Virgin Missing Adventures Reviews: Cold Fusion by Lance Parkin (or, “Patience Is a Virtue”)

What is a Missing Adventure?

In December 1996, this is a question which is neither particularly pertinent nor overly complex. As a result, it’s actually more uninteresting than anything else, mostly because it’s the kind of query that you can give a pretty straight and easy answer to. And, well, as someone who runs a Doctor Who review blog, such questions tend to be rather boring for me.

(How am I supposed to fulfil my mandate of extrapolating insignificant nonsense out into a 4000 word post under such circumstances, I ask you?)

Anyway, if you’ll allow me a second to collect my energy in a valiant attempt to keep my eyelids open, the answer is as follows: The Missing Adventures are a series of full-length novels which purport to slot between gaps in the televised eras of the first six Doctors.

At last count, they numbered twenty-nine in total. By cheating a little and phoning up the ever-reliable wisdom of hindsight, however, we know that they’re not long for this world, with only four more books in the offing before BBC Books decline to renew Virgin’s Doctor Who prose license.

Riveting stuff, to be sure. If this answer effectively marks the limits of our opening question’s usefulness, then I suppose the only logical response is to attempt to ask a subtly different question: What is suggested by the use of the term “Missing Adventure” as it applies to Doctor Who?

The most important thing to understand about the Missing Adventures is that they have always been but one half of a dichotomy within the world of Doctor Who novels, serving to complement the post-Survival adventures of the Seventh Doctor and Ace that began in the New Adventures with the publication of Genesys in June 1991. From the very beginning, the MAs were something of an outgrowth of their predecessors, and it seemed like the writers and editors at Virgin were always keenly aware of this fact.

When Goth Opera hit shelves in July 1994, it opened with a Preface from early NA architect extraordinaire Peter Darvill-Evans that attempted to outline the rationale behind the launch of the new series. Here, he took great pains to stress that “the Missing Adventures [would not be] the New Adventures all over again,” but it is the distinctions he draws between the two that ultimately prove most instructive in appraising the overall arc of the Missing Adventures as a whole and, eventually, that of BBC Books’ subsequent Past Doctor Adventures novels.

In the estimation of this preface, the New Adventures could be characterised by a willingness to engage in “experimental techniques, ultra-fast cutting between scenes, enigmatic dialogue, and… other modern styles.” By contrast, Darvill-Evans’ self-professed aim in creating the Missing Adventures was to produce works that could slot neatly – nay, seamlessly, to use his own words – between the televised adventures of the Doctor and his companions, attempting to faithfully recreate the stylistic quirks of whatever bygone era that a given book happened to be a part of.

In a way, this served to embed a certain degree of narrative and aesthetic conservatism into the range from the very beginning, and this is perhaps the point that the MAs have most frequently come under criticism for in later years. Asked by David J. Howe to give a retrospective evaluation of the series for an article in Doctor Who Magazine, editor Rebecca Levene would confess, “I didn’t have a passion for the range or a vision for them, whereas with the New Adventures we could change, develop and build characters as we went, which is far more satisfying.”

By their very nature as books that could only exist in the gaps and lacunae of the franchise’s continuity, there was much less scope for the authors to use the Missing Adventures to push the franchise forward in any meaningful fashion.

There is undeniably some measure of merit to such claims. For all that you might occasionally get bold or provocative Missing Adventures like Managra or The Man in the Velvet Mask or, as much as it pains me to say it, The Plotters, the books never quite outgrew their traditionalist impulses. With that being said, however, I still believe that to paint a picture which frames the MAs and PDAs as being solely defined by this conservatism is to overlook another rather important ingredient in their composition, and it’s one that is obliquely hinted at by my earlier observation that these are books that, in effect, literally live between the gaps in the stories.

In short, the Missing Adventures effectively represent an exercise in a particular method of proselytising fandom history. For there to be “missing” adventures, there must be an accepted backlog of adventures. In other words, Doctor Who must have something resembling a history, something which can be feasibly talked about with the use of terms like “eras.” This is the most fundamental distinction between the NAs and the MAs, and it’s even reflected in the respective monikers of the series themselves.

After all, if the dichotomy was nothing more than a simple polarisation between experimentation and traditionalism – between “rad” and “trad,” if you will – then the obvious counterpoint to a series bearing the title of the “New Adventures” would probably be something along the lines of the “Old Adventures,” no? Of course, I imagine that there are precisely zero publishing executives that would seriously argue that you should willingly title your fresh new book series in a manner that suggests a certain janky and outdated quality, but the decision to employ “Missing Adventures” instead suggests that the books effectively serve as a secret history of sorts.

If, like so many other cult franchises of its day, Doctor Who can be said to have a history, then it follows that it must also have a historical progression. Like with any “real” history – and much to the dismay of political scientists like everyone’s favourite VAR recurring character, Francis Fukuyama – this progression is rarely entirely linear or neatly teleological but, broadly speaking, it does march onward. In fits and starts, maybe, but onward nevertheless.

Which brings us to the rather delicious irony inherent in using chronologically coded language to label certain corners of the franchise. When you decide to title your fledgling book series the “New Adventures,” the very nature of long-running franchises as constantly evolving pieces of art means that you will almost inevitably run up against a point in time at which the adventures you’re relating to the audience cease to be… well, new.

By the end of 1996, that point has been well and truly reached thanks to the broadcast of the TV movie and the succession of Sylvester McCoy by Paul McGann. In a sense, then, every New Adventure from around the time of Happy Endings has effectively been a Missing Adventure, filling in the gaps between our last regular adventure alongside the Doctor and Ace in Survival and the brutal murder of the Seventh Doctor in turn-of-the-millennium San Francisco.

It won’t be until the Eighth Doctor ever so briefly takes the reins in The Dying Days that one can really make a claim as to the accuracy of the New Adventures moniker having been restored, and by that point the novels are on the cusp of making Bernice the main character and thus falling into the weird limbo to which spin-off series are invariably consigned.

So here, in the last book of the year, Lance Parkin returns with the apparent goal of finally literalising all of that historical subtext, and there are quite a few interesting aspects to talk about when it comes to Cold Fusion‘s handling of that general task.

On the surface level, there’s obviously a rather neat symmetry to the fact that the year should open and close with a Parkin book. Admittedly, this is a symmetry which is entirely dependent on whether you read each month’s Missing Adventure before or after the corresponding New Adventure, and it’s therefore only really significant as nothing more than a happy quirk of reviewing these books in this particular way.

But glancing at the novel’s blurb suggests something far more interesting about Parkin’s own place within the franchise’s established pool of authors. In giving the customary spiel about the writer, it is mentioned that Cold Fusion is his third book to be published in 1996. At first blush, this might appear a little odd if you only have a passing familiarity with the literature of the time. Cold Fusion is, after all, only his second novel after his debut in Just War at the start of the year.

Novels and books, however, are two very different things.

(Happily enough, this provides a rather convenient little segue to mention that this officially represents the 90th book I’ve reviewed. Huzzah! But in keeping with the spirit of the above observation, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it’s only the 87th novel, short story collections being what they are.)

The “second” book which is being referenced here as this novel’s predecessor is the speculative reference work A History of the Universe. Published in May 1996, it represented Parkin’s attempt to place all the televised Doctor Who stories – alongside the first fifty New Adventures and the first twenty-two Missing Adventures – on a single coherent timeline.

As it turns out, this book eventually came to represent little more than the proverbial first draft of history, and although the original edition of the project is long out-of-print, the underlying mission statement is still alive and kicking in the form of Mad Norwegian Press’ AHistory. With an extra twenty-odd years between the first and most recent iterations of Parkin’s timeline, the enterprise is naturally becoming steadily more ludicrously labyrinthine with each new edition published, to the point where the Fourth Edition is actually split up into three separate 400-page volumes.

To tell the truth, I’m rather fond of AHistory, which is somewhat surprising even to myself. You’d think it’d be the kind of thing I’d have a deep-seated loathing for, given the tendency that a lot of fan theorising and continuity debating tends to have where it very rapidly devolves into a pointless screaming match about who’s “right” and “wrong” with regards to what pieces of a fictional television show really “count.”

What makes Parkin’s attitude stand out amongst many of these discussions, though, is his willingness to admit that the whole thing is just a bit silly and shouldn’t be taken as anything more serious than a game at the end of the day. More to the point, he concedes in the introduction that his timeline is by no means attempting to be definitive or authoritative, something reflected in the title of the book itself.

The indefinite article, you might say, and all of that jazz.

This worldview naturally bleeds through into a lot of Parkin’s work in the franchise, arguably climaxing with The Gallifrey Chronicles‘ joyous declaration that all of fiction can be said to be “real” in some fashion, in spite of the intertextual contradictions that such a statement throws up.

Even before that late stage of his Doctor Who career however, it’s visible in the way in which, upon being assigned to write the series’ 35th anniversary novel in The Infinity Doctors, he gleefully set about constructing a book which seemed to almost thumb its nose at any attempts to place it within established continuity.

While there are any number of other authors who take astronomical amounts of carte blanche when it comes to utilising bits and pieces of the franchise’s history to expound their own pet theories – the most obvious targets for this generalisation are probably Gary Russell and Craig Hinton, but it also applies to authors I generally look more positively on like Andy Lane and Lawrence Miles – Parkin is one of the few who seems to recognise both the futility and the fun inherent to such pursuits.

With Just War having been less concerned with televisual history than it was with, y’know, actual history, Cold Fusion represents our first real look at the approach to continuity that was exemplified by A History of the Universe. This is a book which is positively drenched in continuity and history, featuring as it does perhaps the most extensive engagement with the character of the Other between Time’s Crucible and Lungbarrow.

On top of all of that, as we discussed at the beginning, it’s a book which firmly and unequivocally historicises the New Adventures by establishing their status as an era of the franchise within which gaps can be found and exploited for storytelling opportunities. This is, in and of itself, a fascinating and rather clever move on Parkin’s part. It’s so fascinating and clever, in fact, that the subsequent BBC Books Past Doctor Adventures novels would attempt something similar with Nick Wallace’s Fear Itself in their own twilight days.

That aside, the main reason that Cold Fusion works as well as it does and avoids becoming an absolute flaming disaster is the sense that Parkin is very acutely aware of the novel’s strange status as the first and only multi-Doctor Missing Adventure, and has decided to play around with that premise in a rather intricate and clever fashion.

The existing paradigm of multi-Doctor stories on television is a rather simple one, and it takes us back to a comment I made in my Return of the Living Dad review. If there was ordinarily a certain degree of rigidity and solidity to the partitions in the proverbial “revolving door” cast policy that Doctor Who very quickly adopted as a core part of its identity, then multi-Doctor stories represented a rare opportunity to quite literally break the mould and allow the programme’s past and present free reign to interact with one another.

Because of the exceptional nature of such stories, they were generally limited to the realm of celebratory anniversary specials like The Three Doctors. Hell, this tradition even managed to outlast the programme itself, as Dimensions in Time could quite readily attest.

(Again, like we did with Return of the Living Dad, I’m just going to breeze past The Two Doctors here. I see it, I’m acknowledging it, let’s just move on.)

When the series made the transition from the small screen to the printed page, however, the fans and writers weren’t exactly feeling in much of a celebratory mood, and this was reflected – alongside many other parallel developments – in a shift in the way that multi-Doctor stories were approached.

No longer was Doctor-to-Doctor interaction a source of fun, light-hearted banter or gentle ribbing like the Second and Third Doctors trading quips in the Death Zone. Instead, it seemed to become a source of massive existential dread and angst. Cutesy moments like Seven momentarily being supplanted by Three’s personality in Genesys began to seem more and more like an outlier when books like Revelation, Love and War and Head Games postulated an outright antagonistic and violent relationship between the Sixth and Seventh Doctors.

The conclusion to the Timewyrm arc in Revelation even hinged upon the Doctor having imprisoned his fifth self as a representation of his buried conscience, and needing to set that conscience free in order to best the Cybernetic Snake Woman Formerly Known As Ishtar.

With its focus on a desolate, wintry world haunted by strange ghosts with a vaguely Gallifreyan vibe, Cold Fusion very quickly and efficiently establishes itself as another work playing in that grand old New Adventures wheelhouse of a vaguely funerary and mythic approach to the programme’s history.

Indeed, there are points at which it seems Parkin is consciously evoking Revelation in particular. It’s hard not to read the opening passages, which juxtapose a poetic folktale about the local snowstorms giving voice to the souls of the damned against the mundane scientific reality, without being put in mind of Cornell’s own musings on the diversity of snowflakes. The basic tension between these particular incarnations also recalls that which undergirded the earlier novel’s aforementioned climax.

If Cold Fusion‘s task is to firmly collapse the New Adventures into the hazy netherrealm of history and legend which their Missing counterparts represent, then it only makes sense for it to pull upon the iconography and imagery of the book that really established the NAs as a series with their own distinct identity. The impression that we’re dealing with a consciously legendary space here is only further heightened by the fact that we never learn the name of the planet on which the bulk of the action takes place. This is, in effect, a fairytale, but in the dark, forbidding Brothers Grimm-like use of the term.

Only with a lot more spaceships, I guess. I dunno, I never read the originals.

With all of that being said, the decision to contrast the Fifth and Seventh Doctors is a multi-layered one, resonating on a level even deeper than the former’s status as the youngest-appearing and most empathetic of the Time Lord’s incarnations. The key lies in the novel’s placement in the Fifth Doctor’s timeline. Coming fresh off the heels of his first adventure in Castrovalva, it’s the earliest novel to feature Davison across the entirety of the Missing and Past Doctor Adventures ranges.

Featuring a freshly-regenerated Doctor is an obvious choice in this story about change and growth, but the use of the Fifth Doctor feels much more purposeful than readily comparable analogues like Invasion of the Cat-People attempting to slot between The Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders.

As in the case of other recent efforts like So Vile a Sin and Bad Therapy, it all comes back to the Saward Era, and an attempt to cast the Cartmel Era and the New Adventures, now at the end of their lifetime, as a reaction to their direct precursor’s more egregious failures. If you’re going to be tackling the end of Cartmel Era-adjacent fiction in a matter of mere months, it only makes sense to have it share space with the dawn of the Saward years in this way.

Naturally, the confusing production schedule of Season 19 and the turbulence of Antony Root’s extremely brief tenure as script editor before leaving to work on Juliet Bravo both combine to make the particulars of that dawn something of an open question.

Although Castrovalva was the first Fifth Doctor serial to be broadcast, and the first on which viewers would have been able to see the name “Eric Saward,” the writer had technically stepped into his new role with the production of Kinda one story earlier. Root would still receive the script editor’s credit on Four to Doomsday and The Visitation, two stories which had been produced beforehand but were aired later in the broadcast season.

Still, it remains true that the Fifth Doctor’s era was the first to come under the auspices of Saward. The NAs traditionally placed the lion’s share of the focus on the Colin Baker years in conducting their strange post-mortem of the series, and this is completely understandable. In many ways, however, it was the Davison years that saw the quiet pollenation of a number of rather nasty and unpleasant trends that would reach their full, hideous flowering in Season 22.

The brutal Cyber-continuity schlockfest of Attack of the Cybermen was only really made possible by the smash success of Earthshock, just as the violent and horrible not-quite-death of Peri at the end of Mindwarp – and again, the shadow of Bad Therapy rears its head – was foreshadowed by the shocking sting of Adric’s own demise.

Which provides us, funnily enough, with a decent excuse to pivot into briefly talking about Adric for the very first time. On the face of it, it seems a little extraordinary that we’ve gone ninety books and five Fifth Doctor novels before talking about him at any great length.

On the face of it.

Because let’s be real for a minute, when you think about it for more than ten seconds, nobody in their right mind was really clamouring for the return of Adric, let alone any attempts at a redemptive reading. It’s telling that a quick skim through the blog’s back catalogue reveals that the few fleeting acknowledgments of Adric I have made have either been in reference to the character’s untimely end, or the simple fact that, in life, he was a staggeringly annoying creation. Those are the two big legacies of Adric: he was annoying, and then he died.

(It’s not for nothing that this marks the first of only two appearances by the Alzarian boy wonder as an actively travelling companion across the entirety of the Virgin and BBC lines, even if you factor in the short stories. What’s the other, I hear you ask? Oh, just Gary Russell’s much-reviled Divided Loyalties, almost another ninety books from now. Ironically enough, on Shannon Sullivan’s novel rankings, Cold Fusion is actually the second-highest rated Missing Adventure, while Divided Loyalties is the second-lowest rated Past Doctor Adventure. That’s some truly wondrous symmetry of the type that you couldn’t plan, even if you tried.)

Conspicuously absent from Cold Fusion are any real attempts to move the character beyond that simplistic two-clause description. Thankfully, Parkin is wise enough to tone down the annoyingness, but it’s there nevertheless. It feels absolutely consistent, for instance, that Adric would find himself somewhat seduced by the cold, borderline fascistic logic of the Scientifica, particularly when Whitfield starts recognising his vaunted “mathematical excellence.”

These qualities are offset, however, against some genuinely funny sequences like the boy genius’ complete failure to apprehend Roz early on, or the Doctor trying to pass off his time sensor as a watch reminding him of Adric’s bedtime.

Here, once again, we get the sense that Parkin is using this opportunity to have a bit of cheeky fun. There’s no other way you can feasibly read sequences like, say, Chris’ attempts to go undercover by donning an incredibly broad Australian accent and the identity of “Bruce Jovanka” than as an attempt to lightly poke fun at the fact that the character of Tegan herself was rather caricature-esque. Chris even ends up twisting his ankle at one point, in a nice subversion of the rather gendered expectations of the companion role throughout the years.

The emphasis here needs to be placed on the word “lightly,” mind you. There’s never a sense of genuine malice or venom to any of Parkin’s observations, and it ultimately just comes across as another expression of his genuine enjoyment in playing with the particulars of Doctor Who‘s extensive cast and history.

Adric might still be a stuck-up brat, and Nyssa and Tegan might be exiled to a whole lot of wacky comedy highjinks at the novel’s beginning as they attempt to unravel the mystery of “Bruce’s” true identity, but they are all expertly characterised, as is the Doctor himself.

Or should I pluralise the pronoun in this case?

Whatever the case may be, the decision to almost exclusively present the Seventh Doctor and his companions through the eyes of the Fifth Doctor’s own companions at first is also a rather shrewd one. It’s an approach whose creative high point probably comes rather early on, as Parkin avoids offering a third-person description of which Doctor we’re reading about in the first chapter for as long as humanly possible. Avid readers of the NAs will probably be able to make the identification pretty easily, but to complain about that almost seems to be missing the point.

By keeping the representatives of the Cartmel Era at arm’s length like this, Cold Fusion manages to effectively communicate that its plot will be a case of the programme’s future intruding upon its past, rather than the other way around as we have come to expect from what we know of the way televised Doctor Who tends to operate.

Davison’s Doctor simply doesn’t belong in this hardened world of military peacekeeping and Adjudicators and the Earth Empire. Even if it might be a world based on concepts that were introduced in a throwaway manner back in the Pertwee years, Parkin’s approach owes a much greater debt to Andy Lane’s extrapolations in books like Lucifer Rising or Original Sin than it does to Colony in Space or The Mutants.

Indeed, these connections were originally planned to have been even more explicit, with Cold Fusion having been planned to be set in the thirtieth century and tie directly into the Empire’s status quo in So Vile a Sin. These plans were scuppered by the lengthy delays which plagued that novel, but it’s not too difficult to spot their remnants. For one thing, there’s the fact that the two novels both share the presence of the Unitatus, but Parkin has also onboarded the basic themes of the conflict between rationality and superstition that informed so much of the Psi Powers arc.

Not to mention, the twist that the Machine is actually a primordial TARDIS is pretty easily predicted when you factor in a similar beat concerning the nature of Cassandra in Aaronovitch and Orman’s novel. Of course, the selfsame delays that we keep coming back to meant that readers in 1997 would have actually experienced the inverse of all of these sensations. Which isn’t confusing at all, honest.

In the end, Cold Fusion actually ends up hearkening forward to the New Adventures’ future in other ways, some of which are more intentional than others. With the thirtieth century setting of So Vile a Sin having been declared off-limits, a compromise was reached whereby the novel would instead tie into the forthcoming retooling of the line to focus on the adventures of Bernice Summerfield in the late twenty-sixth century.

(This is a little bit bungled when the wardroid in the first chapter gives a copyright date that would better fit the twenty-seventh century, but it’s hardly the first time the Virgin novels’ internal chronology has become confused by Benny’s mere existence. It’s a little bit ironic that this should pop up here, when Parkin himself was the one who aimed to explain away the inconsistent dating of Love and War in his first novel, but the author claims in AHistory that the droid’s copyright date was the result of a simple “typographical error.” Believe that as you will, I suppose.)

And so we get not only our first reference to Dellah, but also numerous flashbacks involving Patience, erstwhile wife of the Other. Here, Parkin draws liberally upon the backstory that Marc Platt will explore at the close of the New Adventures with Lungbarrow. Being tied up with all the usual Cartmel Masterplan stuff, a lot of these flashbacks tend to dominate fan discussions of Cold Fusion, but I won’t really touch on it too much here at the risk of repeating myself for when we do eventually cover Platt’s novel in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

If you’ve read enough of my reviews however, you’ve probably gleaned a broad approximation of my stance on the matter at this point, which is to say that I’m generally rather agnostic about it all. I’m by no means religiously devoted to all the talk of sentient Houses and Looms and the Pythia’s curse, but I also don’t think it’s the franchise-ruining evil that some people make it out to be.

It helps that Parkin is at least competent and stylistically talented enough to portray Gallifrey in an interesting and evocative manner. It’s dripping with the same moody, chilly darkness that suffused Platt’s own efforts, and while some might find it pretentious and overwrought, it’s a take on the often rather musty and dry trappings of Time Lord society that I’ve always rather liked. Sneaking in a covert Twin Peaks reference in describing Patience and the Other’s residence certainly doesn’t hurt the novel’s chances any, either.

All of the Cartmel Masterplan stuff only serves to further reinforce the sense that the Fifth Doctor has wondered onto the sets of a very different show/book series/what have you. After all, in his era, the extent of the wider programme’s engagement with Gallifrey looked more like Arc of Infinity than it did Lungbarrow.

I’ll leave an appropriate pause here for you to get any instinctive shudders of revulsion out of the way.

If this is the point at which we’re finally starting to talk about the particulars of the novel’s plot, then the last manifestations of the future that we really need to talk about are the Ferutu. In view of their status as the denizens of a timeline in which Gallifrey was destroyed at a very early point in its history, they’re a monster whose presence once more brings me back to something we talked about with So Vile a Sin, and only further reinforces the abortive ties between the two stories.

In a superficial sense, I am of course talking about the tendency of Doctor Who novel ranges to become fascinated by questions of alternate timelines and universes as they approach their end, but there’s also another serving of irony heaped on top of this subtext casserole. As with all good ironies, it’s almost completely unplanned and only really becomes perceptible when you’re able to view the arc of history in full a few decades after the fact.

The Ferutu are not just limited to the role of harbingers of a past-that-never-was, even though that’s the only purpose that Parkin probably had in mind when he wrote Cold Fusion. When you take into account their later operations under the guise of the People’s former Gods in the Bernice Summerfield-led New Adventures, they also manage to provide a vital signpost on the road to the final conclusion of Virgin’s novels.

There are all sorts of totally valid reasons to dislike the later revelation that the Gods are actually just the Ferutu. Most of those reasons hinge on the fact that it seems rather unlikely that the resolution to the thread was actually planned to unfold in that way, and dismissing all the various other theories that had been dreamt up in books like Where Angels Fear or Dead Romance in order to shrug and go “Eh, they’re the villains from an old Missing Adventures novel, I guess?” isn’t exactly a very satisfying manoeuvre.

We’ll get to all of that in time, but for this particular moment, all that can be said is that the Ferutu’s eventual about-face as the final “big bads” of the New Adventures – however anticlimactic and mediocre it might be on anything but the most abstract and intellectual of levels – serves to illustrate the fundamental frictions between past and future that run throughout Cold Fusion.

It’s a conflict that can even be seen when one considers the larger shape of the plot itself. Underneath all the familiar New Adventure trappings, a lot of what happens here is a pretty simple runaround, with events following a tried-and-true structure familiar to any fan of Doctor Who.

Yet it’s those little touches of panache and authorial style from Parkin that elevate Cold Fusion above so many of its contemporaries, combined with a sense that the writer is at least aware of the very archetypal structure he’s adopted. This isn’t a novel that can be dismissed as another in the recent line of MAs that have buried their points under a staid and formulaic plot structure.

If Cold Fusion can be credibly accused of wearing that age-old Missing Adventure albatross of “aesthetic and narrative conservatism” around its neck, then it is at least one of the rare books that manages to twist those tendencies in such a way as to actively enhance its bolder themes and ideas.

This is a wonderfully intelligent and sophisticated work, filled with all sorts of cute and endearing touches, and if it has one big flaw it’s that reviewing twenty-five full-length novels and a short story collection in the space of a little under nine months has burned me out a bit and perhaps prevented me from appreciating Parkin’s work to its fullest extent. But that’s an extremely specific critique that only applies to my situation, and even that can be easily remedied by giving it another readthrough at a later date.

Cold Fusion is very, very good, and considering the pretty dire turn that the MAs have taken into cut-rate, low-merit, sequelitis-afflicted offerings in the latter half of 1996, it’s arguably a far better novel to wrap up the year than they ever deserved. At any rate, this is undeniably the most fun I’ve had reading a Missing Adventure since at least The Scales of Injustice, even with the burnout in play.

And I think that’s perhaps as good a note to close on as any.

Miscellaneous Observations

I’m glad that, three novels in, the Missing Adventures have finally figured out something to do with Nyssa besides having her turned into some kind of science fiction/horror monster. Seeing her work with Chris is actually quite enjoyable, and it’s unfortunate that by all accounts the Past Doctor Adventures will have returned to business as usual by the time the character is steadily turning into an antimatter creature in her next appearance in Zeta Major.

Oh well, what we got here was pretty good, I suppose.

In this instalment of what will probably become a recurring feature whenever we talk about one of Parkin’s novels – and which I’m taking this opportunity to dub the “Richardson Report” – I had almost thought we’d get away without a character based on the appearance of Ian Richardson.

Thankfully, Admiral Dattani comes along at the very last minute with his aquiline nose and high forehead, and Parkin virtually reuses the same descriptors he applied to Oskar Steinmann in Just War. Not that that’s anything to complain about, mind you. It’s a fun little in-joke, as ever.

Final Thoughts

Well, there you have it folks. All twenty-six books from 1996 present and accounted for, reviewed over the course of a brisk 262 days. All told, WordPress’ stats are telling me that I ended up writing well in excess of 130,000 words over the course of this block of posts, which is… mildly crazy.

I’ll admit, I did feel a lot of pressure in writing this one, and I worried that the quality of the review simply wasn’t up to par. I had to do a lot of pruning to get it to a point that I was happy with, and collateral fallout from having to slog away at my university work did start to sap the fun out of writing a bit towards the end. Hopefully this was still enjoyable enough, though.

In short, I need a bit of a break.

Still, you can expect the customary Year in Review post at some point in the not-too-distant future. I don’t really have a set time for when I’ll be back, beyond “when I feel like I’ve recovered from this burst of activity.” When I do, however, it’ll be time to ring in 1997 with just… just colossal amounts of death. It’s the return of Jim Mortimore in Eternity Weeps! Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper