Well, here it is folks. One of the Big Ones. In the extremely loosely defined parlance of this blog, the “Big Ones,” roughly speaking, can be taken as a phrase referring to one of those books which is sufficiently massive in its ramifications for the future of Doctor Who that it becomes frustratingly difficult for me to find an angle with which I can approach the task of reviewing it.
The last such occasion on which we ran into this problem, if you were to put a gun against my head and force me to nail it down with any degree of specificity, would probably have been when we tackled Russell T. Davies’ debut novel, Damaged Goods, about a year ago. That, at least, was a slightly less daunting proposition, as its import was largely retroactive in nature. Nobody in October 1996 could have realistically said that the writer of that particular book would eventually be responsible for the revitalisation of Doctor Who into a household name and, eventually, into the biggest thing on television, nor could they have done for about the next seven years or so.
Having been so liberated from the burden of treating the novel as some fantastical ur-text or Rosetta Stone with which we might decipher the hidden secrets of the Davies Era, it was thus a simple enough matter to turn the lens of my review in the general direction of Margaret Thatcher’s stint as Prime Minister, exploring the particulars of Davies’ spin on the franchise by reference to his first target of choice, as it were.
Alien Bodies, of course, largely precludes such a direct approach, being primarily set in the imagined future of the mid-to-late twenty-first century and therefore being impossible to historicise in the same way as Damaged Goods. Moreover, a lot of the more abstract themes I’d like to talk about in relation to the novel are ones that I’ve already seeded, with varying degrees of deliberation, throughout the past few reviews in the run-up to this piece. Rather than being helpful as one might initially presuppose, this instead has the effect of giving me so many potential threads to pick up and run with in this introduction that it loops right back around to being profoundly unhelpful.
And so, we’ll resort to the critical equivalent of throwing up our hands and admitting defeat and go with the easiest thread possible: Lawrence Miles.
Here, though, we would do well to take caution, as Miles is a bit of a tricky prospect for a critic to tackle these days. Actually, even this framing doesn’t quite capture the essence of the situation, implying as it does that there’s ever been a meaningful period of time in which the ongoing story of Lawrence Miles has been describable by any adjective within a good few billion kilometres of “straightforward.”
Even back in the most triumphant days of Miles’ career, following the rapid skyrocketing of his fandom cachet that we’re going to bear witness to in the wake of Alien Bodies, there were any number of detractors that were quite strident in their opposition to some of the writer’s more “out-there” ideas and the increased pull they began to exert on the direction of the BBC Books lines.
From a perspective limned with the gentle glow of hindsight, it’s tough to escape the conclusion that this vocal minority of fandom was, in fact, exactly that: a minority. All four of Miles’ novels (three if you’re counting Interference as a single work) land pretty comfortably within the top twenty places of the Eighth Doctor Adventures per Shannon Sullivan’s almighty list, with two falling in the top ten and a third falling ever so slightly short at eleventh place. The only other author with a similarly consistent rate of contributions to the range who can realistically boast something to that effect, when you get down to it, is probably Kate Orman (and I suppose, by extension, Jonathan Blum).
Alien Bodies itself mostly bears out this impression of a positive reception, even before one stoops to the murky business of quantifying such nebulous concepts as “influence.” Not only does it dethrone Vampire Science‘s status as the highest-rated EDA on the list, holding that title for nearly four years until Lloyd Rose comes along with The City of the Dead, but it’s the only novel from the series’ first thirty-six instalments to scrape past a score of 80%.
In the interests of complete fairness, I suppose I ought to note that the New Adventures also only managed to surpass the 80% threshold on one occasion in their first thirty-odd books, so I do think it can be reasonably argued that a lot of this is simply the natural tendency of any series to get better as the various creatives figure out what they want to do.
Nevertheless, as we’ve been hammering home since the time of The Eight Doctors, it’s worrying that Alien Bodies‘ falling within half a percentage point of books like Lungbarrow and The Dying Days should feel so remarkable, given just how recent both those novels were. It suggests nothing so much as a widespread amnesia – or worse, indifference – as to the past six years’ worth of lessons on “how to write good Doctor Who novels.”
(Also, the lone NA to score higher than 80% in this period was apparently Terrance Dicks’ Exodus, so it’s nice to know that the universe still enjoys being confidently wrong about something every now and then. I mean, I’m fond of it too, but come on now, I can name at least three books that are better than it from 1992 alone.)
But setting all of that aside for the moment, the fact remains that as far as it is possible to gauge these things, there seems to be some pretty solid evidence to suggest that there was a substantial bloc of people who were quite happily picking up what Miles was putting down in these early stages of his career.
This is, in some respects, mildly puzzling. Miles always seemed a slightly ill fit for the role of the EDAs’ great visionary, which snider critics than I might very well suggest goes some way towards explaining why he eventually fell out of that role in as spectacular a fashion as he did. On a basic level, the observation that his style – suffused as it is with violence, general darkness and a willingness to get well and truly weird at times – seems a better fit for the popular conception of the Virgin lines than the subsequent BBC series has more than a ring of truth about it.
Indeed, Christmas on a Rational Planet had actually languished in the depths of Virgin’s slush pile thanks to a filing error on the part of Gareth Roberts before being accidentally unearthed some considerable time later. By the time of its publication, the Virgin era was well and truly over, and the televised adventures of Paul McGann had come and gone all too briefly. In other words, Miles was quite literally caught between eras from the moment he first stepped on to the scene, and even the pivotal role he plays here in fashioning the EDAs proves ever so slightly inadequate in dispelling that impression completely.
It can hardly be considered surprising, then, that one can see hints of that tension starting to creep in around the edges of the frame in Alien Bodies. The most obvious culprit to point at here is undoubtedly the infamous “bottled universe” stuff, with a Buddhism-fuelled vision on Kortez’s part providing our second big piece of foreshadowing for the revelations contained in Dead Romance and Interference. The extremely brief gist of it, for those not in the know, boils down to the premise that the Virgin and BBC Books lines exist as discrete and separate universes, each one nested within the other in a recursive chain of “bottles.”
Miles, in his spectacularly offputting post-Interference exit interview, would go on to cite what he perceived to be irreconcilable differences in continuity and tone between the two companies’ novels as the primary reason for his formulating this theory in the first place. As we’ve been saying for a while now, however, there are some surface-level problems with this argument, mostly boiling down to stuff like Tyler’s Folly getting a mention within this very novel, or Ordifica being shouted out in both Down and Ghost Devices.
Granted, there’s some potential wiggle room within these namedrops to apply a handwave to the effect of “The planets can easily exist in both universes” (or “Lots of bottles have an Ordifica” if you’d prefer). Yet even this doesn’t account for the references to, say, the Martians “[dropping] the rock,” a pretty direct allusion to the asteroid-assisted destruction of Paris in the future history suggested by Transit. Perhaps this, too, is just a case of the universes’ histories converging, but at that point any case you might make for the NAs and EDAs being incompatible with one another is going to be seriously hindered by the fact that you evidently just melded the two with relative ease.
But to pull back from any of the more mind-bending continuity knots thrown up by Miles’ work, if only because I don’t really find them all that conducive to anything deeper than a few scattered anecdotes like the ones I just gave you, Alien Bodies frequently displays all the hallmarks of a book that seems decidedly disappointed to be saddled with the Eighth Doctor as its lead rather than the Seventh.
From the very first scene in which the Doctor appears, Miles consciously plays up the comparisons between the two incarnations, introducing Eight by way of a chess game in which he struggles to recall the rules of play. There are the typical grudging mentions of the TV movie’s “half-human” line, each one suffused with a general air of “Can you believe this nonsense?” At one point, Sam reflects on the Doctor’s general state of being in terms almost redolent of an identity crisis – and tellingly, in a later chapter entitled What is an Identity Crisis, Anyway?, she’ll have a similar epiphany all of her own – realising that he remains almost totally unaware of his inability to quite as easily slot into the “penetrating gaze” routine so favoured by his predecessor even after three whole years of post-regeneration existence.
Generally speaking, I’d be quite happy to reflexively file this away as another instance of the book’s larger commentary on the structures of the Eighth Doctor Adventures as they exist at this preliminary moment in time – cf. Dark Sam and the Krotons, which we will get to, and which I’d also like to take this opportunity to reserve as the name of my future math rock band – were it not for Miles’ having singled out Vampire Science in his aforementioned interview as a novel where “you can tell the authors are just gagging to get the Seventh Doctor back.”
As with the shots fired at the mentions of Yemaya or the structuring of Business Unusual as a sequel to an earlier Missing Adventure from the Virgin days, it smacks of a particularly odious kind of hypocrisy on Miles’ part. If anything, I’d probably even argue that Orman and Blum seem significantly more at peace with their task of fashioning the Eighth Doctor’s personality throughout Vampire Science than Miles is in Alien Bodies, but that’s by the by.
Which brings us to what would have been, if this review were posted a decade or two ago, the biggest snarl in trying to talk about the general arc of Lawrence Miles’ career, and something we’ve been hinting at for quite some time now, namely his long and storied post-Adventuress career as the “Old Man Yelling at Cloud” of Doctor Who fandom.
There’s a lot to choose from here to make our point. We could run with the infamous talking-to he gave The Unquiet Dead in 2005. If we wanted to be slightly more germane to the topic at hand, we could mention his uncomfortably personal 2010 blog post, The Squee Doctors, in which he mixes tiresome and downright unhinged ad hominem attacks on Steven Moffat with some not-quite-wholehearted-allegations that The Pandorica Opens cribbed a sizeable portion of its plot from Alien Bodies itself.
Oh, and he also takes time out of his day to joke about an imaginary competition between Ruth Wilson and Miranda Sawyer for the title of “Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish,” reiterates his oh-so-hilarious comparison of Karen Gillan to a blow-up doll, and complains that Moffat wanted to set Doctor Who up as the BBC’s answer to Twilight. Hence, the title of the piece, serving as an onomatopoeic derision of those stereotypical “fangirls” who are held not to understand Doctor Who or science fiction as a whole, with all the thinly-veiled sexism that implies. So really, I think the only thing saving us from an honest-to-God “It’s about ethics in games journalism” here is the fact that this post was written in 2010 and not 2014.
This isn’t, if we’re being entirely honest, all that relevant to Alien Bodies, but the fact that Miles was consistently presenting himself in such a spiky and unpleasant manner even at the time of his greatest relevance simultaneously means that it’s a more directly appropriate piece of contemporary background information than the decades-removed lapsing into transphobia of authors like Gareth Roberts or Trevor Baxendale. And well, I rarely had any qualms about incorporating discussions of that aspect of Roberts into my writing on his work, nor will I shirk from a similar task when we finally get to The Janus Conjunction, so it seems more than fair to let Miles’ standoffishness – to put it in a kinder light than it probably really deserves – colour our perceptions of his work a tad.
With that being said, the question of how to quantify a non-specific measurement like “a tad” naturally raises its head at this juncture, and it’s tied in to what I meant about Miles proving a baffling critical conundrum at this specific moment in time. To put it simply, it’s been quite a while since any of the man’s legendary grumpiness was actually especially relevant to the franchise itself.
This is not, I hasten to add, meant as some sort of exculpation of Miles for any of the aforementioned comments. Even if I were actually a part of any of the groups affected by the sorts of things he seems to have had a historical tendency towards spouting – which seems, in a wearisomely “1990s science fiction geek” kind of way, to largely just boil down to “women” – the ability to grant absolution by fiat is not actually a workable power for the targets of bigotry to exercise, nor would it necessarily be a good idea to expect it to be.
My point, as far as I’ve conceived of it in my head at least, is rather to note the general strangeness of Lawrence Miles as a piece of Doctor Who‘s history from my own personal standpoint. To some extent, this is just a case of the novels running at full pelt into the wall that is my general reasoning for poring over the Wilderness Years in such an obsessive level of detail.
Speaking as someone who was only six months old when the announcement of the Davies-led revival was made and has therefore only ever held memories of Doctor Who as an actively living and breathing piece of popular culture, the long hiatus of the 1990s and early 2000s has always stood as an intriguing televisual caesura of sorts. Miles, then, becomes one of the most potent embodiments of this hiatus: influential enough to linger on in echoic form through one of the fundamental tenets of New Series lore, but not influential enough to have ever had any direct interaction with the programme beyond complaining about it on the Internet.
Which, y’know, mood, as they say.
But by 2024, writing this as I am mere minutes before the clock ticks over to midnight on May 11 and Series 14 drops on Disney+ – and no, I will not be calling it Series 1 – Miles seems not so much disconnected from the material reality of what Doctor Who is at this present moment as he is pioneering interstellar travel among combative creative personalities.
In this respect, my own personal history with the show proves slightly too perfect to resist, with the very first episode I actually watched on its initial airing rather than merely waiting for the DVD box set having been The Day of the Doctor, the episode in which Moffat most forcefully broke with the psychic trauma of the Wilderness Years and the Time War. Miles’ biggest legacy stands as an object of almost wholly irretrievable secret history from where I’m standing.
All of this is something of a shame, as coming to Alien Bodies on its own terms and with more than a quarter of a century’s worth of hindsight is a happily edifying experience. For all that I imagine my relationship with Miles’ art will never be an entirely uncomplicated one, mired in his many offputting personal vendettas as it is, the actual experience of reading his most influential book was, by and large, a pleasant one.
When you get down to it, it’s blindingly obvious to see why this was the book which effectively set the tenor of the remaining Eighth Doctor Adventures. It’s packed to bursting with wildly ambitious and inventive concepts that can readily stand toe to toe with the rich, Sandman-tinged mythology favoured by the New Adventures, while also just being a fiendishly clever and pacey little book.
If Alien Bodies can’t quite eclipse a novel like Revelation as the biggest of the Big Ones, then that should be taken as an indicator of nothing more egregious than the mere fact that it’s hard to imagine there would even be an ongoing Doctor Who novel line in 1997 if not for the radical reconceptualisations of Paul Cornell.
Make no mistake, folks, the Wilderness Years don’t get much wilder than this.
Having done our requisite paratextual dance around the jagged edges of Lawrence Miles’ relationships with his fellow writers, then, we can at last begin to sink our teeth into the many facets of Alien Bodies‘ actual plot.
Of these facets, the most logical place to start is surely with the War in Heaven itself, which has the added benefit of being the most weighty and consequential innovation for the series in the long term.
It’s perhaps worth reiterating the distinguishing features that serve to separate examples of the late nineties pop-cultural fascination with “Wars in Heaven” from your average common or garden epics which have merely been splashed with a vaguely religious coat of paint in an effort to imply profundity.
Conceptually speaking, the War in Heaven – and I’m speaking here in the genericised sense, not the EDA-specific one – trades heavily in the stock of unknowability and ambiguity. As we argued in our examination of the concept’s theological origins back in Christmas on a Rational Planet, this is largely an inheritance from the Book of Revelation itself, a text so drenched in metaphor and abstraction as to single-handedly support an entire cottage industry of Christian eschatology. To this day, Biblical scholars struggle to reach consensus on such basic details as the identity of the text’s author.
The War was therefore a concept tailor-made to appeal to the 1990s, a decade defined by its culture of listlessness and paranoia, even as life in Western liberal democracies outwardly displayed all the hallmarks of general peace and prosperity. This was, as we must always reiterate if we’re to pay adequate homage to this blog’s roots, the decade in which The X-Files became a big cultural event, and it’s hardly a coincidence that Chris Carter’s smash hit repeatedly drew parallels between the divine and the alien, complete with a mythology centred around an interstellar conflict operating far beyond the ken of mortal, Earthbound beings.
The logic here is easy enough to trace. Shows like The X-Files, being rooted in the burgeoning appetite for conspiracy theory among a generation scarred by the political deceptions of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, concerned themselves with the gradual accumulation of information. Provided the writers at the helm of the project were sufficiently competent, this should have theoretically gone hand in hand with the discernment of an intuitive structure linking these disparate points of information, a roadmap for the End of History with which to hearten one’s self against the overwhelming onrush of data provided by the 24-hour news cycle.
The second half of the twentieth century, after all, had come to be dominated by the spectre of War, both in the fallout from World War II and the pervasive background anxiety of the Cold War, if indeed the latter can be meaningfully said to be separate from the former. The fact that the conflict in Vietnam, itself a smaller facet of the much larger and less easily grasped Cold War, is frequently dubbed the first “television war” ought to tell us something about the newly media-centric nature of warfare in this era.
Under this framework, the War in Heaven represents the ultimate horror for any intrepid Mulderesque truthseeker, being a series of events so complex and vast that it defies all attempts at theorycrafting and interpretation. It’s tough, given the general conceptual leanings of this blog, not to read a measure of the usual post-Cold War ennui into this fascination, an almost perverse yearning for the days in which the horrifying prospect of mutually assured destruction at least provided something approximating a reason for complex sociopolitical events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
That reason was liable to collapse into absurdity upon too much reflection, yes, but by and large the heat of the era’s nuclear tests was, in a strange way, just as capable of keeping people warm as the fires in the grates of their walled and slightly paranoid suburban homes.
As should probably go without saying at this point, the march of history eventually conspired to provide the meandering citizens of post-Cold War America with a shiny new war in the form of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the overarching idea of a “War on Terror” serves as an eerie evocation of the very same indistinct qualities tapped into by the many fictional Wars in Heaven seen throughout the 1990s, a fact which Miles’ own Faction Paradox series made a point of acknowledging starting with This Town Will Never Let Us Go.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious “There are unknown unknowns” press conference in February 2002 was, by his own account, pulled from a conversation he’d had with senior NASA official William Graham in 1998 during their collaboration on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, proving that these ideas didn’t spring spontaneously into existence with the collapse of the World Trade Center. Even the tangentially-related concept of “post-truth politics,” which sprung to global attention in the wake of the rise of Donald Trump and the 2016 Brexit referendum, may have its origins in a 1992 essay by Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich for The Nation, even as the Iraq War is commonly cited as a tipping point for the term’s popularity.
At its most extreme, the unease that typically accompanies notions of a “War in Heaven” isn’t too dissimilar from the schema that we saw put forth last time in Ghost Devices, with the future’s fixity being treated as a source of Lovecraftian cosmic horror rather than anything resembling reassurance.
Miles might not go quite that far with Alien Bodies, but the overall contours of such an idea remain present and visible. The War’s intruding so dramatically into the life of the Eighth Doctor is held to be inherently monstrous and wrong, a fact most saliently signified by the presence of the Relic, revealed to be the corpse of a future Doctor who perished at the very beginning of the conflict in a skirmish on Dronid.
For a being like the Doctor, defined in large part by his mercuriality – and following Vampire Science, we’ve at least got some general notions as to Eight’s being even more heavily mercurial than his predecessors – the permanence imparted by the knowledge of his own death is even more anathema to his core identity than the Vo’lach’s Spire was to Bernice, and given the fact that Ghost Devices closed on Benny narrowly surviving a suicide attempt, that’s certainly saying something.
The degree to which Miles capitalises on this ambiguity and horror – famously declining to so much as name the Time Lords’ chief opponent beyond the purposefully vague moniker of “the enemy” – helps to elevate Alien Bodies head and shoulders above some of the lesser interpretations of the War in Heaven concept that one can find scattered throughout 1990s popular culture. There’s an understanding here as to the deeper significance of “Heaven” as a byword for incomprehensibility rather than an excuse for cheap mysticism and unearned melodrama.
It’s probably worth bringing up some specific examples here, just to prove a point. We’ve already paid lip service to Carter’s work to incorporate such themes into The X-Files and Millennium, both here and in our Christmas on a Rational Planet review, but the contemporaneous Star Trek shows, in many ways the other heavy hitters of the 1990s science fiction television landscape, proved just as fond of the concept.
To call the results of that fondness middling would be a gross understatement. About a year prior to Alien Bodies, Kenneth Biller’s script for The Q and the Grey on Voyager gestured towards the possibility that the Q Civil War would be waged by similarly abstruse methods, though the episode’s imagination only seemed to stretch to blowing up some supernovas and staging re-enactments of the American Civil War with weaponry that we’re assured isn’t as conventional as it appears. Even as it… appears pretty damn conventional.
A month earlier, David Weddle and Bradley Thomspon had contributed one of the weaker scripts of Deep Space Nine‘s generally phenomenal fifth season in The Assignment, which introduced the Pah Wraiths to the show’s mythology as part of an otherwise bog-standard possession story centred around Keiko O’Brien. Although they were somewhat reductively portrayed as devils to the Prophets’ angels from their very first appearance, these overtones would only be further played up in their return in April 1998’s The Reckoning, another Weddle and Thompson teleplay aired some five months hence, complete with handy red and blue colour-coding to distinguish the good CGI clouds from the bad CGI clouds.
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this largely flaccid plot development was the way in which it actively led the series down a path which curtailed the very sense of ambiguity to which we keep returning as a key talking point in this discussion. The Prophets of Deep Space Nine‘s first four seasons or so were rather difficult to pin down into any sort of readily identifiable Christian archetypes, providing for a compelling religious tableau that was quite distinct from the standard fare found within nineties genre fiction. In effect, the Pah Wraiths served as a demonstration of the worst possible traits of a “War in Heaven” narrative, sanding away any sense of complexity and esotericism to the series’ central cosmology in favour of a sort of bland, hazy Miltonianism.
Ironically enough, hindsight reveals that the War arc itself would end up suffering a similarly ignominious fate in the EDAs, as The Ancestor Cell doubles down on its ambitions to be a big, clanking epic of exactly the sort that Alien Bodies largely positions itself in opposition to. Even the destruction of Gallifrey, as we observed last time, was a popular enough trope in fan fiction to up the stakes of a given adventure.
Lurking unspoken in this conversation, of course, is the continuing influence of Star Wars, which has been consistently lingering around these parts throughout 1997 as a result of the shiny, newfangled Special Editions and the announcement of the forthcoming prequel trilogy. Despite its very title seeming to naturally lend itself to a War in Heaven – or at least a “War in the Heavens,” if you will – George Lucas’ saga of blockbuster epics generally favoured World War II-esque space battles to any of the more outlandish possibilities inherent to the artform.
Certainly, by contrast to those most famous tales of a galaxy far, far away, Miles takes great care throughout Alien Bodies to outline that the impending War isn’t a standard free-for-all of the kind that has become almost dime a dozen throughout Doctor Who‘s long and storied history. It’s telling that the Daleks, whose presence remains one of the longest-standing and most useful shorthands by which Doctor Who writers can proclaim “We’re doing an epic!”, become the first of many possible identities of the Time Lords’ mysterious enemy to be floated and summarily rejected over the course of the War arc.
Discussing the looming hostilities on Dronid with Qixotl, the arms dealer’s Gabrielidean contact Mr Gabriel offers a pretty good summation of the storyline’s general ethos. “Maybe it’s different this time,” he speculates. “If the Time Lords are at war, the enemy’s got to be someone big. I mean, forget the Daleks, I’m talking big.”
The Doctor, meanwhile, gets in a pointed jab at the controversial retcons of War of the Daleks while giving a crash course on Dalek societal development:
“Let me think. Late twenty-first century… by now, most of the Daleks are scattered around the edges of Mutters’ Spiral, trying to build up a decent galactic powerbase. The ones who got left behind on Skaro are just starting to think about putting together their own little empire. The “static electricity” phase of Dalek development, if I’m not mistaken. Still, my Dalek history’s always been a bit rusty. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t keep changing all the time.”
This refutation of the nascent BBC Books lines’ increasing monster fixation finds its most dramatic expression about halfway through, with the novel appearing to build up to a standard case of the Daleks invading the narrative. On the face of it, this seems an odd choice so soon after the horrors wrought upon the world by John Peel in the very last book, which makes it all the more delightful when Miles wrongfoots the audience by revealing that the Daleks have been supplanted by the Krotons.
Widely regarded as a bit of a laughing stock, the crystalline behemoths have probably only achieved what meagre notoriety they possess by virtue of their lone televised appearance’s inclusion as a part of the 1981 Five Faces of Doctor Who re-runs, serving as the introduction to Patrick Troughton’s Doctor for an entire generation of fans.
In having the Krotons supplant the Daleks, Miles effectively takes the approach that gave us The Bodysnatchers, Business Unusual, War of the Daleks and Illegal Alien about as far as it can go. Past this point, any further attempts to return to that particular well will very probably run the risk of being seen as just as laughable as the notion of expanding on the backstory of a bunch of Brummie egg cartons.
Indeed, with the obvious exception of the already-commissioned Legacy of the Daleks, the BBC Books novels prove considerably more reluctant to engage in straightforward “classic recurring monster returns” stories from this point forward. You probably have to go as far forward as Synthespians™️ in July 2004 to find a novel which uncomplicatedly fits that mould, which is frankly remarkable when one considers that we had a five-month run of sequelitis-afflicted Missing Adventures barely a year prior.
(I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention that the use of the Krotons here is largely just an expansion upon one of the better ideas contained within Paul Cornell’s No Future, namely the invasion of seventies England by a series of D-tier Doctor Who villains including the Monk, the Vardans and a Chronovore. My point isn’t to level an allegation of unoriginality against Miles as such, but rather to simply note that it’s a trifle odd to see him so casually riff on an earlier Paul Cornell trick given just how badly their relationship would degrade.)
Of course, the other part of The Krotons‘ prominence in fandom’s imagination can be easily explained by the identity of its author, being the first of a great many scripts from the pen of the legendary Robert Holmes, and the arc of Holmes’ later career throws up some interesting parallels when juxtaposed against Miles’ efforts to sketch out the War in Heaven in Alien Bodies.
While televised Doctor Who has occasionally dipped a toe into the waters of longer-form story arcs to this point, with the 1980s proving particularly fond of stringing together a loose trilogy of stories around a concept like E-Space or the Black Guardian, Robert Holmes is the only writer who can boast to have been given the duty of scripting the opening serial for both of the programme’s attempts at crafting a season-long arc.
Of these two scripts, The Mysterious Planet is largely unhelpful for our purposes, both because of its status as the avatar of normality and “the past” in the Christmas Carol-esque structure of The Trial of a Time Lord, and because… well, The Trial of a Time Lord was never an especially coherent piece of work to begin with.
No, for my money the story we ought to pay attention to here is actually The Ribos Operation. Miles, obligingly enough, has provided us with an easy opening for this discussion in the years since 1997, thanks to his role as “Prosecution” to Tat Wood’s “Defence” in those sections of Mad Norwegian Press’ About Time series of guidebooks covering the Williams Era. His main objection to The Ribos Operation, at least as of 2004, can be broadly summed up as a contention that the story fails to adequately sell the idea of the “Bigger Picture” with its brief expository prelude between the Doctor and the White Guardian, with the problem only being exacerbated by what he views as a sneaking contempt for the proceedings on the part of Mary Tamm.
None of this should be terribly surprising to anybody possessed of a decent familiarity with Lawrence Miles’ general views as to what constitutes good Doctor Who, in which the figure of the Doctor themselves is viewed as being secondary to an exploration of the world around them. This stance undoubtedly goes some way towards explaining why he reacted so poorly to the possibility that his inadvertently “making the Doctor a fetish object” through his use of the Relic in Alien Bodies was to blame for The Pandorica Opens. In addition, it likely clarifies no small part of his dislike of the Williams Era, where the world around the Doctor frequently seemed to boil down to a sub-par, low-budget imitation of the mythicism and space opera of Star Wars.
Whatever the case, fandom’s reception of Miles’ books tends to bear out these leanings, with perhaps his most consistently praised novel, Dead Romance, being a spin-off book which operates at as far a remove from the Doctor as is feasibly possible while still maintaining the character’s influence as a tangible force in the narrative.
And Alien Bodies, true to form, is at least in part about the elucidation of this viewpoint, even as it introduces all manner of wacky concepts to the series’ ongoing lore. The epic scale and mythological grandeur of the War in Heaven and the Doctor’s interaction with that concept, Miles argues, cannot have weight without the presence of a more human dimension. In the absence of that dimension, Doctor Who becomes as dull and lifeless as the conceptual sterility that is Mictlan.
(I mean, I think there’s a reasonable objection to be raised here that The Ribos Operation makes a markedly similar case through Timothy Bateson’s turn as Binro the Heretic, mapping out the contours of what El Sandifer has dubbed the “Holmesian epic.” Hell, Miles even repeats the basic trick of populating the narrative with analogues for the Doctor, though he does at least expand the scope of the manoeuvre to consider the role of the companion as well.)
This shines through most plainly in UNISYC Lieutenant Kathleen Bregman’s closing internal monologue, having just escaped the clutches of the Celestis alongside the Doctor:
He’d needed her in Mictlan, because without her, he would have been a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Not making a sound, not making a difference. However big and smart the other things in the universe thought they were – the Time Lords, the Celestis, Faction Paradox, whatever – they needed Bregman, and all the others like her. Without her, all the games they played across the universe, all the auctions and the wars and the power struggles, were utterly meaningless. They were ideas without heads to live in. Gods without followers.
This is, appropriately enough, the central paradox of Lawrence Miles, one that we hinted at all the way back in Christmas on a Rational Planet. He might be remembered as a creative personality who brought about Doctor Who‘s first extended engagement with the notion of a large-scale temporal conflict – the presence of “extended” as a qualifier in that sentence being necessitated by Alan Moore, natch – but he’s always exhibited a certain discomfort with the idea of pre-planned literary epics that became increasingly fashionable for fandom throughout the 1990s.
The Carnival Queen’s dismissal in Christmas of the suggestion that she engaged in any sort of deliberate planning to stage her emergence into Woodwicke is particularly telling here. Read with even the faintest understanding of metatextuality, in the midst of Virgin’s terminally confused Psi Powers Arc, it becomes fairly plain as a commentary on this growing trend in the science-fiction of the period. We oughtn’t forget, at this juncture, that Miles’ big doom-laden prophecy as to the fate of Doctor Who in his exit interview was that it would return as a series in the mould of Babylon 5, the poster-child of the grandiose “novel for television” approach, and that this approach would send the programme straight back into the depths of cancellation.
And thus stands revealed the true nature of the “War in Heaven” interpretation of the Wilderness Years that we’ve been batting around throughout 1997, more cogent than the question of whether Virgin or BBC Books were to be the more salient publisher moving forward. That debate had, in all honesty, been settled by the time Bad Therapy had proven to be the last New Adventure to feature the Doctor Who logo on its front cover.
The push and pull between the trappings of epic and mythologically rich science fiction television and the more intimate and personal sphere was, after all, where we began back in Eternity Weeps all those months ago, and it’s here that we can finally return to it with a more nuanced understanding. Miles isn’t the first to thread this particular needle by any means; to pick just one not entirely random example from recent memory, Kate Orman’s work on So Vile a Sin was animated by similar concerns.
But, coming right after one of the consensus picks for the absolute nadir of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, and the second such travesty in just five months, Alien Bodies proves itself to be a perfectly-timed attempt at solving the problem, and it’s consequently little wonder that it became the most instructive book on the shape of the line to come.
At the risk of making crass generalisations out of the arc of televisual history, one could quite fairly say that cult television fandom begins, from this point on, to bend towards a greater degree of cynicism towards long-form master narratives, and the War arc ironically ends up as something of an incidental casualty in that much larger theatre of war.
The X-Files‘ gradually whittling away a lot of its goodwill over the course of its gargantuan nine-season run is the archetypal example, a fate brought about in no small part thanks to the increasingly convoluted excesses of its mythology, but there are other such examples to pull from. Lost would go from the smash hit of 2004 to a byword for series finales that failed to live up to audience expectations. Twenty years on, fans still persistently mock the dubious declaration as to the Cylons’ “having a plan” in the introduction to every episode of Ronald D. Moore’s revival of Battlestar Galactica.
Within Alien Bodies itself, Miles even includes a not-at-all-veiled reference to Twin Peaks in one of Marie’s dream sequences, whose fall from a state of ratings grace after David Lynch and Mark Frost were forced by ABC to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer perhaps served as an early glimpse of the risks of touting a unifying master narrative without devising a contingency plan for the possibility of audiences’ souring on that narrative.
That Doctor Who is in such a state that it can support a scuppered mythological arc with its own largely unsatisfying conclusion is, in a delightfully roundabout and askew kind of way, just as important a development as the fact that that arc should be concerned with some sort of Suicide Squad Time War. Sure, it’s not a remotely viable path back to a primetime Saturday slot on BBC One, but when we’re less than two years out from the non-starter that was the TV movie, it’s hard to even pretend that that’s a realistic goal at this point.
Bregman herself is also an interesting character. As a representative of UNISYC, an extrapolation of UNIT’s future as it extends into the time of The Enemy of the World‘s World Zone Authority and our third such “ghost of UNIT future” in the past twelve months, the character readily lends herself to being read as yet another commentary on the series’ relationship with the Pertwee Era.
As, indeed, is true of the novel as a whole. In the slightly loopy, paranoid and Buddhism-obsessed Colonel Kortez, we have an effective stand-in for the tension between the spiritual, New Age affectations of the Third Doctor’s tenure – perhaps most prominently in the four Sloman/Letts scripts – and the militaristic surroundings within which those aspirations habitually sit.
Even beyond that obvious resonance, the reason the various Wartime powers are so interested in the Relic boils down to the Doctor’s biodata having been affected by his stint as President of Gallifrey, quite literally weaponising the notion of the character as a figure of authority and the establishment. Meanwhile, the psychedelic shadow of the Troughton Era looms large in the Krotons, who remain perhaps the only Doctor Who adversary to be defeated by a carefully fomented student revolution concomitant with the Doctor’s cooking up a batch of acid.
Both of these ideas dovetail neatly into the prologue. In one of the strangest and most arresting cold opens to an EDA so far, the Third Doctor himself puts in a brief guest appearance to bury the vacuum-dessicated corpse of Laika the dog on the same desolate, lifeless planet on which the Eighth will later bury the Relic in the epilogue. Even if it were divorced from any sort of deeper symbolism, it would still be a memorable and effective means of setting the gleefully macabre tone of the adventure to follow.
But it’s a dark day indeed where we would feasibly write off such a striking opening to a Lawrence Miles novel as a bit of tone-setting with no deeper meaning. The Third Doctor, in his capacity as the incarnation cast down from the days of high adventure and bases under siege, is perfectly suited to the role of digging the grave of Space Age optimism and bringing it back down to Earth, as we saw in The Devil Goblins from Neptune. What’s more, the 1960s’ visions of space travel have always proven a relatively compatible match with the psychedelic spectacle of the age, as anyone who’s watched 2001: A Space Odyssey or listened to the early works of David Bowie will be capable of telling you.
It’s not for nothing that Robert Holmes followed up The Krotons with The Space Pirates, a story that served to eulogise the days of Armstrong and Aldrin some four months before the Eagle had landed. In a similar vein, we are left with little choice but to conclude that Georges Méliès was more right than he knew when he described his lunar magnum opus as a “trip” to the Moon.
Even the fact that Pertwee is accompanied on his little cemeterial jaunt not by his most iconic companion, Jo Grant, but rather by Sarah Jane Smith, a representative of the incarnation’s twilight years and a harbinger of a much more iconic iteration of the programme to come, feels all too appropriate, and a modern reader’s potential foreknowledge of the events of Interference only further compounds this sensation.
And so we’ve finally come around to the last of the major threads that we probably ought to tackle as part of this piece, as it’s here that we’re first treated to the prospect that Sam’s biodata has effectively been rewritten to turn her into the perfect companion for the Doctor.
Throughout the past five novels, we’ve steadily tracked the course of Sam’s integration as one half of the EDAs’ new regular cast, and although I like to think that I’ve generally proved more even-handed in my analysis of her character than the bulk of fan reviews of this period, it remains fair to say that the latest companion to fill the annals of Doctor Who history has consistently fallen ever so slightly short of working completely.
This should not be misconstrued as a statement that there exist absolutely no books that make good use of Samantha Angeline Jones, as such a judgment is patently false even at this early stage. On the contrary, the three-book run between Vampire Science and Genocide, undoubtedly buoyed by the close collaboration enjoyed by Orman/Blum, Morris and Leonard, had actually made significant strides towards manoeuvring her character into such a state that she could be a reasonably interesting protagonist within the adventure fiction wheelhouse of Doctor Who.
The problem, as ever, really boils down to what exists on either side of that loose trilogy. The Eight Doctors, despite serving as the nominal introduction to the character, seemed largely disinterested in actually giving her anything to do beyond serving as a moral anchor in an overearnest Terrance Dicks lecture on the evils of crack cocaine. Outside of a couple chapters at the beginning and end, it was plain to see that Dicks was far more invested in his whirlwind tour of thirty-plus years of Doctor Who continuity than he was in affording Sam any sort of definition or character.
War of the Daleks, on the other hand, might have stung even more. After three books in which Sam’s admittedly somewhat generic teenage viewpoint on the world was beginning to be established, John Peel brought everything tumbling down with his usual ineptitude at writing for women for extended periods of time. Accordingly, Sam somehow found herself flattened into an even more ludicrous stereotype, shooting daggers at any woman who even breathed within ten feet of the Doctor while simultaneously lamenting the fact that she wasn’t as intelligent or attractive as said other women.
Broadly speaking, having singled out Peel for ridicule on the Dalek fetishism front, Miles zeroes in far more harshly on Dicks’ writing as far as Sam is concerned. It’s the infamous “I don’t smoke – I don’t even drink Coke” line that gets trotted out as a signifier of just how profoundly the character’s existence has been altered from the original heroin-using, shoplifting, nightclub-frequenting “Dark Sam.” When the Relic discusses the ramifications of these newly-discovered changes with its past self, it’s the amnesiac Doctor’s criss-crossing his own timeline throughout The Eight Doctors that gets held up as Exhibit A in the case for his irresponsibility and cavalier attitude towards temporal paradoxes.
Most telling of all, however, is the spinning out of this secret second strand of biodata in Sam’s timeline into a general critique of the unreality of the world Dicks sketched in the Coal Hill sequences of The Eight Doctors, despite the scenes giving off every impression that they yearned to be read as a piece of cutting social realism:
Another life. A life without the Doctor. No, more than that; a life the Doctor was never destined to be a part of. Now the dream was over, he felt alien to her. Like a virus. Something that had worked its way into her system but didn’t belong there.
Another life. A life in the real world.
She wasn’t sure whether the thought was exciting, or horrifying.
Once again, this is very much on-brand for Miles, who has repeatedly stressed his belief in the inadequacy of most science fiction characters to function meaningfully in a setting as complex as “the real world.” We’ve already seen it in Down, with his musings on the shortcomings of what he termed the “cynico-realist” school of character development, in which characters developed a propensity to vomit spontaneously when confronted with the myriad insanities of sci-fi. “Real people, in situations of stress, are not prone to simply vomit,” he contended. “Their reactions are far more subtle.”
All these moments are gradually snowballing into their most show-stopping form in Interference, when the Third Doctor finds himself dramatically unprepared to face the realities of the planet Dust, but the accusations of unreality and artifice possess an altogether different resonance when levelled at Sam.
On a metatextual level, the notion that Sam has been shaped and moulded to fit a generic, soft-edged companion role is certainly true in at least one respect. By all accounts, it seems that the initial editorial shambles in which the EDAs found themselves ensured that the line’s authors were not even certain of the new companion’s identity or backstory until relatively late in the game, a state of affairs that’s practically destined to give rise to a certain broadness of definition in the writing of the character in question.
Yet it’s also slightly telling that it’s Sam who gets subjected to the critique of inadequately representing mid-to-late 1990s Earth. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s telling that Sam is the only companion of the Buffini/Cole era – which is, his first two NAs and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street notwithstanding, the period in which Miles was at the height of his influence – at whom such a critique could be feasibly levelled.
Casting a glance over the companions to be, you have Fitz, a brash young man from the mid-twentieth century, and Compassion, whose backstory is so firmly intertwined with a host of complex War in Heaven-related conceits that even mentioning “social realism” within earshot of her feels laughable. It’s not until the Richards years that we start seeing companions like Anji or even Trix, who may be shrouded in mystery but seems to hail from a time period not too far out from contemporary Earth if her falling afoul of the authorities in The Gallifrey Chronicles is anything to go by.
In fact, part of what’s so striking about Sam, and part of the reason that a critique of the material reality and believability of her native milieu sticks in a way that it wouldn’t to, say, Benny or even Ace for that matter, is that she’s very much an outlier as far as Wilderness Years companions go. The last companion we’ve talked about who hailed from contemporary Earth was Ace, introduced a full decade ago, and even then the New Adventures got less than ten books in before they had her spend three years in the twenty-sixth century and become a hardened space marine. It’s unsurprising that, when Sam leaves in Interference, she does so to spend time with Sarah Jane, who was of course the previous “last companion from contemporary Earth before/in the middle of a pronounced dearth of such characters.”
If you’re comparing the companions of the Wilderness Years to the kinds of companions seen in the revival, there’s a much shorter conceptual distance between Sam Jones and Rose Tyler than there is between Bernice Summerfield and Clara Oswald. (Bernice Summerfield and River Song, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether.)
And yet Miles’ critique is largely on point here, because the inability of Terrance Dicks to sketch out the London youth culture of 1997 with anything more than a bog-standard “Drugs are bad” message severely limits how effective Sam can ever be as a snapshot of that culture. As befits a character with two strands of biodata, Sam is at once the closest and the furthest away that the Wilderness Years’ companions have come to the stylings of the New Series.
Which feels like an appropriate way of summing up Alien Bodies as a whole, which, as we said, becomes more and more of a historical curio as it is swallowed up by the mists of time. The influence of this book on the EDAs, and even on the New Series, was monumental, but the New Series has long since moved past the point at which it would make sense to keep pointing to Alien Bodies as a key influence, as one would expect after the nearly twenty years since Rose.
But for this moment in November of 1997, if we may make a fleeting nod to the Miles/Morgan comparisons that we have largely foregone throughout this post in favour of sketching out the general arc of the EDAs, what we have here is nothing short of Lawrence Miles’ own equivalent of Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. It’s debatable whether it’s the writer’s absolute best work, but it might just be the most approachable formulation of their central ideas, and it’s certainly the most timely and most acclaimed.
No matter what we might know now of what’s to come, it’s tough to argue that the Eighth Doctor Adventures weren’t in dire need of a book exactly like Alien Bodies, and its success is, by and large, deserved. It’s funny, it’s thoughtful, it’s clever, and it’s never once boring.
So naturally we’re going to have to wait seven months until we get a book that’s held to be even remotely in the same league…
Miscellaneous Observations
Faction Paradox themselves largely got squeezed out of my consideration here on account of everything else that’s going on, and indeed they’re not nearly as central to events here as they would be in Interference or *shudders* The Ancestor Cell, or even when compared to the Celestis in this very book. Still, they’re a great idea, and it’s hardly surprising that they’d get to headline their own spin-off series that continues to this day.
Another aspect I didn’t really comment on as regards Miles’ general scepticism of Wars in Heaven as a concept here can be found in the fact that he casually throws a war between the Krotons and the Metatraxi, the villains from an unproduced 1980s stageplay by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, into the background of the novel. The idea of the Krotons as a race who habitually build tunnels so long that they take three days to walk down is entirely of a piece with the “Go big or go home” sensibilities of Doctor Who fandom at the time, and yet it’s shown up as being basically worthless on its own because, well, the Krotons will always remain naff.
Ah, the nineties understanding of “sex” and “gender,” you never fail to disappoint. Somewhere in Ideaspace there’s a whole other War in Heaven being waged between the Doctor’s comments as to the Krotons’ being “asexual” and Bones McCoy’s labelling the Tribbles “bisexual” in The Trouble With Tribbles.
Of all the Star Trek shows, who would have guessed that it would be Enterprise which managed to best tap into the confusion and informational overload of the War in Heaven with its Temporal Cold War? Admittedly, that one might have been down less to intentional design than a general opacity of scripting. Still, Mike Sussman wanted to feature a time machine in the shape of a blue police box in Future Tense, so swings and roundabouts, I always say.
Final Thoughts
Not much else to say about this one, really. The main body of the review kind of speaks for itself, to the point where I almost wish this was the final book of 1997 and not the third-last. No matter how good The Roundheads and Mean Streets might ultimately end up being – and both authors have the deck stacked against them on account of their last respective books being pretty awful – they’re never going to feel like anything more than a footnote to what Miles has pulled off here.
So, now that I’ve laid out a convincing case for why you shouldn’t bother to tune in next Saturday for The Roundheads… um, please do? C’mon, it’ll be interesting, we’ll get to talk about the English Civil War and Mark Gatiss and the Second Doctor. I’m sure I can work in discussions of John Milton and Paradise Lost to keep that War in Heaven kick going too, just for the hell of it. Whether you decide to show up next time or not, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 