Adventures, but wrote several, more traditional novels for the Missing Adventures range. ‘Absolutely consciously,’ says Russell. ‘I said after Legacy I’d never do another New Adventure, and when the Missing Adventures came up I went, “Ooh! That’s what I want to write – that’s proper Doctor Who.”‘

He did not write for Bernice again until Deadfall, by which time the New Adventures were no longer Doctor Who books.

As tempting as it may be, then, to try and spin some fantastical alternate portrait of a more present-grounded Gary Russell out of his brief flirtations with Doctor Who‘s ever-evolving status quo both here and in his next novel and lone EDA Placebo Effect – which is notably so committed to nostalgia that it not only opts to bring back the Wirrn, but also resurrects the spelling of “Wirrrn” favoured by Ian Marter in his 1977 novelisation of The Ark in Space – we must eventually admit that these are, in fact, brief flirtations, and consequently cannot be easily mined for insight as to the particulars of such a hypothetical authorial construct.

Even if, as we hinted at last time, we were to tack on the salient fact of Russell’s writing credits on the monthly Big Finish audios being restricted to stories featuring the Eighth Doctor, the past still manages to creep around the edges of the frame. Minuet in Hell was an expansion of an old script from the days of the Audio Visuals, the generally amateurish and entirely unlicensed set of fan-made audio dramas that served as Big Finish’s primary spiritual antecedent, while also adhering to the same fannish, Brigadier-centric logic as Business Unusual in featuring a guest spot from Nicholas Courtney.

Zagreus and The Next Life, meanwhile, were both relegated to the programme’s past by the time post-production wrapped on account of the BBC announcing the 2005 revival. Of these, the former was always going to be chronically past-focused by its very nature as a big celebratory fortieth anniversary piece, while the latter was produced well ahead of its originally intended time in light of Big Finish’s quite reasonable decision to do away with the sprawling, lore-heavy edifice that was the Divergent Universe arc in an effort to make their McGann audios more accessible for any potential newcomers to the series.

The upshot of all this waffling, really, is to make the point that I’m ultimately far less interested in the self-explanatory business of determining why Russell would avoid making a return to the New Adventures than I am in interrogating the very specific way in which he chose to make that return. For a series that had largely retooled itself as being centred around the exploits of Bernice Summerfield by this point, then, it must be said that Deadfall has opted for the rather peculiar choice of largely relegating everyone’s favourite archaeologist to a supporting role and shifting its focus to her ex-husband Jason Kane and – newly returned to the series after his taking up a position in the employ of a bunch of aliens we probably can’t legally name back in Lungbarrow her ex-TARDIS compatriate Chris Cwej.

We ought to butt in with a clarifying remark here, and note that the things which make this a strange premise for the Benny novels from the viewpoint of April 2024 are markedly different from those apparent in October 1997. With the benefit of hindsight, after all, we can see that Deadfall is not the lone aberration that it may have initially seemed.

Instead, it can now be quite comfortably labelled as the inadvertent originator of the eventual tradition of writing New Adventures that openly embrace the perspectives of unusual narrators, a trend which reaches its eventual culmination in the quick-fire procession of The Mary-Sue ExtrusionDead Romance and Return to the Fractured Planet.

(This, incidentally, also leaves the series in the odd position of having Benny forced to the margins to varying degrees in three of her final six outings under the auspices of Virgin, but we’ll tackle that in more detail when we eventually get there.)

Yet with all of that being said, there’s an unaccountable strangeness inherent in any attempt to seriously argue for these books as Deadfall‘s proverbial heirs apparent, and it mainly comes down to the simple fact that such an endeavour would require us to make a case for Dave Stone, Lawrence Miles and Gary Russell all somehow belonging to the same artistic tradition.

To even the most charitable of observers, such a hypothesis must surely seem overwhelmingly strained upon making a cursory comparison of their respective debut novels. Whatever you might personally think of Legacy and its merits when compared to the wackiness of Sky Pirates! and Christmas on a Rational Planet, it’s undeniable that the former belongs to a recognisably traditionalist conception of what Doctor Who can, and indeed should, be.

And so it must be said that, as far as first attempts at the “Benny-lite novel” go, Deadfall largely hews to that more conventional template. There’s precious little talk of bottled universes or Stratum Seven clearance, little yet the kind of formal experimentation evinced by the new series in episodes like Love & MonstersBlinkMidnight or Turn Left, or even by the New Adventures themselves all the way back in Birthright.

But this isn’t, I hasten to add, necessarily tantamount to an inherent failing on Russell’s part, and he once more proves conspicuously transparent in The Inside Story, discussing the way in which the novel’s comparatively orthodox focus on established members of the recurring cast surrounding Benny was very much a purposeful and considered choice:

‘I pitched the idea of doing a Chris Cwej story,’ [Russell] says, ‘because that’s one thing I liked about what they were planning to do. It was in the Benny universe and I thought “Let’s do a book that isn’t about Benny but about the other characters.” Chris and Jason were quite an interesting double act and I thought “Let’s have a boys’ own adventure in outer space.” I enjoyed Jason as a character; I’d loved him in Happy Endings and Death and Diplomacy. And the fact that Roz was gone was really exciting because I thought she was a terrible character. The whole concept of Chris and Roz as characters was awful. Obviously they’re brilliant, but they didn’t appeal to me and I never wanted to write for them.’

Now there are, of course, some relatively standard-issue Dale’s Ramblings pet hates wrapped up in this quote that I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least make a stab at addressing. The basic premise of having a boys’ own adventure in outer space, at least if we’re operating by a staunchly originalist conception of the term, is pretty inseparable from a long-standing publishing edifice tied up in all sorts of troubling ideas about the supremacy of British societal values and the validity of the overall project of colonialism.

In that light, then, the sidelining of Bernice in order to focus on the adventures of Chris, Jason and Emile – and Russell even makes a point of bringing back Tameka just to sideline her so hard that she doesn’t appear again for another five years, while also raising some rather confusing questions about just how much time has passed since Beyond the Sun if she’s been able to give birth in the interim – cannot be read as a value neutral statement if we’re applying our usual critical lenses.

Furthermore, Russell’s singling out of Roz as a “terrible character” and barely-repressed glee at her being killed off in So Vile a Sin is, at the very least, mildly uncomfortable. If we’re willing to be a little less charitable, it comes perilously close to suggesting that the New Adventures’ favourite blonde, muscle-bound himbo would be so much more interesting if he didn’t have to be lumped with a tiresome and fussy black woman, and frankly anything even vaguely smacking of that line of “argumentation” can fuck right off as far as I’m concerned.

As ever, it’s not even that I really believe Russell was consciously motivated by racism in holding any of these opinions or wanting to dabble in a “boys’ own adventure,” but it’s wholly consistent with a rather unfortunate tendency on his part to completely fail to account for any possibility of bad optics or ethics in the name of telling a good old-fashioned rip-roaring adventure yarn.

We’re talking, in the end, about an author who touts his having done extensive research into the culture of Aboriginal people for Invasion of the Cat-People, but who scarcely bats an eye at describing Uluru as Ayers Rock in the same breath. Sure, the interview in question was published at a time when Uluru had only recently been adopted as a dual name for the landmark, and the novel’s uncritical usage of slurs is, by any measure, the far more egregious sin, but at the end of the day both these blunders come about from the same general inattentiveness to any kind of deeper sensitivity.

The mean thing to say here would be to suggest that the man’s days as a protagonist in an ITV Enid Blyton adaptation are perhaps showing here, but even if this might be a bit of an egregiously cheap shot on my part, there is at least a sense in which Deadfall‘s general adventure fiction-focused modus operandi warrants a healthy degree of scepticism.

This is especially true so soon after Down‘s thorough skewering of the conventions of adventure fiction, and there’s something a mite disheartening about the New Adventures’ apparent decision to aspire to little more than pulpy throwaways at around this time. While Ghost Devices will end up advancing the overall mythology of the People and introduce a recurring cast member in the form of Clarence, Mean Streets will see Terrance Dicks turn in his millionth Raymond Chandler impersonation. Meanwhile, Tempest is such a blatant attempt at an Agatha Christie pastiche that Christopher Bulis has admitted to considering just biting the bullet and naming the novel Murder on the Polar Express.

And yet if our final conclusion on Business Unusual was that it failed to properly capitalise upon – or even really acknowledge – its being practically handed all the elements for a much more incisive critique of the Pertwee Era and the UNIT mentality, Deadfall largely represents an inversion of that state of affairs. In unapologetically setting out to evoke a rather outmoded and archaic brand of fiction, all the pieces are seemingly in play for an absolute nightmare of a novel steeped in a moral morass of casual bigotry and spacebound imperialism for the sake of a cheap pastiche of a “simpler” brand of adventure.

It wouldn’t even be the first time that the Virgin novels had succumbed to this kind of temptation, with the most obvious example probably being the way in which Christopher Bulis’ The Eye of the Giant – a book which repeatedly and explicitly drew attention to its own Boy’s Own stylings – descended into all manner of unpleasant stereotypes about “gold-diggers” in its characterisation of Nancy Grover.

Yet against all the odds, and as easy as it might have made my job if I’d been able to turn in a straightforward chunk of a few thousand words’ length picking apart all the novel’s unpleasant decisions with a not-so-faint undercurrent of moral denunciation, Deadfall never really sinks to that level.

This is probably, to be crystal clear, the very definition of damning with faint praise, and the novel’s clearing the very low bar of “not being an out-and-out apologia for the disturbing colonial past of British children’s literature” does not automatically suggest a case for its being some unsung gem. When placed against efforts from true titans of the Wilderness Years like Paul Cornell or Lawrence Miles, or even dependable middleweight types like Justin Richards, the latest Gary Russell novel was never going to measure up particularly well. It’s tough to really begrudge its placement as the lowest-rated Benny novel to date by the Sullivan rankings, and the third-lowest overall.

(Even so, there is no small amount of amusement to be gleaned from the post-Doctor New Adventures hitting their first substantial critical stumbling block and still managing to surpass the concurrent Eighth Doctor Adventure of the month by more than six percentage points, if only because War of the Daleks, like many John Peel books, seemingly ended up being so unbelievably naff that fandom reacted with spontaneous peals of derisive laughter.)

Despite this, Deadfall‘s failure to quite reach the standard of quality set by the NAs’ previous efforts ends up saying more about the astronomically high nature of that bar than it does about the quality of the novel itself. Taken on its own merits, it’s an entertaining and lively adventure romp which does exactly what it says on the tin, while largely sidestepping some of the more glaring potholes that a more cynical view of Gary Russell’s track record might lead one to fear that he’d stumble straight into, and it might just pull ahead of The Scales of Injustice to become my favourite of his novels so far.

In spite of my making a meal out of juxtaposing Deadfall‘s tendency to ground itself in the perspective of established members of the recurring cast, I actually believe the most instructive place to begin is with one of the novel’s guest stars, Governor Oliver Tolland. From his first scene, as he sits in an old wicker rocking chair on the verandah of a palatial house bemoaning the inefficiency of his staff of “wallahs,” it’s clear that he is to serve as the primary avatar of a certain kind of colonial Boy’s Own narrative within the world of the novel.

In a move which cuts very strongly against the idea of Deadfall proving to be a straightforward example of the artform, though, this genial image of the noble colonial official keeping watch over the frontier – imagining a cinematic adaptation of the novel, you could probably do worse than casting Philip Stone in the role, as it’s not too dissimilar from his turn as Captain Blumburtt in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and probably just about as problematic – is quickly and brutally deflated by Tolland’s paranoiac hallucinations of an uprising among the Shabooj’m, spurring him to the cold-blooded murder of his serving staff.

In so doing, Russell solidifies the character’s colonial visage as a source of deep-seated horror rather than the product of some ill-advised nostalgic yearning for the literature of old. In fact, one can probably make a strong case for the gradual stripping away of Tolland’s rank and title as the character’s internal narration progresses being one of the most effective little stylistic flourishes that the writer has ever engaged in.

Certainly, in the context of the New Adventures, where authors like Kate Orman were doing stuff like the jaw-dropping “Stop the tape” sequence in their debut novels, it’s pretty small potatoes, and there are undoubtedly more incisive commentaries on the nature of colonial violence to be found throughout Doctor Who. Hell, you probably really only have to go back by about a month and a half and look at Paul Leonard’s Genocide, but for an author whose prose tends towards the simplistic and downright patronising at times, it’s a surprisingly deft touch.

Similarly intriguing is the novel’s decision to place such an exaggerated representative of British colonial values in the setting of the KayBee 2, which pulls from an entirely different strain of media with a gnarled, thorny and problematic history all of its own: the women in prison film.

The history of the women in prison film is a long and winding one, with forerunners to the genre arguably stretching back as far as the 1950s, but the advent of the form as a distinct subgenre within the larger exploitation film tradition is generally credited to the broadly simultaneous 1969 releases of Jesús Franco’s 99 Women and Lee Frost’s Love Camp 7.

In the case of Deadfall, with its focus on a group of female prisoners assigned to scavenging duty and competing for the title of “Top Dog,” it’s plain to see that Russell has taken inspiration not from the genre’s big-screen instalments, but rather from its representation in numerous television series, and particularly from the cult classic 1980s Australian export, Prisoner – or Prisoner: Cell Block H, as it was retitled in international syndication packages – which had accrued a particularly loyal fandom in the United Kingdom throughout the nineties.

Indeed, it’s not unfeasible to label this as just another manifestation of the fascination with Australia which has suffused Russell’s work since the time of Invasion of the Cat-People and which will seemingly continue to animate him as late as 2015’s Big Bang Generation, with its heavy focus on the city of Sydney.

Still, there remains the impression that the focus on Prisoner proves revealing of more than a passing geographical fixation on the part of the writer. With the series’ cult status in the United Kingdom, derived in no small part from its campy, heightened soap opera aesthetic, there’s automatically going to be a non-trivial overlap between “people who enjoy Prisoner” and Doctor Who fandom, and particularly with the sizeable contingent of queer Doctor Who fans.

We have, actually, already seen a tacit acknowledgment of this fact back in Steve Lyons’ Time of Your Life, where one of the many shows broadcast by the Network alongside the blatant Doctor Who stand-in of Timeriders was said to be Prisoner: The Next Generation, a joke which has suffered the rather unfortunate fate of no longer seeming that far-fetched at all in a post-Wentworth world.

Like so many historically significant texts of a vaguely queer persuasion, Prisoner and the women in prison genre as a whole enjoyed a rather contradictory relationship with real-world LGBTQ+ identities. Writing in 2016 of the success of Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black in fusing the sensibilities of women in prison fiction with the more thoughtful representations of queer socialisation and community in The L Word and Queer as Folk, Kyra Hunting’s All in the (Prison) Family: Genre Mixing and Queer Representation summed up the superficially perplexing nature of this fandom:

The place of the women-in-prison narrative in the queer cannon [sic] is a complicated one. It provides some of the earliest prolonged images of lesbian characters (Beirne 2007, 3) and the closed homo-social environment of the prison provides a context for both queer subtext and for lesbian characters. However, these texts were often structured and harnessed for male titillation and the image of the “prison lesbian” as masculine, violent, and sexually aggressive reinforced negative stereotypes. Nonetheless, according to media scholar Andy Medhurst (2009) these texts were embraced by queer audiences who found opportunities for complexity and camp within them in their reception practice and fan engagement (54, 84). For example, Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (2009) note that the theme song of Prisoner was remixed and played and in queer clubs [sic] and the stars appeared in LGBT venues (84). Despite these limitations, the stock elements of the women-in-prison genre: the closed women’s community, absence of men, prison lesbian, and secret relationships provided the raw material for series like Bad Girls and OITNB to rework the genre in more feminist directions.

While it would probably be a major stretch to label Deadfall an overtly feminist novel, Russell at least seems to have chosen to actively downplay the more salacious implications of the setting. The only characters who seem to dwell overlong on these aspects are Tolland, in his fixation upon one of the inmates, and Marianne Townsend, who we’re informed has a habit of spreading scurrilous rumours as to her main rival’s intent to predatorily seduce younger prisoners.

Of these two characters, we’ve already established the former to be an outright monster, and indeed it’s significant that the novel stresses that Tolland’s obsession with Ghoti – and of all the continuity references I didn’t expect, even in a Gary Russell novel, a character who hails from the Indian colony of Indra from the eminently forgettable Lords of the Storm must surely number quite highly – exists as an outgrowth of his colonialist, dehumanising tendencies.

(Gary Russell getting slightly intersectional? Whatever next.)

Townsend, meanwhile, is straightforwardly homophobic and resentful of Lloyd’s status as “Top Dog,” and therefore quite plainly meant to be seen to be in the wrong. Indeed, of all the KayBee 2 inmates, it’s Lloyd, heavily implied to have received her prison sentence for no other reason than her lesbian identity, who most directly fills the role of the novel’s moral centre, a far cry from the coercive sexuality seen in characters like Prisoner‘s Franky Doyle.

Furthermore, this is indicative of a running theme within Deadfall, which returns time and time again to the notion of something approaching a queer reclamation of the women in prison genre and, more broadly, of adventure fiction as a whole. Of the three main recurring cast members who get to do the bulk of the adventuring here, all have some measure of connection to queer identity.

Emile is the most obvious, what with his coming out of the closet having provided one of the more substantial character arcs in Beyond the Sun, and the repressive, homophobic and sexist dogma of the Natural Path that he hopes to move beyond by attending St. Oscar’s is even tacitly aligned with the spirit of Tolland’s own neuroses. And, of course, as a creation of writer Matthew Jones he serves as a tangible harbinger of the looming paradigm shift in televised portrayals of queer identity exemplified by Queer as Folk.

Jason, meanwhile, has been pretty firmly established as bisexual ever since his introduction in Death and Diplomacy, where his list of past sexual partners included names like Danny or Peter alongside Kimberly and two separate Susans. And while Chris might have had plenty of female love interests over the course of the books, Russell T. Davies made a point in Damaged Goods of suggesting that the Earth of the thirtieth century was considerably less inflexible in its definition of sexuality, giving the character a sexual encounter with another man. The novel even closed on the possibility that the future that the Adjudicator represented might have provided a cure for AIDS within the world of Doctor Who, and thereby countered a profound and all-too-real trauma visited upon the gay community.

As such, throwing these three characters into an adventure romp, particularly when juxtaposed against a genre with a rather tricky relationship to depictions of homosexuality, carries an implicit comment all on its own. It would probably have been nice to get a sense of queerness outside of a group of broadly conventionally attractive white men, but the New Adventures are now nearly seventy books deep and haven’t featured a contribution from a single woman who hasn’t been named Kate Orman, so this isn’t an entirely unexpected development, even as it is a bit unfortunate.

It’s even possible, if perhaps a little ill-advised, to make an argument for Benny and Tameka being excluded from the expedition to Ardethe not on account of their gender, but rather their status as proverbial avatars of heteronormativity. Certainly, The Also People suggested that Benny was “only hetero” – though Aaronovitch admittedly hedged his bets a little with a judicious “so far” – while Tameka’s assuming a position of motherhood obviously links her to a very specific image of a woman’s traditional role in conventional heterosexual relationships, much as using words like “conventional” feels odd when describing a dalliance with an alien dragon man.

But this reading, neat as it may be, still skirts a bit too close to the boundaries of making overly granular post hoc justifications for a work’s uncomfortably misogynistic undertones for my liking, so I’ll once again repeat myself and say “Ew.”

Actually, the main takeaway from all of this is, as ever, that Rebecca Levene was an incredibly canny editor for instructing Russell to at least give Benny something to do, particularly when he actually proves quite adept at capturing the character’s voice. It’s tough not to bemoan the fact that Levene’s departure from editorial duties on the franchise, sensible career move though it undoubtedly was, meant that these kinds of decisions were going to be left up to folks like Stephen Cole or Justin Richards moving forward.

And look, while I’m not inherently opposed to that particular duo from what I’ve experienced of their work, it seems a safe bet that Levene probably would have put the kibosh on The Eight Doctors‘ more virulent flareups of sexism. Or, y’know, would have handled the whole Shadows of Avalon debacle in a much more sensible manner.

Luckily, we don’t even have to resort to making questionable excuses for the exclusion of the female members of the primary cast, as the prisoners themselves offer plenty of fodder for overanalysis. It’s surely significant that Grierson, the inmate most openly enamoured with the idea of a heteronormative, child-rearing life, ends up becoming the first victim of the Jithii, and is posthumously revealed by Lloyd to have been responsible for the murder of two small children and her own family. Multiple times, characters have their heterosexual relationships used as leverage against them, from Njobe’s seduction to the Knights of Jeneve by the Dragon Man to Cassius’ being coerced into cooperating by having the life of his mate held over his head.

BABE herself, reprogrammed for villainous purposes by the Knights and adopting the holographic visage of Marilyn Monroe, could be seen as a quite literal embodiment of this recurring fascination with heterosexual desire as a destructive and unsettling force, an impression reinforced by the secret society’s obsession with DNA and bloodlines as a means of furthering the Baygent Apotheosis. Even Tolland’s two fish, both being female, cannot ever feasibly slot into the kind of imperialist conception of sexuality upon which the disgraced former officer would apparently insist.

Where this reading perhaps runs aground, ultimately, is in the marriage of Charlene and Jason. Russell claims in The Inside Story to have worked backwards from the idea of mirroring Benny’s climactic “This is Jason. My fiancé. He’s just proposed and I’ve accepted. Please don’t kill him.” from the conclusion of Death and Diplomacy. If this is true, however, the relationship as presented in Deadfall is a curiously slender and inconsequential thing, such that it never seems to have been designed with a view towards supporting much weight, even as its status as the first major post-divorce relationship for the ex-husband of the New Adventures’ current main character practically screams out that it should have some heft to it.

Beyond a few references throughout the remainder of the Benny novels, though, building to a rmention of the couple’s having “finished” at some point prior to the final New Adventure, Twilight of the Gods, Charlene largely disappears from the picture from this point onward. Although Benny references Jason’s newlywed status in his next appearance, Oblivion, his wife is never actually mentioned by name in the book itself, or indeed in any book until the aforementioned nod in the series’ final instalment.

To hear Dave Stone tell it in The Inside Story, this didn’t arise from a conscious desire to erase the impact of Deadfall, but rather a more mundane concern:

Deadfall was one of the books I never got,’ says Stone, ‘what with the freebie-policy having changed a bit. And the only option would have been to buy a copy for myself. What with being totally skint and all – then and now – that wasn’t much of a real option. I knew that Jason had got married, but it was a marriage-of-convenience kind of arrangement, to help out somebody who was no more than a friend. Albeit a friend with, ahem, benefits. As such, I just don’t think that the guy himself would count it as much of a real thing – his relationship with Benny was still real – and so would simply move on. It wasn’t a question of consciously ignoring it, or wanting to contradict it, really. I just think that’s what would have really happened. For a given value of “real,” obviously.’

It’s perhaps a little hard to credit this interpretation as being supported by Russell’s apparent intentions, given that it’s a beat that’s been very deliberately treated with a weight equal to Benny and Jason’s own declaration of their engagement, but it’s also not an entirely implausible representation of the situation, either. Eagle-eyed readers who started keeping a running tally after the whole Gary Gillatt fiasco last time might also have noticed that this is now the second time where someone has noted their own inability to procure a copy of Deadfall, and laid a major shift in the novels’ fortunes at the feet of this obstacle.

Whatever the case may be, we ought to resist a certain line of argumentation in all this talk of queer identity that might suggest Jason’s queerness to be somehow compromised by his marrying a woman, as such reasoning is barely removed from the real-world biphobic sentiment that holds bisexual people in “straight-passing” relationships to not be “truly” queer, whatever that means.

There might perhaps be the germ of a conversation to be had about how it might be nice to have Jason’s bisexuality get much significant play so far outside of a rather standard “Dave Stone gives a very long list of people or things” comedy scene, but even this is a conversation that I’d probably feel significantly more comfortable fobbing off to actual bisexual people. Then again, the last time I tried that was with the discussion of whether Lungbarrow was acephobic, and that didn’t so much end up aging poorly as it did extremely funnily, so who knows at this point…

No, the deeper problem hinted at by the marriage – the Problem, if we wanted to get all needlessly Sandiferian and Gaimanesque-by-association about it, of Jason – is not one of sexual identity but rather of narrative function. The inescapable truth of Jason Kane is that he will always be defined in relation to Bernice Summerfield.

It’s her name that gets the privilege of eponymity in regards to the eventual spin-off series – with the notable and purposeful exception of The End of the World, the story in which he’s eventually killed off – and he was, after all, originally introduced with the express intent of providing her with a big show-stopping wedding with which to exit the New Adventures.

Though he might have become something far more complicated when Benny ended up hanging around the series for some considerable length of time after the Doctor’s own departure, this basic fact puts something of a cap on exactly how far he can be allowed to grow and develop beyond Benny, at least for as long as the series remains ambivalent on whether the whole divorce thing in Eternity Weeps was a good idea or not.

And it’s this cap which Deadfall ends up running full-throttle into. You can give Jason hints of a colourful offscreen life with the mysterious Mira. You can make the admittedly rather endearing decision to cast Emile as the idealistic wild-eyed child of metaphorical divorce who makes it his life’s mission to get Jason back together with Professor S.

You can tie into the hype of the Star Wars Special Editions by reconnecting the character with his Han Solo roots, complete with identically-initialled starship to boot. You can even straight-up give the guy a new wife, but in the end the overall impact of any of these developments will end up extremely blunted by the character’s basic unshakeable definition as one half of a long-running “Will they?”/”Won’t they?” dynamic.

None of this is to say that Deadfall necessarily needs to keep one eye on the distant future of the line in order to be successful. On its own terms, it’s a very fun little potboiler with some decent humour and thrills, along with solid characterisation that reminds one that Russell might not actually be quite so bad in that department when he isn’t deciding to riff on Pip and Jane Baker for some Godforsaken reason. It’s the weakest Benny novel so far, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad by default, and it is indeed a great deal of fun.

And before we object too strenuously to a novel merely being fun, why don’t we just take a look at what BBC Books were doing at the same time?

Miscellaneous Observations

For a guy who had trouble realising that it didn’t make sense for the Brigadier to know about Sonic the Hedgehog in 1989 last time, the off-hand prediction that Benny would pick up a cardboard cut-out of Professor Nightshade “from a closing-down video shop in 2006 when the VHS boom had collapsed in on itself” is actually shockingly accurate to the generally accepted date of the last major Hollywood motion picture to be released on VHS in March 2006.

(It was David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, for the record…)

If you really want to try and read Jason’s spontaneous marriage in light of the novel’s apparent queer themes, I do think it’s certainly not impossible. For starters, much like Bernice/Benny, Charlene frequently shortens her name to the more masculine-sounding Charley – oh hey Storm Warning, what are you doing here? – and the fact that she proposes the arrangement as a means of being able to ease her slotting back into society obviously has some significant parallels with the real-world phenomenon of “lavender marriages,” even if it might not be quite the same thing on a literal, nuts-and-bolts level.

I’m assuming it’s a relic of Deadfall‘s origins lying in an Audio Visual play of the same name, but what’s up with the sudden decision, some six books into these New New Adventures, to start talking about the System and the System Administration as if it’s an established part of the Bernice Summerfield lore?

I know I gave Russell credit for writing character work that didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out, but I might have to dock a few points for the rather difficult-to-picture mental image of Irving Braxiatel casually saying “Rightio, Benny.” Apart from that, he remains great, no notes, and I’m sad I’m gonna have to wait until The Medusa Effect in seventeen books’ time to see him again.

In case you’re clamouring for what might be the most pointless addition I’ve ever made to one of my posts, I’ve created a playlist compiling all the Sparks songs used for chapter titles in this novel, which can be found here. Don’t expect me to do this too often for other instances of “pop songs as chapter titles,” unless the writer chooses another artist who I just happen to like. I am shameless.

Equally shameless is the subtitle to this review. Given this is easily the most Jason-focused story since Death and Diplomacy, it was really the obvious candidate, at least once I discarded the more esoteric option of “Jason and the Ardethenauts.” I probably should have gone with “Citizen Kane” back when I talked about Death and Diplomacy about eighteen months ago, but I instead went with a Hooverphonic reference. Figures.

Final Thoughts

Well, I think that went rather well, and certainly afforded the Gary Russell double feature a more positive closing note than I had anticipated. Sure, nobody’s liable to mistake it for high art, but I think we can all admit that that isn’t why we come to a Gary Russell book in the first place, is it?

Speaking of a lack of high art, I hope you’ll join me next time as we finally get a Dalek book from none other than John Peel, making a return to the pages of our blog after an absence of more than three years. That’s right, folks, it’s War of the Daleks! God help us all… Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

BBC Past Doctor Adventures Reviews: Business Unusual by Gary Russell (or, “Living in the Plastic Age”)

For the purposes of a blog that entertains some rather harebrained notions about its author’s ability to mine a minimum of a good few thousand words on nearly three hundred individual out-of-print Doctor Who books, the Sixth Doctor’s era is something of a godsend.

The behind-the-scenes turmoil and consequent dubious quality of scripting that so infamously plagued Colin Baker’s ill-fated three year sojourn as that most Technicolour of Time Lords helps to ensure that, without intending to unduly disparage my own level of engagement with the process of writing these reviews, there exists a relatively tried-and-true framework to which I can adhere if I want to reliably construct a decently lengthy string of critical ruminations on whichever Sixth Doctor novel happens to be under my microscope at a given moment.

Looking at the broader sweep of the Wilderness Years, it often seemed that the writers and editors at Virgin and its successors seemed to share in this recognition of Six’s not-so-privileged status in the eyes of fandom, resulting in one of the most intriguing and unique dynamics afforded to any given incarnation within the Missing Adventures.

Technically speaking, the sense that Six existed at a slight remove from the remaining five extant past Doctors actually began in earnest a few months prior to the MAs, with the first of Virgin’s Decalog collections. Although the series’ significance has been somewhat overshadowed by the subsequent rise of the Missing/Past Doctor Adventures, to say nothing of the glut of Short Trips anthologies published by BBC Books and Big Finish in the years since Virgin had their Doctor Who license revoked, the Decalogs were notable on their initial publication for representing the company’s first tentative steps away from Peter Darvill-Evans’ historical reticence towards any suggestion of a line of past Doctor fiction.

What was perhaps most remarkable about these initial experiments, then, is the pronounced absence of the Sixth Doctor from the proceedings. Although he put in an appearance in David Auger’s The Golden Door, this was largely just a glorified guest spot in a story that was, by all reasonable definitions, a First Doctor story through and through.

Indeed, in a story which traded heavily on paranoia over the concept of shapeshifters and imposters, the First Doctor’s indignation over Steven and Dodo’s denunciation of him as a false Doctor and their embrace of the Sixth as the “real” Doctor can’t help but feel like an extremely thinly-veiled commentary on the latter incarnation’s diminished standing among fans.

With the wounds of the cancellation still raw, the orthodox standpoint on Colin Baker’s era was, rather unsurprisingly, to treat it as an unwelcome departure from the programme’s best attributes in favour of a loud, bombastic, continuity-drenched and overly violent husk of its former self, and the decision to play up that sense of ambiguity and uncertainty in introducing the character couldn’t help but take on a peculiar resonance.

When the time came for the Missing Adventures to tackle venerable old Number Six in State of Change, they ultimately opted for a much more traditionalist approach, all the way down to hiring Christopher Bulis, soon to carve a niche for himself as one of the most prolific voices in the world of past Doctor fiction. Far from tackling the ugliness of Season 22 with any sort of directness, Bulis instead seemingly set out to prove that it was possible to utilise the Sixth Doctor/Peri dynamic to tell stories that didn’t descend into a toxic, verbally abusive mess.

It may not have been the grandest of ambitions, but in spite of a deeply weird moment in which Peri confessed to having wet herself while being transformed into a bird by Quilliam’s machine in Vengeance on Varos, and a role for the Rani that could most charitably be described as “completely extraneous,” Bulis just about managed to pull it off. The fact that it also provided a striking take on the old “What if Rome never fell?” school of science fiction was really just the cherry on top.

With Steve Lyons’ Time of Your Life, however, the novels jettisoned any pretense of tiptoeing around the atypically brutal elephant in the room, levelling a shotgun blast of righteous anger at the heart of the matter and laying bare the callous, misogynistic Sawardian excesses of the 1980s in a shockingly savage fashion through the grisly fate of would-be companion Angela Jennings.

Admittedly, this didn’t exactly make for a straightforwardly comfortable or enjoyable reading experience, but it could quite convincingly be argued that that was the entire point of the exercise. For all that it might have been nice to have retreated into a softer, more soothing version of Season 22 in the style laid down by Bulis, Lyons’ critiques only stung so much on account of their accuracy, and it was almost certainly necessary for the franchise to exorcise these particular demons somewhere along the line if the Sixth Doctor was ever to have any chance of proving workable in the long term.

Continuing along in the tradition of urgently required exorcisms, Millennial Rites saw the Missing Adventures make their first – and, as it turned out, only – extended engagement with the controversial character of Melanie Bush. Meanwhile, Craig Hinton jumped into the impossible task of squaring away the litany of nightmares thrown up by the mere existence of the Valeyard with such reckless abandon that it was hard not to simply nod your head and go along with it, regardless of his eventually proving just as unequal to that lofty and demented goal as the many writers who came before and after.

Killing Ground followed up on the unexplored potential inherent in Time of Your Life‘s Grant Markham, with the first novel-original companion for a past Doctor having largely been crowded out of his debut story by the viciousness of the Angela twist and the more general post-mortem of Season 22’s failings.

In so doing, it managed to unintentionally lay the groundwork for Big Finish’s attitude to their own original companions in the years to come, while also retooling the Cybermen as a metaphor for fascist occupation, taking advantage of Virgin’s ability to push the boat out when it came to violent content in order to capitalise on the monsters’ inbuilt suitability for body horror in a way the TV series arguably hadn’t done since the time of The Tenth Planet some thirty years earlier.

Finally, in an act that lent the series’ treatment of the Sixth Doctor a strange sense of symmetry, Dave Stone returned to the era of Peri and Season 22 with Burning Heart. Cementing the impression that Six’s run in the MAs was possessed of a distinctly unified narrative arc, Stone’s final Doctor Who novel for three years served as a pretty solid closing statement on the incarnation, endearingly and sincerely arguing for the franchise’s being finally able to cast out the lingering wounds occasioned by the scornful wrath of Mary Whitehouse and Michael Grade.

In practice, of course, such long-lasting scars on a franchise’s psyche are rarely so superficial that they can be undone by decree, but it was hard to seriously take issue with the prospect of the writers being free to get on with the business of telling good stories featuring the Sixth Doctor without feeling the need to exhaustively relitigate decade-old baggage pertaining to The Trial of a Time Lord and the 1985 hiatus.

All of this provides us with a decently handy jumping-off point in discussing Business Unusual, the first BBC Books novel to return to one of the most benighted periods in Doctor Who‘s long and august history. According to each and every rule under which we’ve generally assumed our grand unified theory of Sixth Doctor novels to operate, this should be the book which follows through on that unspoken potential which seemed to be left hanging in the wake of Burning Heart.

But as one might be led to suspect from the very title of the work, Business Unusual is wholly unconcerned with any sort of return to normality, or even with the maintenance of the general standards of quality set by the preceding five novels. No, instead what we have here is the worst of all possible worlds: a book which not only continues to believe that there are worthwhile stories to be found in filling the “gaps” of the Colin Baker era, but which doesn’t even have the decency to actually be, y’know, good.

Whatever could be said of the shortcomings of novels like Burning Heart and Time of Your Life, the two lowest-rated Sixth Doctor adventures to date per the Shannon Sullivan rankings, there was a basic sense of merit to ideas like “Let’s direct the ‘video nasty’ satire of Vengeance on Varos at Season 22 itself” or even “Let’s mash up Doctor Who with Judge Dredd” that is sorely lacking from “Mel needs an introductory story” or “The Brigadier needs to meet Colin Baker.”

And yet, those same ideas possess a very strong appeal to a certain brand of Doctor Who fan, such that it can hardly be considered surprising that Business Unusual ends up not only becoming the second highest-ranked Sixth Doctor novel thus far – the first, equally foreseeably, is Millennial Rites, a story written by the man who quite literally coined the term “fanwank” – but the highest-ranked PDA of the four we’ve covered so far.

Granted, it won’t actually hold that distinction for long before it’s dethroned in two months’ time by The Roundheads, and it’s quite difficult for me to argue too strongly in favour of books like The Murder Game or The Ultimate Treasure. Nevertheless, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t something vaguely disconcerting to be found in the idea of a fandom that has decided, in all seriousness, that Business Unusual‘s monotonous parade of continuity references is more entertaining than the gaudy, unbridled seventies spectacle of The Devil Goblins from Neptune.

I am, at this stage of the review, practically having to hold myself back from spinning out my established negative opinion of Business Unusual into a more general question of “What went wrong here?”, which I would inevitably answer with a snide “Gary Russell.” If I’m being honest, I show this restraint only in recognition of the fact that I already subjected poor old Christopher Bulis and The Ultimate Treasure to much the same treatment last time. There may be more than a kernel of truth to the general spirit underlying that observation, but I do believe that there exist more interesting ways to go about dissecting the novel at hand.

So we’ll start with a simple observation: the Gary Russell of September 1997 is a much different consideration than the Gary Russell we’ve been dealing with for the three and a half years that have elapsed since the publication of Legacy way back in April 1994. At the same time, he’s still a ways off from reaching his most influential form as the inaugural producer of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audios, primarily on account of the company still being about a year away from the first of its Bernice Summerfield adaptations, and a little less than two years away from the release of The Sirens of Time.

Even at this early stage of the BBC Books range, however, Russell occupies something of a privileged position, primarily on account of his having written The Novel of the Film, which was, in a positively shocking turn of events, the official novelisation of the 1996 Paul McGann TV movie. Published on May 16, on the very same day as the New Adventures were ringing in their fiftieth instalment with the celebratory Happy Endings, the book’s success – bolstered, no doubt, by the fact that the film itself wouldn’t actually end up airing on British television for another eleven days – served as the primary catalyst for the BBC’s decision to take the Doctor Who prose license in house.

With Business Unusual, therefore, we’re treated to another snapshot of a writer whose place in the larger franchise is in an active state of flux. It’s not quite accurate to say that we’re witnessing the same process of “handsification” that we’ve discussed in regards to writers like Justin Richards or Paul Leonard, but there’s a definite shift in the prestige and prominence afforded to Russell from here on out. Technically speaking one could draw the dividing line even further back with The Scales of Injustice, released a mere two months after the novelisation, but in actuality the fact that the two books were developed roughly in tandem with one another severely complicates any argument for the shift being evident at that time.

Frankly, the evidence to support this sense of transition in relation to Business Unusual is, on the face of it, equally thin. There are precisely three Gary Russell novels which saw publication between the dawn of the BBC Books era and the arrival of Big Finish; of these, two were released practically back to back, and will be covered as such, with Placebo Effect following suit some nine months later.

By the time of Divided Loyalties in October 1999, Big Finish were already two stories deep into their Monthly Adventures range, and it’s interesting to speculate as to just how much of the critical lambasting which that novel received was informed by the contemporary realities of fandom politics and the perceived shattering of the concept of “legitimate” Doctor Who. But I get ahead of myself…

Whatever the case may be, it’s perhaps telling that the bulk of Russell’s contributions to the Past Doctor Adventures in the wake of his new position at Big Finish were fixated upon the Sixth Doctor, and particularly upon his post-Trial of a Time Lord adventures with Mel. Instruments of Darkness brought the character of Evelyn Smythe over from the audio dramas while presenting itself as an overt sequel to Business Unusual, itself a sequel to The Scales of InjusticeSpiral Scratch, released in the range’s dying days, took advantage of its status as the final Sixth Doctor novel to fill the greatest remaining gap in an era defined overwhelmingly by its gaps and lacunae, offering Colin Baker the regeneration scene he was denied back in 1987.

Clearly, Russell seems to exhibit a certain affinity for the Colin Baker years, and Business Unusual thus demands to be read in light of this hindsight-fuelled realisation, particularly when one takes into account the lavish amounts of praise with which Big Finish – not unjustifiably so, I hasten to add – would eventually receive for their redemption of a much-maligned incarnation.

While parts of the novel seem to hint towards these later triumphs of characterisation, however, the overall impression one is left with in reading Business Unusual is one of relief that Russell’s actual writing credits on the monthly audios were largely restricted to the Eighth Doctor, leaving Six to be handled by writers like Robert Shearman or Jacqueline Rayner who were, when you get down to it, far more talented on their bad days than Russell could even dream of being on his best.

In making such proclamations, I might well be running the risk of getting needlessly personal and vicious, and thus violating my general policy of trying to be as nice as possible to Gary Russell in an attempt to make up for my having excoriated Legacy all those years ago. Even so, the fact remains that Russell is, at his core, almost entirely the wrong kind of writer to handle the delicate task of engaging with the deeply flawed Sixth Doctor era. Which makes it slightly vexing that he’d end up writing more than a quarter of the Past Doctor Adventures set in the period, but ho hum.

The problems, actually, begin even before the Prologue, which is never an especially good sign. The bit everyone talks about in assessing the novel, understandably, is Russell’s bold proclamation in the Introduction that he wanted “to write a Sixth Doctor story that [he] thought Colin Baker would have liked to be in,” but there are a couple of far more telling moments that can’t help but stick out to me, particularly in light of this self-professed mission statement.

Firstly, we get the standard bit of “Gary Russell framing his novels by reference to his own interactions with a vaunted figure of Doctor Who history,” citing his experience collaborating with Baker on the 1994 Marvel UK graphic novel The Age of Chaos as a means of bolstering the credibility of the forthcoming novel. It’s a device with which we should have a certain degree of familiarity at this point: Legacy was prefaced with an aside about a teenaged Russell breathlessly  outlining his ideas for a third Peladon story to the late Brian Hayles, while Invasion of the Cat-People was explained away as the result of his “meeting and falling madly into friendship with Anneke Wills.”

This, in and of itself, doesn’t really tell us anything of distinct importance. Indeed, if anything it merely suggests Russell was possessed of a finely-honed set of instincts in the course of writing editorial upon editorial in the course of his work at Doctor Who Magazine, which probably just about tracks.

But, taken in conjunction with what we’ve been able to discern of Russell’s general aesthetic concerns from his first three novels, it begins to paint a picture of a writer who views the historical minutiae of Doctor Who as having intrinsic worth in their own right. In the brief moments in which Legacy demonstrated aspirations beyond offering a rehash of the iconography of the classic Peladon stories, it was only to clarify the provenance of the Gallifreyan space station seen in The Trial of a Time Lord or to capture the early political career of Mavic Chen.

The Scales of Injustice largely speaks for itself, taking on no less than three thorny continuity debates in the form of Liz Shaw’s unseen departure, the Brigadier’s marital status in the UNIT years, and Icthar’s inexplicably recognising the Doctor in Warriors of the Deep.

On the lone occcasion that Russell chose to try and eschew his normal inclinations towards sweeping continuity “fixes” with Invasion of the Cat-People, the primary takeaway was largely just a distressing tendency to blunder into casually and uncritically dropping slurs against Aboriginal people. And, well, when your two options for a given author are “continuity fetishism” or “blundering, unintentional racism,” it does rather feel like the very definition of a rock and a hard place.

It’s with Business Unusual, however, that the extent of this approach’s limitations makes itself painfully apparent. The Colin Baker years are probably the strongest contender in the classic series for the period least suited to a writer who prides himself on his fidelity to the spirit of the past, because the era’s flaws are simply so deeply-rooted that they cannot be separated from the viewing/reading/listening experience without the fairly liberal application of a halfway competent writer’s “redemptive reading” powers.

In other words, it’s all very well and good for Russell to set about making a story that he felt Baker would have liked to have appeared in, but he surely can’t seriously expect people not to bat an eye when he follows up that implicit commitment to a redemptive restaging of the era with a defence of the characterisation abilities of Pip and Jane Baker?

I mean look, I know I’m one to talk about overly verbose writing, what with my use of the phrase “fatalistic Mortimorean nihilism” last time and all, but as much as the hatred for the duo can occasionally become a little overblown, there remains no universe in which “the catharsis of spurious morality,” say, should have been penned as a serious line from your main villain.

Nevertheless, if it really was Russell’s intent to pay homage to the stylistic quirks of that most infamous of husband and wife writing teams, then it must be said that he passed the test with flying colours and then some, much as I remain baffled as to exactly why he would ever consider it a good idea.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” he has the Doctor exclaim at one point, “do you possess even the most rudimentary auditory organs under those flowing locks of golden gossamer?” Lest you think this a lone verbal eccentricity, an example of what the narration itself later reflects upon as “[the Doctor’s] outward veneer of bumbling pomposity,” there’s also what I think is supposed to be an attempt at a running joke with a variety of alliterative names for classic Doctor Who monsters, which is about as funny as it sounds. Zealous Zygons? Vile Vervoids? Truly a comedic talent for the ages.

The villainous Martyn Townsend, on the other hand – and from this point forward, Russell will be using that surname quite a lot – is a few weatherproofed canvas tents short of matching the Rani for sheer, unbridled camp. Not only does he unironically and gleefully exclaim “Today Sussex, tomorrow the world!” to his underling, but he repeats the trick some time later with Brighton substituted in place of Sussex, because I suppose it’s always nice to get a little bit more geographically specific with your Pinky and the Brain-tier villainy.

Like most Russell books, the prose also consistently condescends to the reader, feeling the need to explain references to such obscure literature as… hmm, let me check my notes here… The Stepford Wives. Thanks, Gary, I’d never have caught that one.

On the occasions when the book isn’t outlining everything to the point of annoyance or making cheap, winceworthy shots about the quality of Neighbours, it’s also just studded with some frankly astonishing typographical errors of the sort that we haven’t seen since the early days of Virgin, what with Neil Penswick and his consistent inability to spell Gorbachev correctly.

I get that BBC Books were newcomers in the whole “running an ongoing set of novels” stakes, and the rapid departure of Nuala Buffini can’t have helped matters much either, but surely there must be a point where one puts their foot down and says that the Doctor declaring himself to be “an alien from another plant” is an indicator that the quality control has slipped alarmingly somewhere along the way.

More perplexing still is the question of just how, exactly, Business Unusual came to feature such a heavy concentration of errors by the standards of the preceding seven BBC novels we’ve covered, but one is left with few options but to cynically detect the hand of the writer who somehow missed a digit out of the dateline of the crucial introductory flashback sequence in Invasion of the Cat-People and made everyone far more confused than they really needed to be.

Even outside of all of these problems, the plot is stretched astonishingly thin. If Russell wants to go out of his way to give Mel an introductory that hews to the oh-so-tantalising hints given by John Nathan-Turner in The Companions as to her helping foil the Master’s plans to destroy Earth’s banking system with the aid of the Usurians, that’s one thing, but in practice the business of the Master’s remaining viruses ends up hanging over the entire first half of the book like some kind of electronic sword of Damocles. It’s a transparent case of making sure the Doctor stays away from SenéNet for as long as possible so that he doesn’t end up solving the problem with freakish ease.

You could make the argument that this was done to make room for the quieter character moments, which is a stance I’d totally endorse if, again, Russell hadn’t decided to attend a set of seminars from the horrifying, overly loquacious Pip and Jane Baker School of Character Development. What we’re left with outside of these alleged flares of characterisation, then, are a bunch of wheel-spinning scenes that do little but hit upon a vague and nebulous mood of conspiracy theory and shadowy subterfuge in a half-hearted continuation of The Scales of Injustice‘s imitation of The X-Files. Of course, the droll response to this observation would probably be a comment to the effect that Russell’s aimlessness is, in its own way, perfectly in step with the spirit of The X-Files.

(There is, perhaps, a slightly more convincing argument to be made that Business Unusual is pulling from the Autons’ proven track record as a solid background threat to keep ticking away in the background in stories like Spearhead from Space or Terror of the Autons while Robert Holmes set about introducing new characters and concepts to the programme. Indeed, it’s telling that this logic has routinely been cited by Russell T. Davies in discussing the franchise’s eventual return to television with Rose, but the Doctor and Mel still feel curiously disconnected from the action in a way that can’t be wholly accounted for by such an explanation, at least by my reckoning.)

From this veritable laundry list of flaws, you’d be forgiven for concluding that the most appropriate tack I could take would be to declare Business Unusual to be nothing but a misshapen lump of continuity references for their own sake, lacking any sort of deeper emotive hook or comment on the wider world that one might expect from drama. Certainly, the general shape of Russell’s larger body of work makes this argument a pathetically easy one to make, but to give him his due in this one instance, the novel instead opts for the far more irritating option of giving every impression of making a stab at commentary, while somehow still contriving to avoid saying anything substantive.

Given the barely subtextual capitalist monstrosity of the Nestene Consciousness as an insidious force able to gain a foothold within plastic in all its forms, there’s obviously something rather pointed in the decision to ground the bulk of Business Unusual‘s action in the dying days of the Thatcher administration, particularly since we’re still only four months into the first Labour government in eighteen years.

Set in July 1989 as it is – in an apparent departure from Nathan-Turner’s suggestion that Mel’s origins were contemporary to The Trial of a Time Lord‘s original broadcast in 1986, though the change actually seems to have been off-handedly made by Hinton back in Millennial Rites – all the novel’s talk of Britain’s booming economy and the burgeoning potential of the electronics industry practically begs to be read in the light of the early 1990s recession, just as Damaged Goods‘ focusing on the gay scene in Manchester in mid-1987 invoked the lingering homophobic spectre of Section 28.

(Hell, in one of the novel’s more endearingly blunt touches, Russell throws subtlety to the wind and names one of the SenéNet henchmen Lawson in an apparent nod to Thatcher’s longest-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Mr Jones has an altogether more generic name, and as much as I might like to drag up Tristan Garel-Jones, who would have been serving as Treasurer of the Household in 1989 and is generally agreed to have been the inspiration for the character of Francis Urquhart in House of Cards, that’s a bit of a stretch even for me. Plus, this isn’t a Lance Parkin book, so I’m afraid we’ll have to look elsewhere for our Ian Richardson references.)

In its most effective moments, Business Unusual seems to toy at plunging into a playfully subversive take on the British class system, and the hollowing out of the revolution promised by the sixties into a wave of relentless yuppiedom. There’s undeniably something gleefully perverse to be found in the image of former shadowy government conspirator Martyn Townsend covering up his cybernetically enhanced eyes, the primary mark of his sins, with a carefully chosen set of corporate Ray-Bans.

Elsewhere, an ill-fated businessman’s wife reflects on how she never should have left the civilised environs of Bradford, and how people in Yorkshire were far too polite and well-mannered to commit any acts of violence against her, in a flagrant but effective needling of the usual geographical class stereotypes that have taken root in British culture.

And nestled at the heart of all of this, buried under a metric ton of truly winceworthy dialogue, there’s a surprisingly shrewd link back to the central tension that should theoretically animate Mel as a character. The meagre amounts of onscreen characterisation afforded Mel, after all, essentially amounted to two barely articulated bits of information: she was a computer-oriented career woman, and she hailed from the small West Sussex town of Pease Pottage.

Sure, the decision to cast noted former child actress and light entertainer Bonnie Langford in the role did end up cutting almost immediately against any possibility of these facts really coming across on screen. Mind you, given the sheer vitriol with which fandom treated the actress for so many years we ought to stress that Langford, like so many people who were unfortunate enough to be put in front of a camera during the Colin Baker years, did an admirable enough job with some truly dire material.

Still, there’s an interesting and unexplored juxtaposition between Mel’s apparent status as a go-getting woman of the eighties and her living in a town so small that I can’t actually seem to find a hard-and-fast population figure on its Wikipedia article, and it’s one that Russell dutifully explores. It’s painfully apparent from the very first scenes at 36 Downview Crescent that the Bushes are chronically middle class, with Mel’s father being on golfing terms with the Doctor’s old police constable chum Robert Lines from The Scales of Injustice, and although Mel’s mother may scoff at the suggestion that she prefers to call her daughter “Melanie” on account of its sounding less common, there’s a sense that the observation isn’t far wrong.

What’s telling here is the fact that it should all once again largely come back to Pertwee. It might have been the Fourth Doctor who first mentioned the space-time telegraph, but the very idea of the Doctor having such a good relationship with a small town police officer as to lend him such a device is quintessential Pertwee. Given Paul Cornell’s ever reliable adage about the Third Doctor having been “made a Tory,” and the fact that the seat of Horsham, in which Pease Pottage lies, has an unswerving record of electing Conservative MPs dating back to 1880, there’s a clear political inference being drawn here.

But Russell has apparently at least had the good sense to realise that making Mel a trouser-suited Tory girlboss is the kind of thing that’s going to make any future attempts at reading about her adventures exceedingly difficult to do, at least without descending into an extended riff on that Eric André clip where he asks Mel B if she thinks Margaret Thatcher had girl power.

Accordingly, Mel quits her job at Brighton Information Technologies, an act which constitutes a clear rejection of the materialistic Thatcherist status quo as represented by the Nestenes, and joins the Doctor. It’s all very nice and neat, complete with a thematically appropriate use of Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to reconnect to the landscape of sixties psychedelia out of which Doctor Who originally sprung and which, by one interpretation, was largely foreclosed upon by the Pertwee Era.

What’s missing here, unfortunately, is any sense that Russell really wants to subject the Pertwee Era to any kind of undue scrutiny. He loves it too dearly – again, the man tried to write the third Peladon story! – which is why the bulk of the novel’s iconography comes either straight from that period or from his own immediately prior engagement with the period: the Master (in absentia), the Brigadier, Bob Lines, the Nestene Consciousness.

And on one level it’s hard to begrudge him this love, given that it is clearly shared by vast swathes of the fandom who don’t care to subject it to overly esoteric readings like those favoured by this blog. At some point maybe we just have to sigh and say that Gary Russell was never going to be the one to pick apart the Third Doctor’s links with the establishment.

But what rankles so much about Business Unusual is that, contrary to so many of its author’s previous novels, it actually contains just about all the elements that you would realistically need to pick apart those links, even as Russell seems completely oblivious to the near-miss at brilliance he seems to have stumbled into.

It’s this which most convincingly accounts for Erskine’s arc, say, as he learns that the Brigadier does really care about all the nameless UNIT troops we saw slaughtered throughout the Pertwee years. It certainly slots perfectly into the creeping treatment of the character as “the Doctor’s best friend” rather than a military officer responsible for at least one apparent genocide, but it serves as a resounding rejection of anything which might be a bit more barbed or nuanced. There’s nothing as delicious as, to pick a not-at-all random example, No Future‘s having him declare the Doctor to simultaneously represent the positive aspects of English life and the anarchistic power of revolution.

As you might expect from Scales‘ carefully exculpating UNIT and the bulk of C19 from any responsibility for the actions of the cabal based in the Cheviot Hills, Russell compounds that earlier decision by suggesting that the most reasonable targets of scorn are the politicians like Sir John Sudbury rather than the Brigadier. Which, y’know, given that the book’s timeframe necessarily means that the bulk of those politicians are Thatcher-era Conservatives, isn’t an observation that’s entirely without merit, but it’s certainly without depth.

Then again, this is perhaps the dirty little secret of Business Unusual. It’s a book curiously uninterested in the actual details of history so much as it is in the general texture of history, which explains how the Brigadier can unaccountably know about Sonic the Hedgehog some two years before the release of the first game. That, or there’s something SEGA aren’t telling us about the character’s terrestriality that would give UNIT cause to keep tabs on Yuji Naka…

(We’ll give Russell the benefit of the doubt and assume that Townsend’s seemingly anachronistic reference to the Gulf War is, in fact, meant to denote the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s rather than the later US invasion of Iraq spurred by Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait. I mean, the fact that he didn’t think to question whether Baghdad existed in 20,000 BC back in Invasion of the Cat-People suggests that Iraqi history isn’t his strongest subject, but again, I’m trying to be nice. Contrary to how it may seem.)

Similarly, the potentially cutting idea of the Nestenes seeking out Trey, Mel’s gay lodger, in order to smother and absorb him is curiously muted in its capacity to actually speak to the Tories’ abhorrent treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, leaving the novel to end up feeling considerably less connected to the realities of gay history than Damaged Goods, which didn’t even unfold in a period of time where Section 28 was actually in effect.

Business Unusual is a mess of a book, boring and infuriating in equal measure, one whose lack of quality even manages to reach out and retroactively tarnish the general competence demonstrated by The Scales of Injustice, and perhaps begins to suggest just how much of the earlier book’s successes were founded on its tonal resonances with the vastly superior Who Killed Kennedy.

Somehow, in spite of having all the elements to do something more interesting, Russell ended up turning in an overlong and tedious maze of continuity, filled with stilted and condescending prose and a distinct lack of ambition. In other words, Gary Russell wrote a Gary Russell novel.

It’s perhaps reassuring to know that, no matter who holds the Doctor Who license, some things may never change.

Miscellaneous Observations

On the subject of “not calling out the Doctor’s connections to the establishment,” I became progressively more irked by the Brighton police’s unquestioned insistence on referring to the dead Japanese businessmen from Garrett Manor as “Orientals” or, worse, “Japs.” I don’t know how it’s possible to keep blundering into using slurs like this, but I’d really like it if it would stop.

Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, who’s looking forward to seeing Gary Russell’s take on the Celestial Toymaker?

Slightly more related is the question of how much of the novel’s elements were designed to evoke Robert Holmes’ Yellow Fever and How to Cure It – and for the relevance, I’ll submit that it’s slightly alarming to have a story with that title set in Singapore and written by the guy who apparently saw nothing wrong with The Talons of Weng-Chiang – from the presence of the Brigadier to the Master and the Autons.

Really, the only thing you’re missing is the Rani and Singapore, but I genuinely don’t know whether Russell would have known about these scripts in the 1990s, as most sites seem to cite the 2003 DWM Special on the Sixth Doctor as their chief source. Still, the presence of these elements is easily explained by Russell’s strict adherence to a certain brand of fan-pleasing logic, though it is perhaps interesting to note that there seems to be every indication that the story was to be made in the slot which eventually went to Mel’s pseudo-introduction, Terror of the Vervoids.

There’s a troubling equation of disability/disfigurement with grotesquery and evil that runs throughout Business Unusual, though that’s been an unfortunately prominent aspect of Doctor Who since the Hinchcliffe Era at the very latest. From the scarred Townsend and Erskine through to the SenéNet secretary, Roberta, who’s quite literally grafted onto her swivel-chair and given false memories of a horrific car accident, it happens often enough that I felt like commenting on it.

Well, I actually went back and forth on a bit on whether or not I was going to dignify it with a comment, but the description of the victims of the Irish twins’ brainwashing as “staring blankly ahead, like three autistic friends” at the novel’s end tipped me over the edge. It’s a line that once more gives me the impression, like Dave Stone’s Ship of Fools, that none of the Doctor Who writers have ever knowingly been in a room with an autistic person, let alone three of them, though Russell isn’t even afforded the leeway of having written a halfway decent book.

If nothing else, the simile really doesn’t track with my own experience of having been one of at least three autistic people in a room on such an occasion – there’s generally less “staring blankly ahead” than there is “discussing Freddy vs. Jason as a metaphor for the Iraq War” – but hey, spectrums and all that jazz, I suppose.

Finally, the explanation for the Doctor’s knowing about Mel’s compost heap in Terror of the Vervoids has to win some kind of award for being such a granular and unnecessary bit of gap-filling that I didn’t even recognise it as such until I consulted the Cloister Library. Dearie me.

Final Thoughts

Welp, I guess my briefly proving more lenient on Russell’s works back in The Scales of Injustice was something of a false dawn, because as you can probably tell, I really didn’t like this one. Oops. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to avoid this piece being shorter than my average, but as ever my determination to extract strings of meaning from the most facile of sources won out against my better judgement. Double oops.

I guess the only thing that remains to be seen is whether the writer can salvage his standing any with Deadfall, which is our next port of call in our ongoing ramblings. I mean, the fact that it’s the third-worst Benny novel according to the Sullivan rankings doesn’t give me much cause for hope, but hey, Business Unusual is most definitely not the best Past Doctor Adventure so far, so what are these lists good for anyway? Whatever the answer may be, I hope you’ll join me next time as we try desperately to push through the second half of our Gary Russell double feature. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures Reviews: Genocide by Paul Leonard (or, “Smith and Jo”)

In our explorations of the Buffini Era, we’ve generally held to a couple of choice central maxims. The first, as should probably go without saying at this point, is that the very concept of a meaningful Buffini Era is inherently ludicrous, and the period was all but dead in the water by the time the Eighth Doctor Adventures actually hit the shelves.

If we accept this premise, and make the foolhardy decision to press ahead with analysing the Era as anything more substantial than a transitory blip on the franchise’s radar, we can at the very least construct a reasonably plausible lens through which its central concerns might be viewed: nostalgia.

Time and time again, the six books that comprise the Era That Never Was proved particularly fond of dredging up old friends and enemies from the programme’s past, from the comparatively low-key returns of Professor Litefoot and the Zygons in The Bodysnatchers or Vampire Science‘s revisitation of State of Decay‘s vampiric lore through to the unadulterated continuity fests of The Eight Doctors and the two John Peel novels.

Generally speaking, it’s been relatively easy to identify a clear link between each novel’s author and the unique blend of nostalgia that they chose to offer up. With his vast litany of novelisation credits and his unsurpassed role in defining the tenor of an entire generation’s view of Doctor Who, the fact that Terrance Dicks opted to drop a nuclear payload of fanwank upon an unsuspecting audience can hardly be considered surprising, particularly when the title of the novel in question ended up riffing on that of his last attempt at such a task.

John Peel, similarly, chose to play wholeheartedly into his reputation as “the guy who writes for the Daleks” or, perhaps more accurately, as “the only guy who is allowed to write for the Daleks.” More’s the pity. And although Mark Morris wasn’t an established name in the world of Doctor Who, his sizeable portfolio of original horror novels with a distinct predilection for the Gothic meant that it was always a pretty safe bet that he would opt to revisit the tone and aesthetic of the Hinchcliffe years.

To date, the novel that is perhaps most difficult to square away under this paradigm has been Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman’s Vampire Science, and a not inconsiderable part of that difficulty really just boils down to its rather admirable status as the book least concerned with picking over the remnants of the past as opposed to forging its own path. Even still, in its basic treatment of the mythology of Doctor Who, there was an obvious connection back to the kinds of concerns that have historically animated Orman dating all the way back to The Left-Handed Hummingbird.

Certainly, it’s hard to begrudge the novel this quirk given how frequently it has proven to be a recipe for good drama, but it still remains a rather strange manoeuvre to hire one of the chief architects of the New Adventures to pen the second instalment of a new series of books which was predominantly defined, at least initially, as a rejection of the New Adventures.

But in all of this, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been dancing around Paul Leonard’s Genocide, the fourth Eighth Doctor Adventure and the third and final instalment in an extremely loose trilogy that began with Vampire Science and sought to provide something in the way of character definition for the Eighth Doctor and Sam Jones. At least until War of the Daleks comes along and, presumably, blows any such attempts to hell.

(I mean hey, I’m willing to be surprised, but my hopes aren’t high.)

In some very basic respects, Leonard fits comfortably alongside a writer like Kate Orman, and his presence in this preliminary stage of the EDAs isn’t wholly surprising; when all is said and done, Orman and Leonard are inextricably linked to the Virgin Books era of Doctor Who in a way that Dicks and Peel aren’t, and their being commissioned to provide more novels after the revocation of Virgin’s license is a generally sensible decision on the part of BBC Books. For all that the latter duo may have each contributed multiple books to the New and Missing Adventures – and Dicks, at least, would write one more before the year was out – they remained much better known for their work on the Target novelisations.

But whereas Orman quickly distinguished herself as one of the essential voices in Virgin’s increasingly impressive lineup of writers, Leonard… didn’t. It’s not, to be clear, that Leonard’s books were wholly without their good points, and to a certain extent “His books weren’t as crucial or influential in the success of the Virgin line as those of Kate Orman” is the sort of statement which can be readily applied to so many perfectly respectable writers in the Wilderness Years that it does start to lose a lot of its meaningful critical content.

Even so, petty though it may be, there’s more than a grain of truth to the observation, and it’s rather difficult to point to any particularly definite moments in Leonard’s past work that would seem to make an overly strong case for his being handed the responsibility of defining the new Doctor-companion duo in a fledgling novel series upon which fandom had turned its unflinching gaze in the wake of the extraordinary disappointment that was The Eight Doctors.

Indeed, speaking purely for myself, the most defining characteristic of Leonard’s oeuvre to date has generally been a consistent sense of narrowly missed potential. Venusian Lullaby offered up a truly rich and sumptuous portrait of fantastical alien life that felt perfectly tailored to the kinds of bizarre landscapes across which the First Doctor, Ian and Barbara might well have strolled if it weren’t for the inherent budgetary limitations of a ropey sixties science fiction series, but its villains were pitifully underdeveloped by comparison and the whole thing descended into a rather incoherent finale.

Dancing the Code initially seemed much more promising, offering up a reasonably shrewd critique of the pervasive and unspoken pro-establishment leanings of the Pertwee Era, only to gradually descend into a mindless runaround with giant bugs that provided a painful reminder of just how low the standards for Third Doctor novels really were in the wake of The Ghosts of N-Space.

Toy Soldiers, in keeping with what you’re hopefully beginning to see was becoming a recurring pattern for Leonard’s novels, switched from a haunting exploration of the First World War’s lingering scars to become a blisteringly unsubtle parable against the horrors of child soldiery. Even in dealing with such heavy subject matter, however, it somehow conspired to be singularly uninteresting and bland.

As for Speed of Flight… well, look, I remember being more positively disposed to it than most when I reviewed it last April, but in racking my brain at this present moment I cannot honestly recall a single consequential event or impression from the entire experience, and it hasn’t even been a year. If pressed, I guess I’d have to say that I can catch fleeting glimpses in my mind’s eye of a fakeout death for Mike Yates and a reasonably well-developed alien culture. Nevertheless, the overall package was so cursory and disposable that it seems to have slipped the net of my long-term memory completely, so I expect that that doesn’t really speak well to its general quality.

With Genocide, Leonard’s place in the schema of Doctor Who novel writers undergoes something of a shift. Up to this point, as we can see, he’s been a writer primarily associated with the Missing Adventures, and consequently with the historicised past of the programme. The only occasion on which he broke into the series’ “present” with a New Adventure was Toy Soldiers, which I’m quite comfortable labelling as his weakest novel so far.

Then again, in the interests of total fairness I do feel the need to offset this judgement by remarking that the sequences of then-new companions Roz and Chris experiencing historical culture shock in their interactions with the Europe of 1919 were probably the most solid part of an otherwise subpar novel, and it’s these segments which probably come closest to making an argument for Leonard’s being placed in the proverbial driver’s seat in helping to flesh out Sam beyond the parameters of Dicks’ extremely perfunctory introduction.

On the other hand, introducing a new set of characters more than forty books into a stable series of novels is a fundamentally different kettle of fish from trying to steady a new range that stumbled embarrassingly out of the gate, and in any event Leonard had the exceedingly bad fortune to be one-upped in basically every way by The Also People‘s handling of the characters. But then, as we know, The Also People one-upped just about everyone at everything, so again, that’s not too insurmountable a failing for a writer to have.

With all of that being said, the fact that I was able to interrupt the flow of my argument for a good two paragraphs with a spot of dithering about and generally attempting to make a stab at even-handedness does rather suggest that the extant evidence in support of Leonard’s being let loose on the present of the BBC Books line is, at best, something of a confused and contradictory muddle.

What’s somewhat surprising, then, is that Leonard makes a more-or-less complete turnaround from this point on and becomes an EDA-exclusive writer. I’m struggling, off the top of my head, to really think of any other instances where an author has started out their association with Doctor Who with a strong connection to the Missing/Past Doctor Adventures, only to eventually veer in the opposite direction.

Generally, writers either end up overwhelmingly writing for one line rather than the other, such that any errant blips become all the more notable – think Gary Russell following up Business Unusual with Deadfall, to pick a totally random and not at all pointed example, or Kate Orman making a rare foray into the PDAs with her Sixth Doctor novel Blue Box – or they split their work relatively evenly between the two lines, as in the case of someone like Steve Lyons or, yes, Gareth Roberts.

Even more unexpected is the degree to which the position of prominence afforded Genocide proves not to be an outlier, but rather a harbinger of things to come for Leonard. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to claim that he was anywhere near being one of the era’s leading luminaries, and he was never assigned the task of writing an especially big “pivot” book around which the entire EDA line turned, but he certainly managed to rack up an impressive five novels to his name, more than any other writer save for editors Justin Richards and Stephen Cole.

What’s more, a close examination of the particulars of Genocide and Leonard’s subsequent novels would seem to suggest that his place in the writers’ roster at BBC Books was that of a broadly reliable pair of hands to whom one could entrust the middle material of the series’ ongoing arcs without having him do anything too embarrassing. In his own way, Leonard seems to have been just as “handsified” with Genocide as we observed Justin Richards to be back in Dragons’ Wrath.

(And yes, I’m standing by that term.)

After his first contribution to the range here, Leonard’s next full-length novel, Dreamstone Moon, would be similarly concerned with the character of Sam, following up on her absence from the TARDIS in the aftermath of Longest Day and setting up her eventual four-year sojourn on the streets of Ha’olam in Seeing I.

Meanwhile, his contribution to the inaugural Short Trips anthology in March 1998 was the only story in the collection to feature Sam travelling with the Eighth Doctor, suggesting Leonard’s artistic inclinations were firmly wedded to the EDAs by this time. His lone piece of past Doctor writing for BBC Books, 1999’s Special Weapons, would feature the Seventh Doctor and Mel, which is really the latest TARDIS team you can write for before the advent of Ace starts to ground you more firmly in a recognisably “Wilderness Years” aesthetic.

Even past that point, The Turing Test was one of the more well-received books in the six-novel arc exploring the Doctor’s Earthbound adventures in the wake of The Ancestor Cell, narrowly beating out Lance Parkin’s Father Time on the Sullivan rankings to become the highest-rated book of that period, and the sixth highest-rated EDA overall. The Last Resort offered up one of the many explorations of alternative universes to be found in the extremely loosely-defined and protracted Sabbath arc stretching from, in the most common definition, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street through to Sometime Never…

Even Revolution Man, which shares Genocide‘s peculiarity of not obviously slotting into one of the range’s wider arcs, was still a crucial book in the series for its exploration of the character of Fitz Kreiner, being the first novel featuring the companion to come from the pen of a writer who wasn’t a current or future editor of the EDAs.

So for all that it might seem strange to lump Leonard with the crucial role of defining a new companion, somebody at some unspecified rung of the editorial ladder must have felt him qualified enough to do so not once, but twice, and it seems fair game to ask exactly why that is.

It’s about here in the review, then, that I get to perform an about-face and hopefully make up for the several paragraphs I just spent meticulously detailing the ways in which Leonard has repeatedly fallen just short of clicking with my critical sensibilities. Because the fact of the matter is, however strained the justifications might be for making Leonard a five-time EDA writer on the basis of works like Toy Soldiers or Speed of FlightGenocide itself proves a rather sound defence of that decision.

To call it Paul Leonard’s best novel to date is, frankly, to state the obvious, but unlike some of the more noteworthy instances on which I’ve gotten the chance to adhere to the tried-and-true framework of “speaking more positively about an author I’ve habitually given a bit of a hard time,” the baseline of quality set by the writer’s previous flawed works is significantly higher on average. This, in turn, means that Genocide is a significantly better novel even than something like The Scales of Injustice, where a particularly cynical but not entirely inaccurate reading of my review could very well boil it down to “Well, he didn’t wallow in meaningless Peladon imagery for 300 pages and there were zero casual uses of racial slurs, so I guess this Gary Russell chap is doing alright.”

Appropriately enough, The Scales of Injustice is a pretty decent jumping off point when discussing Genocide. For all that we may have made a big song and dance about the novel’s status as a comparatively present-focused “blip” in Leonard’s otherwise Missing Adventure-bound career as it stood in September 1997, the truth is that such an inflexible framing is ever so slightly misleading. Although nobody could seriously look at Genocide and mistake it for anything but an Eighth Doctor Adventure, it’s plainly obvious that Leonard has allowed his work to be heavily informed by the lingering mythic spectres of Jon Pertwee and the Third Doctor.

This is, of course, true of vast swathes of the Wilderness Years, and we’ve noted before the seemingly intractable debates over the place of Pertwee’s Venusian aikido-practicing dandy in relation to the various other incarnations of the Doctor. While Leonard cannot feasibly claim to be anything quite as ostentatious as an originator of these discussions, especially when Paul Cornell was obliquely broaching the topic some three years before Venusian Lullaby – and note, again, the pointed fact that Leonard’s debut novel should borrow its title from a core piece of wacky Pertwee Era iconography from The Dæmons and the Peladon stories – he was certainly a pivotal instigator of the discourse in the hyper-specific context of the Third Doctor’s outings in the Missing Adventures.

Granted, as the writer of only the second such novel to see print, and the first that wasn’t a putrid, steaming mess authored by one of the original era’s key creative personalities, it could be argued that he gains that title almost by default, but the contributions of Dancing the Code to the art of the Third Doctor novel are still hard to brush past, for all that its regrettable descent into giant bug-fuelled action shenanigans might understandably bring about that impulse.

In laying bare the fundamental inability of the Third Doctor and Jo Grant to deal with the kinds of complex political realities facing a postcolonial nation like Kebiria, it represented the first instance of the Virgin novels interrogating the era’s perceived shortcomings from within the era itself, rather than simply extrapolating abstract possibilities out of a poster in Inferno like Revelation, or constructing a nightmarish alternate history à la Blood Heat.

Both are worthwhile approaches in their own way, to be sure, but Doctor Who has often been at its best when it has a sufficiently deep bench of writers that it can present multiple different solutions for the same problem, and in its best moments, Dancing the Code helped to enable that sense of depth and offset any potential sense of tedium or repetition.

In many respects, Genocide largely just represents a return to and refinement of Dancing the Code‘s criticisms of UNIT – all the way down to the focus on the United Nations’ involvement in Africa and a starring role for Jo Grant – even if Leonard’s decision to largely dispense with the broadly grounded postcolonial dynamics of Kebiria in favour of abstract discussions of Tractites and time trees serves to conceal this fact somewhat.

In this regard, the most interesting character to analyse is Jacob Hynes, particularly since he provides a rather marked contrast to the last occasion on which we grappled with the idea of a subversive element operating from within UNIT in The Scales of Injustice. There, our big takeaway was that Gary Russell was largely using the pre-existing “sceptical scientist partnered with much more outlandish and credulous colleague” format of Season Seven in order to provide one long, continuity-drenched riff on The X-Files, just a few months after David Bishop provided his own long, continuity-drenched riff on The X-Files with Who Killed Kennedy.

Both Bishop’s and Russell’s novels traded heavily on the tenebrous mystique of Department C19 as a stand-in for The X-Files‘ Syndicate, which was, looking back, perhaps rather too much weight to put on an organisation constructed entirely on the basis of a single throwaway line in Time-Flight.

Regardless, there was a clear sense that C19 was intended to serve as a shadowy blight on the heart of UNIT, suggesting what was probably immediately obvious to anybody with a decent working knowledge of how top-secret military organisations tend to go in the real world: UNIT, or at least the larger edifice of the British establishment, were probably quite regularly involved in business a mite more shady than was suggested by the façade of loveable Brigadiers and  dutiful, amiable Sergeants.

And my equivocation on the point of UNIT’s level of knowledge and complicity in the dubious deeds of Department C19 is no accident, as it shines a light on one of the biggest issues thrown up by The Scales of Injustice, and to a lesser extent Who Killed Kennedy as well. In Russell’s conception of the group, the Department was effectively set up as an external third party operating at a distinct remove from the familiar set of programmatic characters that we’d come to so love and cherish that we’d somehow reached the collective decision to dub them the UNIT Family. Indeed, the novel even chose to take this logic a few steps further, making it quite clear that the Pale Man’s villainous coterie was in fact contained to an extremely secretive subset of C19 operatives:

What no one in the British Government, the United Nations or even Lethbridge-Stewart’s UK branch of UNIT knew was that there was more to C19. Far more.

Like any organism, natural or social, it possessed a dark side: a cancerous, repressed side that made the light seem all the brighter. Only those who directly worked for C19’s darker half knew of it. They were ensconced deep within those Cheviot Hills, reporting directly to someone who, on the rare occasions the matter was discussed, did not appear to possess a name.

While Who Killed Kennedy proved altogether more willing to play up the nebulous, Official Secrets Act-cloaked manoeuvres of UNIT in a manner akin to All the President’s Men, the basic dictates of the novel’s “mash up Doctor Who with the Kennedy assassination” brief eventually asserted an inescapable narrative pull that saw the Doctor reassure Stevens that he had effectively been duped into chasing the wrong conspiracy before promptly lending him a Time Ring and sending him back to Dallas in November 1963.

In the character of Hynes, Leonard has constructed an indirect rebuttal to this simplistic dichotomy. Although the temptation exists to label Hynes the antithesis of the C19 approach, he is in truth something far more ambiguous and, as such, far more interesting.

Looking at the basic structure of Genocide, Hynes would appear to be every inch the stock “rogue element” that one would expect to find in a story like this, a bad apple that requires the attention of the more virtuous and noble elements of whatever military organisation happens to lie at the centre of the narrative. But although Benton is able to find a computerised record of Hynes’ service dating back to June 1981, there’s no corresponding documentation on microfilm, and the maddened soldier gives every appearance of occupying a space in the traditional UNIT command structure that is hazily-defined at best.

Leonard wisely refrains from providing too many specifics on the reason for this discrepancy, though the most plausible reading would seem to be that Hynes somehow faked his credentials with the aid of the Tractites, as there’s little indication in his confrontation with the Planet First activists as to his being associated with UNIT prior to Gavril’s suggesting they contact the organisation outside of the Tractite’s use of the phrase “your military.” Even this, however, seems decidedly vague as to whether it implies any sort of concrete military membership on Hynes’ part, or if it’s simply a case of Gavril speaking in general terms.

In practice, the debate is largely an academic one, and nobody seems to have batted an eye at assigning Hynes a position of authority in a sensitive investigation of a temporal anomaly. It seems quite likely that Benton is the first to so much as mildly question the gaps in Hynes’ record, and even he only does so at the urging of Jo, who has to resort to the invocation of the Doctor’s name to get him to agree.

Whatever the truth of Hynes’ standing within UNIT, be he rogue element or external actor, Alpha or Omega – and you just know I can’t in good conscience let slide the unintentionally prescient echo of Millennium‘s Polaroid Stalker from The Beginning and the End, to the point where I think Doug Hutchison would have been the perfect casting for Hynes in a hypothetical televisual adaptation of Genocide if he hadn’t decided to start marrying sixteen-year-olds – the very nature of the organisation and its structure has effectively allowed him to set the Tractites’ plans in motion with near impunity, just as he’s able to trade on the Doctor’s name in order to get Sam to unwittingly infect Axeman later on.

The Tractites themselves only serve to further reinforce the sense that Genocide is a story rooted in a horror that has arisen out of the very specific aesthetic and thematic preoccupations of the Pertwee Era, and it’s not for nothing that the inciting incident of Tractis’ destruction happens at the hands of the Earth Empire, which received the bulk of its conceptual development over the course of such Third Doctor stories as Colony in SpaceThe Mutants and Frontier in Space.

Perhaps the most significant point of intersection between Genocide and the Pertwee Era, however, comes when you realise that the story’s central moral dilemma can essentially be boiled down to a synthesis of The Silurians‘ deliberate blurring of Doctor Who‘s traditional definition of “alien” with the Doctor’s famed “Do I have the right?” speech from Genesis of the Daleks.

To Leonard’s credit, he’s about as unsubtle on this point as he could feasibly be. The first chapter quite literally opens with an environmental protester putting on a tree costume and loudly declaiming, “I have the right to live here by the river, and I have the right not to be chopped down and used by humans for their own purposes. I have the right!” At the tail end of the novel, watching the Earth Empress address her subjects, the Doctor explicitly likens her to Davros, which also serves as a handy bit of foreshadowing for War of the Daleks. The only way Genocide could possibly be more forceful in identifying its core inspirations would be if it were to replace all the Tractites with Silurians, and at that point you’d just have… well, you’d probably have Blood Heat, as it happens.

And there’s the real kicker. The standard snide dismissal of Leonard’s authorial style, such as it is, is to label it as merely being a poor man’s substitute for Jim Mortimore, and the comparison isn’t entirely without merit. Both writers have a penchant for the Big, and typically manage to endow their alien worlds with a sense of scale and grandeur which stands out from the general approach to such planets in Doctor Who.

Even in their narrative voices, both Leonard and Mortimore are fond of allowing their sentences to trail off into jagged, italicised fragments in an effort to convey the intensity of a character’s emotional state, and the early chapters of Genocide even seem to gesture at the kind of alternating structure that Mortimore will employ in a much more showy fashion in five months’ time with Eye of Heaven.

Of course, Leonard still keeps things vaguely linear and eventually collapses the parallel narratives into a much more straightforward single thread. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to wonder if Genocide‘s initial stabs at an unusual structure might have been a relic of the plans hinted at by Leonard in DWM all the way back around the time of Toy Soldiers to have his next New Adventure – provisionally entitled Conjunction – serve as the first half of a story centred around Easter Island, with Mortimore’s Eye of Heaven written as the follow-up.

So it’s clear that there’s a well-developed simpatico between the two writers, and it’s not hard to identify why, with the duo having moved in the same community of Bristol-based authors. Even if the planned Conjunction/Eye of Heaven duology may have fallen through, it’s evident that the two remained close collaborators, with Mortimore having supplied sketches of Venusians for the front cover of Leonard’s debut novel and taking on co-editing duties on the fifth Decalog, which we covered in extensive detail last time and which was published mere weeks after Genocide and Business Unusual.

In other words, the underlying point of the “Leonard is a poor man’s Jim Mortimore” stance is at the very least broadly understandable, even as it’s a bit too needlessly personal and adversarial for my tastes and puts at odds two writers who evidently enjoyed a close creative partnership. With Genocide, however, we’re placed in a rather unprecedented position, and presented with a novel that might, for once, make a case not just for Leonard’s being decoupled from the shadow of Mortimore, but actively surpassing his contemporary.

After all, a recurring problem we’ve raised with Mortimore has been his uncomfortable eagerness to lose sight of any sort of human dimension in the shocking and calamitous tableaux of destruction with which he tends to populate his novels.

Certainly, I’ve demonstrated a certain level of sympathy for the sheer bleakness of his approach in the past. Subtitling every review of a new Mortimore novel with the tagline of “The Bleakverse” has been one of my most consistent running bits, as it’s the best way I can think of to encapsulate the sense in which his work seems to exist at a particularly nihilistic and grim tangent to the established way that Doctor Who usually works, and I think it’s an interesting enough departure that it at least accrues some small measure of worth, so I’m not exactly going to do a complete 180 and start denouncing it as detestable or what have you.

All the same, while Mortimore shares Leonard’s taste for creating worlds with a sense of genuine scope, he often seems to be far less interested in the dynamics of those worlds and the people inhabiting them. Lucifer Rising largely skated past this problem by having Mortimore team up with one of the writers at Virgin with the strongest love for the kind of stuff that is generally presumed to fall under the label of “worldbuilding” or “character development,” and Blood Heat similarly papered over the cracks in the canvas by coasting on the old “multiverse story” trick of offering up hard-edged versions of established characters to whom we already had a pre-existing emotional attachment.

In hindsight, the Mortimore novel that comes closest to cracking this specific egg is probably Parasite, and even there the debate over “polygamy vs. monogamy” that played itself out in the dynamics between Gail, Drew and Rhiannon – and yes, I did have to go back to my review from four years ago to even remember their names – was largely just a means to hammer in the general birth-related sexual symbolism in which that novel was drenched.

With Eternity Weeps, we reached perhaps the absolute nadir of this approach, as six hundred million human beings from near-future Earth were wiped out by Agent Scarlet to an emotional impact that could most kindly be described as “negligible,” while Liz Shaw was killed off in such a perfunctory manner that you could quite easily swap her for an anonymous UNIT scientist with very little tweaking.

It’s telling, then, that Leonard chooses to devote significant chunks of Genocide to the return of Jo Grant, a character whose presence in Blood Heat was necessarily restricted by her not having met the Doctor until after the alternate timeline’s point of divergence in The Silurians, driven mad and ultimately consigned to the ignominious fate of being killed in the course of the Brigadier’s single-minded efforts to interrogate her. Taken in context, it was a shocking enough means of demonstrating the novel’s divergence from the history of Doctor Who as fans had come to know it, but it did rather have the effect of reducing Jo down to little more than a symbol.

Here, while Jo’s presence never really comes to dominate over the narrative, she still gets to play the pivotal and morally dubious role of destroying the Tractite settlement, and there’s something decidedly, understatedly ironic about Leonard’s constructing an alternate timeline where Jo Grant is one of the last remaining human beings in existence rather than a random casualty of the universe’s stray brutality.

Indeed, while the climax’s decision to have Jo become complicit in an act of destruction against the Tractites might be the sort of thing to make fans cry foul – certainly, I can practically smell the reactionary YouTube thinkpieces on the subject that would materialise if it were tried today – it’s hard to construct a plausible reading of events in which Leonard is attempting a spot of character assassination or anything in that vein. It’s not for nothing, surely, that he remains the only writer to actually feature the character in an original, novel-length piece of fiction, even though it’s been nearly two and a half years since Dancing the Code.

There’s undoubtedly something pointed in having the primary representative of the militaristic Pertwee Era bear the brunt of the blame for Paratractis’ destruction, but it never really seems as if Leonard is suggesting that Jo’s actions hint at a fundamental evilness on her part or anything so trite and simplistic. On the whole, Genocide seems rather sceptical of the division of people into immutable “good” and “evil” camps, not as an expression of fatalistic Mortimorean nihilism, but rather as an acknowledgment of the universe’s complexities.

When it comes down to it, Jo makes an impulsive and hasty decision in the heat of the moment, and while the Doctor is well within his rights to chastise her for the unnecessary violence of that decision, being confronted with the idea of your entire civilisation having been erased is the kind of thing that does tend to fray one’s nerves. The audience can empathise with Jo’s perspective, even if they don’t condone the destruction of the settlement.

(Admittedly, the particulars of Jo’s perspective are drawn in very broad terms, essentially boiling down to a single scene with her son on contemporary Earth – complete with the requisite Wilderness Years dose of a less-than-rosy fate for a former companion, though Cliff was such a patronising git in The Green Death that the couple’s separation is hardly a big shock; certainly it’s a preferable fate to having your flesh transmogrified into sulphuric acid – which provides us with the requisite knowledge that she’d probably prefer not to have her child completely erased from history thank you very much, but it works well enough.)

Even bolder, however, is the decision to have Sam become complicit in a similar moment of violence without the Doctor’s knowledge, as she panics and kills one of Mauvril’s guards. Up until the climax, after all, Sam has largely been filling the role of the novel’s moral centre, though she finds herself arguing for a position far more sympathetic towards the Tractites than, say, Sarah Jane’s “You must destroy them” in Genesis of the Daleks. In her steadfast refusal to submit to the idea that there’s no other way to resolve the fact of Paratractis’ existence, she’s quite clearly taking a stance that places her in opposition to Hynes’ genocidal fatalism, and the broader text of the novel would seem to suggest that it’s a stance to which Leonard is receptive.

Hynes’ chief failing, in essence, lies in his concluding that the individual’s diminished capacity to effect meaningful change in the face of the vast edifices of capitalist society amounts to evidence that there is absolutely no hope of anything getting better, and the best one can hope for is to quite literally erase it all. Obviously, Hynes is a raving lunatic with delusions of grandeur, so any attempt to infer a coherent political platform from his ramblings will end up severely strained, but it certainly seems as if Leonard favours the Planet First activists’ smaller acts of rebellion over the more rationalistic and “big” approach advocated by Hynes.

Genocide even suggests something of an equivalence between Jo and Sam much earlier, though the former’s separation from Cliff and decision to use her maiden name prevents Leonard from drawing the obvious surname-based parallels. When Jo shoots down Rowenna’s suggestion of making contact with the local population of Homo habilis, the doomed archaeologist protests, “We’ve got to do something,” causing the former companion to reflect on how she said something similar during her travels with the Doctor.

A perusal of Chakoteya suggests that she did, indeed, utter those words all the way back in Colony in Space, but while the invocation of a Malcolm Hulke serial is undeniably apt in this context – and a serial which, in its novelised form, was even rewritten to serve as Jo’s introduction – it works just as well as a more general reflection of the kind of character Jo has always been, and serves to make her actions at the climax all the more shocking. What’s more, it adds a further resonance to the failings of the Doctor’s current companion, particularly since Sam has always been cast in the mould lain down by Jo, even to the point of having her introductory story written by Terrance Dicks.

It’s all characteristic of the rather shrewd approach to characterisation evinced throughout the loose trilogy that began with Vampire Science and The Bodysnatchers, and while Sam is hardly the most compelling lead character in the history of Doctor Who so far, there is at least more than a faint glimmer of an idea on display as to how she might conceivably prove workable, if nothing else.

Remember, four books into Bernice Summerfield’s tenure as a regular cast member, we were getting books on the level of The Pit, and while it’s hard to believe on the basis of the past three novels that Sam could ever evolve to a point where she can single-handedly anchor a book as good as The Also People or even Return of the Living Dad, it’s still a shame that John Peel will, by all accounts, throw a spanner into the works next time and have her revert to the most generic, Jo-influenced flavour of companion imaginable. But we’ll get there in good time, and as I said, maybe I’ll eat crow on this one and War of the Daleks will surprise me against all the odds…

In the end, however, the most striking perspective to be found within Genocide is that of Kitig, the lone survivor of the seemingly utopian Paratractis. For the character’s arc to have any weight whatsoever, we need to be able to invest in the idea that he might conceivably wish to preserve the world as he knows it, and even if “not wanting his children to be erased from existence” is a rather blunt and broad motivation – although even here, Leonard proves adept at relitigating one of the central thematic points of Blood Heat in a considerably more nuanced fashion than Mortimore ever did – it remains an effective one nevertheless.

Moreover, this just makes it all the more heartbreaking when he inevitably finds himself forced to confront the harsh reality: that the world he so cherishes is built on a foundational act of colonial violence. In a very real sense, in spite of its being couched in the emotional angst of a society of talking alien horses, Kitig’s newfound adamant resolution in the face of Mauvril’s atrocities is more affecting than anything to be found in a Mortimore novel:

I will never go home, he decided. Home is built on these bones. These deaths. These burnings. It should never have existed, and neither should I.

It is, in many ways, the boldest and most inflammatory statement that the BBC Books have allowed themselves to make to date, and it’s made all the more remarkable for Leonard’s refusal to flinch or back down in order to file off his novel’s rough edges.

It also helps that it’s really just the most striking culmination of the idea, repeatedly seeded throughout Genocide, that these kinds of horrific misdeeds can only be properly atoned for if the lived experiences of their survivors are allowed to be shared, and that the vague intellectual, rationalist understanding that “something bad happened” can never fully substitute for that kind of awareness.

While the inhabitants of Paratractis seem to understand this to an extent, eschewing record-keeping methods centred around “pure information” in favour of recording the impressions of those who lived through the Earth Empire’s invasion of Tractis, the complete erasure of humanity serves to necessarily impose a definitive limit on their society’s capacity to come to any sort of meaningful historical reckoning with its crimes.

Even against such bleak surroundings, however, Leonard suggests that there remains the tiniest morsel of hope, as Sam tends to an exhausted, unconscious Doctor and tries to tell him of her having killed the Tractite. It’s a small scene, and the novel would probably work just fine if it had stopped with Kitig’s destruction of the time tree, but the decision to have the sequence parallel the framing device of Mauvril’s recounting Tractis’ subjugation to the Doctor during his imprisonment is simply astonishing, and a very strong contender for the best thing Paul Leonard has ever written.

And that’s Genocide in a nutshell really. It’s straightforwardly Leonard’s best novel to date, with an epic sense of scale and wonder that nevertheless remains curiously grounded and intimate, providing a haunting and timeless tale of colonial violence, and the fact that it comes from the same man who was turning out books like Speed of Flight and Toy Soldiers just a year or two earlier is nothing short of a minor miracle. At long last, Paul Leonard seems to have escaped from under Jim Mortimore’s shadow and finally lived up to the potential I always felt he fell just short of.

It is, I suppose, better late than never.

Miscellaneous Observations

Although Leonard makes the rather wise decision not to hammer home the parallels too strongly, it can’t be denied that a book from 1997 titled Genocide that deals with the violent legacy of colonialism in the Rift Valley of Africa will invariably evoke the violent upheavals of the Rwandan genocide a mere three years earlier. This sense is only further reinforced by the decision to christen the gorge in which the bulk of the novel’s action unfolds “Kilgai Gorge,” which is, by all accounts, wholly fictitious, but whose name bears an uncanny similarity to the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

In keeping with the general air of ambiguity that shrouds so much of Genocide, I did rather like the decision to refrain from featuring a scene directly identifying Hynes as the source of the skull uncovered by Rowenna and Julie, though it’s certainly obvious enough with even a moment’s thought. Nicely understated, that.

As usual, I’m not the first to remark upon it, but… Gavril really does just sort of disappear completely from the narrative after a certain point, doesn’t he? It’s not even made explicitly clear, as far as I can tell, if he had any connection to Mauvril’s faction of Tractites. It’s easy enough to infer whatever quick fix you want to fill in the gaps with, though, and these are minor quibbles that don’t really detract from a rather pacey and enjoyable novel.

More evidence from the file marked “Genocide Subtweeting Jim Mortimore’s Work”: Although it’s eventually confirmed that the Earth Reptile Mauvril speaks of in her conversations with the Doctor is named Menarc, her suggestion that he might be called Morkal is a pretty obvious nod to the two versions of Imorkal seen in Blood Heat and Eternity Weeps.

It’s funny to go back to my review of Eternity Weeps and see that I apparently hemmed and hawed a bit about adopting the adjective “Mortimorean” for regular use, and questioned whether it was too pretentious. Welp, if it wasn’t, the phrase “fatalistic Mortimorean nihilism” almost certainly is. Welcome to Dale’s Ramblings, folks.

Final Thoughts

Well, that was a nice change of pace from my usual conflicted feelings on Paul Leonard. Looking at the books we’ve got coming up, however, I suspect I’m going to need this last gasp of optimism before we dive into… ugh, two Gary Russell books and a John Peel Dalek novel.

Joy of joys.

Regardless, join me next time for the first of the Russell books, as the writer continues his quest to fill in every “gap” in the history of Doctor Who by finally depicting Mel’s introduction story, and giving the Sixth Doctor an adventure opposite the Brigadier. You’ll be thrilled, you’ll be amazed, and you’ll probably wind up asking yourself “Did we really need this?” It’s Business Unusual! Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

Virgin Decalog Reviews: Wonders, edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

This is it, folks.

What we’re looking at right here is an absolute limit case, a book so esoteric and granular in its focus that we can use it to define some rigid boundaries for just how far we’re willing to wonder off the beaten path in exploring the Wilderness Years.

To utter what is becoming an increasingly common refrain as we burrow ever deeper into the New Adventures’ strange, marginal afterlife as a spin-off series, the question of whether we should even be covering this at all is an open one. To put it mildly, the number of Doctor Who fans – or, if we’re being blunt, people in general – who give the slightest iota of a toss about the fifth Decalog collection just barely scrapes by “absolutely nobody.” Even by the typically spotty standards of coverage afforded past instalments in the series, the TARDIS Data Core’s entry on Wonders is an astonishingly bare one, essentially boiling down to a list of story titles and their associated authors.

Of the ten stories contained within, only two are afforded the privilege of having a separate article of their own; one of these stories, Lawrence Miles’ The Judgement of Solomon, achieves this feat by dint of being the only one in the collection to feature Bernice Summerfield, while Stephen Marley’s Bibliophage was retroactively lent a meagre morsel of legitimacy by the author’s decision to revisit the story’s main characters in his contribution to the 2013 Faction Paradox anthology, Burning with Optimism’s Flames.

(Even this might not be enough, at least if the Data Core’s application of a big, bold “This article should be deleted” header is anything to go by. This being the TARDIS Data Core, it seems that the only reason that the article hasn’t been deleted yet is that the site’s rather arcane bureaucracy prevents any deletion decisions made outside the forums from being binding, which did complicate things a bit when they had no forums to speak of for a two-year period. The fact that nobody seems to have bothered to raise the issue on the new forums, in turn, is a remarkably appropriate snapshot of the collection’s languishment in obscurity.)

Barring Marley and Miles, who are plainly Virgin Books veterans, the only author with an article of their own on the site is prominent English hard science fiction writer Stephen Baxter, and that’s almost certainly just because he would later pen a more “legitimate” Doctor Who story with the Second Doctor novel The Wheel of Ice in 2012. Well, OK, if you’re willing to do some judicious squinting you can technically say that Dome of Whispers author Ian Watson has an article of his own, but I somehow highly doubt that he’s the same Ian Watson who apparently worked as a designer on The Space Pirates and Terror of the Autons, wouldn’t you agree?

Even at the time, it seemed that fandom was conscious of the extent to which Wonders existed at a bit of a tangent from the “Doctor Who universe.” Adding on to our discussions last time of Gary Gillatt’s decision to retire Doctor Who Magazine‘s New Adventures reviews, it’s worth noting that nobody seemed to bat an eyebrow at Dave Owen’s neglecting to review the latest Decalog. Indeed, the book didn’t merit so much as a throwaway mention in the magazine’s Collectors’ Heaven feature, something which even Re:Generations had managed. It doesn’t seem implausible to make the case that there were probably vast swathes of Doctor Who fandom in 1997 who were simply wholly unaware that a fifth Decalog had even come out.

Wonders therefore stands as a bit of an oddity, a case of Virgin seizing upon the logic underpinning the contemporary New Adventures’ decision in novels like Down to start fashioning a more robust mythology and taking it to its absolute limits, turning out a collection in which only one of the ten stories had a demonstrable connection to Doctor Who on initial publication. Even for our purposes, where we routinely disavow the correlation between financial sense and artistic merit, there’s a fundamental strangeness to this decision that does bear commenting on.

In one of the only pieces of contemporaneous fandom coverage of Wonders that I can find, namely the same Doctor Who News post we referred to in trying to untangle the Nuala Buffini/Stephen Cole fiasco, it was suggested that, as late as June 1997, the possibility of a sixth Decalog was by no means assured, contingent as it was upon the sales figures for the fourth and fifth instalments.

The four-month gap between the publication of Re:Generations and Wonders, by far the shortest interval between two Decalogs, would seem to rule out the possibility of our being able to draw any particularly significant conclusions as to the sales of the fourth collection on the basis of the existence of a fifth collection. Rather, it seems more likely – particularly when considering the two anthologies were handled by entirely separate editorial partnerships – that the volumes were simply worked on at the same time.

Whatever the case may be, Wonders serves as the end of the line for the Decalogs in every sense of the phrase, and in a little under six months’ time, the arrival of BBC Books’ own set of short story anthologies, Short Trips, would effectively ensure the passing of the series into memory. On the off chance that anyone ever remembers the Decalogs these days, it will probably only ever be in the context of Steven Moffat’s admittedly brilliant Continuity Errors, which is a rather meagre hit rate for a series that turned out some forty-nine other stories, all told.

So, for old time’s sake, let’s take one last trip around the block and see what the Decalogs have to offer us in their final batch of ten stories, shall we? Without further ado, then, I give you Wonders

1. The Place of All Places, based on an idea by Nakula Somana

After a brief detour, at least. The Place of All Places is less of a traditional short story than it is an extremely loose framing sequence that doubles as both a prologue and an epilogue, recalling the use of Playback in the first Decalog, only without serving as an explicit unifying thread or overarching mystery running between all of the coming stories.

No, the most important contributions made by The Place of All Places are primarily thematic in nature, as a boy – or simply Boy, as the case may be – contemplates the stories of which a group of labourers sings as they go about their washing. After a while, the boy’s uncle brings along a washing machine, and he lets the boy know that by freeing the labourers from their gruelling work, he has allowed them to wonder at the universe around them, a rather choice bit of phrasing in light of the collection’s title. When the boy protests that the stories aren’t real, his uncle simply enquires, “Is a story less wonderful because it exists only in your mind?”, a question that the boy cannot help but silently ponder as the years wheel by.

On a very basic level, it’s the kind of piece that doesn’t really lend itself to a neat plot summary, but it nevertheless manages to evoke a faintly apocalyptic and quietly moving tone with some truly beautiful turns of phrase along the way. It’s not exactly the stuff of high-level literary analysis to read a deeper significance into the rather listless mood of the story, particularly when considering an especially pointed refrain later in the workers’ song: “Every night there are fewer stars. Every day there are fewer stories.”

So no prizes for spotting the resonance that such a remark has for a short story collection that most of the writers and editors had to understand on some level was quite likely to be the last of the Decalogs, as indeed it ultimately was.

The only other point of note here is the peculiar manner of the story’s accreditation, as it’s the only example I can think of across the Decalogs and Short Trips series – or at least the three BBC Books Short Trips collections we’ll be covering – in which the only by-line provided is a “Based on an idea by” type of credit. On the basis of past editors like Stephen James Walker, Andy Lane and Justin Richards writing linking material or even fully-fledged stories for their respective collections, I think it’s a pretty safe bet to label The Place of All Places as the product of some combination of Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore, particularly since the rather poetic, abstract and free-flowing prose style seems a comfortable fit with their respective oeuvres.

All the more interesting is the individual credited with providing the main idea for The Place of All Places, Nakula Somana, who was previously the subject of an afterword in the back of Mortimore’s last novel, Eternity Weeps. There, the author entreated his readers to consider supporting Somana’s application to remain a resident of the United Kingdom for the sake of the collaborative musical project Mammal among other artistic endeavours. In light of the fact that I can find a public LinkedIn profile for someone under the same name who took a degree in Leonard and Mortimore’s native stomping grounds of Bristol, and who started working in a freelance capacity in the arts industry of Bengaluru in 1998, I can only assume that the campaign failed to yield the expected results, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole.

Whatever the case may be, The Place of All Places becomes rather striking for its being unselfconsciously framed in terms very specific to the cultural history of India. The laundry-place at which the labourers go about washing their clothes is explicitly described as a dhobi ghat; slightly more controversially, the workers are identified as harijans (literally “children of God”), a hotly contested term for those members of Indian society alternatively named as Dalits. First applied by Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s as an alternative to terms like “untouchables” that he considered to have overly pejorative implications, the usage of the name quickly came to be criticised by prominent activists like B. R. Ambedkar for its perceived condescension towards Dalits.

In light of that history, The Place of All Places does read with a bit more bite than it might otherwise have, and the use of such a controversial epithet feels like a purposeful commentary on the privilege implicit in the boy’s perspective. Certainly, his family would seem to be reasonably well-off if his uncle can afford to spend his time building a washing machine, and the fact that the central point of the story seems to be a deflation of the child’s rather patronising dismissal of the workers’ stories as not worth listening to on account of their fictitious nature lends further credence to this interpretation.

More than that, the story doubles as a remarkably thoughtful preliminary acknowledgment of some of the obvious pitfalls that a collection like this, centred around the idea of the “wonders of the universe,” might find itself inadvertently blundering into. There is, after all, a tendency in the real world to let the “wonders of the world” mentality tip over the thin line that exists between “This building is wondrous because it’s so big” and “This building is wondrous because I find it hard to believe that a group of people I have decided are less advanced would be capable of constructing something on this scale.” As a matter of course, the “less advanced” peoples that typically get singled out for these conversations are overwhelmingly those that hail from… well, if we’re being honest, anywhere that isn’t Europe.

It’s something we’ve touched on before, perhaps most notably in our conversation about the uncomfortable assumptions underlying the Orion correlation theory expounded by fringe Egyptologists like Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert and Graham Hancock, and which informed elements of Justin Richards’ plot for The Sands of Time. On television, Doctor Who itself has been guilty of building on this mindset to readily embrace von Dänikenite theories of “ancient aliens” in stories like Death to the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars. We will probably, in due course, talk about it again, particularly in relation to Mortimore’s own forthcoming exploration of the Rapa Nui moai and Victorian archaeology through the prism of Leela in his next full-length novel, Eye of Heaven.

Still, as an opening statement for a collection like Wonders, it’s nice to see a story like The Place of All Places that seems to gesture at a deeper awareness of the potential for such a wonder-centric mindset to imperialistically erase the nuance and complexity of past cultures. It may not be the deepest of statements, but it’s worthy of reiteration, and the subtly lyrical beauty with which it’s delivered only makes it more so.

2. Poyekhali 3201 by Stephen Baxter

Ah, it’s my favourite kind of review, the one where I get to open myself up to the criticism of not having read the works of a particularly prominent and acclaimed science fiction author. Joy of joys.

More seriously, the presence of Stephen Baxter in this collection is a pretty big coup for Wonders. These days, as we’ve already alluded to, the existence of The Wheel of Ice makes his agreeing to write for the anthology considerably less perplexing, clarifying as it does that Baxter would seem to nurture a personal affection for Doctor Who of not inconsiderable stature underneath the patina of professional and artistic credibility that tends to habitually cluster around award-winning science fiction authors in a way that it doesn’t to the more overt fans-turned-authors that populate the Wilderness Years.

In fact, a close investigation of Baxter’s personal involvement with the programme will reveal that he went so far as to write a letter to City Magazines’ TV Century 21 as far back as December 1968 when he was only eleven years old, imploring the magazine writers – represented, in keeping with the prevailing tradition of the publication’s treating itself as if it were published some one hundred years in the future as an accurate account of various science-fiction goings-on, by the fictitious personage of Colonel White from Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons – to start a “fourth dimension story” based on either Doctor Who or Irwin Allen’s thirty-episode cult classic series, The Time Tunnel.

Moreover, September 1997 was an especially auspicious time for Baxter, coming fresh off the heels of his critically lauded 1996 novel Voyage, which was the second recipient of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and earned the writer his third of seven nominations for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, though it ultimately lost to Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Fittingly enough for the cultural history of Doctor WhoVoyage purported to offer an alternate account of the United States’ space programme in which the nation’s history diverged from that of our own on account of President John F. Kennedy’s survival of his assassination in Dallas, eventually culminating in a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s.

Exactly two months before the publication of Wonders, Baxter would follow up on the themes of Voyage with Titan, the second book of his loose “NASA Trilogy” that eventually concluded with Moonseed in August 1998.

With Poyekhali 3201, then, it initially seems as if Baxter has made a conscious decision to depict the other side of the Space Race coin, as it were, offering up what seems to be little more than a historical account of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey to become the first man in space aboard the Vostok 1 in April 1961. Gradually, however, oddities start to seep in around the edges, with Gagarin being plagued by visions of unfamiliar faces among the crowds around the launch site at Baikonur, inexplicably hearing voices while in the depths of space, and noticing that the stars around him seem to have a perplexingly green tint to them.

All of this eventually gives way to the story’s big twist, in which it’s revealed that what we thought was Gagarin is, in fact, a clone, the 3201st iteration of a historical simulacrum of the famed cosmonaut, created by humankind’s descendants at some unspecified point in the far future and christened Poyekhali after his words to lead Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev immediately prior to the liftoff of the Vostok capsule.

Buried within this revelation, as the future humans exposit as to the historical significance of Gagarin’s flight to their culture, is a rather perplexing piece of information that seems to exist to further reinforce the sense of ambiguity hinted at by Boy’s contemplations of the realities of the Desert’s stories in The Place of All Places. “Mankind has covered the galaxy,” we are dutifully informed. “But nowhere away from Earth has life been found, beyond simple one-celled creatures.”

On the one hand, this is manifestly not true of the established Doctor Who universe, and by any reasonable estimate hasn’t been since about five weeks in when the TARDIS landed on Skaro in the first episode of The Daleks, so this only serves to further muddy the waters of Wonders‘ legitimacy. But on the other hand, this certainly fits with the rather glum view taken by the collection as a whole towards the very idea of universal wonders.

For every great monument or stirring achievement of the human spirit, Baxter seems to suggest, there’s an equally strong element of historicised and mythologised loss. Gagarin’s orbit of the Earth is significant not for heralding in a bold new age of interstellar diplomacy between humanity and other alien races as tends to be supposed by series like Star Trek; rather, its significance lies in something approaching the exact antithesis of that idea, being important only for enabling mankind to perform the simple act of surviving and spreading out across the cosmos and not much else besides.

Indeed, this also fits with one of the central sentiments of Voyage, which picked at the romantic idea of a manned mission to Mars by suggesting that such a future would have only been made possible if successive American administrations had chosen to forego funding for other NASA projects that they did finance in the real world, including the Space Shuttle programme and the VoyagerMariner 10, and Viking probes, severely curtailing Earth’s understanding of the wider universe.

To a certain extent, the romance of space travel giving way to the disappointing realities of the vacuum of space and the snuffing out of paragons of astronautical valour in a cosmically tragic fashion is a part of the general thematic and mythic arc of the Space Race. Gagarin, as Poyekhali 3201 reminds us, never ventured into space again after his 94 minutes aboard Vostok 1, and spent several months after the disastrous Soyuz 1 launch training to regain his license to pilot regular aircraft, only to be killed barely a month later at the age of thirty-four when his MiG-15 crashed near the Russian town of Kirzhach.

Ed White, whose awestruck reactions to his becoming the first American to perform an extra-vehicular activity would be memorably sampled on Lemon Jelly’s Space Walk in 2002, would subsequently lose his life in the catastrophic pre-launch testing of the Apollo 1 mission. The 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster speaks for itself, as does its 2003 echo, the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia, an event which was rather eerily forecasted by the alternate history posited by Baxter’s own Titan.

Even those figures who didn’t die, like Valentina Tereshkova, ran the risk of becoming stooges of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia and voting in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggesting that there might be some truth after all to the age-old maxim – well, OK, fifteen years old but that doesn’t sound quite as good – that one either dies a hero or lives long enough to see one’s self become a villain.

This arc, of course, is really just a single facet of the much larger popular conception of the sixties as a decade, beginning with the apparent promise of Kennedy’s Camelot and eventually ending with the resurgence of Eisenhower-era Republican powerbrokers like Richard Nixon as the United States found itself dragged ever deeper into the moral and political quagmire of Vietnam.

So if we attempt to take Poyekhali 3201 as a part of the Doctor Who universe, the central contradiction of alien life not existing ultimately becomes too great to neatly square away without the benefit of some major handwaving, but there remains the distinct possibility that this is the point of the exercise, and that the future into which Gagarin’s clone awakens is as speculative as The Ambassadors of Death‘s positing a British space programme running manned missions to Mars in the seventies/eighties.

At sixteen pages, the second-shortest story in the collection, there’s admittedly not much meat on the bones of the story itself beyond a reasonably solid twist and exactly the right amount of attention to the minutiae of space travel that you’d expect from one of the leading lights of the British hard science fiction tradition, but its implications are nevertheless fascinating to attempt to puzzle out, and it certainly can’t be accused of overstaying its welcome.

3. King’s Chamber by Dominic Green

Quite early on in my habitual attempt to research the authors contained within these past couple Doctorless Decalogs, I made what I took to be a chilling discovery about Dominic Green, namely that he seemed to have taken up quite a prominent editorial position at The Spectator. As you can imagine, this sent me into a kind of frenzied mumbling about the horror of such a realisation, with declarations that “It’s too soon!” and “I can’t do this again!” peppered with appropriately feverish entreaties for deliverance from various deceased relatives and deities whose existence I find dubious at best.

Then I realised that I’d found the wrong Dominic Green, and breathed an Earth-shattering sigh of relief. Yes, thankfully for all of us I don’t have to marshal up my energies to get quite as angry as I did at The Well-Mannered War a mere thirteen books ago, and we can save all of that pent-up bile for the next occasions on which we’re destined to run into transphobic shitheads, like The Janus Conjunction or More Short Trips. Joy of joys.

Having actually read King’s Chamber, mind, only served to further convince me of my general suspicion that apologies were in order to this particular Dominic Green, as it turned out that his story was actually supremely sharp and incisive, and possessed of an imagination so far beyond the average individual involved with any part of the production of The Spectator that the act of comparing him, however jokingly, to his rather more authoritarian namesake feels like the kind of thing for which one must beg forgiveness in the humblest manner possible.

Where Poyekhali 3201 was just another feather in the increasingly beplumed cap of Stephen Baxter, King’s Chamber arrives at the earliest stages of Dominic Green’s career. In September 1997, Green was just starting out as a frequent contributor to David Pringle’s Interzone, having penned some four short stories between June 1996 and July 1997.

He would go on to become one of the more acclaimed members of the magazine’s writing roster, with his 2005 story The Clockwork Atom Bomb eventually garnering a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story. In subsequent years, he seems to have finally made the transition from a writer of short fiction to a habitual scribe of self-published novel-length adventures, most prominent of which would seem to be his recently-concluded twelve-volume young adult science fiction series, Ant and Cleo.

Even at this early stage, it’s plain to see that there’s ample potential in Green’s writing. King’s Chamber is a clever, witty, and inventive story that manages to strike out in a bold conceptual direction all its own while simultaneously managing to tie back into the larger themes of the collection as a whole.

Initially, King’s Chamber seems to be setting itself up as a commentary on the well-worn debate between creationists and proponents of evolution, filtered through the fantastical contextual decanter of a disagreement between the arboreal and amphibian inhabitants of an alien world as to the provenance and import of a shared, mysterious dream of an ancient sarcophagus lying empty in a gargantuan pyramid.

It’s hardly untrodden ground for nineties science fiction by any measure. All the way back in June 1993, Deep Space Nine had concluded its first season with In the Hands of the Prophets, which positioned Keiko O’Brien and Vedek Winn on opposing sides of the debate over the nature of the wormhole discovered in Bajoran space in the series’ pilot episode. In April 1997, Voyager had departed from its usual format with Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky’s Distant Origin, an episode told primarily from the viewpoint of a set of aliens of the week seeking to prove a heavily-contested theory about the origin of their species.

Of course, like all the most worthy and restated of science fictional ideas, the debate only recurs so frequently on account of its speaking to some very real and concrete concerns facing society in the real world. Beginning in the late eighties and continuing well into the nineties, the United States in particular was rocked by vociferous debate over the educational system’s duty, or lack thereof, to advance a particular viewpoint on the origins of the Earth and humanity.

In 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled against a contentious law introduced by Governor David Treen of Louisiana requiring schools to teach creationist doctrine in conjunction with any occasion on which evolution was discussed, on the grounds that the law’s advancement of a specific religion contravened the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

In response to this, the burgeoning religious right movement chose to throw its weight behind the nominally distinct concept of “intelligent design,” with a particularly conspicuous example of this shift coming about in the revision of the drafts of the school-level textbook Of Pandas and People to replace all references to variants of creationist-adjacent language with discussion of the notion of intelligent design.

A year prior to the publication of Wonders, the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based conservative Christian think tank, would found the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which promptly published Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box in an attempt to bolster the case for intelligent design. Echoing its 1987 decision, the Supreme Court would eventually declare intelligent design to be just as pseudoscientific and religious as creationism in the 2005 case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a case in which both Of People and Pandas and Behe played central roles.

King’s Chamber manages to offset any potential sense of roteness and repetition that might accompany such a stock philosophical debate by effectively turning many of the assumptions of the conversation on their head. Contrary to expectations, it is the Amphibian faction, defined as religious to a fault, who endorse the position most analogous to real-world concepts of natural selection and evolution, while the secular and implicitly socialist Arboreals argue in favour of intelligent design, with a smattering of “ancient astronauts” thrown in for good measure.

Eventually, it transpires that the Arboreals are broadly correct, with the two races on this unnamed planet having been forcibly bred by a colonising power as little more than livestock. The pyramid that stands at the centre of the populace’s dreams is an inheritance from this past, with the sarcophagus designed to function as a weapon fuelled by the powers of a telepathic individual, weeding out any of the Arboreals and Amphibians who might mutate above their station. Somnambulatory eugenics, in effect.

What’s striking here isn’t the fact that Green reveals the “ancient astronauts” position to be the correct one; as we’ve said, that’s largely just part and parcel of Doctor Who, for better or (more often) for worse. Rather, King’s Chamber ably exposes the fundamental colonial horror of such a belief. The appeal of creationism and intelligent design, after all, generally aligns with the broad appeal held by religion as a whole: it’s nicer to think that there might be some ordering principle underlying all the world’s apparent chaos, a prime mover that set things in motion and, presumably, has some sort of foreknowledge of and maybe even control over how things will turn out.

But if God exists, Green’s world seems to suggest, he exists in a cruelly and exploitatively imperialist form. It’s usually only a hop, skip and a jump from the religious desire for order to outright fascism, and in this regard King’s Chamber‘s thinly veiled meditations on the cyclical nature of violence in the aftermath of the Cold War have arguably aged better than something like The X-Files, which tended to take a broadly positive view of unquestioning religious faith that would ultimately end up feeling like an ill fit for the world as it stood in the wake of 9/11.

Even in the suggestion of a slave revolt by the Arboreals and Amphibians, while arguably just playing into the same uncomfortable post-colonial anxieties about the victims of imperialism seeking retaliation on their oppressors as the Kazon’s hostility towards the Trabe on Voyager, Green demonstrates a far stronger understanding of the complex realities of this kind of social factionalisation than Michael Piller’s blunt fretting about “Bloods and Crips” ever did. The object of horror at the heart of King’s Chamber is not the fact of an oppressed underclass’ revolting in and of itself, but more their continued unwitting reinforcement of a eugenicist agenda a hundred millennia gone.

It’s ultimately unclear exactly how well King’s Chamber squares with its immediate predecessor’s declaration that there has been no alien life found on any planet, as the overthrown oppressors of the Amphibians and Arboreals are never conclusively identified as human beings, and it’s ambiguous in any case how engineered non-human life forms would fit under the terms of a verb like “found.” Nevertheless, it continues to develop Wonders’ suggestion of an inter-story continuity based more upon tapping into a common vein of apocalypticism-tinged awe and astonishment than in anything more straightforwardly narrative, while also just being an entertaining and creative read in its own right, and it’s more than worthwhile for that reason alone.

4. City of Hammers by Neil Williamson

Much like Dominic Green before him, Neil Williamson is a newcomer snatched up into the editorial clutches of Leonard and Mortimore, although he primarily wrote for one of Interzone‘s main competitors, Andy Cox’s The Third Alternative. In a way, then, Wonders serves as a snapshot not just of the dying days of the Decalogs, but of a very particular moment in time for the British science fiction scene, as Cox’s TTA Press would eventually acquire Interzone from Pringle in the mid 2000s.

Funnily enough, City of Hammers feels like an entirely appropriate point at which to broach this subject, being concerned as it is with questions of endings and allowing loved ones a final moment of wonder and human connection. Despite being just as apocalyptic as any of the other stories that have come before it, Williamson’s piece balances the massive sense of scale implied in these narratives of the end of the world against a curiously small and intimate tale of the dissolution of a relationship, and manages to become one of the highlights of a collection that is already shaping up to be compellingly strange.

Although it’s the wondrous city at the story’s heart that lends its name to City of Hammers, it must be said that the construction itself never really rises above the level of metaphor, which is saying something when the previous story’s “wonder of the universe” existed only in dreams. In fact, if Williamson’s story has one major flaw, it lies in its middle section, which is almost exclusively given over to the tourists’ awed reactions to the city’s grand, industrial architecture.

Certainly, the general arc of the story does require some scenes of this nature, if only so that the audience might actually have some understanding of the reasoning motivating those who would journey to Altaque in the first place, but it remains difficult to fully escape the sensation that Williamson has perhaps gotten a bit too wrapped up in the splendour of his own vivid descriptions.

Even allowing for that major caveat, however, everything else going on in City of Hammers around the city itself is sufficiently fascinating that it’s hard to begrudge the story its little indulgences. In many ways the most striking idea here is that gestured at by Intka in one of his final conversations with Cal, as the monk concedes that much of Altaque’s overly mystical atmosphere has been carefully stage-managed and controlled in order to draw interest from the public.

At a glance, this appears indistinguishable from the common or garden variety cynicism with which Wonders has been populated thus far, and City of Hammers contains plenty of other nods to this sense of disillusionment; witness Cal’s ruminations on his native Scotland’s having been reduced to a quaint tourist destination not too dissimilar to Altaque, a critique of the “Heritage Theme Park Britain” mindset that no doubt hits close to home for a Glasgow-based writer like Williamson.

But in the end, Williamson takes the far more interesting route of suggesting that the exaggeration of the City’s esoteric attributes doesn’t automatically invalidate the meaning with which it is endowed by those who gaze upon it. In this sense, the abstract, metaphorical quality of the City becomes a strength, providing comfort to those in dire emotional need.

Even the destruction it wreaks upon the landscape of Altaque is given a marginally more optimistic spin than the portraits of desolation found elsewhere in the anthology, as it’s made clear that new life will be created in place of the old, as opposed to the lingering sensation of total and absolute dissolution that accompanied The Place of All Places or King’s Chamber.

Underneath all the grand philosophical musings and detailed descriptions of improbable industrial landscapes, though, the heart of City of Hammers is to be found in the relationship between Cal and Yanni, a thoughtful and considered exploration of the human desire for connection even in the face of something incomprehensible like the gradual degradation of one’s ability to process the sensory input of the world around them.

It’s tempting to read Yanni’s desire to end her days by becoming a part of the City’s propagation of new life as some sort of comment on euthanasia, particularly since we’re now only about a year out from the arrest of the infamous Doctor Jack Kevorkian for the death of 52-year-old Thomas Youk in September 1998, but in truth any engagement City of Hammers makes with the debate over euthanasia is strictly secondary to its character work and heavily abstracted to boot.

In the end, however, I do think this decision pays off, and it’s hard not to be entranced by the simple story of two old flames who realise too late that their feelings for one another aren’t quite as dead as they thought. Even if you know or have guessed the City’s purpose ahead of time, there remains a certain haunting inevitability in watching Cal slowly realise Yanni’s real reasons for asking him to take her to Altaque.

It might be a very straightforward and familiar kind of tragedy, but it’s all the more effective for that simplicity, and the decision to leaven the heartbreak of the ending with a faint pinch of hope – symbolised aptly in Intka’s gift of a snowglobe to Cal commemorating an earlier moment of connection with Yanni, a gesture equal parts tacky and profound – helps to make City of Hammers another winner. If I seem to have very little to say, that’s only on account of the story’s positive attributes largely speaking for themselves.

5. Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days by Mike O’Driscoll

Well, that’s a title and a half and no mistake, and provides me with a rather fortuitous opportunity to namedrop For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky for the second review in a row. Unfortunately for Mike O’Driscoll, much like that Star Trek episode of old, the title is very much the best part of Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days, and it ultimately ends up becoming the most disappointing story in the collection so far.

This is a particularly ironic state of affairs when one considers its status as a product of the anthology’s most experienced writer so far whose name isn’t Stephen Baxter, with the credits I can find for O’Driscoll on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database stretching back a good eight years to 1989’s Sherringham Brooding.

Certainly, my rather negative feelings on the story should not be misconstrued as an indictment of any kind of dearth of aboutness on O’Driscoll’s part. On the contrary, Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days is positively full to bursting with all manner of grandiose reflections on perennially nineties themes of ennui and anomie, and the human tendency to turn to acts of violence in the simple effort to be able to feel any kind of emotion to offset the creeping sense of emotional disconnect and meaninglessness that plagues them in their everyday lives.

The problem with all of this, as much as there is one, is that these ideas have quite frankly been so thoroughly explored by September 1997 that making these kinds of observations lands one squarely in the same trap of banality and tedium against which they rail so forcefully.

In John Seavey’s 2003 review of Wonders over at Stacey Smith?’s ever-useful Doctor Who Ratings Guide, he draws a comparison to David Fincher’s controversial 1999 adaptation of Fight Club, and while the resemblance is an uncanny one – and Palahniuk’s original novel, bearing a publication date of August 1996, could quite feasibly have influenced O’Driscoll in the course of writing his own short story – it belies the extent to which Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days is really just pulling from a far larger artistic tradition reiterating these sorts of themes.

Reed and Della’s relationship might very well approximate that between Fight Club‘s narrator and Marla, but a flashback sequence to what is presumably an early, drug-fuelled sexual encounter between the two of them also hammers in overtones of the links between sexuality and violence suggested by the couples at the heart of films like Kalifornia or Natural Born Killers, the former of which even cast future Tyler Durden actor Brad Pitt himself in the role of a serial killer.

Even the basic idea of blurring the line between countercultural art and terrorism is nothing new for the New Adventures. Paul Cornell had effectively tackled that theme as well as one was ever likely to back in No Future, and unfortunately for O’Driscoll, it’s a very bad idea indeed to put your short story in a box that openly invites comparison to a Paul Cornell novel, even if it might only be to the weakest of his six New Adventures.

Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days, when you get down to it, is a phenomenally unsubtle work, constantly drawing the audience’s attention to the deeper meaning underlying all the scenes of depravity that have been carefully articulated to push the reader’s emotional buttons. This is, to a certain extent, very much the point, and a case of O’Driscoll allowing form to follow function as a commentary on the sensationalist button-pushing of Honeyman’s own in-universe pieces, but there remains something crass and cheap – to use two of the kinder words I can come up with – in a short story which so casually bandies about references to and extended discussions of pedophilia and necrophilia in service of a deeper meaning that doesn’t extend that much deeper than trying to get a rise out of people.

Even putting aside any elements of moral outrage, there are points at which O’Driscoll just seems plain clunky in his thematic work, like his explicitly namedropping Damien Hirst as a cultural precursor to Honeyman, as if afraid that the audience might not make the connection between the themes of the story and the real-world example of the hubbub caused by The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living at the beginning of the nineties.

The “emplacements” depicting a wry, ghoulish twist on the Zapruder film in which a ghostly, celluloid Kennedy starts taking shots at the neoliberal banality of his Democratic presidential successor might be another instance of Wonders harking back to the cultural beginnings of Doctor Who, but it also feels like a nod to the infamous recurring conceptualisation of the Kennedy assassination as akin to a sporting event or an act of sexuality throughout J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition.

And that, really, is the heart of the issue. It’s not quite accurate to suggest that there are absolutely no worthwhile observations left to make on the subjects that O’Driscoll is so blatantly chomping at the bit to be let loose on. Sure, as I said, by September 1997 it’s getting harder and harder to find those observations of worth, but they definitely still exist.

I’m quite a big fan of Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool, for instance, which deliberately blurs the line between the poetic and pornographic, and which shares Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days‘ central subject matter of a dubious creative partnership that causes a nationwide debate over the artistic worth of its products. In fact, the film had its premiere at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival just eleven days before Wonders hit the shelves.

But like all good Hartley films, it’s characterised by a knowing sense of humour, even as the dialogue might tend to the ludicrously over-choreographed. Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days is similarly overwritten, but any ironic content which might be wrung out of a piece being constructed to be “deliberately bad” – and really, as creative gambits go, that’s one that can only carry you so far before you start to need something else with which to garnish your post-post-ironic detachment-fuelled commentary on detachment – is simply sunk by the sheer po-facedness and unoriginality of the story.

I mean really, what am I supposed to make of a line like “My head felt fuzzy and washed out, full of yearning for something else that I thought might be her understanding,” if not the wry observation that the line between worthwhile art that takes on the stylings of bad prose and mere bad prose would seem to be much thinner than O’Driscoll imagines?

Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days is a piece with no shortage of ideas, but for once that ends up being a vice rather than a virtue. Even within the context of Wonders as a collection, O’Driscoll’s central premise of “What if the ‘wonder’ we felt was derived from more negative emotions?” rings alarmingly hollow when placed against the more pessimistic attitude adopted towards the concept of “the Wonders of the Universe” in stories like Poyekhali 3201 and King’s Chamber.

The only thing I’m left wondering, after concluding the story, is whether the conceptual well is already beginning to run a little dry, or if this story will ultimately just end up being an anomalous blip in an otherwise solid collection. Either way, neither conclusion leads me any closer towards actively enjoying Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days, and it’s the first story of the anthology that I felt negatively disposed towards.

Really, you should just go and watch Henry Fool instead.

6. The Judgement of Solomon by Lawrence Miles

Just as Continuity Errors should come to be the one Decalog short story that predominates over all the others by virtue of its marking the first engagement with Doctor Who of one of the revival’s most talented writers, The Judgement of Solomon is inevitably the story within Wonders that will draw the most attention.

For one thing, it’s written by Lawrence Miles, in that brief period after Down made everyone realise that he had it in him to be a very good writer indeed, but before Alien Bodies revealed that he could simultaneously be very influential. For another, it’s the story with the strongest connection to the established Doctor Who universe across Wonders, being only the second of three occasions on which Miles would write for the character of Bernice Summerfield, and the last for a little over a decade.

On the basis of quality alone, this is a bit of a shame, as the collection has actually been doing rather well for itself thus far, and it’s tough to sincerely argue that The Judgement of Solomon manages to meaningfully better stories like King’s Chamber or City of Hammers. Nevertheless, the fact that the story features one of the most popular New Adventures characters will lead it, without fail, to be held to “count” in a more tangible way than all the preceding stories put together.

To give Miles his due, we ought to once again note that he remains an undeniably talented writer, and even in reading a slightly sub-par effort by the standards of Lawrence Miles, one can be assured of some extremely clever ideas and a greater level of formal experimentation than one generally expects from the baseline of Doctor Who tie-in fiction. It would, in short, be the height of churlishness to complain about The Judgement of Solomon “just” offering extremely clever ideas and some nifty experimentation with form.

And yet…

It’s entirely possible that Miles might just be the kind of writer who doesn’t work very well in the truncated medium of the short story. He certainly wouldn’t be the first, and this is a notion that would seem to track with his general reputation as a writer of capital B Big Ideas. If Miles had enough ideas to warrant so much of Down ending up on the cutting room floor, and the unprecedented and never-repeated splitting of Interference into a two-volume epic, it seems fair to wonder whether he would be best served by a more short-form medium.

Certainly, the ideas at the heart of The Judgement of Solomon are sound enough. Much as Down was best read as an autopsy of the problematic underpinnings of B-movie adventure fiction, it’s quite clear that Miles has constructed his latest short story as a refutation of what he sees as the overly teleological and deterministic attitude toward technology in much of science fiction.

Travelling back to eighth-century Baghdad by means kept deliberately vague, Bernice aims to disprove the claims made by one of her fellow academics as to the people of the era having invented rudimentary electrical batteries. Predictably, she not only finds herself confronted with evidence of the batteries, but with a vast panoply of other seemingly anachronistic mechanical devices besides, most prominent of which is a mysterious brass automaton that alternates between recounting Benny’s own recent adventures and an Arabian Nights-inspired tale purporting to reveal how King Solomon cast down an irrational, djinn-ruled City of Brass.

The point of the exercise would seem to be twofold. On the one hand, it’s a reiteration of Miles’ basic sympathy for a more overtly “magical” conception of Doctor Who, as previously expressed through concepts like the Carnival Queen or MEPHISTO which are rather difficult to square away with the ostensibly rationalist approach favoured by vast swathes of the series’ fandom on account of its perceived science fiction credentials. In his own way, Miles frequently seems to feel just as regretful at the perceived erosion of the strange and magical corners of the world as any episode of Twin Peaks or The X-Files.

One might quite fairly argue that these ideas are building to their most memorable expression, Faction Paradox, and there are, as ever, numerous passages that read rather differently in the light of Alien Bodies, whether that be the suggestion that Solomon trapped the enemy city in a bottle or the resonance of the city’s gargoyle-like defences with the Celestis’ realm of Mictlan.

But underneath all this, we’re also treated to a pretty coherent account of Miles’ view of history. That was, in effect, what a large part of Christmas on a Rational Planet was already concerned with, but here we’re treated to the Cliff notes version, if you will: the idea that there is some straightforwardly linear progression to history is held to be fallacious at best, and there’s no grounds for the pretentious supposition that the present moment is inherently technologically or culturally superior to “lesser” civilisations.

Now, as I say, it’s hard to fault Miles too much here. In fact, much like Down, he’s making some very astute criticisms of science fiction as a genre. Admittedly, much like Down, they’re criticisms that have been made by anybody who’s ever seen a single Prime Directive-heavy episode of one of the later Star Trek shows, where the principle that originally boiled down to “Maybe we should try not to do another Vietnam War” was arbitrarily reframed as a justification for why it was OK to let certain species die out because they hadn’t yet invented a magical piece of space technology.

It’s an attitude that ironically ends up looping back around to the very kind of cultural imperialism that the Directive’s original formulation sought to prevent, and even if Miles is far from the first one to call it out, he manages to do it in a reasonably novel fashion. A cynic might suspect, particularly given the common Middle Eastern setting shared by the two stories, that this was part of why Miles went on to react so poorly to what he saw as Kate Orman’s alleged advancement in Walking to Babylon of the thesis that the arc of history bends towards the viewpoint of the middle-class, twentieth century liberal feminist.

While we’ll save that particular debate for another time, however, it’s worth looking at what Miles thinks accounts for the nonlinear progression of human technology and the relegation of supposed “anachronisms” to the status of “wonders,” at least within the fictional world of The Judgement of Solomon. In a rather wicked subversion of Clarke’s Law, Miles makes it plain that the Vizier is fully aware that the confiscated technological oddments are not the product of dark magic, but simply of unfamiliar sciences. The reason for the Caliph’s pronounced technophobia stems not from some inbuilt superstition, but simply from what Miles holds to be the innate desire of political leaders to arrest drastic changes wherever possible. As with most of Miles’ attempts at big, Earth-shattering political statements, it’s not necessarily that this is wholly untrue, but it’s simply not nearly as insightful as he seems to believe it is.

In other words, we’re ultimately right back where we ended up with Down, only without the leeway afforded Miles on account of that novel’s “Break out of established systems” prescription not being a platform with the implicit goal of bringing about some kind of meaningful political change.

Stripped of any of the more interesting characters – or, more often, high-minded science fiction concepts wearing a loosely-fitting character-sized skin suit – that usually elevate Miles’ full-length novels, then, we’re left with a rather facile view of history wrapped up in a vaguely experimental package. Whatever one might say about Walking to Babylon, and I suspect I won’t really know what I’m going to say until I actually get there, Kate Orman’s view of history, on the basis of past form, is at the bare minimum generally more sophisticated than that on display in The Judgement of Solomon.

That’s not to say that The Judgement of Solomon is a complete waste of space. Far from it; as with Down, Miles has a gift for capturing the voice and attitude of Bernice Summerfield that really make you wish he wrote for the character more often, and the story veritably whizzes by despite its forty-page length being the second-longest in the collection. If nothing else, it’s a welcome change of pace from the self-seriousness of Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days, but it fails to be the revelatory spark that shows off the full potential of what we could feasibly have expected from a straightforward solo Benny anthology.

It doesn’t have to be a revelatory spark, necessarily, but the fact that it isn’t smacks more than a little of missed potential.

7. The Milk of Human Kindness by Liz Sourbut

Hmm. Right. I mean, that’s definitely… one of the things I’ve had to read for this project.

The Milk of Human Kindness is… God help me, let’s just get right to it: this is the story where havoc is wrought upon the world by a rogue virus that causes everyone, men and women alike, to start spontaneously lactating to death. As far as premises go, it’s no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most out-there I’ve had to contend with in the six years that I’ve been doing this, and it feels like it belongs more firmly in the realm of weird, fetishistic id vortex fanzines than it does in a professionally published collection of short stories. Certainly, its connections to the theme of “Wonders” seem so tangential as to be almost non-existent.

Superficially, The Milk of Human Kindness works well enough. It certainly succeeds in its apparent goal of unnerving the reader, and manages to gesture at some vaguely progressive and substantive commentary on the arbitrariness of gender roles. And yet, underneath all the apocalyptic imagery and body horror, it’s tough for me to shake the feeling that there remains something ever so slightly unnerving and reactionary at the heart of Liz Sourbut’s story, even as I freely admit that it seems quite plausibly unintentional.

It seems fair to suggest that The Milk of Human Kindness is, by and large, shooting for a feminist reading of its central themes, with the virus effectively serving as a shock to the societal system and forcing the inhabitants of its fictional world – and, by extension, the reader themselves – to ask some potentially probing questions about the division of labour along gender lines in situations of child-rearing. It is, one might remark, something of a limit case for this style of allegorical science fiction, if only because of the premise’s sheer peculiarity, but if nothing else, Sourbut’s intentions are quite plain on this point.

Yet somewhere along the way, subtle shades of nastiness creep into the story’s portrayal of its extremely singular apocalypse. Even saying “somewhere along the way” is perhaps a bit misleading, however, as the problems present themselves from the very first scene, thanks to its decision to introduce its “everybody’s lactating” premise through scenes of Roger, an Iowan farmer who believes strongly in the need for his newborn daughter to be breast-fed, despite the protestations of his wife Rachael.

And it’s Roger that provides the best opportunity to see the problems underpinning The Milk of Human Kindness in action. All throughout, Sourbut practically luxuriates in the fundamental “wrongness” of the image of a man lactating, in what feels like a rather transparent attempt to push the audience’s buttons, exemplified by the decision to only ever use the word “tits” in reference to Roger, as if to underscore the idea that his situation is in some sense more worthy of a visceral reaction of disgust.

Furthermore, it’s Roger who goes through the most pronounced and prolonged mental deterioration, turning violent and feral when confronted with the admittedly weird and fucked-up situation of his teenage neighbour attempting to breastfeed his daughter. Sure, it’s his wife who eventually kills said neighbour – and it’s around here that I’m really going to need to stress, for those of you who have had the good fortune not to have read the story, that I’m not making any of these events up – but it’s Roger who gets the big angry blow-up scene.

Hell, we’re not even two pages into the story before we’re explicitly informed that Roger considers the sensation of breast-feeding to be better than sex, implying that there’s some sort of weirdly predatory sexual impulse tied up in the character’s desire to breastfeed his own child, which is all shades of “ick.” Actually, it manages to spontaneously invent so many new and repugnant shades of “ick” that the Dulux paint dog has just decided to pack it in and die of a massive coronary.

My problem, beyond that general “ick” factor, is… well, let’s be frank, it’s hard to read a story by a British author in which a man suddenly acquires breasts and the ability to lactate and promptly sets about behaving in a violent and predatory fashion without thinking to myself “Hmm, is this a little bit transphobic?”, even with the broadly progressive feminist message. In fact, considering the tendency of self-professed “radical feminists” to make up the loudest and most vociferous transphobes, the attempt at a broadly progressive feminist message arguably just makes things more alarming, from a certain point of view.

Sourbut seems to try and deflate any possible reading of Roger’s journey as in any way analogous to a trans identity by having the character refute Rachael’s suggestion that he “wants to be a woman,” but A. this is really just an instance of the classic Hitchcock-Harris defence – i.e. flawlessly echoing the beats of transphobic narratives while half-heartedly hedging against the idea that the character at the centre of the story is “really” trans or whatever – and B. even this measly defence is further kneecapped when it’s followed shortly thereafter by a comment on Roger’s resemblance to, and I quote, “a transsexual Madonna.”

Even in its handling of its female characters, The Milk of Human Kindness feels rather more essentialist than one might expect of a story of this nature. One receives the impression that the story puts some credence in the notion of a fundamental maternal instinct in all women, and that it’s wrong to try and pervert or meddle with that instinct. The central lesson of Rachael’s character arc, when you get down to it, would seem to be a warning against the dangers of hubristically tampering with the “natural order of things” and genetically modifying livestock, which carries a none-too-subtle and none-too-pleasant parallel when applied to a woman whose only major trait besides her scientific work is her refusal to breastfeed her daughter.

There are other flaws, because of course there are. There’s something rather lazy and condescending in the decision to link the unease felt at the perceived impending “emasculation” of the world’s men with Islamic fundamentalists in areas of the developing world like Tajikistan and Kenya. Sure, there are demonstrable issues to talk about with regards to, say, Islam and women’s rights, but it’s not as if Christianity – to which Roger would seem to adhere, at least if his repeated entreaties to “the Lord” are anything to go by – is some virtuous paragon of feminism and gender equality either. Curiously, though, Christianity doesn’t get singled out in the same fashion.

More basically than all that, though, the story just kind of… ends. It’s not open-ended in the usual horror movie sense of “Will they make the antidote in time or won’t they, oooooooh?” or whatever, the story just stops in the middle of a random scene that doesn’t feel especially climactic or meaningful. It was almost enough to make me wonder if I’d somehow wound up with a copy with a printing error or missing pages or something, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The Milk of Human Kindness is a basically functional read, but even once you get past the strangeness of the premise, there remains a disconcerting sense of something ugly lurking at the story’s very core. It’s one of the strangest and most uncomfortable reads I’ve ever had to sit through in the course of Dale’s Ramblings, but not in the way I think Sourbut was intending.

8. Bibliophage by Stephen Marley

I was actually rather fond of Stephen Marley’s first and only full-length Doctor Who novel, Managra. Even if I’d be the first to admit that the writer’s rather idiosyncratic blend of dark comedy, Gothic imagery and copious references to a wide range of classic literary works was the very definition of an “acquired taste,” it was still distinctive and zany enough that I found the knowledge of his never again writing for the franchise in any long-form capacity vaguely disappointing.

Since that time, I’ve had the pleasure of reading both of Marley’s contributions to Virgin’s line of Judge Dredd novels, and while Dread Dominion suffered a little from its need to set up and resolve an entire alternate timeline in the space of a 200-odd page novel, I found Dreddlocked to be an unjustly forgotten film noir-tinged classic that departed from the Dredd line’s usual milieu in favour of something much stranger. I also managed to find copies of all three books in the Chia Black Dragon trilogy, and I might even get around to reading them some day.

Suffice it to say, then, that while there were other stories in the collection that I was looking forward to on account of their having a notable author (Poyekhali 3201 and The Judgement of Solomon), an unhinged premise (The Milk of Human Kindness), or just being obscenely long (Negative Space, not to get too far ahead of myself), Bibliophage was perhaps the story in which I was most interested on account of my own particular taste in Doctor Who fiction.

Thankfully enough, Marley has managed to live up to my expectations and then some, crafting a fast-moving tale of staggering wit and creativity, packed to bursting with inventive and playful concepts. With all its talk of memory worms wreaking ontological havoc in a vast, interdimensional library whose corridors are patrolled by strange, unseen forces, comparisons to the work of another more famous Steven are all but inevitable, but for once the object of this juxtaposition measures up rather nicely indeed.

Even putting aside our foreknowledge of Silence in the Library/Forest of the DeadBibliophage‘s library-bound setting (pun very much intentional) cannot help but evoke Moffat’s Continuity Errors, and the idea of “ontological vanishing” slots nicely alongside that story’s meditations on the Doctor’s rewriting of Andrea Talwinning’s personal history, itself a harbinger of the general ethos of “Time can be rewritten.”

As you’d probably expect from the writer of Managra, however, Marley proves rather more interested in the library as a setting unto itself. It would be all too easy to turn a review of Bibliophage into a list of clever concepts and gags, and one is truly spoilt for choice: the idea of travelling the vast differences of the Omnilibrarium by quite literally cross-referencing one’s self, the Unread Fiction section where any of the books therein will instantly refile themselves to another part of the library upon being read, or the mind-bending and potentially apocalyptic splendour of the Infinite Regress Department.

Underneath all the humour and fast-paced creativity, however, Bibliophage manages to become the first piece in a while to hammer home the idea of an apocalypse whose effects seem peculiarly confined to the realm of fiction and literature itself, perhaps reflecting its placement at the narrow end of the anthology.

Marley is hardly subtle in his linking of the fate of potential erasure with which Reginald Forthman is confronted to the current predicament of the Virgin novels themselves, with a reference to “some obscure SF anthology called Dogleg 5” and the presence in the Unread Fiction section of a book which quite plainly quotes Managra‘s “The name of the rose is Eros” seeming to suggest a lurking cognizance of the possibility that the Virgin era of Doctor Who might wind up just as forgotten as the countless biographies consumed by Obald the Omnivorous.

As we’ve been hammering home for quite a while now, this is certainly what ended up happening in one sense, especially to these later, Doctorless outings, but the cultivation of new talent over the span of the six years from Genesys to The Dying Days helped to ensure that the spirit of the era would live on, and largely prevent Marley’s more pessimistic conclusions from coming to pass.

The characters of Forthman and Pik Lim themselves are similarly entertaining, if a little broadly drawn. Then again, it’s not every day that you find a story headlined by a priggish gentlemanly adventurer and a foul-mouthed Buddhist nun, so Bibliophage can largely scrape by on novelty if nothing else. Marley also cheekily blurs the line with regards to which of the duo is the sidekick, in another spot of storytelling which can’t help but seem rather pointed in light of Clara’s general arc.

Really, the only thing that mars my enjoyment of the story is the sense that Marley is a little too eager to dwell on descriptions of Lim’s scanty clothing, exhibiting an uncomfortable level of focus on the character’s underwear. Certainly, part of this fixation can potentially be handwaved as a means of conveying Forthman’s rather caddish attitude towards women, but it nevertheless brings to mind memories of Marley’s insistence on having Sarah Jane spend the first quarter of Managra in a skimpy bikini for rather dubious reasons.

Even with that caveat, Bibliophage is one of the highlights of Wonders and of the Decalogs as a whole. After a string of stories that fell short in one respect or another, it’s nice to see Marley reassure the reader that there’s life in the series yet, even if any injection of vigour he manages to provide seems destined to prove short-lived with only three stories to go.

9. Negative Space by Jeanne Cavelos

Jeanne Cavelos is one of Wonders‘ more interesting authors, even if, like so many of her colleagues in the anthology, her career never went on to intersect with Doctor Who in any more substantive fashion. Indeed, it’s reasonably easy to trace where her involvement with this collection probably came about, as she had helped launch Dell Publishing’s series of Babylon 5 novels, a range to which Wonders co-editor Jim Mortimore had contributed the fourth book, Clark’s Law. Cavelos herself wrote April 1997’s The Shadow Within, and she would return to the magical world of J. Michael Straczynski with the publication of 2001’s Technomage Trilogy.

In marginally less fiction-based pursuits, meanwhile, Cavelos would draw upon her background in astrophysics – having previously worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center – to compile The Science of the X-Files in November 1998, followed six months later by The Science of Star Wars. In fact, it was in the latter book, depending on who you ask, that the writer coined the phrase “May the Fourth be with you.”

(I only prove so non-committal on this point, mind you, on account of the phrase’s Wikipedia article citing its prior usage in sources as diverse as an advertisement congratulating Margaret Thatcher on her victory in the 1979 general election, a 1994 defence debate in which Labour MP Harry Cohen labelled the pun “a very bad joke,” and… a 1988 episode of Count Duckula, because variety is the spice of life and all that, I suppose.)

Reading Negative Space, and admitting that I know very little about Babylon 5 once we set aside Simon Pegg’s joking declaration in Spaced that it’s “a big pile of shit,” it seems eminently clear that Cavelos has opted to pull from the well of scientific grounding rather than the grandiose space opera stylings of Straczynski’s famed “novel for television.” This impression is only further cemented at the very end of the story, with the author setting aside an acknowledgment section to set out the litany of scientists with whom she conferred in an effort to ensure verisimilitude with the basic laws of physics.

What we’re dealing with here, then, is quite plainly the first substantive instance of Wonders dabbling in hard science fiction since Poyekhali 3201. Sure, the wonder at the heart of the story takes on a slightly more fantastical hue in embracing its premise of “sculptures that are finely tuned so as to evoke an almost Lovecraftian sense of despair and horror at one’s insignificance in the universe,” but even this is really just a more extreme version of Baxter’s hammering in of the universe’s overwhelming emptiness and hostility.

Moreover, vast chunks of Negative Space are given over to speculative scientific discussions and attempts to understand the physics underpinning the sculptures; in other words, even the story’s more outlandish elements are slotted comfortably into the aesthetic logic of hard science fiction.

Discussion of “vast chunks” of Negative Space, of course, brings us to the story’s other notable aspect. At a whopping fifty-two pages in length, it’s handily the longest piece in the collection, and considering the anthology numbers 313 pages all up, this means that nearly a sixth of those pages are given over to the one story. It’s hardly a great surprise that Cavelos’ is the only story in Wonders to be labelled as a “novella” on the ISFDB, and one of only three stories to merit such a designation across the entirety of the Decalogs.

(The others, if you were wondering, are The Trials of Tara and Dependence Day.)

The main problem with Negative Space, such as it is, boils down to the impression that the story simply never manages to fully justify this extreme length. It feels silly to complain about characterisation in a story which we’ve already identified as hard science fiction, given how unconcerned that particular artistic movement tends to be with such paltry matters, but even the basic ideas at play here don’t feel especially incendiary.

The most obvious critique one can level here is to note that somebody, somewhere, should probably have piped up and said that the basic idea of “art that makes you feel really strong negative emotions” was perhaps a bit too similar to Painting the Age with the Beauty of Our Days, but even the questions of humanity’s tendency to anthropomorphise and project their own cultural and technological assumptions onto other societies have been touched upon before in stories as diverse as King’s ChamberBibliophageCity of Hammers and The Judgement of Solomon.

Crucially, those stories tended to do them in ways that were considerably more interesting, whether that be the tragic relationship between Cal and Yanni, or the ambiguity of an unbelievably complex automaton in eighth-century Baghdad.

It’s difficult to resist the temptation to draw a line under Negative Space and suggest that, like Wonders itself, the story offers a limit case for what can be considered “Doctor Who.” After all, the number of stories in the franchise’s history that could plausibly be labelled “hard science fiction” is actually vanishingly small, and of those stories that might fit the bill if you look at them from the right angle, the hard science fiction trappings are generally just one facet of a much larger and weirder whole.

Poyekhali 3201 and Negative Space come closer than just about any previous examples, but crucially, they had to exist in a collection which all but jettisoned any preconceptions about being connected to Doctor Who in order to do it. It’s not that hard science fiction is necessarily diametrically opposed to what Doctor Who usually does, but rather that one’s ability to meaningfully construct a science fiction tale that pays more attention to the “science” part of the equation is inevitably curtailed somewhat when it’s done in the context of a show that revolves around a shape-changing, functionally immortal alien who goes around fighting genocidal pepperpots across all of time and space in a 1960s British police box.

There’s probably a rather good hard science fiction novel to be had in the basic premise of Negative Space, and indeed the writing is actually rather good and at times rather beautiful. But when read for our purposes, as a part of the ongoing narrative of the Wilderness Years, it simply provides us with a handy sign denoting one of many roads not taken.

Robert Frost could never.

10. Dome of Whispers by Ian Watson

From the longest story in the collection to the shortest, clocking in at just twelve pages. Indeed, Dome of Whispers is something of an oddity, being by all indications the only Decalog story ever to be a reprint of an author’s earlier work.

In this case, writer Ian Watson – perhaps most famous these days to general audiences for his work on the plot of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, for which he retains a credit in the finished film – apparently opted to reach back some fourteen years to the September 1983 issue of TSR’s Imagine, a short-lived magazine dedicated to coverage of Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that a cursory spot of research tells me also played host to Featherquest, the first professionally published short story by Neil Gaiman.

In reality, this knowledge isn’t actually quite as helpful as it appears, as I don’t really have any surefire way of knowing what changes Watson made from the original – and it seems apparent that there were, indeed, changes, at least if my reading of the collection providing two different copyright dates for the story is accurate – without being willing to significantly delay this post and spend more money than I’d like to on a forty-year-old copy of an obscure tabletop gaming magazine for the sake of a single twelve-page story.

Neverrtheless, it’s quite apparent that Dome of Whispers is a bit of an odd fit for Wonders. Even setting aside its low page count, the whole piece has the distinct bouquet of a short story from a magazine, the kind of smell that clings to stuff like Doctor Who Magazine‘s Brief Encounter series or the Preludes that they did for each of the New Adventures way, way back.

It’s the type of short story that would feel perfectly adequate as a stopgap between pieces desperately salivating over the rumours of a new Doctor’s casting, or an independent production company’s interest in making a new Doctor Who series, or… well, whatever the equivalent pieces of routine journalism would have been for an official Dungeons & Dragons magazine in the mid-1980s. Placed in the context of an anthology that generally likes to keep up the pretence of shooting for something a bit more substantial, however, it can’t help but feel ever so slightly disappointing.

The actual plot of Dome of Whispers is stunningly straightforward. A mysterious visitor shows up at the eponymous Dome, where any sound made echoes around the structure’s walls for all eternity. When he gets questioned by one of the Dome’s guardians as to his reasons for visiting, he reveals that he’s descended from a long-dead Emperor who allegedly spoke the co-ordinates of a planet that he determined to be Paradise within the Dome’s walls.

About a page after this infodump, the visitor manages to find the Emperor’s echo, which essentially boils down to “There actually isn’t a Paradise planet, sorry about that, mb.” Naturally, he’s a bit annoyed about this whole thing, and decides to crash his ship into the Dome, releasing the whispers into the wider world and inverting the situation so that the structure is now the only place on the planet where one can find any silence whatsoever.

I hope you’ll forgive my blatant lapse into mere plot summary as a means of review, but there really isn’t that much to work with, because Dome of Whispers simply isn’t set up to support the kind of overly intense scrutiny I usually try to foolhardily bring to these sorts of occasions. The idea of a building that provides people across the millennia with a form of posthumous immortality is an interesting one, but City of Hammers still managed to touch upon similar ground in a much more affecting manner, so it’s going to take a bit more than that for me to be willing to sink my teeth in here.

There’s maybe the faintest shadow of topicality in the suggestion that the planet Suf has witnessed an “End of History” in a Fukuyaman sense, with the Dome’s guardians awaiting an Event that will bring back the straightforward linearity of history. All of this gets particularly eerie when the Event in question turns out to be a vehicle hitting a very big building, but even here any attempt we might make to spin this as a prophetic echo of the end of the long nineties with 9/11 is hampered somewhat by the fact that the story was originally written some six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Much like Negative SpaceDome of Whispers is mainly significant for its unintentionally highlighting the limitations of the Decalog as a place for wholly original science fiction. If scrounging together the requisite ten stories left Leonard and Mortimore with no choice but to reprint a fourteen-year-old throwaway story from a cancelled D&D magazine, then it’s hardly shocking that there was never a sixth Decalog.

The least they could have done was reprint Featherquest

11. Waters-of-Starlight by Stephen Marley

The most striking thing about Waters-of-Starlight, the first and only Decalog story to share its author with another story in the same collection – though it would become considerably more common over the course of BBC Books’ Short Trips series – is just how different it is in tone from Bibliophage. While the wonder at the centre of the story certainly doesn’t skimp on imagination, the only particularly pronounced spot of traditional Marley wackiness is a short, isolated sequence of Old River Woman being menaced by a living marble statue of Apollo dressed in a black evening suit and patent leather shoes.

That aside, Waters-of-Starlight is largely a pretty sober and sombre affair for the bulk of its length. Indeed, it’s downright apocalyptic, and while ideas of apocalypse have hung over just about every story in the collection, never before have they found expression in a manner quite as fundamental as this.

There’s a very simple reason for this, of course, as the finest moments of the story seem almost to play out the arc of these final Decalogs in microcosm, and indeed the arc of the Virgin books as a whole. The titular Waters-of-Starlight, a vast, incomprehensible river composed of the stories and memories of an entire culture and linking every point in time and space, is ultimately pure metaphor, and a rather transparent one at that.

Throughout the story, Marley stresses the idea of the Waters-of-Starlight gradually vanishing and effectively causing a kind of widespread, universal collapse, and with its nature being firmly rooted in ideas of storytelling, the parallels with the Virgin line’s current ignominious and drawn-out end practically write themselves.

Early on, the villainous Pale Wolf reflects of the growing irrelevance of the traditional methods of recording history and judging the passage of time, “What’s the point? Everything has been said and done a million times. What’s there to do in the twilight of the Great World of galaxies and nebulae but dance and hunt and play?”, and it’s hard not to wonder if the writers remaining at Virgin might feel the same.

With their main claim to legitimacy as the future of Doctor Who having been practically stripped away by the dictates of cold, hard economics in the wake of the TV movie, there would probably be a certain strong appeal in adopting a generally nihilistic or cynical attitude towards the series’ long-term prospects. Indeed, considering the New Adventures would come to an end barely two years after the publication of Wonders, the intervening years have probably only made it all the easier to side with this view.

Initially, River Woman’s arc seems to be gesturing at an embrace of this gloomy mindset. Setting out to fulfil a pact she made with her dead husband, she journeys up the Waters-of-Starlight to reach the river’s source, travelling backwards in both space and time even as she accepts that she has no idea what awaits her there. Even the possibility of total oblivion doesn’t particularly faze her, and she views it as preferable to remaining in a world without her beloved, perhaps obliquely reflecting the feelings of many a New Adventures writer on the prospect of continuing to work at Virgin despite the loss of the Doctor Who license.

Slowly but surely, however, Waters-of-Starlight sets about refuting this idea. The “crack in the world” is eventually revealed to be the Big Bang, and although River Woman’s internal monologue suggests that the traditional conception of that particular event as the beginning of the universe neglects to consider the possibility that it is also the universe’s end, it’s simultaneously suggested that it is an essential truth that the two interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

(I’d also be remiss if I didn’t comment that here, as in Bibliophage, all Marley’s talk of cracks in the universe and the Big Bang resonates very strongly with Moffat once again.)

In other words, the barrier between life and death is not necessarily as clear-cut as we might think, and what might initially appear to be an agent of apocalypse and dissolution can in fact bring about something altogether stranger. It’s worth noting that, in stepping out of the world in a very literal sense, River Woman cements her connection to the beginning of Doctor Who itself. After all, it could quite convincingly be argued that the foundation of the series is to be found in Ian and Barbara falling out of the world and into the TARDIS all the way back in An Unearthly Child, an event which echoes throughout every subsequent companion’s introduction.

This gets at the real beauty of Waters-of-Starlight, and the aspect which makes it a perfect note on which to close the Decalogs down, even if some at Virgin may have entertained the vanishingly small hope that Wonders‘ sales might have been strong enough to consider a sixth instalment. When River Woman finally makes it out of the Great World, against all the odds, she finds herself confronted not with oblivion, but merely with transformation.

The inhabitants of the World who left it in the time of primal myth – an idea which seems to unconsciously hearken forward to similar suggestions about the Time Lords in Dead Romance and Interference – have only declined to return on account of their having become something so impossibly vast that their former home can no longer feasibly contain them.

It is, perhaps, possible to suggest that this is rather self-important on the Decalogs’ part, as if to suggest that the series’ stepping outside the bounds of traditional Doctor Who renders it “superior” to BBC Books’ contemporary efforts, but whatever one thinks of the relative merits of the two lines – and for my money, Waters-of-Starlight alone is bolder and more creative than anything the Eighth/Past Doctor Adventures have done as of yet – I think this element of potential hubris is offset against a quiet acceptance of the possibility that the Virgin line was due to fade in relevance from this point forward. Moreover, I’m willing to excuse a little bit of arrogance in light of just how good vast swathes of Virgin’s output really were.

As a final note, the extent to which Waters-of-Starlight leans on a Native American aesthetic gave me pause for thought initially, given the difficulties which frequently plagued nineties genre fiction when it tried to play in that conceptual space, but Marley manages to turn in one of the better examples of the form.

There’s little of the clumsiness evident in Voyager‘s misguided consultation of the controversial Jamake Highwater – whose claims to Cherokee ancestry had been exposed as fraudulent as early as the 1980s – in the representation of Chakotay’s Native American culture, and Marley’s understanding of the concept of the manitou certainly seems to hew closer to real-world Algonquian beliefs than Marilyn Osborn’s retrofitting it to serve a genericised Western werewolf myth in The X-Files‘ Shapes.

Of course, “making something that isn’t flagrantly offensive and/or outright inaccurate” shouldn’t be an especially difficult bar to clear, but it frequently seemed more difficult than one would hope in the context of nineties media, so it’s nice to be able to see a generally respectful take on the subject matter.

Waters-of-Starlight is a welcome return to form after a short string of lacklustre stories, and ensures that the Decalogs can claim to have bowed out with their head held high. It remains a crying shame that Marley never returned to the world of Doctor Who until he wrote a few scattered pieces for Obverse Books’ Faction Paradox and The City of the Saved lines, but between Bibliophage and Waters-of-Starlight, his efforts certainly number among the highlights of Wonders.

Final Thoughts

So those were the Decalogs, folks. In spite of everything, I do think it would have been nice to see a sixth volume, as there’s some real promise in the approach suggested by Wonders, but in light of the financial realities of this sort of publishing, the necessary interest simply wasn’t there.

In hindsight, it probably would have been smarter to centre the anthology around an established character like Bernice. When interviewed for Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, Lawrence Miles even suggests that the original intent for The Judgement of Solomon upon his initial commission was that it would be one of many Bernice Summerfield stories, and the success of Big Finish’s subsequent anthologies suggests that the character lends herself readily to that kind of treatment.

Still, regardless of the financial sense – or lack thereof – of Leonard and Mortimore’s editorial decisions, they generally managed to keep the collection ticking over smoothly and created a compelling continuity of tone and emotion rather than of narrative. Wonders is a worthy addition to the Decalogs, and a reminder that we could probably wander even further into the weeds of the Wilderness Years and still find some worthwhile stuff amidst the mess. In the interests of completing Dale’s Ramblings in my lifetime, though, I think it’s reasonable to draw a line here and mark this as a spot beyond which we will tread no further.

With all of that being said, I hope you’ll join me next time as we return to something resembling regular programming, and Paul Leonard makes his second consecutive appearance to bring us the return of Jo Grant in Genocide. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

Virgin New Adventures Reviews: Down by Lawrence Miles (or, “Hell Is Other People”)

You may recall, if you care to cast your mind back some two months and nine books ago, that I opened my review of Dragons’ Wrath by tackling head-on the question of how strongly one should allow their retroactive foreknowledge of an author’s future works to colour their perceptions of the earlier parts of their oeuvre.

In so doing, I also set up what I viewed to be a helpful distinction between those authors who benefit from this hindsight-gleaned clarity by virtue of the sheer magnitude of their influence on the shape of Doctor Who‘s future, and those who simply stuck around for so long that their every novel achieves an aura with an uncanny resemblance to what we might term “significance.” If it was this latter camp into which we placed Justin Richards, then Lawrence Miles probably represents the most prominent example of the other side of the proverbial coin, and there is no better demonstration of this phenomenon in action than Down, the second of the writer’s three contributions to the New Adventures.

It’s hardly controversial or groundbreaking to observe that Miles is an author defined in the collective memory of fandom primarily by his contributions to the BBC Books line, and particularly by Alien Bodies. For all that his novels are filled to the brim with cuttingly witty retorts and downright insane concepts, the ideas which lingered longest and shaped the course of the EDAs – and, consequently, set the ambient temperature of Doctor Who as a whole for a good year or two, even by the most conservative of estimates – were those that could trace their lineage back to that venerable tome.

(Granted, for the purposes of this thought experiment we’re setting aside the quite frankly entirely reasonable alternative perspective on Miles’ legacy, in which he’s remembered primarily for his general interview persona, which could be charitably characterised as “standoffish,” and less charitably – and, I concede, possibly somewhat more realistically – as simple, childish and vindictive contempt for those writers who played with his concepts in a way that met with his disapproval.)

Dead Romance‘s infamous “universe in a bottle” cosmology was divisive and Earth-shattering, sure, but it was perfunctorily foreshadowed by an offhand line in Alien Bodies. The debt owed by Interference to Miles’ debut EDA was altogether more obvious, with the grand, two-volume epic expanding upon some of its predecessor’s more attention-grabbing concepts such as the Gallifreyan voodoo cult of Faction Paradox and the looming War in Heaven, while dropping further hints about the mysterious, unknowable Enemy and continuing to double down on the bottled universes.

Even after Stephen Cole and Peter Anghelides tried to square away the labyrinthine bulk of the War and the weight of its accrued mythology in The Ancestor CellThe Adventuress of Henrietta Street firmly established the EDAs’ post-Gallifrey mythology as arising out of the ashes of the old order like some ghastly, amnesia-plagued phoenix.

Not even Miles’ pre-Alien Bodies work can escape the novel’s inexorable gravity, with Christmas on a Rational Planet more likely to be discussed in terms of the release of Grandfather Paradox than for its own, more particular set of ideas. Which, given that one of those ideas was to establish the supposed irrationality and superstition of the feminine mind as some kind of fundamental ordering principle of the universe, might not actually be such a bad thing looking back.

In many respects, then, Down is the novel most negatively affected by the overpowering influence of Alien Bodies. This is not, I hasten to add, tantamount to a declaration that it is disliked as such. Going by the Sullivan rankings, it manages to better Christmas on a Rational Planet by more than five percentage points, and as the seventh highest-ranked Benny NA overall, the only one of the five novels we’ve talked about thus far to surpass its ranking has been Beyond the Sun.

Yet with all of that being said, Down remains something of an oddity even when judged by the standards of one of the most perennially strange writers Doctor Who has ever seen, and it seems a reasonably safe bet to say that any summary of Miles’ contributions to the franchise will inevitably see the book tacked on almost as an afterthought. If we follow through on my woefully self-indulgent decision in reviewing Christmas on a Rational Planet to contrast Miles with Darin Morgan, then Down would seem to be the novelist’s answer to War of the Coprophages.

To a certain extent, this feels like little more than a question of timing. On a very basic level, the window of time between the respective publications of Down and Alien Bodies was an extremely narrow one, coming in at a mere two months. Coupled with the BBC Books tradition of not publishing in the month of December, the novel had the chance to percolate in fandom’s heads for a while over the Christmas break, and with all due respect to Terrance Dicks – which probably isn’t much, given the continued freshness of the wounds inflicted by The Eight Doctors – it’s not as if a book like Mean Streets was really liable to give Stephen Cole and the EDAs’ readerbase pause for thought.

More importantly, however, it was the specific context of Alien Bodies‘ arrival that served to seal the deal, being the first Eighth Doctor Adventure to really hint at something bearing the general shape of a plan for the range, even if it would take some considerable time for other writers to pick up the gauntlet that Miles had thrown down.

But this also begins to gesture at the rather perverse irony underpinning Down‘s being quietly superseded by the steady forward march of Doctor Who as a franchise. For all intents and purposes, after all, Down arguably holds just as significant a place in the Benny-led New Adventures as Alien Bodies does for the EDAs, being the first book to confirm the importance of Ben Aaronovitch’s People as a key part of the retooled line’s mythology moving forward.

To even the most casual of New Adventures fans, this should hardly have come as a surprise, with Oh No It Isn’t! having dedicated a recurring subplot to Bernice’s repeatedly crossing paths with a pair of human ambassadors from the Worldsphere’s Tiny But Interesting Interest Group. The fact that the two of them also happened to dress up like the lead characters from The Blues Brothers and ended up hiding from the madness of the Perfectons’ world inside a pantomime horse was entirely beside the point.

Even so, the fact remains that it’s Down that contains the first reappearance of one of the People within the series, to say nothing of the return of everyone’s favourite sardonic supercomputer, God, operating with his own suitably shadowy agenda that might very well be in violation of the People’s non-aggression pact with a certain prominent species who are, for legal reasons, most decidedly not the Time Lords.

There are still a few particulars to be worked out over the course of the NAs to come. Most notably, Simon Bucher-Jones’ Ghost Devices will add the character of Clarence to the increasingly deep bench of recurring players orbiting around Bernice and St. Oscar’s University, and the looming presence of the People’s gods won’t be truly felt as an ongoing concern until Where Angels Fear, although it would ultimately transpire that both these “additions” were rather more familiar to the audience than they might have initially appeared.

On a very basic level, though, this is the point at which the People have just about completed their transformation from a strange and much-loved spot of Iain M. Banks plagiarism into an essential part of the larger backdrop of the New Adventures.

From most angles, this is a decision which makes no small amount of sense. At its core, The Also People remains one of the most wildly successful and beloved Doctor Who novels ever, even nearly thirty years later. We ought to reiterate here the basic fact that the final form of the Sullivan rankings saw the book deemed the third most-popular New Adventure, behind only Just War and Human Nature.

This, in turn, places it squarely ahead of just about any of the EDAs and PDAs, with the lone exception being Nick Wallace’s Fear Itself, which just barely managed to scrape past the minimum ten vote threshold necessary to merit placement on the list proper and can probably be safely labelled a statistical outlier. So, as I say, opting to pick up on the concepts outlined within the pages of Aaronovitch’s novel – however unoriginal they may have ultimately been – is a perfectly sound and logical choice.

But equally, it’s a choice that probably ended up having an altogether deeper and longer-lasting impact on the standing of the New Adventures than might have been initially apparent at the time, and the extent to which Down is eclipsed by Alien Bodies is really just a symptom of a much more profound set of fault lines that were taking shape in the Doctor Who fandom of the day.

I’ve made no secret over these past reviews of my feelings on fandom’s general tendency to treat this era of Doctor Who as a hazy, murky battlefront in a larger war over the future of the franchise, particularly when it comes to the contemporaneous outputs of Virgin and BBC Books. Up to this point, I’ve generally stuck to the premise that this framing, while not completely without merit, can very easily become overexaggerated when applied to the earliest of these new, Bernice-led New Adventures.

At the same time, I’ve repeatedly rejected one of the core premises that seems to lurk unarticulated in most fan discussions of the NAs’ twilight years; namely, that the lack of commercial viability which the novels were plagued by at this time was in any way reflective of their general worthiness to be analysed in the same level of depth as their Doctorful predecessors.

Yet at the risk of compounding my opening reference to the review of Dragons’ Wrath and turning this piece into a tangled and abstrusely self-referential mess even by the somewhat skewed standards of Dale’s Ramblings – though there’s certainly a convincing case to be made that that might just be the best mode of artistic expression when analysing a Lawrence Miles novel – I’m going to take the opportunity to hark back at this juncture to another off-handed comment I made in talking about Ship of Fools last time, concerning my provisional identification of a handful of major flashpoints in the grand, convoluted battle to try and determine the “real” future of Doctor Who that gradually came to consume the McGann years of the series. To cut to the heart of the matter, then, Down is the last New Adventure to receive a review in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine‘s regular Shelf Life column.

Now, this is a statement which must necessarily be followed up with the rather hefty caveat of “for the moment,” as the publication eventually relented at the beginning of 1998. Following intense reader backlash, the NA reviews would make a triumphant return until the year’s end, taking the magazine through to the dying days of the line with Where Angels Fear.

To that end, the 261st issue’s Time Lines feature would spotlight a litany of correspondence from fans both for and against the proposed relinquishing of the NAs’ place in the sun, concluding with a declaration from Assistant Editor Alan Barnes that the cynical part of me can’t help but read with an ever so slightly passive-aggressive tone – “Okay, we got it wrong.” – particularly when it’s taken in conjunction with the heavily qualification-laden reassurance that “the Bernice novels will continue to be assessed [in Shelf Life] – albeit not necessarily every month…”

Still, it’s pretty clear that the intent of editor Gary Gillatt was for the Benny novels’ newly-enforced absence from the magazine to be a more permanent condition, and the marked reversal of fortunes in a series that had, barely a year prior, been the undisputed standard-bearer for the future of Doctor Who is an important enough moment that I think it’s worth reproducing his argument in full:

A ‘definitive statement’, then. But first…

The omission of Deadfall from DWM 257’s Shelf Life was down to the most mundane of possible reasons – we simply didn’t receive a review manuscript from Virgin early enough. Necessarily, we would have had expected our reviewer to cover both that, and November’s Ghost Devices, and BBC Books’ own two November releases, all in DWM 258 – and that’s only that month’s novels, let alone assorted non-fiction/video releases/audio tapes…

And therein lies the rub. There’s a long DWM tradition that Shelf Life is written by one columnist with an individual style, as opposed to the fragmented approach to review columns adopted by other science fiction magazines. However, expecting one individual to read and digest up four novels – albeit usually three – in a very short space of time (deadlines often require all the books to be read in the space of just a few days) is a bit too much even for the usually indefatigable Dave Owen…

The whole point of the Bernice New Adventures is that they should exist unto themselves – they contain characters and references only to other of the New Adventures, not directly to televised Doctor Who stories (unlike the [Dreamwatch/Reeltime/BBV] video spin-offs you mention). Virgin hope that the Bernice New Adventures will acquire their own readership wider than merely Doctor Who fans. This is laudable, and we wish them all the best – but we’ve now seen them through the first five ‘Doctor-less’ releases.

We will continue to include details of all the upcoming Bernice books in Collectors’ Heaven. But we now don’t believe that they have quite enough connection to television Doctor Who – they are not ‘licenced’ in any way, after all – to merit a higher profile in our already jammed pages.

That said, we’d be happy to reconsider if enough of you disagree. Have we got it right or wrong? One way or another, write and let us know…

So there are a couple of things to unpack here. First and foremost, let’s park a few disclaimers right up front. Because I generally like to avoid being a needlessly mean and snarky prick if at all possible, I’ll give Gillatt the benefit of the doubt and assume that the story of Deadfall‘s manuscript simply not being sent to DWM on time is an accurate account of what happened.

Moreover, the fact that DWM‘s November issue ultimately saw Owen supplanted by guest reviewer “Jackie Jenkins” (a pseudonym for his eventual successor as Shelf Life‘s resident critic, Vanessa Bishop) on account of the former’s illness would seem to lend credence to the notion that the magazine’s resident critic had quite enough on his plate as is, and at the end of the day I might just have to throw my hands up here and submit that there are probably far more efficient and useful ways to spend my life than taking to task the one-time editor of a Doctor Who fanzine for editorial decisions that he made five years before I was even born.

But underneath all of these simple logistical arguments for the dropping of the New Adventures from DWM‘s schedule, there are some frankly astonishing logical leaps on display here. Most obviously, as several readers were quick to point out in the aforementioned responses collected in issue 261 – to say nothing of similar observations made in the very letter Gillatt’s statement originally responded to, points which he was definitely cognizant of on account of, y’know, his directly acknowledging them in said statement – there is something inherently ludicrous in the notion that a series of novels headlined by a popular and long-lasting Doctor Who companion is in any way less worthy of serious critical consideration as a part of the franchise than a crummy and amateurish direct-to-video film that just so happened to be able to persuade Robert Holmes’ estate to let them feature a couple of Autons.

In fact, by the time we reach DWM 268, less than a year after Gillatt’s making a “definitive statement” on the primacy of licensing, the presence of the first two instalments of BBV’s Audio Adventures in Time & Space series in that issue’s Shelf Life feature would seem to require us to strain our definition of the word “licensed” to the point where the poor thing is liable to develop a hernia. Given the very well-documented threats of legal action made by the BBC against Bill Baggs on account of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred’s characters in the Time Travellers audios being virtually indistinguishable from their more famous roles in Doctor Who, it’s very hard to take Gillatt’s logic all that seriously.

What’s more, it’s hardly too fantastic a speculation to read some measure of factional favoritism into that logic, even if we’re rapidly drifting into thematic territory of which it’s hard to speak without sounding like those particularly unhinged corners of fandom that seem determined to prove the existence of a state of perpetual Cold War and undying mutual hatred between writers like Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat.

While such reasoning naturally represents the most extreme possible formulation of the kind of war-focused conception of Doctor Who‘s production that we’ve more or less steadfastly resisted thus far, the peculiar thing about such superficially laughable argumentation is that, every once in a while, you run into a set of circumstances where it seems wholly appropriate.

Gillatt’s personal dislike for the direction that the New Adventures represented is certainly no secret at this point, after all. Interviewed by Paul Scoones for Time Space Visualiser in November 1997, he would confess: “It’s fairly well known that I consider the books to be rather charmless and at something of a tangent to the core spirit of the show.”

However truthfully he may be able to refute claims that he was responsible for the decision to retire Bernice from the ongoing DWM comic strips when interviewed for The Inside Story, he was most definitely still behind the rather vicious decision to brutally kill off Ace – in an incarnation pointedly bearing a closer resemblance to her televised self than her NA persona, no less – in Ground Zero. With that context in mind, it becomes difficult to avoid reading some measure of spite into the decision to drop the Bernice novels from Shelf Life moving forwards.

The elephant in the room that I’m still kind of dancing around here, of course, is Big Finish, which will eventually arise out of the same crowd of ex-Audio Visuals personnel that had initially formed the backbone of BBV. With the benefit of hindsight, we also know that DWM will eventually go on to resolutely pin its colours to the mast and effectively side with the audios over the novels, to the point where Gillatt’s co-editor and eventual succesor Alan Barnes seemingly becomes the company’s go-to writer whenever they need someone to handle the big “event” stories for the Eighth Doctor, whether that be Storm WarningNeverlandZagreusThe Next Life, or The Girl Who Never Was. Indeed, he ultimately sticks around for so long that he would still be turning out stories for the Monthly Adventures range as late as June 2019’s An Alien Werewolf in London.

Even if we’re taking the cynical position as read, however, it’s not as if the distinctions between these separate factions are particularly clear cut. Not only was Gary Russell a key player in the Audio Visuals/Big Finish clique, but Deadfall, the New Adventure which sparked Gillatt’s controversial editorial directive in the first place, was a direct adaptation of an earlier AV audio play of the same name.

Even as Russell reigned supreme in his position as an executive producer and frequent director of Big Finish’s series of monthly audio dramas, he would still pop in to contribute novels like Divided Loyalties or Spiral Scratch to BBC Books’ Past Doctor Adventures, even incorporating the character of Evelyn Smythe into Instruments of Darkness. In other words, a reading of these fault lines that primarily focuses on the in-crowd/out-crowd factionalism of contemporary fandom is, by necessity, something of an incomplete one.

No, to even begin to make sense of this tangled mess, we need to circle back around to Gillatt’s rather bizarre emphasis on the point that the New Adventures are insufficiently linked to televised Doctor Who, despite their unfolding against a future history backdrop rather painstakingly charted throughout the length and breadth of the series by reference to scattered clues from the original television programme. Key concepts and characters like the Knights of Jeneve, Irving Braxiatel, the People and Chris Cwej all come pre-packed with their own implicit and inseparable links to more “official” pieces of Doctor Who lore like UNIT or the Time Lords.

Sure, these concepts have been suitably expanded beyond the bounds of their original iterations, but it’s honestly quite difficult to come up with a model of the Wilderness Years where that isn’t the entire point of the exercise, even for ranges like the Big Finish audios and the BBC novels that were, as a rule of thumb, more habitually conservative than the New Adventures ever were.

And so we’re effectively forced here to cede some ground to the “War in Heaven/Time War” schools of historiography when it comes to the Wilderness Years, as we’re faced with an irrational and vexing conflict where the participants are effectively fighting to claim the title of “Doctor Who‘s true continuation.” It’s a strange peerage, and one which seems at this point to be only marginally less absurd than the monarchy of the Could’ve-Been-King, framed as it is by reference to each claimant’s descent from an object that resolutely refuses to exist in any meaningful sense in the world of September 1997: televised Doctor Who.

Mind you, if Down serves as a case study in the looming inevitability of a conflict-centric view of this period, then it simultaneously reinforces my decision to refute the idea that the idiosyncrasies of Oh No It Isn’t! somehow spelt the end of the New Adventures’ continued relevance. By choosing – or, more accurately, being forced – to construct a mythology and world out of those purpose-built, novel-original concepts that they actually had the rights to, the Benny novels’ fate was practically sealed as soon as BBC Books announced their own line of “actual” Doctor Who books.

Gillatt’s logic may be petty and unconvincing, but it still speaks to a line of argument that was surely not uncommon, even as plenty of readers wrote in to quibble with it. In a world offering a choice novels which could proudly emblazon their front covers with the newly telemovie-fied Doctor Who logo and a series of spin-off novels focusing on Bernice Summerfield, the fact that swarms of fans opted for the former – regardless of these new New Adventures having failed to turn out anything quite as abysmal as The Eight Doctors in their first five months of existence – can hardly be considered surprising.

(The natural counterpoint to this argument might seem to be “But what about Big Finish’s Bernice Summerfield series?”, to which I reply… “Yeah, what about it?” Remember, even Big Finish only spent about ten months as a purely Bernice-based company before they dropped The Sirens of Time, and the fact that the recording sessions for that story took place as early as March 1999 suggests that Haigh-Ellery and co. were acutely aware of where their bread was due to be buttered. As, too, does the more recent decision to effectively just retool the series into the rather ironically-titled The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, in which the character voyages in the TARDIS once more alongside the Doctor(s), though it remains to be seen where the series will go next now that the passing of David Warner would seem to render a continuation of the Unbound Doctor status quo untenable.)

That all of this discussion should come to overshadow the actual text of Down itself in this review so far feels like a strangely appropriate microcosm of its swift absorption into the mystique that will begin to cloud our perceptions of Miles once he releases Alien Bodies, even as it is more than a little unfortunate.

Rest assured, though, that Down is actually a frightfully good novel on the whole, even though it took me some 4000 words to actually come out and say it. It’s a more tightly-focused and coherent work than Christmas on a Rational Planet, much as such adjectives come with an entire shaker’s worth of salt when applied to a writer like Miles.

What’s more, it does an admirable job of following up on Ship of Fools‘ suggestion that the audience was mistaken to assume the more adventurous and genre-bending impulses of Oh No It Isn’t! were a freak occurrence; five novels in, the Bernice-led New Adventures are just as likely to offer up a whirlwind tour through the tropes of pantomime and murder mysteries as they are to provide conventional thrills, a kind of stylistic diversity that the early EDAs have been sorely lacking to date.

In order to at least try unpacking what exactly Down itself sets out to do, rather than how it relates to the broader context of the Bernice Summerfield and Doctor Who novels around it, there are worse ways to begin than by circling around to our earlier observation about the People’s having undergone a bit of a shift in the eighteen months and change since the publication of The Also People.

The simplest framing of these changes, and therefore the one which subtly yet significantly misses the mark, would be to say that The Also People was the product of a writer familiar enough with the Culture series to glibly lampshade the heavy stylistic inspiration in his Acknowledgments, while Down is… well, the product of a writer who was much more familiar with The Also People, as it happens. Interviewed for The Inside Story, Miles himself would quite readily concede his unfamiliarity with Banks’ science fictional oeuvre:

“I’ve never read any Iain M. Banks,” admits Miles, “although I’ve had Use of Weapons described to me in detail and it sounds rather good. I’ve read one book written by Banks’s non-SF persona, namely The Wasp FactoryDown came from Aaronovitch and At the Earth’s Core – the film with Peter Cushing and Doug McClure, not the novel.”

So in many ways the obvious tack to take here would be to say that Miles’ conception of the People, and by extension that of many a New Adventure to come, is in some way a departure from the more “literary” style favoured by Aaronovitch in his own explorations of the Worldsphere. Such an argument naturally requires us to onboard the generally accepted science fiction fandom definition of “literary” that treats it as a byword for more lowkey explorations of a particular setting, operating at a remove from such pulpy concerns as space battles or fantastical superpowers.

On the whole, this definition is largely the product of a pronounced vein of insecurity within certain sects of SF fandom when confronted with elements which might somehow be seen to suggest that the objects of their adulation and obsession are anything less than wholly serious or, to use an all-important and perpetually misused buzzword, cerebral.

In the past, our example of choice has been the Star Trek franchise’s decision to gradually trend away from the theatrical, minimalist and almost impressionistic set design favoured by The Original Series, and to opt instead for sets that might conceivably bear a passing resemblance to what starships might look like if humanity got its act together and went exploring the final frontier.

(Fittingly enough, it’s this very aesthetic which Miles selects as one of Benny’s first reference points when confronted with the improbable reality of Tyler’s Folly, followed shortly thereafter by a slight misquoting of that most legendary of episode titles, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky. In other circumstances, this might be what we’d call “laying it on a bit thick,” but it actually works reasonably well if you read it as playing into the understated running joke started by Bernice catching a Spanish dub of Darmok on TV all the way back in The Left-Handed Hummingbird.)

Furthermore, it’s perhaps this tendency which best accounts for the age-old rivalry between Star Trek and Star Wars fans, which usually ends with the Trek fans accusing the other side of not being real science fiction enjoyers and being susceptible to distraction by flashy laser swords. The Trek fans, believing themselves triumphant, will then promptly go off to watch true, cerebral science fiction like The Inner Light and conveniently neglect to consider the fact that the very next episode of The Next Generation revolved around Mark Twain having a spot of bother with interdimensional beings who are going about removing the souls of homeless people in nineteenth-century San Francisco with a snake-headed cane.

Appropriately enough, DWM‘s Timelines feature comes in handy here once again, providing a snapshot of these fan debates in real time, filtered through the prism of Doctor Who. Gillatt’s statement on the place of the New Adventures was followed immediately thereafter by a letter scoffing at the idea expressed in previous correspondence to the magazine that Star Trek was in any sense a more serious show than Doctor Who:

Whilst I am myself a fan of all forms of Star Trek, even down to running a Star Trek Local Group, I quite agree that an IQ no higher than that of your average Ogron is needed to watch the show. There may be the odd episode that has “brains” but they are quite clearly the exception rather than the rule. If Trek fans are so clever, why is it that the most popular episodes – such as The Way of the Warrior and The Best of Both Worlds – are action-filled romps through space that require no more intelligence to watch than The Big Breakfast?

Of the many Trek fans I know, one and only one looks for “brains” in a story before impressive visuals and action. The more thought-provoking episodes, such as Frame of Mind and The Thaw, both favourites of mine, are generally classed as ‘OK’ episodes by your average fan. In fact, the only ‘intelligent’ episode held with any regard within Trek fandom is The Inner Light, and that is only because it won them an award!

I’ll spare you from engaging with this argument in any particularly protracted or extensive fashion and just stop at the basic comment that it’s all a bit silly, and necessarily requires us to oversimplify two very expansive franchises, each with over thirty years’ worth of history behind them as of 1997. Nevertheless, as we hinted at in reviewing The Ultimate Treasure last time, these debates were no doubt further invigorated by the twentieth anniversary Special Edition re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy and the looming prequel films, with The Phantom Menace wrapping up its last spot of studio filming less than two weeks after the publication of Down.

Initially, Down seems to give every indication of playing into this rigid distinction between high-brow and low-brow forms of genre fiction, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the case of the novel’s central antagonist, !X. Miles devotes the bulk of the prologue to reinforcing the sense that !X is fundamentally and intractably antithetical to the Worldsphere, going so far as to refuse to acknowledge himself as one of the People, and has managed to wrangle God into providing him with an alternate universe, ironically named Paradise.

This sense of wrongness, of course, is primarily derived from !X’s main function within the world of Down: serving as an avatar of serial killer fiction – even if the utopian idyll of the Worldsphere means that he doesn’t actually kill anybody in the traditionally understood meaning of the term until he arrives on Tyler’s Folly – itself a distinctly pulpy artistic tradition which has long stood shoulder-to-shoulder with most other horror fiction in an enclave all its own, consistently cut off from mainstream awards recognition in spite of its self-evident mass appeal.

All the same, however, it was plain to even the most casual of pop culture observers that the cinema and television of the nineties played host to something of a critical and commercial boom as far as serial killer fiction was concerned. The most obvious point of reference here is undoubtedly The Silence of the Lambs, which became the fifth highest-grossing film of 1991 and is generally considered to be the first and only horror film to win the Best Picture Oscar.

In 1995, David Fincher’s Seven saw a similar level of success, appropriately becoming the seventh highest-grossing film of the year. On television, one of Michael Piller’s stronger scripts from Voyager‘s troubled second season, Meld, would tackle a dilemma superficially similar to that posed by !X to the People, asking how a violent criminal like Brad Dourif’s Lon Suder would best be dealt with in the context of a post-death penalty and broadly utopian society like the Federation. A couple of years earlier, The X-Files had scored an early classic by casting Dourif as a potentially psychic serial killer in Beyond the Sea, riffing on the debt owed by Dana Scully to Clarice Starling by placing the character in a transparent homage to The Silence of the Lambs.

Throw in The Exorcist III for good measure, which saw Dourif cast as a thinly-veiled analogue for the Zodiac Killer – himself an avowed fan of William Friedkin’s original 1973 film, which in many ways laid the groundwork for Jonathan Demme’s later success by becoming the first horror film to score a Best Picture nomination, and standing as the highest-grossing R-rated horror film until the release of It in 2017 – and it seemed that the actor simply couldn’t help being cast as a serial killer throughout the decade, even before you get to the Child’s Play films.

It could be argued that one of the greatest innovations of Chip Johannessen’s script for Force Majeure in the first season of Millennium, a show frequently derided for its “serial killer of the week” aesthetic, was to cast Dourif in the role of Dennis Hoffman and not have the character turn out to be a murderer. Not to be outdone, the 1996-97 season of television also saw the debut of Cynthia Saunders’ Profiler, a much more conventional counterpart to Chris Carter’s predilection for Nostradamus prophecies and religious symbolism.

!X is the type of character that would feel perfectly at home in some hypothetical Worldsphere-bound version of Millennium – and to be entirely candid with you, I would totally watch such a show – and his travelling companion-cum-handler Fos!ca repeatedly finds her thoughts drawn to rather melodramatic ruminations on the sense of all-consuming wrongness that her charge represents.

It’s only logical, then, that !X should find an affinity for the pulpy surroundings of Tyler’s Folly, as its self-admittedly ludicrous Hollow Earth geology, prehistoric fauna and cartoonishly evil neo-Nazis would seem to be just as contrary to the narrative logic underpinning the world of the People as the very particular form of madness exhibited by the Worldsphere’s most wayward son.

Miles being Miles, and the Worldsphere having been established as the purview of a vast artificial intelligence that quite literally answers to the name of “God,” it’s not long before this relationship takes on an outwardly religious aspect. As Bernice finds herself subjected to a compressed vision of the People’s history and the casting out of MEPHISTO from the Worldsphere, we’re treated to our first reference to “a war in Heaven” in a Lawrence Miles novel – some two months before the most salient example – as befits a sequence which has been quite plainly modelled on the archangel Raphael’s account to Adam of the conflict between God and Lucifer in Paradise Lost.

As it turns out, this is all part of a much larger plan on God’s part to reintroduce the archetype of dystopia to the Worldsphere so as to enable its inhabitants to properly appreciate the significance of the environment, with Fos!ca’s character arc making it quite plain that the People as a whole have become so blinkered by utopian thinking that they have trouble even conceiving of such base concepts as death.

Naturally, talk of critiquing the ideal of utopian science fiction in the 1990s will inevitably bring you around to Star Trek in some fashion, particularly when The Also People had been so candid in its depiction of the Worldsphere as a utopia rooted firmly in the sixties aesthetic of Roddenberry’s original programme, from the unspoken principles of free love and psychoactive beverages to the unambiguous portrayal of the People’s conflict with the Insects as a proxy war which evoked the cultural memory of Vietnam.

Indeed, Down‘s healthy scepticism towards the idea of utopia calls to mind the contemporary critiques launched within the Star Trek franchise itself by Deep Space Nine, which was barely a week away from beginning its sixth season with a multi-part epic that separated the main cast from the eponymous space station and brought war to the otherwise tranquil Federation.

To his credit, there are points at which Miles’ previously-discussed nods towards the franchise would seem to encompass that most controversial of the nineties shows, perhaps most prominently in the declaration of !X as a messianic “emissary” whose presence has been awaited by the inhabitants of Tyler’s Folly.

Discussing her traumatic experiences at the hands of the “original” Nazis in Just War with Katastrophen, Bernice even punctures his valorisation of his movement’s forebears in a manner that feels like it offers an even more cynical twist on Sisko’s monologue from The Maquis, Part II on the ease of being a saint in Paradise. “Sods. Just like you,” she responds when the Kommander asks her to tell him what the soldiers of the Third Reich were really like. “You rewrite your history and turn them into saints, but they were just Sods. History’s full of them. You’re no exception.”

Appropriately enough for a book so concerned with hidden subterranean worlds, however, there remains a sense of something lurking beneath the surface of the novel’s perfectly valid and insightful – if, it must be said, not wholly groundbreaking or original – critiques of utopian science fiction. In creating such a strict dichotomy between the concepts of utopia and dystopia, and in linking those concepts to particular science fictional impulses, Down seems to almost inadvertently double as a novel about reconciling the fantastical and the low-brow with the literary and the scientifically plausible.

When you get down to it, after all, the dirty little secret at the heart of the Worldsphere has very little to do with !X or MEPHISTO or God’s plans to allow the People to conceive of dystopian ideas. The fact of the matter is that the Worldsphere itself is just as much a scientific inanity as Tyler’s Folly could ever be, and the extent of its ludicrous nature reveals itself upon even the slightest examination of the ideas upon which it’s built.

For all that the Culture series is consistently held up as an example of space opera being given a serious and thoughtful treatment when compared to the cheap, spectacle-based thrills of the pulp stories of the thirties or the cultural sensations of Star Trek and Star Wars, Banks’ engagement with the technology and sociology of his fictional world was never liable to satisfy those science fiction fans with an unquenchable hankering for so-called “hard SF.” More to the point, as we said last time, the very label “space opera” remains one with pejorative origins, for all that it might have ultimately stabilised somewhere in the more neutral region of the spectrum of qualitative aesthetic judgments.

In the case of The Also People, and acknowledging that I’m getting unbearably churlish and pernickety here, it goes without saying that the notion of a Dyson sphere has very little grounding in anything approaching empirical science, for all that it might bear the name of prominent physicist Freeman Dyson.

In fact, as far back as Disturbing the Universe in 1979, Dyson would make a point of stressing that the conceptual genesis of the sphere harked back to a considerably less academic source. “Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit of inventing the artificial biosphere,” he explained. “In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues.” Crediting Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker with inspiring his thinking, Dyson even suggested that a more appropriate name for the hypothetical structure would be a Stapledon sphere, while grudgingly admitting that he was too inextricably linked with the sphere in the popular imagination, concluding that he was “sort of stuck with it.”

(The same interview also contains Dyson’s thoughts on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Relics and the Dyson sphere contained therein, including a moment in which he follows up the declaration that the episode’s science was “all nonsense” with a concession that it was “quite a good piece of cinema,” which feels particularly illuminating in the context of Down‘s general thesis.)

And this finally begins to get at the most meaningful spot of cleverness at the heart of Down. For all that elements like the artificial, dreamlike construction of Tyler’s Folly and the quoting of The Wizard of Oz might lead us to conclude that Miles is playing a game akin to that of Chris Carter’s TriangleDown ends up feeling far more reminiscent of Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defence.

Just as that episode would see Darin Morgan simultaneously lampooning the tendency of Millennium to wallow in unbridled angst and misery while allowing the titular author to make an impassioned plea for the right to be dark and gloomy, Miles seems to be making a case that the more outlandish and goofy elements of Doctor Who cannot be so cleanly dichotomised in relation to allegedly more serious fare, just as Kryptosa suggests that it’s fallacious to divide the universe into “natural” and “artificial” constructs.

The most literal expression of this idea can be found in the presence of Mr. Misnomer, a representative of the more low-brow and pulpy aspects of adventure fiction, explicitly inserted into Bernice’s account of the narrative so as to make sense of those parts that she finds difficult to reconcile with her impressions of her own character and the character of those around her. Tellingly, this psychological distancing comes about in response to a moment of shared communion in the memories of Benny’s adventuring party, as she decides to edit her own recollections so as to better impose a sensible, ordering narrative on them.

And when all is said and done, isn’t that the very essence of mythology?

There’s an irony here, mind you, and it isn’t entirely divorced from that which we observed to be inherent in Down‘s being almost immediately outmoded by Miles’ much more famous and acclaimed debut EDA. El Sandifer hits quite close to the mark here with her observation that the story mirrors Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s Underworld with the People as a suitably copyright-appeasing substitute for the Time Lords.

As Sandifer notes, this is a particularly significant realisation when taken in conjunction with Miles’ labelling that story as the worst to come out of Doctor Who in the 1970s, and this almost definitely goes some way towards explaining why he reacted so poorly even to those more positive reviews which focused overwhelmingly on the wackier elements, with Dave Owen feigning exaggerated surprise that the story could have come from the same mind as Christmas on a Rational Planet did.

But the incongruity runs a mite deeper even than that. It’s worth remembering that Miles’ solution to the proposed utopia/dystopia dichotomy is to have Benny shove the stasis gun up !X’s rear end, effectively stepping out of the mechanistic narratological processes of the world around her and doing something completely spontaneous and unconventional.

Certainly, Miles was never going to seriously advocate for any resolution which involved the universe of Doctor Who and/or Bernice Summerfield hewing closer to the template laid down by Underworld, and the fact that he introduces Bernice in a sequence that sees her internal monologue playfully skewer an overly ostentatious Asimovian hard SF style suggests that he doesn’t think salvation is likely to come from that direction either.

The solution, in other words, is to have Bernice respond to the imposition of a suffocating narrative order on her life by making the same choice that Miles will eventually lay down through the character of Sam Jones in Interference, which is to say that she makes new rules to supplant the old ones.

When applied to questions of narrative aesthetics and not real-world political concerns, this just about manages to avoid a head-on collision with Paul Cornell’s infamous declaration that Miles’ political literacy was akin to that of a seventeen-year-old virgin, but the seed of the idea is at least beginning to take root, appropriately enough, and we might at least want to subject Down to a random breath test just to avoid any particularly nasty fandom-shaped car wrecks.

Similarly, we can probably quite comfortably dismiss the idea that Down‘s deconstructionist impulses somehow inflict a mortal wound on the New Adventures that prevent them from sincerely executing these types of pulpy adventure stories, as tempting as it might be to believe.

Just as a show like Millennium was still able to turn out “serial killer of the week” scripts like The Mikado after Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defence, there’s not really an inherent reason that Down takes away the NAs’ ability to pivot to a book like Deadfall, even if making that comparison puts me in the laughable position of mentioning the works of Gary Russell in the same sentence as Darin Morgan and Michael R. Perry.

But in the end, Miles’ solution of “make new rules” can’t help but ring hollow on account of its sheer vagary and, some might argue, its vapidity. It works here, because the fate of !X is just about bizarre enough that Down can pull it off. It will also work on the next occasion that Miles tries to apply this solution to the New Adventures, if only because he decided to set about applying it by writing Dead Romance, which is an entirely sensible move that speaks for itself.

Yet perhaps our comparison to Morgan, stumbled upon by sheer happenstance because I happened to be trying to rewatch The X-Files for the umpteenth time when I first read Christmas on a Rational Planet, might be more apt than its apparent arbitrariness would lead us to believe. Morgan could be ferociously cynical in his attitude towards the central worldview of The X-Files and Millennium, but there was always a sense that this prickly attitude masked a pronounced romantic streak, bursting out in full force with the closing soliloquy on loneliness and the need for human connection in Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, which even saw a character preaching his own personal Hollow Earth doctrine for good measure.

It’s difficult, if not outright impossible, to envision Miles ever being able to turn out a scene as curiously and heartbreakingly human as the central moment of shared connection between Scully and Peter Boyle’s doomed psychic in Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. This isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw in Miles’ writing, mind you, even if the fact that Paul Cornell seemed to frame his attempt at a closing statement on the character of Bernice in reference to that scene perhaps suggests that some measure of conflict between the two authors was inevitable even if The Shadows of Avalon had turned out as smooth as it possibly could have.

Miles and Morgan are two different writers who happen to share some surface-level similarities and stylistic quirks, so the mere act of noting that they are, in fact, different does not allow us to make any significant qualitative judgments one way or the other. But for a fledgling spin-off series like the New Adventures, which was already facing challenges to its legitimacy, a novel stressing the need to turn one’s back on some of the more familiar structures of Doctor Who was probably a bit of a bad move for the long-term future of the range, as it only provided the folks at DWM sufficient pretext to treat the novels as a vestigial and irrelevant offshoot that could be quietly forgotten about.

It’s a manoeuvre which doesn’t rise to any level of sophistication much higher than placing your nth-generation copy of The Inner Light into the VHS player and sniping at people in the letters column of DWM, and the craziest part of all is that I can’t honestly tell you if I’m taking aim at Miles or Gillatt here.

Down is a fiendishly clever and entertaining book, even if Miles would probably prefer it to be framed as a much more serious and psychologically harrowing affair. But Down is also the book that saw the logic of the spin-off series truly and definitively assert itself over the Bernice Summerfield novels, to the point where it’s hardly surprising that most accounts of the NAs, from Shelf Life through to TARDIS Eruditorum, typically stop around about here, give or take the anomaly that is Dead Romance. If this seems thoroughly paradoxical, then perhaps it’s only a hint of things to come. And on that note…

We’ll be back after this short break,

Godfather Cooper

BBC Past Doctor Adventures Reviews: The Ultimate Treasure by Christopher Bulis (or, “Holy Rovan’s Empire”)

As we’ve gradually eased ourselves into the shifting status quo for Doctor Who over the course of 1997, it seems fair to comment that my reviews for the past Doctor fiction published by Virgin and subsequently by BBC Books have hit upon a certain formula that I have found to be a broadly effective means of structuring and organising my thoughts. At its most basic, this approach boils down to the consideration of each Doctor’s allotted novels as a subseries of the larger corpus that is the Missing or Past Doctor Adventures.

If we wanted to get more specific about it, we could note that there actually exist two distinct phases to this method. The first of these phases was concerned with the business of summarising and drawing down the curtain on Virgin’s Missing Adventures series, attempting to tie all the various threads together into something resembling a closing statement. That being concluded, we’re now entering the second phase, ushering in the new Past Doctor Adventures line and continuing to elaborate upon some of those threads in an attempt to weave a whole new tapestry.

To a certain extent, of course, this merely speaks to the inherently fragmentary nature of Doctor Who as a television programme, even by the standards of television, a medium that presupposes a certain level of fragmentation by dint of most shows being formatted into a set of discrete and individualised episodes. For its first twenty-six years of existence, the audience primarily engaged with the series in a mode that favoured weekly, multi-part serials – barring the occasional oddity like Mission to the Unknown or The Five Doctors – which was largely unheard of for such a long-running show once you discount soap operas and the like.

Coupled with the constant rotating door cast policy, the structure of Doctor Who therefore naturally lends itself to the strange and idiosyncratic format of the MAs and PDAs. While their “present day” counterparts in the grand scheme of Wilderness Years fiction can maintain a generally forward-looking, unidirectional progression, the past Doctor novels are more logically read as… well, like I said, as six or seven insulated subsets of the larger whole.

Generally speaking, our transition across the Virgin Publishing/BBC Books divide hasn’t been an especially bumpy one. With both of the PDAs’ first two Doctors of choice having been met with a pretty lukewarm reception in their outings for Virgin, there was a sense that there was not really anywhere to go but up. But, to shamelessly channel Torchwood for no particularly good reason I can think of at the moment, the Fifth Doctor is where everything changes.

Readiness is strictly optional.

Of the first six Doctors that the Missing Adventures played host to throughout their lifetime, the Fifth Doctor was perhaps the most consistently solid of the bunch. The only real competition, for me at least, would probably be the Sixth Doctor, but I’ll readily concede that I have a much more positive read on books like State of ChangeTime of Your Life and Burning Heart than fandom orthodoxy, which generally reacts to said books with a half-hearted shrug and a muttered “Yeah, they’re fine” at best.

(It’s also worth noting that I think the appeal of the Colin Baker novels is of a much more singular kind than that enjoyed by other Doctors, stemming more from the apparent presence of a relatively coherent and consistent thematic arc which seems to find the writers at Virgin grappling directly with the question of how to write for the most reviled of the Time Lord’s incarnations, and developing a rough framework along the way upon which companies like Big Finish could subsequently build. But there’ll be time enough to discuss all that when we get to Business Unusual.)

Still, loath as I am to appeal to fandom orthodoxy – oh who am I kidding, I love to do that, if only in the capacity of a general illustrative aid – the Sullivan rankings would generally seem to concur with the spirit of my sentiment. Of the five Fifth Doctor MAs published from Goth Opera through to Cold Fusion, three of the novels manage to land in the top ten as voted on by fans, while a fourth sits comfortably within the top fifteen.

The lone outlier in this pattern of general acclaim is Lords of the Storm in twenty-fourth place, and while I certainly won’t quibble with that placement, even this factoid goes to show the generally high calibre of novel that the Missing Adventures afforded Davison’s affable, celery-apparelled cricketer. Lords of the Storm may have been an aggressively mediocre work, but it was a far cry from the tedium of true, out-and-out stinkers like The Ghosts of N-Space and Invasion of the Cat-People.

Yet if one casts a cursory glance over the comparable ranking of the Past Doctor Adventures, a rather jarring pattern reveals itself. Far from the critical plaudits with which books like The Sands of Time were being lavished barely a year ago, the Fifth Doctor’s tenure in the PDAs seems to have met with supreme antipathy from fandom.

The disjunction, as ever, can be illustrated quite starkly with the application of some handy statistics. By my count, there are seventy-six Past Doctor Adventures in total, seventy of which make the final form of Sullivan’s list, excluding as it does the scattered outlier here or there like Paul Cornell’s novelisation of Scream of the Shalka or the last few books in the range, which were simply unable to secure enough votes to make the main body of the ranking before updates ceased in January 2006.

From this pool of novels, there are ten Fifth Doctor stories, and only a single one of those – David Bishop’s Empire of Death, for the curious, which is also conspicuous in its status as the last of the books to be published – manages to land in the upper half of the list. In fact, between The King of TerrorDivided Loyalties and Warmonger, the list’s bottom three slots are Davison all the way.

So if there is to be anything approaching a unifying central question throughout these coming Fifth Doctor reviews – and it should be noted that these ten novels are spread out across a period of more than 160 books, all told, so I use words like “unifying” extremely loosely – we would seem to have had it presented to us here in no uncertain terms: What, exactly, happened here? In the mere eight months since Cold Fusion, how have the attempts to capture the Davison years apparently undergone such a dramatic reversal of fortunes?

And with Christopher Bulis’ The Ultimate Treasure, it seems we’re off to the races early with these questions. Coming in at fifty-first place, it falls on the lower end of the spectrum of Fifth Doctor books, being the lowest-rated instalment not to merit inclusion in that ignominious cluster at the very bottom of the list.

(Although it should be noted that, being placed right below Superior Beings and Bulis’ own Imperial Moon, it’s apparently part of a cluster all its own. Actually, the Davison books seem to have a marked tendency to do that, if the similarly consecutive rankings of Fear of the Dark and Zeta Major are anything to go by, so that’s kind of strange for those of us who get unreasonably excited by the granular minutiae of life.)

At 59.4%, it is admittedly unable to claim the title of “Most Disliked Davison Novel To Date,” what with Lords of the Storm having achieved a score of 58.3%, but as the first of what we can now acknowledge with the benefit of hindsight to be a great many Fifth Doctor novels to come that will accrue a rather indifferent or outright hostile critical consensus from fans, its comparatively diminished standing cannot help but take on a deeper significance. So I ask again, what went wrong here?

This is the point where I think I’m supposed to pithily exclaim “Christopher Bulis” and refuse to elaborate. But, because we generally like to avoid unmitigated and unexpanded snark around these parts, we’re going to elaborate regardless.

Bulis is, as I’ve discussed over the course of a whopping six reviews dedicated to his works so far, a bit of a strange author for me. If first impressions are the most important, then it seems fair to say that he somewhat bungled things with his debut effort, Shadowmind. While I was certainly not the first to pan the novel by any stretch of the imagination, my rather scathing review was most definitely a product of a very particular period in my own development as a critic that, I’m pleased to say, didn’t actually last that much longer beyond that point once I actually started taking the whole blogging thing a mite more seriously.

It may not be the worst offender to ever grace the pages of Internet fan reviews in regards to getting needlessly personal towards the author of a book of lesser quality, but it took a tone that was much more aggressive and belligerent than I would like to believe that I would countenance today. Even more than that, there were certain basic factual errors that could have been quite easily dispelled with a minimum of research, most notably in my taking cheap shots at the somewhat shoddy cover and insinuating that Bulis was the first New Adventures author to contribute their own cover art, when Jim Mortimore had actually managed to beat him to the punch with Lucifer Rising some two months earlier.

In short, the review was honestly quite flawed looking back, the product of a sixteen year old who thought he was much cleverer than he probably was, and the only meagre saving grace, as I’ve said time and time again, is probably that there remain people twice the age that I was when I posted that review in 2019 that have continued to build much more successful careers than mine out of significantly worse and frequently outright bigoted opinions on media. So y’know. Swings and roundabouts.

Since that time, I’ve made a conscious effort to be a bit more charitable to Bulis, though he hasn’t always made it the easiest of tasks. State of Change was a massive improvement over Shadowmind, being more fairly described as a sophomore leap than a sophomore slump, and began the aforementioned work of providing a redemption of sorts for the Sixth Doctor and particularly his relationship with Peri, softening off some of the rough edges of Season 22 while Steve Lyons geared up to tackle those edges head-on with Time of Your Life.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, meanwhile, was a fairly pedestrian affair that seemed to aspire to little more than a rote imitation of classic fantasy tropes and especially The Lord of the Rings, and I can honestly barely remember a single thing about it besides that. Then again, apparently it seems to be reasonably well-liked by fans and is even Bulis’ highest-rated book ever per Sullivan, so it remains entirely possible that I’m just missing the point entirely and it’s some unsung gem.

The Eye of the Giant was an improvement, though it suffered from a similar sensation of mechanically replicating the stylings of 1930s adventure fiction, even down to some of the more questionable gender roles. Still, it was one of the better Third Doctor novels to that point, and was buoyed somewhat by the novelty of offering new, post-Inferno adventures for Liz Shaw.

As if to confirm my gradually dawning realisation as I write these paragraphs that any attempts to graph the quality of Bulis’ books over time would look alarmingly like a sine wave, however, Twilight of the Gods offered one of the longest and most tedious reads I’ve ever subjected myself to for this project, arriving at perhaps the absolute nadir of the Missing Adventures’ increasingly irritating flirtation with sequels to classic Doctor Who stories with an attempt to follow up on the visual eccentricity of The Web Planet. Bulis being Bulis, this largely meant a whole lot of gritty, hard-edged science-fiction militarism and debates about monarchism versus communism, alongside some wholly unasked for attempts to explain the minutiae of Menoptera biology.

With A Device of Death, the writer’s fifth and final Missing Adventure, having managed to unexpectedly win me over with its surprisingly creative and ambitious attempts to provide the missing link between the gloomy Gothic horror of the Hinchcliffe Era and the more comedic, light-hearted antics of the Williams years, the stage seems well and truly set for me to tear this most recent Bulis offering apart in the most polite and apologetic fashion I can muster.

Any such expectations were quickly dashed when I actually sat down to read The Ultimate Treasure, however. Not because it really managed to surpass all the odds and become a true classic by the somewhat skewed standards with which such terms can be applied to Bulis’ novels, mind you. Make no mistake, it’s an appreciable step down from books like A Device of Death or State of Change. By the same token though, it never sinks to the absolute depths of awfulness achieved by Shadowmind or Twilight of the Gods.

If the arc of the Bulisometer (patent pending) as applied to the entirety of the author’s career resembles a sine wave, The Ultimate Treasure seems more akin to a flatline. But… a more optimistic flatline, I suppose. A flatline that hovers not at a point of cardiac arrest, but rather at a sort of vaguely pleasant readability that doesn’t actively offend one’s sensibilities in the moment, yet which also doesn’t exactly leave one with much reason to pore over the intricacies of the plotting or thematic work in the aftermath.

So anyway, let’s try to pore over the intricacies of the plotting and the thematic work…

The first thing to note about The Ultimate Treasure is that it has chosen to adopt a placement that has, to this point, been rather atypical for the Fifth Doctor stories, coming at the very end of Davison’s tenure in the narrow gap between the arrival of Peri in Planet of Fire and Five’s regeneration into Six at the close of The Caves of Androzani.

To date, the tie-in books have only fleetingly explored this gap with David J. Howe’s Fascination, a short story from the very first of Virgin’s Decalog collections, so The Ultimate Treasure is notable as the first extended, novel-length story to be set in this gap. Indeed, BBC Books would go on to prove noticeably less reluctant to fill this lacuna than their predecessors, with the PDAs playing host to books like Nick Walters’ Superior Beings and Terrance Dicks’ Warmonger.

Readers of the Short Trips series, meanwhile, could expect to be treated to such Five-Peri short stories as A Town Called Eternity courtesy of Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham, and even a rare excursion from Bulis into the realm of short fiction with Hot Ice. The Telos novellas, perhaps reflecting their status as the brainchild of Howe’s own publishing company, would make a similar attempt with Blood and Hope, with Big Finish-original companion Erimem added into the mix for good measure.

As that last item suggests, of course, this is a gap which is primarily notable these days for Big Finish’s rather prodigious catalogue of audio dramas that they would go on to retroactively insert into the Fifth Doctor’s timeline, beginning with Red Dawn in May 2000. Like much of the company’s early output starring Davison, it’s a production decision with a rather prosaic motivation, coming about as a result of Janet Fielding’s prolonged refusal to return to the role of Tegan Jovanka.

Naturally, given the character’s presence in all but two of the Fifth Doctor’s televised stories – to say nothing of the way that Five’s stories tended to open with scenes directly referencing the events of the previous serial as a matter of recent history, making it rather difficult to invent gaps in Five’s timeline from whole cloth without various shades of quirky temporal hijinks – this presented a bit of an issue.

Until Fielding finally relented with the recording of 2010’s Cobwebs, the incarnation’s audio adventures were primarily confined to three specific “eras”: travelling solo with Nyssa between Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity, travelling solo with Turlough between Resurrection of the Daleks and Planet of Fire, and the previously discussed adventures with Peri and later Erimem.

One of the more frequent observations about the latter subset of Fifth Doctor audios is to point out that it seems hard to invest much credence in the existence of a gap of sufficient magnitude based on the on-screen evidence available in The Caves of Androzani as to the length of Peri’s travels with the Doctor, with The Kingmaker alone taking up at least two years from her and Erimem’s perspective.

In retrospect, then, The Ultimate Treasure‘s ambitions can’t help but feel almost quaint by comparison. As one might expect from Bulis, the novel seems to go out of its way to reassure the reader of its maintaining verisimilitude with Davison’s televised adventures, directly referencing Peri’s choosing to travel with the Doctor as a means of filling out the remaining three months of her vacation per the closing scene of Planet of Fire, and making it crystal clear that this is her first trip in the TARDIS post-Sarn on account of her only having heard the TARDIS’ dematerialisation once before.

In spite of this, the duo’s relationship feels ever so slightly off, primarily in the earlier segments of the novel. Generally speaking, it seems fair to suggest that the relationship between Five and Peri, transitory though it is, is held by fans to be much more healthy and level-headed in comparison to her rather more caustic interactions with the Sixth Doctor.

This might initially appear to be little more than a simple case of fandom extrapolating rather too much out of two stories totalling eight episodes all up, until you remember the rather pertinent fact that the show decided to have Six attempt to strangle Peri in one of his very first scenes. Even if Peri had known the Fifth Doctor for a grand total of five minutes before his regeneration, it would be extraordinarily difficult for them not to seem like the very pinnacle of cordial, good-natured friendship when measured against the benchmark set by The Twin Dilemma.

The Ultimate Treasure, on the other hand, opts for a slightly unexpected tack. While there’s definitely nothing here that approaches the level of sheer, sustained unpleasantness contained in Season 22, there remains a strangely pronounced streak of what I can only think to describe as pseudo-condescension in some of the pair’s early interactions.

When Peri finds herself possessed with the sudden urge to purchase a souvenir of her jaunt to Astroville, the Doctor leaps right to chastising her for her perceived materialism. “Isn’t the experience itself enough for you?” he asks, in the tone of a grandparent wondering why those darn youngsters can’t just put down their phones and live in the moment without all those selfie sticks and Snapgram posts. His companion’s subsequent attempts to explain her need for a souvenir to uphold the grand tradition of tourists everywhere are met with a quietly withering, “I thought all those clothes might suffice.”

Perhaps the most incongruous moment of all comes after Peri expresses her mounting irritation at being detained on Astroville Seven as part of the investigation into the murder of an ill-fated antiques dealer, with the Doctor letting loose a veritable torrent of almost Sixish condescension: “You come from an impatient species, and you have youth against you as well.” Following this up with a patronising pat on the hand, he continues in much the same vein, assuring her that “[she’ll] learn in time.”

The problem isn’t necessarily that this note of exasperation is all that out of character for Davison, and it certainly remains a far cry from the downright cruelty of the Baker years, but the impression remains that Bulis has accentuated this particular trait just a little too much. One can’t help feeling that this dynamic would probably have worked better with, say, Tegan, who was never afraid to verbally spar with the Doctor in some of his more pompous and overblown moments. Even in the Big Finish audios, Peri’s bond with Erimem generally enabled the two of them to deflate and tease their travelling companion in a good-natured fashion that kept things from feeling too unpleasant, and the inability for The Ultimate Treasure to dabble in those kinds of interactions does hurt it a bit.

It also doesn’t help matters that the novel as a whole feels a bit mean-spirited towards Peri, having her roughed up and imperilled in a consistently uncomfortable fashion, including a particularly wince-worthy moment where Dexel Dynes – who is admittedly not supposed to be a sympathetic character in the slightest – violently yanks off one of her shirt buttons to show off a bit more cleavage during her interview spot as Gribbs’ hostage.

Coupled with Bulis’ decision to highlight the character’s wide-eyed enthusiasm at the beginning, and to contrast that with her eventual creeping sense of self-loathing at having dragged herself and the Doctor into the whole mess – hell, she apologises to him for it on two separate occasions, even if he’s quick to downplay things – the book skirts uncomfortably close to suggesting that its driving impetus is, in some way, to show Peri up for believing that the universe could ever be a vaguely optimistic or wondrous place for her.

This certainly fits with the television show’s decision to have her essentially remain trapped in an abusive relationship with the Sixth Doctor until she can be off-handedly pseudo-fridged in Mindwarp, but it doesn’t make the entire experience any more pleasant.

Even with all of that being said, I’d probably be willing to grant considerably more leeway here if it didn’t feel as if this slight glitch in characterisation was reflective of a larger tonal and aesthetic mismatch at the heart of the novel.

One thing that’s always been very clear about Bulis’ particular style, beyond its staunch traditionalism, is a certain penchant for a rather pulpy aesthetic. Of course, this framing assumes that the one is not merely an outgrowth of the other, which is probably a matter of some debate. Nevertheless, I believe both points hold merit, regardless of their precise relationship to one another.

For proof of this claim, one need only re-examine the premises of his novels. State of Change, for example, played upon one of the most archetypal and enduring “alternate history” conundrums science fiction has ever known, asking what would happen if Rome never fell. The Eye of the Giant combined the gigantism-tinged anxieties of such fifties B-movies as Them! or Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman with the pulpy thrills of jungle-bound adventure serials from the thirties. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as we’ve already alluded to, was so blatantly intended to be Bulis’ take on “Doctor Who does The Lord of the Rings” that it was frankly something of a minor miracle that he had enough self-restraint to refrain from having Ian namedrop Tolkien’s epic outright.

As the rather generic title implies, The Ultimate Treasure is quite plainly playing in the same conceptual wheelhouse, and Bulis seems to be practically jumping at the opportunity to indulge his taste for pulpy genre fiction, especially as regards one of his greatest passions of all: space opera.

Ever since Shadowmind, we’ve noted Bulis’ affinity for the genre of space opera, placing particular emphasis on the stylistic debt that much of his work seems to owe to the contemporaneous Star Trek shows. He’s far from the only culprit as far as the New Adventures were concerned, mind you, with 1993 alone also seeing Peter Darvill-Evans and Daniel Blythe fall under the influence of the franchise in penning Deceit and The Dimension Riders, respectively.

(Perhaps not coincidentally, both books ranked right alongside Shadowmind as my least favourite of the year, with their Trek imitations ultimately feeling rather lifeless and superficial.)

Much as traditionalism and pulpy science-fiction seem to go hand in hand, Star Trek and space opera make for comfortable bedfellows. As Darren Mooney has noted, the phrase has its origins in a pejorative moniker first applied to a specific school of science-fiction storytelling by author Wilson Tucker; drawing from the term “horse opera,” a similarly scathing put-down applied to the wave of generic Western films which so gripped Hollywood in the 1930s, it was a term that carried an obvious resonance for a franchise so famously described by Gene Roddenberry as “Wagon Train to the stars.”

And The Ultimate Treasure dutifully contains a few token nods from Bulis towards his Trek tendencies. It’s very hard not to read the descriptions of the bustling, extraterrestrial-packed Astroville Seven space station without being put in mind of Deep Space Nine – or, I suppose, Babylon 5 if you happen to swing that way – even before you factor in the presence of one Inspector Myra Jaharnus, who bristles at her superiors’ requests that she come to them with actual, tangible evidence against her suspects before subjecting them to a surveillance operation, lest those suspects hide behind the protection of those pesky civil rights charters. One suspects that she ought to get together with Rene Auberjonois’ Odo some time and discuss the merits of incorporating a tad more authoritarianism in the running of a space station and its environs.

(This being Bulis, it’s a little difficult to tell precisely how uncomfortable we are meant to be with Jaharnus’ “dogged inspector” routine, or if we’re just meant to take her rather heavy-handed view of law enforcement as part of the cost of doing business, as it were, particularly since the bulk of her scenes seem to place great stock in her status as a reasonably and unambiguously heroic figure.)

The Gelsandorans, meanwhile, would feel right at home among a line-up of Star Trek‘s many, many God-like beings, particularly when they curb the belligerence of the various treasure-seeking parties by rendering their weapons non-functional, bringing to mind a similar manoeuvre pulled by the Organians at the close of Errand of Mercy. Even Bulis’ terminology is suitably Trek-tinged, with the TARDIS food machine only being referred to by its traditional, David Whitaker-given name once. On all other occasions, it’s simply the “food synthesiser.” If you really want to stretch the parallels past the point of breaking, Peri’s order of an unspecified sandwich and coffee might even be said to bring to mind one of the most memorable jokes in The Trouble with Tribbles.

For all of these smaller beats, however, it’s tough to avoid the sensation that The Ultimate Treasure is also pulling quite heavily from the aesthetics of Star Wars, the other big “space opera” franchise dominating the cultural zeitgeist in the mid-to-late 1990s.

There are the requisite superficial points that one would be remiss to avoid noting, like the conspicuous prominence of a ship named the Falcon, but the most telling details are far more basic and fundamental. As we’ve said, The Ultimate Treasure‘s all-encompassing title might serve well enough as a signifier of its pulpy aesthetic, but it also denotes a consciously mythic quality that feels much more of a piece with Star Wars and its so-called “Skywalker Saga” than it does Star Trek.

Throughout the length of the novel, Bulis includes a panoply of not-so-oblique references to classical Greek mythology, from the nightmare sequence in which Arnella finds herself trapped in a bush, destined to be constantly pecked by crow-like beings a la Prometheus, to Brockwell’s being stuck in mud, taunted by a vine that offers the possibility of escape only to shrink away when he reaches out for it in a manner that recalls the afterlife of the infamous King Tantalus. At one point, forsaking all sense of subtlety, Bulis even has the Doctor exclaim of his party’s narrow brush with an artificial atmosphere of overpowering lethargy and apathy, “We were becoming lotus eaters!”

Outside of this mythological atmosphere, even the way that The Ultimate Treasure approaches spaceships and space travel sits ill at ease with the idea of its being a mere Star Trek pastiche. Unlike other Bulis novels like Shadowmind or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, there exists no readily identifiable Starfleet analogue to offer up a vaguely militaristic portrait of spacefaring. Rather, The Ultimate Treasure tends to lean rather more heavily into the idea of space – or, at the very least, space treasure hunts – as the domain of less strictly regimented bands of private individuals, and while such a portrayal certainly isn’t wholly alien to Star Trek, such examples as do exist within the franchise generally stand as a deliberate contrast to the world of our typical Federation protagonists.

Furthermore, the book’s very structure, with the treasure-seekers encountering a new obstacle every couple of chapters, could quite readily be adapted to suit the format of the old serial films that inspired George Lucas in the development of Star Wars – and, for that matter, Raiders of the Lost Ark – to begin with.

But herein lies the essential oddity of The Ultimate Treasure. The choice of Star Wars as the object of Bulis’ inspiration, rather than his seemingly more traditional Star Trek milieu, underscores the extent to which the novel feels like a rather odd fit for the Saward years. If anything, the shared artistic sensibility with Lucas’ galaxy-spanning epic – perhaps spurred on by the controversial twentieth anniversary Special Edition of the original trilogy, which would have been making its way to theatres at around the time of Bulis’ last novel in February 1997 – and the frequent allusions to Greek myth would seem to make it a better fit for the Williams Era, feeling like a far more natural fit alongside stories like Underworld and The Horns of Nimon than it does when forced to rub shoulders with Earthshock and Warriors of the Deep.

Make no mistake, this isn’t necessarily tantamount to a declaration that “gritty, hard-edged science-fiction militarism” is the only thing that should ever be done in the Saward Era, particularly since most of the Era’s problems can be boiled down to a profound unwillingness to aspire to anything but. Yet at the same time, it can’t help but feel curious that Bulis, an author with such a pronounced fondness for that particular strand of science-fiction, should pretty much only choose to restrain himself from such impulses when writing for the Saward Era, at least if State of Change is any indication.

(The Eye of the Giant also lacks any sort of “space marine” storytelling, but its being set in the UNIT years – whatever decade that might actually denote – and latterly in the 1930s does rather tend to foreclose most of the opportunities to explore that artistic avenue.)

But whereas State of Change was able to coast by on the back of a breezy, well-told story with a few memorable scenes here and there, The Ultimate Treasure feels rather barebones. It avoids the active tedium of Bulis’ lesser novels, but only by steadfastly refusing to add much of consequence to the rudimentary quest narrative at its core.

Nevertheless, the novel does make some token stabs at thematic depth. Of these, perhaps the most consistent throughline is the recurring idea of the quest as a rather cyclical endeavour, with the participants each being caught up in their own unbreakable patterns of behaviour. The Marquis te Rosscarrino is probably the most explicit culprit here, becoming obsessed with carrying on his dead brother’s crusade in search of Rovan’s treasure and attempting to elevate his niece Arnella to the throne of a restored Earth Empire by proving the prestige of his family bloodline.

(Naturally, this kind of preoccupation with family and inheritance is, in itself, pretty much bread and butter to a franchise like Star Wars. It would almost be a wonder that the Marquis never starts harping on about Midi-chlorians, if it weren’t for The Phantom Menace still being some twenty-one months away…)

Tellingly, Arnella ultimately chooses to break with her uncle’s fixations and avoids sharing his fate by entering into a relationship with Brockwell, putting an end to the perverse ouroboros-like perpetuation of the aristocracy – though having said that, the Gelsandorans’ deceptive cycling staircase might be a more apt visual metaphor – but not before we get some hair-pullingly irritating scenes of her jealously assuming him to be more attracted to Peri, which merely add more fuel to the fire of my suspicion in the wake of similar love triangles in The Murder Game and The Bodysnatchers that the BBC Books authors can conceive of precisely one character dynamic for a companion. Ah well.

Qwaid, Drorgon and Gribbs find themselves locked in a bitter cycle of their own, with the former trying desperately to assert his own individuality and break away from his boss, Mr. Alpha. Even as he murderously usurps his former employer, Qwaid remains unable to conceive of any sort of wider-reaching ambition beyond simply continuing to run the same operation, a failure of imagination that ultimately costs him dearly when Alpha’s robot duplicate inevitably enacts violent judgement upon his betrayal. It’s a reasonably elegant literalisation of the novel’s central moral schema, if not exactly a subtle or nuanced one.

Bulis also vaguely gestures at the idea of each of the seekers finding themselves caught up in a narrative of their own devising, trying desperately to exercise some form of control over the events of their lives and impose a measure of structure upon them, most plainly seen in the arc of “Sir John Falstaff,” a minor aristocrat who has adopted the persona of the Shakespearean character in an effort to seem more interesting.

Even a character like Dexel Dynes, sleazy and contemptible though he is, exercises a very literal sort of control over the narrative, repeatedly contemplating the question of how to edit the footage of the quest in order to elicit the highest ratings.

(In a way, with his consistently treating the quest for Rovan’s treasure as little more than idle, mindless entertainment, Dynes’ brand of journalism seems almost to tip over into the realms of modern, competition-based reality television. Bulis’ timing here is actually kind of impeccable, with The Ultimate Treasure arriving just over a month before the premiere of Charlie Parsons’ Expedition Robinson on Swedish television, later to be reformatted overseas under its more recognisable name, Survivor.)

Entirely unsurprisingly, however, putting aside all these rather underdeveloped ideas, my final impression of the novel is that Bulis’ traditionalist impulses have managed to win out over any paltry attempts he might have made to spice things up or offer some semblance of a subversion. The Ultimate Treasure does exactly what it says on the tin and not a syllable more, down to an honest-to-Rovan attempt to sell the audience on a “The real treasure was the friends we made along the way” type ending, as if a decently savvy science-fiction reader wasn’t likely to have been clued in to that possibility from the start.

This isn’t one of Bulis’ worst novels by a long shot, and when I was actually in the middle of reading it, I found myself reasonably well-entertained, but it’s largely just a small, insubstantial thing with paper-thin characterisation and a few neat puzzles to hold the reader’s attention without taxing their brain too unduly, and it’s hard to really begrudge fandom its low opinion of the book. One percentage point above Lords of the Storm sounds about right, I’m afraid.

It’s tough, on the basis of a single entry, to really posit any kind of answer just yet to our initial query as to what went wrong with the Fifth Doctor novels, but it’s plainly clear from The Ultimate Treasure that somehow, somewhere, the Past Doctor Adventures have lost that indefinable spark that so animated some of the best Missing Adventures to feature this particular incarnation of the roving Time Lord. It’s regrettable, but such is the way of things sometimes, I suppose.

Miscellaneous Observations

I’m hardly the first to note this, but the sense that we’re reading a very generic sort of adventure isn’t helped any by the many aspects that feel as if they were lifted from other Doctor Who stories. You’ve got the “Which of us is lying?” test straight out of Pyramids of Mars – though at least the Doctor acknowledges that he’s seen it before – alongside such favourites as “cross a tiled floor in the correct pattern,” making a return appearance after its guest spots in Death to the Daleks and The Five Doctors.

Even outside of the riddles themselves, Thorrin’s ill-informed quest for immortality mirrors the final fate of Borusa – Blood Harvest and The Eight Doctors notwithstanding – while Dynes finds himself doing his best impression of Martin Jarvis’ Governor from Vengeance on Varos, attentively watching the Doctor’s delirious wanderings around a desert environment and hoping to find a suitably artistic place to cut the footage.

I just realised I didn’t even touch on anything to do with the Kamelion subplot, such as it is, but that only serves to underscore how little of an impression it made on me. It’s precisely what you would expect if I told you that an author like Christopher Bulis had decided to tackle the aftermath of the character’s demise in Planet of Fire, complete with a woefully clunky scene at the beginning where Peri sees a silver jumpsuit while shopping and finds her thoughts turning to Kamelion, which might as well be accompanied by a gleaming neon footnote to the effect of “This will be relevant later!”

Maybe it would have felt more organic if it weren’t for the fact that Kamelion’s name is never once uttered past this point until he’s revealed to have been present throughout the narrative in the guise of Red in the book’s penultimate chapter. If Peri is supposed to have been wracked with misgivings about the tormented android’s final fate, there’s nothing within the text of the book to really lend credence to that idea beyond that single scene.

In conjunction with the rather bathetic notion that Kamelion’s true, final destiny was to beat the everliving daylights out of the walking two-dimensional gangster cliché that is Mr. Alpha, the attempt to give the character a heroic send-off ultimately fails to be much more emotionally affecting than the tragic tale of that one nameless soldier who had a sexual relationship with Ace in Shadowmind before being killed off and never spoken of again.

Really, the only thing of note here is Kamelion’s casually revealing that he had “interfaced” with the TARDIS shortly before the Master’s attempts to regain control, which can’t help but read as a stealthy acknowledgment of Christmas on a Rational Planet, and is therefore probably the only time you’re ever likely to find Bulis referencing the works of Lawrence Miles, however indirectly.

Speaking of which, the BBC Books line continues to enact pre-emptive violence against Miles’ controversial and yet-to-be-advanced theory that the New Adventures line happened in a bottle universe, with the Rosscarrino family’s motivation being inextricably linked to the decline and fall of the Earth Empire. Sure, Bulis never really speaks about “the fall” with any more specificity than he did in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but there’s really only one way that you could reasonably expect fandom to read those hints that do exist just a few months after the publication of So Vile a Sin.

Final Thoughts

Another day, another Bulis novel. Oh well. Things definitely could have been a lot worse, but I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a major step down for the PDAs. Even The Murder Game, as ambivalent as I might have come across at points in my review, at least benefitted from Steve Lyons’ gift for a witty one-liner here and there or an entertaining sequence, but The Ultimate Treasure is just a profoundly average experience.

Next time, as the old saying goes, it’s time for something completely different, as that Lawrence Miles chap returns to grace us with a second New Adventure in Down. Surely this will be his most important book of 1997. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper

BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures Reviews: The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris (or, “The Stingers of Weng-Chiang”)

Starting a new line of multi-author tie-in novels is – I imagine, having never been placed in a remotely comparable situation in my life – a rather daunting prospect for any editor to face. Where wrangling a single author into submission in order to get them to meet a deadline can be a struggle at the best of times, attempting to achieve something similar for multiple different writers, each with their own very particular style and temperament, drastically increases the number of chaotic and unpredictable elements that one needs to keep track of.

These issues are only further compounded in instances where the audience have come to expect, for one reason or another, a certain level of coherence and shared continuity between books, to say nothing of the possibility of nods towards long-form storytelling and the serialisation of common plot threads across multiple instalments.

Under such circumstances, it makes sense to play things safe and stick with writers who have already proven themselves capable of meeting deadlines and a publisher’s general editorial standards. Indeed, for all that we have quite rightly sung the praises of Virgin’s open submissions policy to date, Paul Cornell’s Revelation remained a bit of an oddball exception among the early New Adventures.

Of the range’s first six novels, the first three volumes of the Timewyrm saga were all penned by established Target Books veterans, one of whom had served as script editor for one of the most iconic eras of Doctor Who imaginable, while the first two books of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy were handed off to writers from the dying days of the original programme. Perhaps tellingly, the second writer to make his full-length novel debut in the NAs, Andrew Hunt, would never write for the series again after he concluded the aforementioned trilogy with Witch Mark.

This is, of course, a part of the natural ebb and flow of such creative endeavours, and over the next few books the series would play host to any number of influential and lasting talents, from Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts through to the Lane/Mortimore two-hander that was Lucifer Rising. When this policy of encouraging burgeoning young talent seemed to fall rather dramatically flat on its face, as in the case of Neil Penswick’s The Pit, this felt like little more than a minor imperfection in a pool of writers that was becoming increasingly diversified and reliable.

(It is admittedly rather difficult, following this line of argument, to entirely account for the runaway success and staying power of Christopher Bulis off the basis of a book as poor as Shadowmind, but A. that’s probably a topic best saved for next time and B. as we’ve argued before, this success was probably considerably bolstered by the arrival of the Missing Adventures and the realisation that Bulis could pretty consistently be counted on to offer up a solid replication of a particular regular cast’s dynamic and, perhaps most importantly, could do so with a turnaround of about five or six months, give or take. Art and commerce, that eternal tug of war.)

As long-time readers of the blog are probably well aware, however, with some 107 books and six years behind us, the tenor of the Wilderness Years has undergone a rather dramatic shift since the modest beginnings of Genesys, and there exists no better exercise to illustrate that shift than a comparison of the respective beginnings of Virgin and BBC Books’ novel lines.

Even allowing for their persistent influence on the shape of post-2005 Doctor Who, after all, the slow march of time has increasingly consigned the Wilderness Years fiction to a sort of hazy realm of half-remembered truths and blind avenues long since boarded up, and it becomes more and more difficult to entirely wrap one’s head around the status quo as it stood in June 1991.

(To put the revival’s longevity into perspective, as I write these very words at about 1:30 in the morning from the dehumidified safety of my bedroom in the most ungodly, sweltering summer Brisbane has ever known, and wreak unconscionable havoc on my sleep schedule in the process, it has been exactly 6877 days since the broadcast of Rose. If we transplant that into the timeframe of the classic series, that would take us roughly to late September 1982 and the gap between Seasons 19 and 20. So, if nothing else, Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson can probably rest assured that it’ll be tough for Series 14 to fail to meet the meagre bar of quality for season premieres set by Arc of Infinity.)

So to reiterate for the sake of anyone who’s only just joining us, the Virgin novels were, at their inception, a rather flimsy construction. By all accounts, they came about when Peter Darvill-Evans’ impassioned pleas to be allowed to extend the company’s remit to publish original novel-length fiction – having run out of serials to novelise under the Target imprint – were met with an affirmative gesture sitting a few rungs above a non-committal shrug from the BBC management.

If the books turned out to be a massive commercial flop, well, that would probably only serve to vindicate the decision to cancel Doctor Who less than eighteen months prior, and it would certainly be no skin off the Beeb’s nose. This rationale, more than anything else, serves to explain the rather strange decision to entrust the series to a company like Virgin Books – which seems nowadays, if we envision the self-same Branson media empire as something akin to a human body, to have been equivalent to the appendix – and to underline just how much the show was not really considered a “going concern” in the post-Survival gloom of the early nineties.

With the benefit of hindsight, one can’t help but wonder if this rather low-key beginning was something of a blessing in disguise, providing the New Adventures with some much needed leeway in the eyes of fans while the novels worked through their rather messy beginnings. The pronounced failure to hit the ground running with the release of Genesys wasn’t as insurmountable an obstacle when the simple novelty of an undertaking like the New Adventures was factored in, to say nothing of the cause for further optimism occasioned two months later when Exodus turned out to be surprisingly decent.

(I mean, I’m still not convinced that it’s the seventh-best New Adventure of all time as the Sullivan rankings would have you believe, but we’re also talking about a fandom that would apparently quite sincerely argue that books like GodEngine and The Death of Art are more worthwhile forms of artistic expression than Transit, so maybe I’m just an idiot.)

And yet by 1997, the comparatively leisurely bimonthly release schedule enjoyed by the first two years of the New Adventures – nearer one-and-a-half, if we’re insisting on being sticklers for the calendar – had well and truly been supplanted as the default mode of publication for new Doctor Who novels. Not only did the NAs opt for a monthly timetable starting with The Highest Science in February 1993, but the launch of the Missing Adventures as an NA-adjacent home for past Doctor fiction in July of the following year would solidify the tradition of releasing two Doctor Who novels every month, effectively meaning that Virgin had quadrupled their yearly output when compared against the humble beginnings of the Timewyrm saga.

Barring a few exceptional circumstances in which a given month would have no new or past Doctor novel to speak of, this two-a-month pattern would be upheld for some considerable time, with BBC Books maintaining the policy set by their esteemed predecessors until the start of 2003, at which point the publisher would switch to alternating between Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventures until the broadcast of Rose put the kibosh on the novels’ continued relevance once and for all.

For the nascent EDA and PDA ranges, the most immediate consequence of this relatively accelerated beginning was to largely rob them of the grace period that had been afforded the Virgin novels. At present, it’s only been a mere two months since the publication of The Eight Doctors and The Devil Goblins from Neptune in June, but whereas the New Adventures were just barely getting around to their sophomore instalment by this point in their own life cycle, The Bodysnatchers and The Ultimate Treasure were going out as the fifth and sixth novels to be published under the seal of BBC Books, and this rapid pace inevitably disinclined fandom to be as lenient as they might have been some six years prior.

This is by most reasonable estimations rather unfortunate, as the early days of the BBC Books line were certainly not short on reasons for fans to find what meagre leniency they possessed sorely tested. We’ve gone over most of them in the course of the past few reviews but, to wit, the Eighth Doctor novels were fighting an uphill battle almost from the word go on account of their having replaced the generally quite popular – albeit equally controversial – New Adventures series, and these difficulties were only further compounded by the behind-the-scenes chaos caused by the departure of original editor Nuala Buffini shortly after The Eight Doctors hit shelves.

As if to add insult to injury, this was quickly followed up by a moment of collective pained realisation on fandom’s part when people actually picked up The Eight Doctors from said shelves and found it to be, to put it mildly, not very good at all, with Terrance Dicks ironically finding himself on the opposite side of the Genesys/Exodus dichotomy entirely this time around.

While some of these more unfortunate developments couldn’t feasibly have been known to Buffini and co. during the pre-publication stages of the new series, there remains a sense that the gruelling realities of scheduling played no small part in influencing the selection of writers for this initial batch of novels.

For all that received fandom wisdom would generally have us believe the BBC Books line to be wholly insulated from what came before, the first few Eighth Doctor Adventures are striking in their willingness to pull from Virgin’s pre-established pool of writers. Kate Orman is perhaps the most obvious example, but people like Genocide author Paul Leonard were certainly no stranger to the Missing Adventures of old, even if the idea of pitting books like Speed of Flight or Dancing the Code against The Left-Handed Hummingbird seems more than a little laughable.

Furthermore, while Alien Bodies might have quickly become Lawrence Miles’ career-defining opus – and inarguably a pivotal moment for the EDAs as a whole – he was, at the time of its initial publication, primarily notable as “that guy who wrote two really whacked out New Adventures.” Even in commissioning battle-seasoned Target alumni like Terrance Dicks and John Peel, Buffini seemed to be consciously harking back to the days of the Timewyrm saga.

(Some might quite reasonably make the argument that the fact of their books meeting with the most hostile critical reception since sliced Eric Saward only serves to further underscore just how far the franchise had evolved in the intervening half a decade, but that’s by the by.)

Across the aisle in the Past Doctor Adventures, the story was much the same, with the first few months of the range playing host to any number of old favourites of the MAs, from Christopher Bulis to Gary Russell. Even Mark Gatiss returned to offer up his first Doctor Who novel in three years with The Roundheads.

What meagre pickings existed for those in search of “new” authors were heavily asterisked affairs. Keith Topping may have never written a full-length Who novel before The Devil Goblins from Neptune, but he was sharing authorial privileges with his erswthile Discontinuity Guide colleague – and scribe of The Menagerie, to boot – Martin Day. Illegal Alien, similarly, was the product of Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, who had already contributed the short story Question Mark Pyjamas to the second of Virgin’s Decalog anthologies.

And then we have Mark Morris’ The Bodysnatchers, the only BBC Books novel of 1997 to be written entirely by an author with no prior involvement with Doctor Who to speak of. In fact, it will manage to stand as the only such book for the next seven months, only being knocked off that pedestal by Stephen Cole’s decision to extend a pseudonymous toe into the EDAs’ murky waters with Longest Day in March 1998.

Mind you, even this distinction comes with a rather substantial caveat of its own. While Morris may be a first-time Doctor Who novelist, he is by no means a stranger to the publishing world. In fact, well before putting pen to paper on The Bodysnatchers, Morris had made something of a name for himself as a writer of original horror novels, with 1989’s Toady providing the foundational stone of a bibliography that encompassed no fewer than six such horror tomes all up as of August 1997.

(And yes, that figure does in fact include the suspiciously familiarly titled Longbarrow a mere two months prior.)

So clearly, for all that this marks the first intersection with the franchise of a figure who goes on to build up a respectable number of writing credits across the length and breadth of the series’ tie-in fiction – and while we’re largely going to be passing Morris by with the exception of The Bodysnatchers and Deep Blue, the most recent of these credits saw him dignified with the task of novelising Russell T. Davies’ Wild Blue Yonder as a part of the sixtieth anniversary celebrations, so he’s certainly not doing too poorly for himself – any attempts to paint Morris with the same “fan turned novelist” brush that we applied to Cornell and his contemporaries can’t help but feel rather misjudged.

Still, while it may be a trifle premature to so cavalierly slap such a label onto Morris, The Bodysnatchers nevertheless retains a certain fannish aura that proves equally difficult to dispel entirely, revelling as it does in the trappings of continuity and, if you happen to be of a more uncharitable persuasion, sequelitis.

What we’re witnessing here, then, would seem to bear all the hallmarks not of a Doctor Who fan getting their foot in the door of the industry, but rather an established author using the series as a vehicle to explore their own pre-existing stylistic and thematic interests. Sure, this places Morris at a remove from people like Paul Cornell and Kate Orman, but in this respect he’s also joined by writers like Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, and given how things turned out for them it’s certainly hard to label them “bad company” or anything of the sort.

The specifics of what Morris chooses to foreground as his objects of nostalgia are, in this case, probably rather predictable when taking into account his well-established horror bona fides, pulling heavily from the Gothic-tinged halcyon days of the Hinchcliffe Era and, more precisely, from Terror of the Zygons and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

It’s hardly difficult to trace the thought process at work here, with both stories numbering among the most popular and iconic instalments in the era of the classic show most routinely held up as a “Golden Age” for the programme. In the case of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, at least, we’ve already tread this ground in some detail when we looked at David A. McIntee’s own foolhardy attempt to offer up a redemptive sequel in 1996’s The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, noting the perennial fan-favourite status of Robert Holmes’ original script even as many an anorak chose to withhold comment on its unabashed Yellow Peril storytelling in favour of pointing at a dodgy rat costume.

(About the only development of note since the posting of that review, actually, is the slightly heartening realisation that Doctor Who Magazine‘s big sixtieth anniversary poll to determine the show’s best stories finally saw Talons edged out of the top ten for the first time, which strongly suggests – alongside the preponderance of Capaldi stories in the top ten – that nature might, in some small way, be healing, and that the Doctor Who fandom can still positively surprise me on occasion. On occasion…)

Terror of the Zygons, meanwhile, has largely avoided our attentions thus far, but this should certainly not be taken as an indication that the story is any less iconic or memorable. Although its original broadcast achieved rather meagre viewing figures by the lofty standards of the Hinchcliffe Era, being the lowest-viewed serial of Season 13, it eventually enjoyed a new lease on life when it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster just three months later, becoming only the second Fourth Doctor story to receive the Target treatment.

In many ways, the most endearing aspect of The Bodysnatchers is the sheer level of glee with which Morris has set about mashing up the Zygons with a setting more explicitly rooted in the aesthetic concerns of the late Victorian period that proved such a fruitful breeding ground for the Gothic horror of the Hinchcliffe years. It’s a manoeuvre which seems all but inevitable in retrospect, but which is certainly no less effective for its logicality.

Appropriately enough given the subject matter, Morris adopts a consciously stylised narrative voice that feels quite unlike anything BBC Books have been willing to dabble in to date. Far from offering the bland-but-readable prose of Dicks or the Virgin-esque playfulness of Orman/Blum and Lyons, The Bodysnatchers is replete with adjective-laden descriptions of nineteenth-century London streets and uncomfortably fleshy Zygon technology.

While it’s quite understandable that this is the type of creative decision liable to draw negative reactions from those fans less inclined to what might be described – not entirely inaccurately – as purple prose, it’s just about fresh enough this time around that I’m willing to cut it some leeway. Then again, my general tolerance for this sort of thing would seem to be considerably higher than the average Doctor Who fan’s to begin with, so such leeway should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Yet with all of that being said, I would be lying if I tried to sincerely claim that there wasn’t some small part of me that balked at the novel’s decision to so directly and wholeheartedly embrace a Victorian artistic sensibility, and a not inconsiderable part of this discomfort can be laid at the feet of the prominent guest spot afforded to Professor George Litefoot of The Talons of Weng-Chiang fame.

In and of itself, the prominence of Victoriana as a piece of Doctor Who‘s creative inheritance is only sensible, and not necessarily indicative of anything much deeper than its roots as a direct descendant of a long-standing tradition of British children’s literature from that very period. There exist any number of examples of the series choosing to pay homage to its literary forebears and reaping fruitful results, from The Evil of the Daleks through to Ghost Light.

Even if we restrict ourselves to the Wilderness Years, the New Adventures were generally thoughtful enough to at least attempt to gesture at a deeper examination of the more unpleasant underbelly of Victorian society. Scratching off the Victorian veneer, if you will.

All-Consuming Fire, while undoubtedly imperfect, was far more attentive to issues of imperialism and cultural elitism than one would expect of a novel seemingly pitched on the basis of “The Doctor teams up with Sherlock Holmes to fight monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos,” and even Strange England suggested that the nostalgic façade of domesticity associated with the period in the British cultural imagination was an inherently fragile one, prone to giving way to intense violence and horror at a moment’s notice.

By the same token, however, there also exist points in the franchise’s history at which it has  seemingly allowed itself to be overpowered by a certain uncritical reverence for aspects of this era that would seem to merit a more careful handling. All-Consuming Fire‘s occasionally awkward and over-earnest attempts at critiquing the worldview of the Conan-Doyle canon seemed positively acerbic when placed against John Peel’s bizarre insistence on having the Doctor fall all over himself to sing the praises of Rudyard Kipling, imperialist poet extraordinaire, in Evolution.

And in due course, discussions of these moments will inevitably gravitate back towards The Talons of Weng-Chiang. As I hinted at earlier, we have already pretty extensively litigated the subject matter of Talons‘ general racism and fandom’s long-standing unwillingness to meaningfully critique said racism in past reviews, but the subject of Jago and Litefoot’s intertwining with this tendency towards the indiscriminate veneration of Holmes’ original script – or, indeed, of Jago & Litefoot, as the case may be – has largely gone untouched until now.

There exist a few necessary clarifications in any discussion of Jago and Litefoot, much as is true of just about any element of genuine quality in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. While the default position of any sort of fan writing that at least tries to keep some semblance of an eye on matters of social justice might be to quite reasonably look askance at the popularity of the two characters, there is certainly a case to be made for the genuine chemistry enjoyed by Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter, to the point where it can hardly be considered surprising that Big Finish would eventually cave to fan demands and get a full thirteen seasons’ worth of mileage out of it. Equally, it goes without saying that Robert Holmes’ typical gift for scintillating dialogue and building endearing comedic double acts was on full display.

Hell, to give credit to Morris where it’s due, there are even aspects of The Bodysnatchers that could be seen to signal the writer’s consciousness of some of the issues inherent in trying to treat Litefoot as a beloved legacy character. Most obviously, of course, there’s the wise decision to refrain from actually having him return in the context of any sort of revival of Talons‘ Fu Manchu homages, substituting Magnus Greel and Mr. Sin for the Zygons and the Skarasen.

Even on the level of characterisation, however, there’s a sense that Litefoot’s background has undergone some rather purposeful expansion in order to tie him slightly less firmly to an aristocratic Victorian perspective and all the attendant baggage that comes with it:

Despite his gentlemanly appearance and rather formal behaviour, by Victorian standards he was actually something of a rebel. He had outraged his parents by leaving the army, in which his family had a long and honourable tradition, and becoming a doctor in one of London’s poorer hospitals in the East End. For the last twenty years of his life, his father had refused to speak to him, a situation which Litefoot regarded as eminently regrettable, but which nevertheless had not swayed him from his chosen path.

Revealingly, the basic thrust of this newfound backstory bears more than a passing resemblance to the suggestions made by Marc Platt in Lungbarrow as to the Doctor’s own past, having disappointed Quences in his plans to become a physician rather than stepping into the cutthroat arena of Gallifreyan politics and achieving the lofty rank of High Cardinal.

Coupled with the eerie resonance inherent in hearing Sam, a companion already positioned by Vampire Science as a spiritual successor to Ace, address him by the admittedly entirely accurate honorific of “Professor,” one does get the sense that The Bodysnatchers aims to cast Litefoot in a more straightforwardly heroic light akin to the Doctor himself, and this might at least partially explain the conspicuous absence of Jago – papered over as it is by the excuse that he’s visiting his sister in Brighton – what with “theatre manager” being a profession that’s a bit harder to honestly sell as performing any sort of altruistic service to the more impoverished or disadvantaged members of Victorian London.

The cynical perspective to take here, mind, would be to suppose that the character is simply there as a bit of fan-pleasing fluff, and that Morris has merely engaged in the minimum amount of tweaking necessary to avoid the thornier aspects of Talons. Certainly, it’s not exactly as if Litefoot really contributes much to the plot beyond offering a place for the regular cast to regroup between expeditions to the Zygon ship and commenting in a scandalised manner upon the impudence of Sam, and it’s not as if these functions couldn’t have just as easily been assigned to a wholly original character.

At a certain point in any attempt to “reclaim” Litefoot, after all, one is bound to run up against the simple question of… well, why? Why bother trying to find a workable “angle” on a character who, on at least one occasion in Talons alone, quite explicitly drops a racist slur against Chinese people? There’s a curious paradox underlying fandom’s treatment of Litefoot here, with fans simultaneously making the rather unconvincing excuse that Holmes is merely setting Litefoot up as a mouthpiece for outmoded Victorian ideals, while in the same breath sanding away those viewpoints in order to hold the character up as some entirely wholesome and value-neutral recipient of fandom’s tendency for nostalgic reverence.

Much like The Shadow of Weng-Chiang fell flat despite its admittedly far cleverer decision to transpose the action to 1930s Shanghai on the eve of the Japanese invasion, then, we’re left with the impression that The Bodysnatchers‘ decision to have Litefoot fighting fictional alien shapeshifters rather than a perennially vilified ethnic minority is not as subversive a response as it might appear on a superficial glance. Rather, it smacks of nothing so much as a simple attempt to sidestep and avoid the problem entirely.

This is a bit of a shame, as the Zygons themselves do feel like a more successful instance of Morris capitalising on very deeply rooted horror tropes. While the basic premise of the species – alien climate refugees, in essence, even if Lester Brown wouldn’t propose the term “environmental refugee” until 1976, the year after Terror of the Zygons originally aired – would seem to lend itself all too readily to a xenophobic reading, The Bodysnatchers‘ treatment of the Zygons is notable for the way in which it feels specifically tailored to the concerns of popular culture and science fiction in the 1990s.

While the title of Morris’ novel might owe a conscious debt to the classic 1950s Red Scare-tinged paranoia of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers – indeed, Morris is really just returning to the title employed by the original Jack Finney story, simply labelled The Body Snatchers – and the vaguely plant-like and organic iconography of the Zygons seems practically ready-made for comparisons to be drawn to the so-called “pod people,” the presentation of the aliens themselves never feels like a throwback in the manner of some of the more blatant nineties homages to the B-movies of yore like Brannon Braga’s Cathexis over on Voyager.

The horror of the Zygons here – would you believe me if I said that pun wasn’t intended? – stems more from their subversion and replacement of an individual’s personhood, rather than the direction of an existing individual’s energies towards the end goals of some nebulous, malevolent outside force. (Space communism, obv.)

In one of the nicer little instances of Morris capitalising on his Victorian setting, Nathaniel Seers seems to undergo a transformation after his replacement that can only realistically be described as a twisted reversal of Ebenezer Scrooge, going from a kindly and compassionate industrialist – however fantastical such an image probably is – to a mean-hearted tyrant of a boss who will fire an employee for mangling their hand and being unable to work.

In spite of what one might expect of a loose sequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang set in Victorian times, it’s notable that the vast majority of the Zygons’ chosen targets for impersonation are not immigrants or the lower class. In fact, the most prominent working class characters in the novel are probably Albert and Jack, who have been blatantly lured into the practise of graverobbing by the promise of a stable income, and unwittingly end up providing the Zygons with food for their Skarasens.

Ultimately, The Bodysnatchers largely avoids devolving into some sort of ill-advised, paranoia-drenched story of an insidious minority seeking to destabilise the fabric of English society – the type of story, in other words, that Dave Stone was directly mocking in the Sandford Groke segments of Ship of Fools – but instead exhibits a profound unease at the potential for capitalist, colonialist systems of authority to be employed in service of nefarious and oppressive ends. In that respect, it feels like a natural companion piece to other contemporary examples of prominent shapeshifters in nineties genre fiction like Deep Space Nine‘s Changelings or the Bounty Hunters over on The X-Files.

Putting aside the guest characters, however, The Bodysnatchers is also notable for continuing the early efforts of the EDAs to afford the Eighth Doctor and Sam some actual characterisation of which to speak after the series had kind of dropped that particular ball with The Eight Doctors, and it forms the second part of a very loose trilogy with Vampire Science and Genocide. Just as Orman and Blum went out of their way to single out Morris and Paul Leonard as being of especial assistance in defining the new Doctor-companion duo as part of the acknowledgments to their own book, Morris opens The Bodysnatchers with a similar dedication, affording the quartet the affectionately hokey nickname of “the Sam squad” and reinforcing the sense that these three books were the product of close collaboration.

And the traces of that collaboration are plainly visible in the form of the finished novel. The idea of the Eighth Doctor as a chaotically spontaneous force who enters situations with only the vaguest semblance of a plan is present here in full swing, getting embroiled in the Zygons’ plan to invade the Earth on account of something as trivial as his desire to replace a ruined copy of The Strand magazine.

Sure, it probably goes without saying that Vampire Science manages to make use of the concept in a more consistently satisfying fashion, but Orman and Blum are the kind of writers who routinely set such a phenomenally high bar that it feels almost churlish to complain that an otherwise generally competent novelist like Morris can’t meet that standard, especially when this is his first ever foray into the world of Doctor Who.

Even allowing for the different level of finesse on display, The Bodysnatchers does a solid enough job of following up on the hints dropped by its direct predecessor as to the possibility of this spontaneity being a character flaw just as serious as any that afflicted the Seventh Doctor in the NAs.

To a certain extent, this is couched in the same kind of barely-veiled passive-aggressive swipes at the TV movie for which we took The Eight Doctors to task, with the Doctor reflecting on the possibility that the trauma of his recent regeneration has brought deeply-buried character traits to the fore.

In specifically citing the examples of the infamous kiss from the telemovie’s closing moments, as well as the character’s tendency to be very open about his life and history as a Gallifreyan, Morris keys in on two of the biggest talking points in fandom in the wake of the failed 1996 revival. All he’s really missing is some scepticism over the Eye of Harmony’s presence in the TARDIS and outrage at the “half-human” line and he’s got a completed Fanboy Griping bingo card.

And yet where Dicks allowed these grievances to overwhelm the voice of his novel, such as it was, Morris just about manages to scrape by here, and he’s helped in no small part by his shrewd decision to implicitly tie the most egregious failing brought about by the Doctor’s newfound haphazard relationship to forward planning – namely the Zygons’ inadvertent fatal reaction to the anaesthetic with which he doses their lactic fluid – back to the traumatic circumstances of his own “birth,” drawing a parallel and wisely allowing it to hang relatively unarticulated.

Admittedly, there does occasionally exist a certain inelegance in the handling of these themes when compared to the high points of the New Adventures. It’s kind of tough to get past moments like the Doctor’s surprisingly low-key and almost casually blunt reflection that “[he has] committed genocide on more than one occasion,” and it feels like a weird beat to largely brush past at the three-quarter mark of your novel in favour of a big action-packed climax where the Skarasen terrorise London, a sequence I can only truthfully describe as Doctor Who‘s answer to Spielberg’s then recent The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Still, the Doctor remains infinitely more compelling here than he ever was throughout The Eight Doctors, and we oughtn’t to lose sight of that.

Sam is a bit more of a mixed bag. I’ve already kind of reconciled myself to the idea that I’m probably going to wind up with a more favourable impression of the character than a fair number of EDA readers seem to almost by default, if for no other reason than that I don’t… totally despise her? Shocking, I know.

Much as the characterisation of Eight clearly builds off of the precedent established by Vampire Science, Sam is presented in accordance with the false bravado-slinging, painfully idealistic teenager that she was established as in the earlier novel, and I honestly kind of like that The Bodysnatchers gives her the space to be vaguely obnoxious and ever so slightly inept at reading the room in that perennially teenaged kind of way.

Her immediate response upon being confronted with the wounded, terrified and dishevelled figure of Tom Donahue is to sidle up to the Doctor and almost salaciously ask, “Is he a crackhead?”, which feels like a bit of a pointed jab at the over-earnest “Just Say No” tone of Dicks’ chosen manner of introducing the character.

Even in her more tasteless moments, like cracking wise about the resemblance of her cell on the Zygon ship to a gas chamber, Sam remains painfully believable as a portrait of a teenager lobbing off what she sees as witty bon mots with a bit of an edge to them, not knowing any better. It’s hardly liable to make her an especially likeable character in any sort of straightforward sense, but if we can look past the jagged edges of an individual like Roz Forrester and find something compelling underneath, I see no reason why the same logic can’t be applied here.

Yet in that ever so contradictory EDA fashion, there are still some irritating flies in the ointment  of Sam’s characterisation that may not have yet metastasised to truly troublesome proportions, but which are slightly troubling nevertheless. The most pressing of these concerns, as it happens, are probably the first proper rumblings of her latent – and eventually blatant – attraction to the Doctor.

There will inevitably be better places to talk about this development, most obviously in the arc running from Longest Day to Seeing I, but for now I’ll at least drop the obligatory disclaimer that I’m not necessarily inherently opposed to the idea of exploring the idea of a Doctor-companion romance.

And yes, it’s probably slightly troubling that the franchise should make its first proper steps into that arena with a companion who is, y’know, seventeen, but the intent of the books is quite clearly to have Sam move past these feelings as a part of asserting her own agency and moving out of the Doctor’s shadow, realising that he can never – and, quite frankly, should never – reciprocate those kinds of feelings given the realities and dynamics of their relationship.

The best one can hope for, I suppose, is the kind of handling that these hints were given in Vampire Science, with Orman and Blum pointedly highlighting the Doctor’s complete lack of understanding of the truism that, as Kramer put it, “chicks dig the time machine” and having him take time out of stopping Slake and his vampires to repair the damage he’d inadvertently wrought to James and Carolyn’s relationship.

While the earlier novel definitely nodded towards a certain rivalry between Sam and Carolyn, this was juxtaposed against the latter’s subtextual role as a stand-in for Grace, with the arc clearly being designed to close with an affirmation of Sam’s status as the rightful companion.

This deftness of touch is sorely lacking from Morris’ own attempt at a “Sam gets jealous of the Doctor lavishing attention upon a female guest star” plotline, trotting out such tired sequences as “Sam reacts poorly to the Doctor comforting Emmeline.” Things eventually reach a nadir with a moment where Morris outlines Sam’s emotions in response to the sight of Emmeline running up to the Doctor in her water-drenched underwear after having escaped the Zygon ship, specifically noting “how clearly the outline of Emmeline’s breasts could be seen through the wet material.”

So that was… definitely a sentence I had to read. And I guess you did too now, sorry about that.

Look, without getting too bogged down in all of this, when the only comparison I can really think to make is to bring to mind the dark, dark days of John Peel introducing us to Ace in an amnesiac and disrobed state in the opening sequences of Genesys, you can’t help feeling that, somewhere along the line, things have taken a very bad turn indeed. Coupled with the rather trite and tired Ben/Polly/Terri love triangle from The Murder Game, it does rather create the unfortunate impression that the BBC Books lines are already showcasing a tendency to dip into the whole jealousy angle a mite too frequently in characterising their female companions.

The Bodysnatchers is a strange book, and I’m ultimately not quite sure how to best summarise my feelings towards it. It’s certainly not bad, and there are aspects of its style I quite like, even as none of those aspects ever feel wholly original. “Doctor Who as gothic horror” is always nice to see, yes, and infinitely preferable to anything Terrance Dicks or John Peel were choosing to offer at around this time, but as Morris’ directly taking inspiration from the Hinchcliffe Era shows, it’s definitely been done before – even as recently as the Virgin days – and it’s probably been done better.

But this is perhaps another instance where we need to be patient, as mildly infuriating as my repetition of that refrain might be. The fact remains that the Eighth Doctor Adventures have a much higher batting average, three books in, than the New Adventures did at the same point in their lifecycle. The Eight Doctors aside, the range can now boast two books that are at least OK, and in the case of Vampire Science, very good indeed.

It’s probably slightly telling that I’ve lapsed into talking about other books entirely at this point, mind you, and I can’t imagine that The Bodysnatchers will really be the sort of novel I find myself itching to revisit in the distant future when I’ve finished up this project. It’s respectable enough, but when the Benny novels are turning out books of the quality of Ship of Fools, “respectable” feels strangely inadequate, somehow.

Miscellaneous Observations

In the spirit of following up on Vampire Science‘s characterisation of Sam, Morris reveals the identity of the former occupant of her rooms in the TARDIS, and as if to make an absolute laughing stock of my impression that Orman and Blum seemed to be implying they were Ace’s old rooms, it’s apparently… Nyssa. Bit of a curveball, that. I’m game enough to admit when I’m wrong, mind you, even if it does make a lot less thematic sense. Oh well.

There were also a few elements in The Bodysnatchers that take on a more interesting resonance in light of the post-2005 revival, most notably in the general idea of “Victorian Gothic-tinged horror throwback as the third story to feature the new companion” feeling rather close to The Unquiet Dead, with Sam even reflecting early on that her primary source of information about the period comes from old adaptations of Dickens novels. In a similar vein, Thin Ice gets bonus points for hitting on the same effective image of “big alien/spaceship lurking at the bottom of the Thames” about twenty years later.

Between proudly emblazoning Mr. Sin all over the front cover of The Shadow of Weng-Chiang and now pretty clearly foregrounding a Zygon’s features when it takes nearly half the book for the Doctor to go “Ooh, these are Zygons actually,” I’m starting to wonder if there’s something about Hinchcliffe Era homages in particular that leads to a miscommunication between the writer and the cover artist as to how much they want to reveal.

I mean, it’s money. The miscommunication is because of the ability for the book to make money.

Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it, folks, the BBC Books line has taken its first step into the brave new world of hiring some newer authors, however fleeting and slender a step it might be. In fact, however transitory you thought it might have been, I’m going to need you to actually jettison those preconceptions right now, because it turns out that it’s at least ten times more so than you could have imagined. Yup, next time we’re back with yet another Christopher Bulis novel, as he finally manages to complete his grand plan of writing for each of the first seven Doctors, and sends the Fifth Doctor and Peri on a quest of their own in search of The Ultimate Treasure. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper