Virgin Missing Adventures Reviews: A Device of Death by Christopher Bulis (or, “Genesis of the Movellans?”)

It’s rather surprising, but A Device of Death represents our first extended engagement with the Hinchcliffe Era in quite some time.

Although Christopher Bulis’ latest contribution to the Missing Adventures – bringing his total number of novels for the range to an unequalled five at the very last minute – may not be the last Fourth Doctor novel from Virgin, the fact of the matter is that I’m planning to give over much of the thematic real estate in my review of The Well-Mannered War to a more generalised closing summary of Virgin’s stint as the custodians of the Doctor Who print license, given that it’s the last novel to be published before the loss of said license.

As such, I feel it behooves me at this juncture to offer up the standard retrospective of the Fourth Doctor’s run in the MAs, since this is really the last chance I’ll have to do it. What’s more, there’s undeniably something interesting to be gleaned from the way in which these novels have handled the Hinchcliffe and Holmes years, a period widely considered to number among a select few epochs in the history of televised Doctor Who that could credibly be described as a “Golden Age.”

With the publication of the first Missing Adventure to feature Tom Baker’s iconic bescarved Gallifreyan misfit, there seemed to be a conscious desire to evoke these kinds of favourable associations and fond remembrances of the era. John Peel’s Evolution was a work that leaned very heavily on the aesthetics of Gothic horror and Victoriana that had proved such a winning combination for H&H.

Even the regular cast’s wardrobe was apparently in on the act, with the Doctor sporting his imitation Sherlock Holmes get up from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and Sarah pointedly choosing to don the dress once owned by Victoria, as she did in Pyramids of Mars.

Peel, of course, was undeniably a representative of the more traditionalist school of Doctor Who writers. A staunch ally of Terry Nation with scattered credits stretching back to the earliest days of the Doctor Who Magazine backup strips, he shot to prominence in the late 1980s as the writer who took on the unenviable task of novelising the remaining 1960s Dalek stories that had – thanks to the infamously complicated rights situation pertaining to the xenophobic pepperpots – remained unadapted to that point. What’s more, he was selected as Nation’s co-author on 1988’s The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book, complete with a seventy-four page in-universe history of the creatures.

When Virgin made the leap to the production of original fiction in June of 1991, Peel had also been afforded the opportunity to usher in the New Adventures. Although Genesys ultimately turned out to be a rather unappetising hodgepodge of sleazy sexuality and flavourless, Target novelisation-style plotting, its status as the series’ first instalment nevertheless helped to cement its author as something of a pivotal figure in the early stages of the Wilderness Years.

One suspects, then, that the decision to hire Peel to provide the second Missing Adventure, featuring one of the most popular and recognisable TARDIS teams imaginable, was – at least in part – an attempt to get into the good graces of fandom by starting in the realms of the familiar. It may not have exactly been a very ambitious plan, but you need to learn to crawl before you can walk, I suppose.

With the benefit of hindsight, the faultiness of this reasoning rather readily presents itself. Although Peel’s work may have fit quite comfortably alongside the more restrained and conservative stylings adopted by the early New Adventures of 1991, it was hopelessly outmoded by the time of Evolution‘s publication in September 1994.

As if to reinforce this sense of the novel being a time-lost relic of a bygone age, virtually all of the same problems that had plagued Genesys reared their head once more, from the decision to introduce Sarah in a skimpy, low-cut swimsuit to the tired “You can’t judge people from the past who did horrible things!” rhetoric. On top of all that, its generic plot detailing the escapades of a nefarious Victorian industrialist didn’t exactly make for the most scintillating of reading material.

So it seems fair to say that the Fourth Doctor wasn’t exactly off to the most auspicious of starts, despite the clear desire to recapture the goodwill enjoyed by his most beloved of eras. Indeed, far from becoming some new fan-favourite, Evolution was seemingly greeted with something of a collective shrug. If you consult the final form of the almighty Shannon Sullivan rankings, it sits at no. 28 out of a total of thirty-three Missing Adventures, thereby awarding it the dubious honour of being the lowest-ranked Fourth Doctor novel on the list by some considerable distance.

Fortunately, Virgin seemed to hit upon a rather more successful template by the time they took their second crack at dear old Tom with the publication of Gareth Roberts’ The Romance of Crime just four months later. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the novel, particularly when placed against Peel’s, is the vastly different choice of source material.

Situated between The Creature from the Pit and Nightmare of Eden, in the thick of Douglas Adams’ single-season tenure as script editor, it’s hard to think of a more stark contrast to the moody darkness that so incensed Mary Whitehouse back in the day.

Despite this profound tonal shift, The Romance of Crime was greeted with a much more exuberant reception than Evolution ever was, to the point where Virgin would shortly commission two further novels from Roberts featuring the exact same roster.

For a series like the Missing Adventures, with very little connective tissue between each book, this was something of an atypical manoeuvre, which probably speaks to the high regard in which Roberts was held at this time. The closest points of comparison would probably be Steve Lyons continuing the adventures of Grant Markham in Killing Ground, or David A. McIntee structuring next month’s The Dark Path to loosely follow on from Bulis’ own Twilight of the Gods.

Even today, Roberts’ Season Seventeen books continue to cast a long shadow. Each of them manages to fit quite comfortably within the top ten highest-rated novels as measured by Sullivan. Moreover, when Big Finish decided to adapt some choice favourites from the Virgin years as audio dramas in the 2010s, the trilogy numbered among the only Missing Adventures to receive the treatment.

(Although Lance Parkin’s Cold Fusion is pretty unambiguously a Fifth Doctor novel with a guest appearance by the Seventh Doctor and his companions, the fact that Big Finish saw fit to release it in conjunction with an adaptation of Chris and Roz’s debut in Original Sin would seem to suggest that they viewed it as being of a piece with their other adaptations of New Adventures.)

All of these subsequent developments notwithstanding, however, it’s still hard to escape the sensation that Roberts’ focus on the Williams years served to distort the Fourth Doctor novels to come. System Shock was nominally placed in the gap between Seasons 13 and 14. As a high-octane techno thriller, though, its presentation owed a far greater debt to contemporary anxieties about the “information superhighway” than anything that might be deemed more strongly reminiscent of Doctor Who as it existed in 1976.

By contrast, Stephen Marley’s Managra was unashamed to wear its Gothic influences on its sleeve, featuring clones of Mary Shelley, representations of and allusions to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and no fewer than three versions of Lord Byron.

Nonetheless, this promise of Gothic-drenched Hinchcliffe homages would largely go unfulfilled in the subsequent novels. Even when The Shadow of Weng-Chiang offered up a sequel to a beloved fan-favourite story from the era, David A. McIntee would make the choice to integrate the plot into the Doctor and Romana’s quest for the Key to Time.

It is perhaps worth pondering the question of why exactly the Hinchcliffe Era has remained largely untouched by the Missing Adventures when compared to the Williams Era. The easy answer would be to make the observation that one is significantly more beloved than the other, and any botched attempts at capturing the spirit of that original period in Doctor Who‘s history would consequently be met with a more acrimonious reaction.

While the Hinchcliffe/Holmes years are often held up as the programme’s Golden Age, fandom’s estimation of the Williams Era is usually far less flattering in nature. Broadly speaking, as we noted in reviewing Burning Heart, it seems reasonable to say that this period is most often viewed as the starting point – or, at the very least, a possible starting point – of Doctor Who‘s eventual decline, with the incoming producer finding himself forced by BBC management to make a rapid course correction away from the violence and darkness that had so incensed the rabid, unhinged, bigoted hordes comprising the powerbase of Whitehouse’s NVLA.

The thing that usually gets held up as “the problem” here, mind, is that a lot of the writers working on the programme at this point didn’t seem able to come to an agreement upon something approaching a basic, cohesive and consistent style that could supplant all that Gothic horror goodness, beyond a vague notion that the show should have a brighter, more colourful and more humorous bent. Oh, and that maybe they should try making it a bit like that new film people seem to be going fashionably crazy for. Constellation Belligerences, or some such, no?

Regardless, the truth of the matter is admittedly far more complex, bound up in all sorts of unfortunate production realities and unlucky happenstances, and like any piece of Doctor Who I could care to name, the Williams Era has never been without its stalwart defenders, not the least formidable of whom is Gareth Roberts.

Regrettably…

Even allowing for these attempts to mount a defence in the intervening decades, fans as a whole still seem rather icily disposed towards this particular three-season block, particularly when compared with its direct predecessor.

Consulting the results of Doctor Who Magazine‘s mammoth “First 50 Years” poll from 2014 – and conceding that I’m relying considerably more on fan rankings as a barometer of opinion than I usually do, but kindly bear with me – immediately presents a pretty sharp disparity.

As one might expect, Seasons Twelve through Fourteen manage to land no fewer than three entries in the list’s top ten, with Genesis of the Daleks taking third place and thus attaining the lofty distinction of being the highest-rated serial of the classic show.

Seasons Fifteen through Seventeen, on the other hand, are far more uneven in their distribution; with the exception of City of Death, not a single story from this period cracks the top thirty. Furthermore, five stories actually manage to fall below 200th place, while the lowest-rated story of the Hinchcliffe Era, Revenge of the Cybermen, sits at a cool 160.

Given the obvious and vast gulf that exists between the fan perception of the two eras, it’s certainly not a wild or unfounded supposition that the Hinchcliffe years might have constituted something of a sacred cow that the writers were collectively unwilling to poke at.

Even the “About the Author” blurbs on the novels’ back covers seemed to be in on the bit at times, if only in the half-hearted, comedic kind of way that one expects from such things. Sure, we’re obviously not supposed to take The Shadow of Weng-Chiang‘s declaration that McIntee “[said] no one in their right mind would even suggest a sequel to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which is why he volunteered instead” entirely seriously, but that doesn’t mean that it’s light-years removed from being a feasible response on the part of fandom, given the genuinely reverent light in which Talons is often viewed.

(Whether it should be held in such reverence is another question entirely. To which the answer is no, incidentally, but I digress…)

With all of that being said, despite the appealing simplicity of this hypothesis, I don’t believe it to be quite sufficient to completely cover the nuances of the Missing Adventures’ attitudes towards the Hinchcliffe years.

After all, fans had been pretty unanimously positive in their appraisal of Justin Richards’ The Sands of Time, a book which, though set during the Davison years, was still pulling from a beloved classic in the form of Pyramids of Mars. Evidently, it seemed that readers were more than willing to tolerate reiterations of the more iconic imagery of the programme’s perceived Golden Age if it was done right, even if the exact parameters of “right” may have been largely dependent on a given individual’s personal interpretation.

So there’s clearly something deeper going on here, and I would contend that this preference for the aesthetics of the Williams years over those of Hinchcliffe is just another manifestation of the same internal conflict that has plagued the Missing Adventures ever since their inception: how seamlessly are these books supposed to slot into the television series?

To compare and contrast the Fourth Doctor books we’ve already discussed, it’s pretty clear which school of thought each story aligns itself with. If you toned down some of the more graphic bits of violence and upped the programme’s budget – and, being honest, the nature of the Hinchcliffe Era means that you might not even have to go too far with regards to the former of those two criteria – Evolution could very readily slot between the gap in which its back cover places it. It’s a traditionalist work through and through, aiming to recapture the spirit of the original stories to the letter, for better or for worse.

The Romance of Crime, however, is actively engaged in a redemptive reading of a much-maligned period of the show’s history, attempting to bring forth the potential which Gareth Roberts seemed to wholeheartedly believe was always present within Williams and Adams’ vision of Doctor Who, but which was often hampered and smothered by the realities of television production.

Even a novel like Managra, which outwardly cloaks itself in the trappings of Gothicism, still manages to end up becoming far too literary and strange, making very deliberate use of its status as a novel in such a way as to render it, in all probability, nigh-unfilmable.

And so we come to A Device of Death, a book which seems to have made the rather curious decision to split the difference between these two modes of Fourth Doctor literature, and attempts to get the best of both worlds in the process.

By its very nature as a book from Christopher Bulis, it’s obviously not exactly liable to become some sort of post-modern masterpiece that revolutionises the Missing Adventures and turns everything we thought we knew about Doctor Who on its head.

This is Bulis’ sixth novel, all told, and he’s long since made a name for himself as one of the more traditionalist and nostalgia-prone voices in Virgin’s line-up, having offered up affectionate homages to such diverse genres as Golden Age science fiction (State of Change), epic fantasy (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), and even the Boys’ Own adventure serials of the 1930s (The Eye of the Giant).

Whatever your thoughts on these books might be, it can’t be denied that, if you need a solid Missing Adventure delivered in a pinch – indeed, A Device of Death marks the author’s third novel in the past twelve months, proving that Bulis is, if nothing else, supremely efficient in his writing – there are far worse candidates to whom you could turn, and for all that his style may be less ambitious than some of his comrades over in the New Adventures, he’s almost indisputably possessed of rather more talent and imagination than someone like John Peel.

So on one level, A Device of Death is everything we’ve come to expect from Bulis at this point in time. There’s a whole boatload (fleetload? armadaload?) of internal military hierarchical politics, some high-tech, futuristic combat sequences between a bunch of alien factions, and a propensity for spouting technobabble, all of which combine to leave the audience with the general impression that Bulis may feel more at home in the realm of Star Trek than Doctor Who.

Wrapped around all of this, however, is a simple yet effective framing device that might just be the best conceit to grace a Bulis novel since State of Change gave us “an alternate Rome, but not really.”

I’m assuming, if you’re bothering to read this post, you’re familiar with the general dramatic thrust of Season Twelve’s Genesis of the Daleks: the Doctor winds up being recruited by the Time Lords to interfere with the creation of the Daleks in the distant past of their home planet Skaro, hoping to completely avert or, at the very least, significantly delay their galactic reign of terror.

Inevitably, what with the Doctor being a rather anti-genocide sort – he’s just quirky like that, I guess – he ends up refusing to kill the Kaled mutants in their incubation chambers, giving a rather iconic speech about not having the right to serve as judge, jury and executioner on such a monumental scale, before promptly using the Time Ring to escape the general carnage that tends to arise when a thousand year-long war comes to a violent and bloody conclusion. As far as the television series was concerned, that was that.

As it turns out, fans weren’t quite so convinced that all the loose ends had been tidied away, and would idly ponder the implications of the Doctor’s actions in the years to come. Within the serial itself, we’re only given the most fleeting of clues, primarily in the form of the Doctor’s insistence that he had “only delayed them for a short time. Perhaps a thousand years.”

All of this is without even mentioning the nasty continuity snarls thrown up – for those who knew enough to care about such things – by the sudden existence of Davros, a never-before-referenced figure who would go on to become all-important in the Daleks’ remaining appearances throughout the classic run, and whose status as the creator of the Daleks seemed to directly contradict the TV Century 21 comic strips, which ascribed that title to Yarvelling, a member of a blue-skinned humanoid race bearing very little resemblance to the eventual on-screen presentation of the Kaleds.

The task of reconciling these discrepancies obviously falls squarely within the realm of fan speculation, and therefore is usually outside the remit of these reviews, barring the occasional cheeky acknowledgment from someone like Lance Parkin in The Gallifrey Chronicles, wherein the Eighth Doctor is said to have nearly driven William of Ockham to a nervous breakdown by confronting him with the tangle of Skarosian history.

No, for the purposes of examining A Device of Death, there’s only one particular theory that we really need to consider, courtesy of that age-old fount of wisdom – if you’re willing to stretch your personal definition of “age-old” a little bit to mean “about twenty-one months or so when counted from February 1997” – from the minds of Cornell, Day and Topping, The Discontinuity Guide.

Essentially, the trio ran with the notion that the Doctor’s mission had broadly succeeded in rewriting substantial chunks of Dalek history, with the survival of Davros – as revealed in the creatures’ next appearance in Season Seventeen’s Destiny of the Daleks – being considered a remnant of said temporal alteration, and going some way towards explaining all the factional infighting that plagues the Daleks throughout their later outings. Quoth the Guide:

The Doctor does succeed in changing history in Genesis of the Daleks. The events of previous Dalek stories, if they happened at all, are now vastly different. The Doctor delays Dalek development by 1000 years, but, more importantly, his actions cause Davros to remain alive.

The Doctor’s warnings about the dangers of the Daleks had some effect on their creator, making him paranoid enough to activate a force field in his chair. He thus survives the Daleks’ assassination attempt. In the previous time line, Davros was killed and forgotten. Davros also remembered some of the Dalek defeats mentioned by the Doctor. For example, the Daleks retain an interest in Earth and want to invade it again, especially as Davros thinks he knows how they were defeated.

A Device of Death, then, proceeds further along this chain of reasoning, inserting a gap between the Doctor, Sarah and Harry’s departure from Skaro and their arrival on Nerva Beacon in Revenge of the Cybermen. There is, naturally, not much in the way of on-screen evidence to suggest such a gap, but it seems churlish to start complaining about such things now, when the very first Missing Adventure positioned itself in a seemingly non-existent interval between Snakedance and Mawdryn Undead.

Regardless, in the great classical Who tradition, the three regulars find themselves separated from one another thanks to their being caught in the wake of a rogue front of temporal distortion resulting from the alteration of history at the conclusion of Genesis, thrown into their own personal subplots which eventually come to mesh together by the book’s end.

All throughout this, though, the novel’s prologue establishes that the effects of their actions are being closely monitored by the Time Lords back on Gallifrey, and once the rather traditional main plot has drawn to a close, the Doctor is informed by his people that the secret Landoran weapons manufactory of Deepcity so heavily featured throughout the book will eventually go on to give rise to a race of “synthonic robots” with some unspecified role to play in the downfall of the Daleks.

Although these robots are never identified by name, the very clear implication is that they are, in fact, the Movellans seen in Destiny of the Daleks, whose conflict with the Doctor’s iconic nemeses served to provide the impetus for them to dig him out of his extended hibernation in the first place. And the second place, if we’re also throwing Resurrection of the Daleks into the bargain.

Got all that? OK, you may now exhale.

So. There are a couple of ways that we can assess this development. To start with, there’s the obvious response of kneejerk cynicism, writing all of this off as so much fan-pleasing guff which only manages to attain marginally more artistic value than something like Craig Hinton’s attempts to delineate the social standing of gastronomy within the Ice Warrior caste system in GodEngine.

Certainly, this is something of an understandable viewpoint. It’s not as if providing an origin story for the Movellans – a race who had only, to date, appeared once nearly twenty years ago in one of the less-beloved Dalek stories, and who would go on to make one further cameo appearance in Series Ten’s The Pilot twenty years after the publication of A Device of Death – was really one of the burning questions that fans were clamouring en masse to have answered, but it is the type of thing whose inclusion in a novel would still end up pleasing a certain stripe of continuity-obsessed fan.

Equally, though, I do think there is at least the semblance of a deeper meaning to be mined from Bulis’ inclusion of this twist. It is, on the level of the programme’s own metanarrative, a clear attempt to forge an undeniable link between the Hinchcliffe and Williams years; that it does so using the pre-existing time travel shenanigans of Genesis of the Daleks, too, should be no big surprise, given the high esteem in which we have continually reiterated that fandom holds that serial.

Indeed, it’s a revelation that feels perfectly in keeping with that conception of the Missing Adventures as a series which can engage in these sorts of redemptive readings, weaving strands of connective tissue into the tapestry of Doctor Who‘s history and attempting to form some kind of Grand Unified Theory of Tom, if you will. If you’re going to do that, then keeping it to the very end is perhaps the most unobtrusive and reasonable way of doing so.

It also bears noting that choosing to play to the fans in this manner is a much more forgivable manoeuvre in light of the current status of the Virgin books, because at this stage, fans are really the only ones who have stuck around.

Those who weren’t sufficiently attached to Doctor Who to begin with had likely remained wholly unaware of the novels’ existence, and those hardcore fans who had found themselves alienated by the occasionally spiky in-house style of the New and Missing Adventures were probably just twiddling their thumbs and waiting impatiently for the BBC Books line to start. After all, it’s not as if you can go too drastically wrong with Uncle Terrance at the helm, right?

(Dramatic irony? What’s that?)

Of course, if you’re shrewd enough to put on your patented futuresight goggles… well, first off, I’ll ask very politely if you could lend me a pair. After that, though, you might very well ask me why I would write in defence of Bulis taking the time to elucidate upon a minor point of continuity while having occasionally ragged on John Peel for doing something similar in War of the Daleks.

Putting aside basic questions of which individual is the stronger writer, pound-for-pound – I mean, it’s not as if Christopher Bulis vs. John Peel is the kind of head-to-head I could really bring myself to get all that worked up about – the simple fact of the matter is that War‘s infamous retcon stems from little more than a profound grumpiness at the direction in which the Daleks had developed in those scripts that didn’t have Terry Nation’s name emblazoned across the front in big bold letters.

Without getting too thick into the weeds on War of the Daleks just yet, I’ll merely note that the difference in apparent intent between Peel and Bulis seems to bleed through into the finished substance of their respective novels.

A Device of Death hinges upon the iterative and cumulative nature of Doctor Who and its lore; the revelation that we’ve been unknowingly reading the origin story of the Movellans for the last 200-odd pages simply doesn’t work unless we assume there’s something of a natural, unspoken progression from the aesthetic of Hinchcliffe to that of Williams.

War of the Daleks, on the other hand, will choose to actively play against this idea, seeking to rewind the clock on nearly a decade’s worth of televised Dalek stories in the most petty and inelegant manner possible. It’s telling that the origin of the Movellans is the most significant divergence between the two books, with Peel going out of his way to have the Dalek Prime detail a ludicrous scheme in which the threat of the androids is said to have been entirely concocted by the Daleks as a means of pulling one over on Davros.

It is surely completely coincidental that War should choose Destiny of the Daleks, a script which director Ken Grieve apparently claimed was “98% written by Douglas Adams” and whose final form had consequently attracted Nation’s disapproval, as the proverbial “ground zero” for its efforts to rewrite Dalek history. Surely.

So now, through examining A Device of Death, we’ve ironically looped right back around to the beginning of the review, and have begun – in a roundabout sort of way – to get at the rather inconvenient truth about John Peel, which is to say that he’s a writer whose greatest contribution to the history of the Wilderness Years was always in setting up a template from which subsequent novels in a given series could deviate wildly, whether it be the puerile sexuality of Genesys being supplanted by the genuine maturity of Revelation, the uninspired imitation of Evolution giving way to the revisionist joys of The Romance of Crime, or the cynical retconning of War of the Daleks crumbling under the weight of Alien Bodies‘ sheer inventiveness.

(To be perfectly honest, I half suspect that the only reason Legacy of the Daleks was never meaningfully rebuffed by later novels in this fashion is simply down to Peel having so thoroughly torpedoed his own standing among fans with the release of War that nobody was really paying him much attention at that point. This is perhaps me wearing my most cynical of hats, but I don’t think I’m entirely wrong either…)

A Device of Death‘s case is only further bolstered by virtue of the fact that this central idea of the Doctor and his companions materially altering the substance and character of the world around them resonates pretty heavily throughout the novel. Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be seen in Sarah’s friendship with Max, the synthonic Landoran trooper who comes to grow his own personality and conscience over the course of their journey together.

Yes, you could quite easily write all this off as Bulis’ latent Star Trek sympathies shining through once again, as there’s nothing here that will be too radically unfamiliar to anyone who’s ever watched any of the episodes of The Next Generation or Voyager focusing on Data or the EMH, say, but it’s charming nonetheless.

To be quite honest, despite his status as a robot, Max is infinitely more likeable and memorable than any of the dry, lifeless planks of wood masquerading as characters that inhabited Twilight of the Gods. In a sense, the forging of this connection only serves to add an extra sting to the Time Lords’ implication that Max’s leadership of Deepcity will eventually end up paving the way for the ruthless efficiency of the Movellans.

This idea of profound and constant metamorphosis even finds an expression within the Doctor’s very mode of conveyance. Being separated from his regular TARDIS in the wake of the mission to Skaro, the Time Lords end up providing him with a replacement, complete with a functioning chameleon circuit.

On the symbolic level, it goes without saying that this is deeply significant, undermining as it does the police box shape that has served as one of the only truly enduring constants in the ever-changing landscape of the programme, and thus reinforcing the sensation that the audience is somehow bearing witness to a strange mercurial process in which the very fabric of Doctor Who is being subtly reshaped around them.

Even the TARDIS’ temporary masquerade as the Tralsammavarian yacht, all gaudy and gold-plated and graceful, feels far more of a piece with the space opera stylings of Williams than it does the Gothic gloom of Hinchcliffe, and it’s not for nothing that the Time Lords ultimately reclaim the time capsule as a result of the Doctor’s influence having “disrupted [the unit’s] psychometric balance.”

This same inconstancy also holds true of the war gripping the Adelphine Cluster, which provides the better part of the novel’s plot. Oftentimes this aspect of the book is summarily dismissed as being little more than a cut-rate imitation of Genesis of the Daleks, but I don’t think that’s an entirely fair characterisation, and it overlooks the fact that Bulis has actually injected some pretty interesting worldbuilding to help flesh out the particulars of the conflict. There are, inevitably, superficial similarities inherent in telling a story of two alien factions locked in a state of perpetual and ceaseless war, but that’s really about as far as the comparisons can feasibly be carried.

For one, while Nation’s original script for Genesis had very clearly drawn from the iconography and weaponry of the Second World War, especially in the characterisation and costuming of the Kaleds, A Device of Death sees Bulis shift his frame of reference a little further down the historical track.

Where the Thals and the Kaleds were presented as largely homogeneous, monolithic political entities in line with the traditional conception of nation states – pun very much intended – the Union and the Alliance more closely evoke a vision of geopolitics in line with the realities of the Cold War, two competing interstellar superpowers engaging each other in a series of proxy wars in lieu of a direct military confrontation. As such, we’re again left with the impression that there is some level of distortion and alteration in evidence here, with the seemingly firm political and moral foundations at play in Genesis having been worn away.

Bulis has one more fiendish trick up his sleeve, however, as it’s revealed that the “war” is effectively nothing more than a hollow façade maintained by the upper echelons of Landoran society. More than that, Landor has actually long since obliterated the homeworld of the Averonian Union, with Director Kambril merely keeping up the pretence that the inverse is true in an effort to motivate the Deepcity workers to continue the manufacture of ever more deadly weapons, selling the products of their labour to both sides in an effort to keep the native inhabitants of the Cluster wrapped up in interminable skirmishes and therefore unable to challenge the supremacy of the Alliance.

It is, perhaps, not the most original of twists. Dave Stone had already tread similar ground with the Hollow Gods’ manipulation of the Dagellan Cluster in Death and Diplomacy, as well as exploring militantly xenophobic attitudes in Burning Heart. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for the sheer sardonic tang which suffuses A Device of Death‘s commentary, particularly from a writer like Bulis, who can often seem a tad more enamoured with the aesthetics of the military and the “space marine” style of science fiction than is usually considered seemly within Doctor Who.

There’s just something so wonderfully cynical and incisive about setting up the Adelphine Cluster as a thinly-veiled Cold War allegory, when it is in fact a mildly more thickly-veiled post-Cold War allegory, with Landor’s behaviour holding up a mirror to the role of the United States – and implicitly, the Western political bloc as a whole – in the 1990s, having seemingly vanquished the spectre of communism and standing triumphant as the victor of the twentieth century, primarily engaging in military conflict in a “peacekeeping” capacity. Indeed, like so many of those pieces of media that seem skeptical of the “unipolar moment” stretching on into eternity, A Device of Death has only become more pointed in the post-9/11 world.

This is not to suggest, however, that the novel lacks a contemporary relevance in its original context. After all, arms trading was a pretty big hot-button issue in the 1990s. A little over a month after the publication of A Device of Death, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would embroil Quark in the shady clutches of the gunrunning business in Business as Usual. For their part, Virgin had already waded into this territory before, with Andy Lane’s The Empire of Glass depicting Irving Braxiatel’s efforts to head up an arms control summit.

(And it now occurs to me that, since said summit is the Armageddon Conveniton off-handedly referenced in Revenge of the Cybermen, there are now entirely too many explorations of 1990s arms trading that use late Season Twelve as a lodestone of sorts…)

As any historian well-versed in the Soviet-Afghan War or the Iran-Contra affair will tell you, arms trading had long served as a useful foreign policy lever in the toolkit of the American government during the Cold War, but the 1990s saw this trade intersect with the collapse of the Soviet Union in new and complex ways.

The most infamous figure to rise out of this time was one Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, a Russian arms dealer who made a name for himself supplying illicit weaponry for use in conflicts the world over, from Liberia and Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. It is suspected that Bout’s operations were given an early headstart through his acquisition of former Soviet military assets, including a fleet of cargo planes, thanks to pre-existing connections forged during his time in said military.

Here, Kambril’s rhetorical inquiry becomes especially relevant: “Who really knows or cares what is happening in the next star system, or who sold them the weapons?” The deception perpetrated upon Deepcity functions through imposing artificial distance upon the citizens of the Alliance, and it is ultimately this same logic that fuels the divisions fostered throughout the Cluster. In short, it’s imperialism, given a shiny new coat of paint for the turn of the millennium.

That these points are often overlooked in appraising A Device of Death is a real shame, as I do think it leads people to unfairly disregard a novel that might just be a solid contender for Bulis’ new personal best. It’s filled with solid characterisation of the regulars, a couple standout guest players – Olivor Malf, the pretentious alcoholic thespian, is an absolute joy – and some abnormally barbed and clever commentary from the usually strictly traditionalist Bulis.

And yet the fact that the novel’s central conflict is so frequently compared to Genesis of the Daleks is also hardly surprising, while proving deeply emblematic of some of the broader problems afflicting the Missing Adventures.

For all that Bulis might have tried to get a little more experimental with the implied links to other stories, the fact remains that nobody is really reading this as a secret, undiscovered sixth serial from Season Twelve placed between Genesis of the Daleks and Revenge of the Cybermen, bar those rare, crazy few who try to go through the books in strictly chronological order.

No, the novel’s default mode of consumption, for most people, will be as the thirty-first Missing Adventure, and it will almost always be evaluated as such. That is, after all, how it was released, and I do wonder if this accounts for some of the more dismissive reactions to the war plotline. It’s easy to see how people might react poorly when considering the fact that Bulis essentially pulled a similar – albeit much less nuanced- “two warring alien factions” schtick not even six months prior with Twilight of the Gods.

So we haven’t really resolved that central tension of the Fourth Doctor novels – and the past Doctor books at large – which we began back in Evolution, and I can’t say that I blame Virgin for not choosing this novel as Tom’s final bow.

Very good though it may be, it doesn’t really fit with the spirit of the Fourth Doctor as embodied by the VMAs, and while it does go some way towards reconciling the incarnation’s two very different eras, it never quite manages to put together a summative closing statement on the totality of this block of seasons. For that, unfortunately enough, we once again need to return to Gareth Roberts.

And, unfortunately enough, we shall shortly do just that… but we don’t have to do it just yet.

Miscellaneous Observations

It’s curious that Bulis should decide to reveal the name of the Time Lord messenger from the opening of Genesis of the Daleks, here given as Brastall, when the very next book will posit an entirely separate identity for the character in the form of Lord Ferain. I suppose it’s possible that we’re dealing with two incarnations of the same Time Lord, each going by a different name, and Brastall certainly doesn’t stick around long enough to rule out the possibility of his being Ferain.

None of that, however, can possibly account for Gallifrey‘s suggestion that Valyes was the one sent on the mission to Skaro, and he’s almost certainly a distinct individual. It’s almost like fans scrambling over each other to explain a trivial piece of continuity will sometimes end up producing a multitude of different answers.

(No I’m not foreshadowing the review of Lungbarrow, why would you suggest that?)

It didn’t really fit with the wider body of the review, but Bulis does a pretty good job at capturing Harry here, an especially impressive feat since he’s only made one prior appearance, a few decades after the conclusion of his TARDIS travels – from his point of view – in System Shock.

It was nice to see his medical training actually get some considerable play for once, and it’s just a shame that – barring Millennium Shock, featuring the same aged Harry from Richards’ earlier novel – we’ll have to wait well over six years and almost 170 books until we get another story featuring him in the regular cast.

Ah well. He’s still in more books than Leela so far.

(No I’m not foreshadowing the review of Lung… etc. etc.)

Final Thoughts

Huh, I was pleasantly surprised with how that turned out. I didn’t like being as harsh on Bulis as I was in my Twilight of the Gods review, so it was nice to have some almost uniformly positive things to say about one of his novels as a change of pace.

Regardless, I hope you’ll join me next time, as we try and sort out once and for all just what a Lungbarrow even is anyway, and bid farewell to the Seventh Doctor’s tenure as the protagonist of our ongoing journey. Until then, however…

Kind regards,

Special Agent Dale Cooper