There’s certainly something to be said for originality in media criticism, and nowhere is this more important than in cases where one has adopted a method of writing wholly dependent on a stream of tumbling associations stemming from a choice opening statement. As you’ve probably managed to surmise if you’ve stuck around these parts for long enough, or even just read the title of the blog and its increasingly imprecise tagline, “Ramblings about anything,” that’s exactly the situation I’ve concocted for myself.
That’s not a complaint by any means, and I wouldn’t really have it any other way. It’s a method that largely works for me, if only on the level of my own personal enjoyment. I try my best to ensure that I’m not the only one feeling gratified by the whole process, but sometimes it can be a bit of a shot in the dark.
And sometimes this sense of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks extends to the act of choosing a metaphorical point of entry with which to introduce a given review. While the finer details of the process are largely irrelevant for my purposes today – particularly given I already delved into said details not too long ago in the opening to my piece on Burning Heart, and I do broadly try to avoid repeating myself too egregiously wherever possible – suffice it to say that I don’t always sit down with some divine spark of inspiration and find all my arguments flowing forth with reckless abandon. On the contrary, I’ve talked before about how it can sometimes take me a few tries to really find an opening angle that I’m satisfied with.
At the risk of lending the current proceedings an unnecessarily melodramatic tone, today is not one of those occasions.
Vampire Science is the second novel to be published as part of BBC Books’ Eighth Doctor Adventures series. As these things go, this is probably the second-most important fact about it, surpassed only by the observation that the first instalment in the series was The Eight Doctors. For originality’s sake, I would very much like to be able to put together a take on the novel that isn’t overwhelmingly informed by these two facts, but the simple fact of the matter is that this is functionally impossible.
No small part of this impossibility, of course, is down to The Eight Doctors being pretty unanimously panned by fandom, and not unjustifiably so. It honestly numbers among the most mind-numbing and tedious reads I’ve ever had the misfortune of sitting through as a part of this project.
Where the very best of the Wilderness Years novels could just about make a claim to standing on their own two feet as pieces of solid science fiction even beyond their connections to Doctor Who, The Eight Doctors embodied just about every bad trait that one might expect of a series of tie-ins based on a cancelled piece of niche British sci-fi esoterica, being drenched in continuity, needlessly petty pot-shots at pieces of the franchise that didn’t meet with Terrance Dicks’ approval, and a frightful amount of sexism.
So it’s fair to say that, as beginnings go, things could have gone better, which actually serves as the perfect segue into talking about Vampire Science. If you dig around those corners of the Internet where the Eighth Doctor Adventures are regularly discussed, you’ll come across one particularly relevant opinion with a decent amount of regularity, almost always phrased as one of many variations of: “You can just start with Vampire Science.”
Certainly, the gulf between how the two novels have been received is a striking one. Where Dicks’ much-maligned attempt at a debut sits squarely in third-from-last according to the Sullivan rankings, Vampire Science manages to sit at a frankly phenomenal fourteenth place. Even if you put The Eight Doctors aside for a moment, as far as the first six EDAs to be released in 1997 are concerned, the only book to achieve a higher ranking is, predictably enough, Lawrence Miles’ Alien Bodies.
If you want to find the consensus third-best book of the year, you have to scroll as far down as forty-third place before you hit Paul Leonard’s Genocide. But perhaps the most intriguing comparison here can be made when one places the book against its contemporary over at Virgin. Where Matthew Jones’ Beyond the Sun achieved a rating of 75.8%, Vampire Science sits at 75.4%. Both books, if they were ranked relative to the Doctor-led New Adventures, would slot into the exact same gap between Return of the Living Dad and Happy Endings, or eighteenth and nineteenth place for those of us who can’t read the base code of the universe.
What we’re looking at here, then, is a rare occasion where the fandom consensus as to the comparative merits of Virgin and BBC Books’ respective offerings for a given month is largely in alignment, even if it is kind of telling that the figure for Vampire Science is extrapolated from 268 votes while Beyond the Sun manages a measly eighty-seven.
Putting our hindsight goggles to one side for the moment, and pretending we know absolutely nothing about Dalek history retcons or Wars in Heaven, it isn’t unreasonable on the basis of this evidence to assume that The Eight Doctors might have just been a regrettable fluke, and that it wasn’t such a pipe dream to have a vision of the Wilderness Years where there could be two major publishers turning out original, novel-length Doctor Who fiction co-existing side by side, even if the one had been forced by the other to avoid referencing any of those concepts with a more overt grounding in Doctor Who.
There’s a temptation here to disappear down this train of thought and get caught up in offering possible alternative histories of what might have been, which is a revealing impulse in and of itself. After all, we’ve touched on it in passing before, whether in reference to the age-old debate of whether Oh No It Isn’t! was a financially shrewd starting point for the new, Bernice-led NAs, or in questioning what The Devil Goblins from Neptune could have looked like had Paul Cornell stuck around to co-author it alongside his Discontinuity Guide cadre.
At each juncture, we’ve roundly dismissed the idea as being a rather unfruitful avenue, due in no small part to the BBC Books era still being something of a black spot when it comes to any sort of definitive, behind-the-scenes coverage, at least by the standards that we usually see elsewhere in Doctor Who‘s history. With the Virgin novels, I can refer back to books like David J. Howe’s The Who Adventures, and even the New Adventures’ post-Doctor Who era has been explored in a pretty exhaustive level of detail thanks to Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story.
The Eighth Doctor Adventures, meanwhile, are made conspicuous by their lack of any such convenient reference work. It’s easy enough to ascertain the broad outlines of the series’ production if you put in a decent amount of research, but it’s a scattered endeavour, often entailing the piecing together of offhand comments made in interviews on websites so old and janky as to be barely functional in today’s day and age, provided they haven’t simply become completely inaccessible without the aid of something like the Wayback Machine.
All of which serves as a roundabout way of building up to the biggest question mark hovering over these early EDAs: the editorship of Nuala Buffini. If my repeated comparison between Peter Darvill-Evans and Rebecca Levene’s stewardship of the New and Missing Adventures to Michael Piller over on Star Trek: The Next Generation – mostly on account of their quite famously fostering an “open submissions” policy for their respective series – holds any water at all, then the only logical reference point I can think of as a means of illustrating the strangely elusive nature of Buffini’s tenure would be the example of Michael Wagner, who served as executive producer for the first four episodes of TNG‘s third season before quickly handing the reins over to Piller.
In a similar fashion, it’s seemingly generally agreed that Buffini only ever actually commissioned six books in total, those being the first five EDAs as well as the book that would eventually become John Peel’s Legacy of the Daleks, approved at the same time as War of the Daleks. Once you reach Alien Bodies, you’re firmly in the realm of those books that were instead commissioned by Buffini’s successor, Stephen Cole, who had been moved from a position as the editor of BBC Worldwide’s pre-school magazines.
By all accounts, Buffini was not an avowed fan of Doctor Who, largely having secured the job by dint of already holding a position at BBC Books into which the newly reacquired Who license could be comfortably slotted as an additional part of her responsibilities. This presented the line with something of a problem right off the bat, although it’s the type of problem where it’s regrettably easy for fandom to fall prey to some of its sillier impulses and consequently misdiagnose the issue completely.
Let’s begin by making one thing clear: Buffini’s lack of a pre-existing fandom is not inherently problematic in a situation like this. In actual fact, sometimes a franchise can run for so long that a fresh pair of eyes is exactly what’s needed. To stay on our established “Star Trek comparison” kick, director Nicholas Meyer has talked quite openly about not being able to get a handle on the series and its fictional world due to his personal unfamiliarity until coming to the epiphany that it was “Horatio Hornblower in space,” and for all that certain segments of fandom might have initially resisted some of his more controversial stylistic flourishes, you’d be hard-pressed these days to find a fan who doesn’t consider The Wrath of Khan to be a monumentally important and influential piece of Star Trek.
But there are, inevitably, a few rather significant differences between these two situations. Most superficially, the relative influence of science-fiction fandom over the creative process in the early 1980s was considerably smaller than it was in the mid-to-late 1990s. Yes, the oral history of Star Trek throughout the 1970s had invariably been one expressed in the language of the convention circuit rather than the television studio, but there was nothing approaching the level of organisation exemplified by Usenet groups like “rec.arts.drwho” – or even, for that matter, “alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die.”
Moreover, Doctor Who was stuck in a phase of its lifecycle where fan culture was the singular driving force lending it any semblance of staying power – if terms like “staying power” can even be said to be relevant in relation to a cancelled television show – and the New Adventures, for all that they had never been what you might call “uncontroversial,” had fostered a sizeable fandom all their own.
The last thing that was going to go over well was anything that could be interpreted as an overt signal that the revocation of Virgin’s license was a decision with little forethought put into it beyond the usual corporate considerations of profit maximisation, and in the hasty assignment of editorial duties to Buffini, that’s pretty much exactly what they got.
It should be reiterated here that it is pretty much impossible to blame Buffini herself for any of this, at least without descending into a rather unappealing sort of wilful ignorance and deliberate disingenuity. If anything, it’s hard not to feel some measure of sympathy for her; she had found herself in a situation that was essentially unwinnable, and for all that we might have come down hard on the first book of her short-lived stint as editor, the overwhelming sense one got in reading The Eight Doctors was that the blame for its many, many faults lay squarely at the feet of Terrance Dicks, not Nuala Buffini.
Yet at the end of all of this, we’re still left with the task of trying to discern something approaching a unifying aesthetic for what our inner fannish impulses inexorably pull us towards calling the “Buffini Era.” As you might have already surmised, this is the kind of task which is self-defeating to an almost comical degree, as it’s difficult to convincingly argue that the Buffini Era ever really existed in any meaningful sense.
The exact timeline of events is, again, characteristically murky, but I can certainly find reference to Buffini’s replacement by Cole in a posting to Doctor Who News dated June 22, 1997, just under three weeks after the publication of The Eight Doctors and The Devil Goblins from Neptune. By the time Vampire Science hit shelves on July 7, all indications are that Buffini was already on her way out.
With all of that being said, there do remain some very loose recurring motifs that can be discerned throughout these first five books, which might perhaps be seen to gesture at the larger shape of the EDAs’ initial form. Perhaps the most notable of these motifs is a certain preoccupation with some of the more iconic elements of the television programme’s storied history.
This probably manifests most visibly in The Eight Doctors and John Peel’s two Dalek novels, which is rather unfortunate for anyone trying to make a case in defence of the Buffini Era’s ambitions given the universal revulsion with which those books were greeted, though again the sense remains that the faults of these books lie more with their individual authors.
Even outside of these three proverbial whipping boys of the early range, though, a book like The Bodysnatchers not only positions itself as a sequel to Terror of the Zygons, but also features the return of fan favourite Professor George Litefoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, clearly taking its cues from the much-vaunted “Golden Age” that was the Hinchcliffe and Holmes years. Genocide is perhaps less explicitly fannish in scope, and yet it still foregrounds the return of iconic Pertwee Era companion Jo Grant in a story that offers a glimpse of her life post-The Green Death.
Against that backdrop, Vampire Science can’t help but feel like a rather strange outlier. While it might feature the return of the vampires that had been injected into Doctor Who‘s rather gonzo conception of Time Lord history and mythology in State of Decay, vampirism as a concept is nebulous enough that it can support a range of interpretations in a way that more definitively Doctor Who-ish monsters like the Daleks or the Zygons can’t, at least without a conscious retooling.
Indeed, it’s quite illuminating that the biggest continuity touchstone for Vampire Science actually seems to be the 1996 TV movie. Not only does the book consciously bring the Eighth Doctor back to San Francisco, but it was originally structured as something of a direct sequel to the events at the turn of the millennium, being centred around the return of Daphne Ashbrook’s character of Grace Holloway before it became apparent that the complicated rights situation between the BBC, Fox and Universal would not permit such a development, and Grace was reworked to become Carolyn McConnell.
(This is, in its own way, a pretty fitting encapsulation of the sheer surreality that the Eighth Doctor’s tenure gradually descended into, being splintered so far across the mediums of comics, books and eventually audio dramas that even the only definite televisual document of the Era – with the sincerest of apologies to any The Night of the Doctor enjoyers in the audience – remains curiously inaccessible on a fundamental level. A similar kind of logic would also seem to be at play in the EDAs’ curious reticence to display Paul McGann’s likeness on the front cover, which was rumoured in contemporary fandom circles to be the result of a similar legal tangle, at least until the time of Demontage in March 1999, a full twenty books into the line.)
The idea of building out an incoming Doctor from their introductory story is the kind of thing that seems rather self-evident, particularly when one is operating at as much of a stylistic and creative remove as the EDAs are from the Segal TV movie. Sure, there exist any number of counterexamples one could point to of a new Doctor’s era being defined in direct opposition to the story that properly introduces them; the tone of the McCoy years owed far more to Paradise Towers than it did Time and the Rani, while the Alien-prefiguring body horror of The Ark in Space was to prove a more accurate guide for the Hinchcliffe years than the last fading echoes of the UNIT family in Robot.
Most of the time, though, these divergences are readily explicable as a consequence of the realities of television production, with a few stray scripts being held over from the administration of the departing editor and/or producer. With a medium like prose, which differs in several basic respects from television and isn’t bound by the same constant, grinding pressures that grip the writers’ room on a weekly programme, there’s really no reason why some of the more workable aspects of the TV movie can’t be used as a springboard upon which to build future adventures.
As is, The Eight Doctors seemed almost spiteful towards the television movie, wasting no time deriding the whole farrago as “a weird, fantastic adventure, full of improbable, illogical events” before nitpicking the plot, questioning how the Eye of Harmony had ended up in the Doctor’s TARDIS, or the Master’s means of entry into the ship.
It’s not necessarily that any of this is an inherently invalid stance for Dicks to take – Lord knows there are any number of completely valid and reasonable criticisms that can be levelled at the TV movie – but as the bedrock upon which an entire novel range would have to be built, it was an atttitude that was at best extremely unhelpful, and at worst downright mean-spirited.
More than anything else, this is the essence of the divide between The Eight Doctors and Vampire Science that fandom hints at whenever it warns prospective EDA readers to simply start with the second novel. Orman and Blum have constructed a novel that is not just a solidly entertaining piece of Doctor Who in its own right, but a thoughtful and considered response to the hurdles facing the EDAs at this early stage of their development.
Perhaps most damningly of all for The Eight Doctors, however, the tricks they pull are all rather obvious and elementary ones; they’re certainly no less entertaining or effective for that obviousness, but they still only serve to make Dicks’ apparent inability to hit even these rather basic beats all the more galling.
Appropriately enough, then, one of the more interesting places to jump into Vampire Science is with the treatment of the titular vampires themselves. As we’ve already hinted at, by 1997 they’ve been a part of Doctor Who‘s fictional world for a little over a decade and a half, and you can quite easily round that figure up to nearer twenty years if you squint and choose to take The Witch Lords/The Vampire Mutations into consideration, those being the preliminary forms of State of Decay that had been abandoned when the BBC higher-ups grew nervous of the scripts’ detracting from the broadcaster’s more earnest high-profile adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Consequently, despite the fact that State of Decay was ultimately one of the earliest stories produced under the aegis of John Nathan-Turner, its formulation of the vampires at the heart of its narrative was firmly rooted in the Gothic horror sensibilities of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, pulling not just from Stoker’s original novel but from the wave of successful Christopher Lee films released by Hammer Film Productions from the 1950s through to the 1970s.
When the time came for Doctor Who to be cancelled and the series made the move to the printed page, it seemed inevitable that someone would eventually choose to revisit the idea of vampires, particularly given the veritable glut of vampire fiction that seized popular culture throughout the 1990s.
What was perhaps more surprising, however, was that the series should largely choose to hew to the more traditionalist, Hammer-esque approach favoured by Dicks, in spite of the rather substantial leaps and bounds made by the vampire aesthetic in the intervening years.
(Well OK, it’s not that surprising, given two of the more substantive efforts at offering a State of Decay sequel came in the form of Blood Harvest and The Eight Doctors. “Terrance Dicks sticks to his established style,” stop the presses!)
Providing a complete portrait of this evolution and the intertwining of vampirism with the burgeoning Gothic subculture and eventually more conventional forms of geekdom would, quite frankly, be a far more involved and complex task than is probably feasible within the bounds of this review, but it’s an easy enough development to trace from a broad strokes perspective.
Certainly, elements of the vampiric were always a natural fit for the typical concerns and styles associated with those Gothic rock outfits that began to sweep the British music scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and this influence can be quite plainly seen in some of the movement’s more influential singles, whether that be Bauhaus’ nine-minute epic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” or the Birthday Party’s “Release the Bats.”
As such, it was hardly surprising that the Gothic scene’s real explosion in popularity should be accompanied by a certain retooling of the classic vampire archetype. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire may have seen print in 1976, but it didn’t properly give rise to the sprawling, multi-volume Vampire Chronicles series we know today until the publication of The Vampire Lestat in 1985.
Two years earlier, Tony Scott had made his feature-length directorial debut with 1983’s The Hunger; based on a novel of the same name by future Communion author Whitley Strieber and boasting a star-studded cast that included Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie, the film quickly became something of a cult classic among Goths everywhere, despite meeting with a decidedly more chilly reception from critics, being labelled “an agonizingly bad vampire movie” by Roger Ebert.
In 1987, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys proved a more critically and commercially successful endeavour, grossing $32.2 million on a budget of $8.5 million; interviewed for a retrospective on the film in 2019, screenwriter James Jeremias would directly cite Rice’s Interview with the Vampire – and specifically the character of Claudia – as a key source of inspiration.
By the 1990s, then, vampires were primed to stage a not-so-bloodless coup and take the entertainment world by storm, buoyed even further by such milestones as the publication of the massively successful tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade by White Wolf in 1991, to say nothing of the hugely successful 1994 film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, which became the ninth highest-grossing film of the year and accrued two Academy Award nominations. In 1998, Marvel Enterprises would find their first major commercial success on the big screen with Stephen Norrington’s Blade, starring Wesley Snipes in the title role.
On television, even The X-Files proved unable to resist the allure of the haemovoric undead; despite Chris Carter’s insistence upon signing his initial contract with Fox that he “didn’t want to do something limited to vampires,” the show devoted its first Scully-free hour of television to Glen Morgan and James Wong’s 3, pitting Mulder against a vampiric coven wreaking havoc in sun-drenched California. Seven months after the publication of Vampire Science, Vince Gilligan would offer a decidedly more comedic – and, it must be said, far more successful – take on the subject with the gleefully format-bending Bad Blood.
All of this, however, is really just a case of avoiding the elephant in the room, because if you’re going to have any sort of conversation touching on the intersection of geek culture with vampires in the 1990s, you’re always going to come back around to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Premiering for a truncated twelve-episode season in March 1997 after the cancellation of Aaron Spelling’s prime time soap opera Savannah, the series quickly established itself as a ratings winner for the fledgling WB network, securing the channel’s highest ever Monday night viewing figures and bringing with it a whole new teenage demographic, paving the way for later shows geared for a similar audience including Dawson’s Creek, Felicity and Charmed.
What’s most striking about Vampire Science, viewed in this light, is the sheer extent to which Orman and Blum have chosen to frame their vampires in relation to the decade’s rapidly-evolving pop cultural milieu. Harris bemoans Slake’s shamelessly taking inspiration from Lestat and “that Masquerade card game,” while Slake himself gleefully contemplates turning Anne Rice as part of his grand vampiric rampage through the streets of San Francisco, and his compatriots lust over Deborah Duchêne’s Janette in re-runs of Forever Knight.
(In fact, Vampire Science is actually so conversant with nineties vampire fiction that it even manages to work in a namecheck of James Marsters’ Spike from Buffy, which is rather impressive when one considers that the character wouldn’t even appear until School Hard in late September 1997, some two months after the book saw print.)
But the sense that these vampires are inextricably linked to a distinctly nineties sensibility extends even beyond a few choice pop culture references, and it’s here that Vampire Science really shines, as its vampires seem to resemble nothing so much as walking, talking embodiments of the decade’s peculiar premillennial ennui.
One of the smarter decisions Orman and Blum make here is to not play the obvious card and have the “turning” of the humans come about by violent means, a decision which Vampire Science consciously lampshades when the Doctor is suspected to have been converted after his bloodfasting with Joanna. “Do we know for sure that it’s the bite that changes people?” James muses.
It’s quite telling that perhaps the most shocking vampire bite sequence in the entire novel, the attack upon Sam by Weird Harold, exists in complete isolation from the big “human gets turned to the side of the vampires” plotline, which is instead foisted upon poor old David Shackle, who ends up completely broken down and ready to be vampirised through the application of no grosser violence than the gradual corrosion of his belief in the inherent worthiness of life.
In actual fact, Shackle’s arc might just be one of the most stirring things contained within Vampire Science, and it’s surely a strong contender for one of the most beautiful things Kate Orman has ever written, which is certainly no small feat. When he’s initially introduced, he just seems like your standard melodramatic cynic, waxing poetic about the “trickle-down theory of social unrest” and refusing to believe that Sam could possibly care enough about the multitude of exsanguinated homeless San Franciscans. To all intents and purposes, it almost seems like he’s being treated as a source of comic relief; astonishingly bleak comic relief, mind you, but even so.
And then, somewhere around the halfway point, he simply stops being funny. The futility of trying to hold together something as fragile as human life in the chaos of the big city, with all its random, senseless violence, ultimately gets to him, and he finds himself a prime target for Harris’ manipulations. By the time she’s done her work on him and he’s candidly and calmly discussing potential suicide methods with anyone who’ll listen, you can’t help but feel that Orman and Blum may not have received a copy of the whole “Try to be less serious than the New Adventures” memo.
But the fact is that this departure from form – as much as a series which is only two books deep can really be said to have a “form” to depart from – ends up feeling supremely welcome, hitting on those notes of aching, poetic darkness that only Kate Orman really can. It isn’t, perhaps, entirely consistent with the spirit of The Eight Doctors but, to be blunt, well… that’s a very good thing.
It also helps that, like all good Doctor Who novels, Vampire Science is an extraordinarily tightly-wound construction, both thematically and narratively. The stuff with Shackle is wonderful, but it’s even better when taken as one small facet of the book’s larger consideration of faith and belief, which is a very nineties theme in and of itself.
There’s a reason, after all, the popular X-Files credo “I want to believe” struck a chord with so many people, perfectly capturing as it did the mood of a populace searching for meaning in the face of so much despair and hopelessness, being served hot and fresh at the televisual all-you-can-eat buffet that was the rapidly-forming twenty-four hour news cycle. Reading Vampire Science, one is left with the impression that Orman and Blum have tapped into a similar vein – ha! – of listlessness and dejection, if only to chime in with a more broadly wholesome answer to the conundrum than Chris Carter might have ever been capable of.
And with all this talk of belief and individuals’ greater awareness of the various evils and injustices plaguing the modern world, Vampire Science actually manages to quite elegantly dovetail its wider themes into reflecting back upon the main cast, most notably in the case of Sam Jones.
Ah, Sam. Where do we even begin? The novels have, after all, been on something of a hot streak when it comes to their original companions. Even if characters like Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester hadn’t quite managed to set the world alight in the same way as Bernice Summerfield had done – with Chris pretty consistently being the weakest link in a given book both before and after Benny’s departure from the TARDIS, only really becoming a particularly workable character in the wake of Roz’s death – it still feels as if there is something worth noting in the rather… extreme reactions that Sam tends to generate.
The usual objections raised to her character centre on her perceived “generic companion” status, and the tendency that she had in internal monologues to descend into a mouthpiece for various progressive causes which were engaged with in a manner that some found rather trite and surface-level.
This sense that Sam exists as a problematic foundational wrinkle in the Eighth Doctor Adventures’ rather twisted continuity is only reinforced when the range eventually chooses to fold her blandness into the very text of the series, with the suggestion being made in Alien Bodies that the character’s biodata had been deliberately altered so as to make her the perfect companion for the Doctor, an idea which Orman and Blum subsequently picked up and ran with big time in their work on Unnatural History, much to Miles’ chagrin.
Reading Vampire Science, then, it’s rather striking just how much of this treatment of Sam is visible from the get-go, or at least from the character’s first substantial appearance, what with her having largely been a bland non-entity for the two sections of The Eight Doctors in which she played any sort of part.
It’s not that anything here consciously hearkens towards Alien Bodies per se; as we’ve established, the two books were commissioned under completely different editors, which one would expect to have rather limited the potential for cross-author communication, even before you start factoring in Orman, Blum and Miles’ each living on completely separate continents, Internet or no Internet. But on a basic conceptual level, if we can take a premise like “The character of Sam is a problem in need of solving” to be a concept, there’s actually a surprising level of overlap at play.
One suspects that one of the main issues that really lies at the heart of this debate is that Sam is, at least until the time of Seeing I, a teenager, with all the embarrassing frailties and blind spots that tend to come with the territory of trying to loudly and forcefully declare your own sense of independence and personhood in a way that gets the rest of the world to actually sit up and pay attention. In this respect, it’s perhaps instructive to compare Sam to her two most direct antecedents in the “teenage companion” stakes, those being Ace and Adric.
(Yes, I suppose you could probably count Peri here as well, given the broad consensus that she’s eighteen as of Planet of Fire, as specified in her initial Character Outline for Season 21, but the series never engages with that facet of her character in as meaningful a way as it does with Ace or Adric. And frankly, given the way in which Peri was so routinely sexualised, her identification as a “teenage” character in any meaningful sense cannot possibly reflect positively on the show.)
Ace, after all, is a rather beloved character, and it’s quite revealing that Vampire Science chooses to adopt her as a point of comparison for Sam, heavily implying that the TARDIS’ latest occupant has taken up residence in the room that used to belong to Ace and even having General Kramer warn her of the way her predecessor was treated by the Seventh Doctor, which goes on to play a big role in precipitating Sam’s eventual crisis of faith in her newfound life.
In comparing the vastly different fan reactions to the two characters, one wonders how much of this gulf can be put down to Ace’s tendency to express her teenage angst in ways that are broadly considered “cool,” or at the very least more conventionally cool than attending a Greenpeace rally. In essence: Make super-powered baseball bats, not placards.
Adric, on the other hand, serves as an effective illustration of the flip side of the coin, being a character who comes in for almost universal derision from fandom, and received wisdom generally holds that a not insubstantial part of this lambasting stemmed from the extent to which he was a mirror to some of the more unflattering attributes that adolescent male members of the audience might have recognised in themselves or people they knew.
Regardless of how much stock one is willing to put in that notion, the idea is a common enough talking point in what we might only half-seriously term the Adric discourse that it also neatly summarises some of my occasional misgivings about the proverbial Sam hate train that can sometimes get a-rollin’, even as there are certainly some very legitimate criticisms to be levelled against the character.
Where the character of Adric seemed close enough to some of the more stereotypical conceptions of Doctor Who fandom that it was reasonably possible to read the disdain with which the character was widely greeted as an exercise in self-flagellation, the overwhelmingly masculinist gender politics of that self-same fandom make it quite difficult to view a similarly hostile response to a female character as a wholly value-neutral act.
Sure, I’ll quite readily concede that this could all be a simple case of my faith in fandoms’ ability to discuss female characters with the appropriate levels of nuance – and appropriate lack of misogyny – having been severely eroded after my having grown up in the 2010s, but the idea of a contemporary take on Sam Jones being greeted with alarmist YouTube thumbnails bemoaning the reign of the SJWs or labelling the character a Mary Sue remains depressingly difficult to dispel entirely.
In any event, Vampire Science gives Sam a pretty solid and self-contained character arc, clearly designed to undercut some of the grating bluntness apparent in The Eight Doctors‘ “I don’t even drink Coke” exchange, and while it would be all too easy for this to seem like nothing more than a somewhat mean-spirited proclamation that the character is invested, as she herself puts it, in a “list of causes a mile long and an inch deep,” it helps that Orman and Blum choose to give her a certain curious dignity, even if it might be imperfect.
From the moment she first meets Carolyn in 1976, it’s quite clear that Sam is still in the mindset of treating her adventures with the Doctor as a bit of a harmless lark, spouting corny clichés like “Gimme weird over boring any day.” While it’s not as if Terrance Dicks had exactly given Orman and Blum much to work with in The Eight Doctors, the Sam we see here still feels of a piece with the brash youngster who had so brazenly swanned into the TARDIS at the conclusion of that novel.
In true Kate Orman fashion, of course, it doesn’t take long for Sam to acquire some rather pronounced battle scars, as she finds herself brutally attacked by Weird Harold while on a stake-out – and before you accuse me of bad punnery, the book beat me to it; on this charge, at least, I am an innocent man – at the Other Place. Not only does this allow for some unsurprisingly slick and well-executed hurt/comfort sequences, but it also does a lot to shatter many of Sam’s illusions and induct her into the hall of NA-adjacent “wounded protagonists” that the Virgin books seemed so fond of setting up, what with the Doctor’s stabbing in The Left-Handed Hummingbird and Set Piece, to say nothing of Chris’ bullet to the shoulder in Bad Therapy.
It is, admittedly, all too easy to imagine a version of this arc that comes off as a rather cynical exercise in off-handedly inserting trauma into a character’s life, particularly when one considers the pretty extensive body of existing literature that has coded vampire attacks as a particularly sexual and eroticised form of violence.
Thankfully, however, we’re dealing with Kate Orman, and the book just about manages to strike the right balance between never losing sight of the unique horror of Sam’s experience, and knowing when to pull back so as to not veer into the realm of crass, shallow exploitation of such serious and weighty themes. Much as Orman was able to ground Roz’s death in So Vile a Sin in an active choice on the character’s part, Sam’s eventual triumph over Weird Harold is treated as hers and hers alone, and Vampire Science never feels like it allows the Doctor’s reaction to Sam’s wounding and temporary disempowerment to unduly overshadow proceedings in the grand fridging tradition.
But underlying all of this is a sense that Orman and Blum have at least tried to pre-empt some of the accusations of political vacuousness that will inevitably be levelled against Sam, and to find a workable niche for her in the ensemble. For all that her comfortable white middle-class English upbringing might mean that her high-minded ideals aren’t always backed up with definitive life experience, Vampire Science posits that she might be able to acquire that experience through her travels in the TARDIS, and maybe eventually manage to live up to those ideals that she prizes so dearly.
It isn’t a perfect solution by any means. Certainly, there’s an argument to be made that defining Sam in so ironclad a fashion as “the one who learns things by being around the Doctor” inherently limits how much she can ever feasibly develop, at least when she is sharing the same narrative real estate with the Doctor. It wouldn’t be entirely unfair to state that this really just represents the EDAs kicking the proverbial can a little further down the road, and it’s telling that the four-book arc leading up to Seeing I needs to go to such drastic measures to separate Sam from the Doctor so that she has the vaguest hope of developing.
And yet as single-book character arcs go, it’s readable, it’s nuanced, and it just about works as a broad-strokes outline for how to get the character of Sam to a state where she can reliably function. It’s an innovation just as significant as the first prolonged stirrings of the anarchic, hyperactive and distractable characterisation of the Eighth Doctor, even if it shares the same pitfalls of requiring future EDA authors to be working on the same page.
Which, as we’ll soon see, can be something of a tall order at the best of times.
With faith serving as a central theme in Vampire Science – and given how much religious iconography tends to seep into vampire fiction, the book is really just pulling from a well-established tradition here – it’s also unsurprising that Sam’s vociferous and forceful political opinions are contrasted against the other members of the guest cast.
We’ve already touched on Shackle, of course, but in many ways the most obvious dramatic foil for Sam comes in the form of Carolyn. No small part of this is undoubtedly down to her origins as a return appearance by Grace, and trying to add some definition to the newest member of the regular cast by contrasting her against her direct televised predecessor is a reasonably solid solution to the problem.
Even if that might have fallen through, however, there remain shades of the “tired of living but afraid of dying” characterisation to her character, though the change in her specialisation from cardiology to biochemistry and oncology has necessarily wrought a similar shift in her ultimate aim. Where before we had “to hold back death,” now we have “find a cure for cancer,” stated just as bluntly as if to reinforce the parallel even further.
Interestingly enough, the ultimate trajectory of Carolyn’s arc – learning to rediscover the magic of life that she had found on an initial brief encounter with the Doctor, while also tempering that against the bedrock reality of the relationship that she’s already found on Earth – seems to hearken even further forwards to the characterisation of Amy Pond during the Eleventh Doctor’s era. It’s executed pretty well, serving as another solid example of the distinct thematic Orman-Moffat thematic resonance that I’ve noted in the past, though building a significant portion of Sam’s first appearance around the possibility of an alternative companion does rather predictably give rise to the expected “Why couldn’t we have had Carolyn instead?” comments from the anti-Sam camp.
If Carolyn and Sam both offer up snapshots of overpowering or misplaced belief, then Slake and his crew of vampires would seem to caution against the dangers of hollow, all-pervasive nihilism. Orman and Blum aren’t exactly subtle here, introducing us to Slake in the midst of a desperate attempt at theatrics to wow some disinterested Goths at the Other Place. With the aforementioned references on Harris’ part to Interview with the Vampire and Vampire: The Masquerade, it seems that Slake has chosen the vacant spectacle of popular culture as the foundation of his ideological edifice, for all that he might make some token stabs at depth by kitting out his apartment in suitably nihilistic Nietzsche tomes.
In one of many great Doctor moments, the Time Lord makes all of this quite plain: “In forty years even the most mundane of these people can raise a family, get new jobs, do things they’ve never done before – and you’re still doing just what you did back in your gang in 1956. Talk about arrested development. All these years and you’re still a teenager.”
And that is, one suspects, the heart of the matter. At the end of the day, Vampire Science seems far more sympathetic to the youthful blundering of Sam Jones than it does to Slake’s brand of careful, practised stasis. Hell, it even seems that the book would rather take the quiet retreat into political banality enjoyed by Sam’s parents and the 1960s generation as a whole over perpetual fixity, and for all that we could perhaps make some snide remarks about how this marks Vampire Science as a work produced on the cusp of Tony Blair and New Labour, the basic premise of embracing change over stagnation strikes close enough to some of the big themes at the heart of Doctor Who that it just about works.
And so, too, does Vampire Science. It may not be an absolute, unalloyed masterpiece, but to expect the EDAs to so rapidly and totally grasp their own identity after just two books feels rather unrealistic, particularly when the first of those two books was as wretched as The Eight Doctors ended up being.
For now, it’s more than enough for the novels to prove that they can turn out entertaining, quick-paced adventures with a workable vision of the Doctor and Sam, while not completely sacrificing the depth and innovations brought by the New Adventures in the process. Taken on those terms, it’s tough to call this anything but a resounding success.
Miscellaneous Observations
I didn’t really comment too extensively on the Doctor’s characterisation here, as I don’t know if I have too much to add to the conversation that hasn’t already been said, but suffice it to say that the definition of Eight as “Life’s Champion” largely goes down a treat. Even if defining the character so heavily by reference to the ways he differs from his predecessor may not have been the best long-term game plan, it’s just about excusable when you consider how little the EDAs had to work with at the very beginning.
Speaking of ways Vampire Science turned out way better than it really had any right to, let’s just pause for a moment and acknowledge just how insanely prolific Kate Orman has been in the past few months leading up to July 1997. Between capping off the Seventh Doctor’s arc in The Room With No Doors and frantically scrambling to get So Vile a Sin to a state where it was fit for publication, not to mention somehow squeezing in a short story for Re:Generations along the way, it’s a wonder this book is at all enjoyable.
In fact, to hear Orman tell it in conversation with David J. Howe, she largely delegated responsibility for the handling of Vampire Science to Blum in order that she might better focus on So Vile a Sin, and for all that I’ve focused in on Orman over the course of this review far more than I have her then-fiancé and now-husband, I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on how seamlessly the pair’s writing styles have meshed together in the final analysis.
There aren’t the same markers that might have allowed one to make an educated guess as to the division of the Aaronovitch/Orman segments in So Vile a Sin, say, and it’s therefore no great surprise that the two of them would form one of the more enduring creative partnerships in the Wilderness Years from this point on.
Final Thoughts
Well, hopefully this one has redeemed me some in the eyes of the EDA fans after so thoroughly trashing The Eight Doctors. Coupled with The Devil Goblins from Neptune, it looks like we might actually be in for a better start to the BBC Books line than we might have been led to believe. What’s up next? A Troughton novel, you say? Hmm… do I have to? Oh well, join me next time as we see if the PDAs prove any more adept at handling the Second Doctor than the MAs of old, and we welcome back Steve Lyons with The Murder Game. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 