One of the trends which we’ve observed over the course of the New Adventures has been the gradual shift away from the series’ penchant for lobbing out a scattershot barrage of fans-turned-authors in its early days. Instead, the range moved towards a model that increasingly came to rely upon a few trusted stalwarts who could be relied upon to turn in a novel with a minimum of fuss, hopefully with the added benefit of that novel being basically functional within the strictures of the medium.
To more plainly illustrate this contrast, all we really need to do is compare the NAs’ slate for 1993 to that of 1995. The former year was overwhelmingly dominated by first-time authors, with the only exceptions to this rule of thumb being Nigel Robinson and Jim Mortimore, and although the latter had previously collaborated with Andy Lane on Lucifer Rising, Blood Heat remained his first solo outing, so its inclusion alongside a novel like Birthright ought to come with a bit of an asterisk.
By 1995, however, the only New Adventure to be written by a newcomer to the world of Doctor Who was Dave Stone’s Sky Pirates! Even then, Stone was hardly what you could call a novice by that stage, having cut his teeth on the British comics scene with numerous credits for the Judge Dredd Megazine in the early 1990s before migrating to Virgin’s own short-lived line of Judge Dredd tie-in novels, for which he wrote a total of three instalments. For a series that only lasted nine books, that’s certainly no mean feat.
While some might respond to this shift by decrying the novels for their “cliquishness,” we ought not lose sight of the fact that this is really just part and parcel of the process that any long-running series needs to engage in if it hopes to have a shot at actually running for a long time.
Peter Darvill-Evans’ open submissions policy, indirectly echoing a similar edict made by Michael Piller over on the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is rightfully lauded as a brilliant decision. On the most obvious level, presuming you’re the type to care about such things, it helps to ensure that “real fans” with a deep and abiding love for the source material are in a position of shepherding the franchise.
And sure, for all that the subsequent decades may have seen this logic run riot to the detriment of Doctor Who and many other series besides, it was a fundamentally sound idea in the context of a cancelled television programme which nobody had any reason to suspect would ever return. Letting people like Paul Cornell write novels like Revelation was a better game plan for the series in the long term than entrusting it to the same old group of Target veterans, at least one of whom had been working on Doctor Who since the first government of Harold Wilson.
But crucially, this policy of open submissions was only the first step. The greatest strength of the early New Adventures was that they were willing to entertain novels from anyone, and their greatest flaw was… that they were willing to entertain novels from anyone. I may have said it before, but it’s worth reiterating that for every Paul Cornell or Kate Orman that this period produced, you also had an Andrew Hunt or a Neil Penswick. The series would undeniably have been weaker for not allowing this wild, experimental sense of reckless creative abandon, but if you’re aiming to be a consistently entertaining source of fresh Doctor Who, you eventually need to pare things back a bit.
Under Rebecca Levene, then, the Virgin line gradually moved closer to achieving that goal, and the results spoke for themselves. Though the early NAs had their fair share of triumphs, it seems just about inarguable that the lineup of a year like 1995 – wherein the weakest novel was probably the deeply flawed but still interesting Toy Soldiers – represented a substantial improvement over what had come before, and the development of a consistent and reliable pool of writers from those initial submissions was a key component of that success.
It’s perhaps telling that Lawrence Miles, who can probably quite uncontroversially be dubbed the author with the most influence upon the coming shape of the world of Doctor Who novels to have made their debut in this late period of the NAs, had actually submitted a proposed storyline for the book that would become Christmas on a Rational Planet some considerable time earlier, only for it to get lost amidst the slush pile until being idly rediscovered by Gareth Roberts. The novel might quite rightly feel like an anomaly amongst the general trend of Virgin choosing to focus on consolidating their existing writers, but that’s only because it was quite literally grounded in the ethos typified by Darvill-Evans’ editorship.
And then you have Matthew Jones. It is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch to portray Jones as some completely untested novice who sprang out of the ether fully-formed upon the publication of Bad Therapy in December 1996, having already established himself as a known quantity in the vaunted corridors of 1990s Who fandom through his regular Fluid Links column in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine.
Indeed, he’d even contributed The Nine-Day Queen to Lost Property, the second of Virgin’s Decalog short story collections, though it must be said that it wasn’t a story I much cared for in the final telling, taking some rather inelegant shortcuts in establishing its central historical tragedy that left its attempts at emotional heft feeling blunt and underdeveloped.
Yet with all of that being said, Bad Therapy still remained his debut full-length novel, and the new and expanded format seemed to do Jones a world of good, allowing him the space to sketch a quietly moving tale about loneliness and empathy which befitted the vaguely dispirited and dejected mood among certain sects of fandom in the twilight months of the Virgin line.
At the time of its initial publication, it seems fair to say that it was a bit of a difficult book to process, with its emotional stakes being so heavily tied to Roz’s death in the as-yet unpublished So Vile a Sin. Perhaps this confusion at least partially accounts for its conspicuously low placement on the Sullivan rankings, coming in at #20 and missing out on the apparent boost afforded other novels in the New Adventures’ endgame, not-so-narrowly avoiding the fate of being the lowest-rated of the final five books thanks to the widely lambasted Eternity Weeps, which fell at #48.
With Beyond the Sun, by contrast, we’re looking at a book that seems to have received a considerably warmer reception. Among the twenty-three Bernice-led NAs, it’s the highest-rated that we’ve looked at so far, sitting squarely in fourth place, while Oh No It Isn’t! and Dragons’ Wrath only managed to reach eleventh and twelfth, respectively. We won’t be talking about a novel that bests that score until we get to Walking to Babylon some seven months and twenty books hence.
Look at the composition of that top three, however, and the results are quite telling. We have, as mentioned, a tragic historical romance from Kate Orman, a universe-spanning, format-bending epic courtesy of Lawrence Miles at the height of his authorial powers and relevance, and a novel deliberately designed by the Benny novels’ most prolific contributor to wrap up as many of the series’ loose threads as possible in a suitably show-stopping fashion.
These are all books that look remarkably like “safe bets,” and while Beyond the Sun‘s 75.8% rating isn’t too extraordinary – placing it somewhere between Return of the Living Dad and Happy Endings, which occupy eighteenth and nineteenth place among the Doctor-led NAs – the fact that a second-time author like Jones should manage such a warm reception is interesting enough that it bears remarking upon.
In Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story, Jones himself even reflects on Beyond the Sun as being a more mature and original work than Bad Therapy, crediting his debut New Adventure as “an imitation of several of the others – mostly Paul Cornell’s.” Personally, I think Jones sells himself a bit short – even if it is a self-evident Cornell imitation in some respects, it’s a very good Cornell imitation, which is more than a lot of other first-time novelists can manage – but I can understand the general thrust of his judgment.
Certainly, it’s reflected in the contemporary opinion of DWM‘s own Dave Owen. Having given Bad Therapy a mixed yet still broadly positive review, and noting Jones’ clear fannish affection for the New Adventures as a worthwhile corner of Doctor Who in their own right, his assessment of Beyond the Sun came straight to the point: “Within his opening chapter, Matthew Jones convinces that he has significantly developed his storytelling technique since Bad Therapy.”
Of course, although it could hardly have been obvious to fans at the time, this newfound critical success in the Virgin novels was something of a false dawn for Jones, and anyone harbouring hopes that he might become a shining light among the latter-day New Adventures authors in the vein of a Miles or a Stone was likely to be disappointed, with Beyond the Sun ultimately proving to be his last full-length Doctor Who-adjacent novel in the Wilderness Years.
But equally, the benefit of hindsight proves particularly illuminating here. While Jones might be largely departing the narrative at this point, he only does so by dint of moving outside the bounds of the way I’ve opted to tell the story of the Wilderness Years, rather than by outright ceasing to be influential on the direction of Doctor Who, per se.
Not long after the publication of Beyond the Sun, Jones managed to secure a position as a storyliner on Coronation Street on the strength of a recommendation from Gareth Roberts, joining the list of “NA authors turned soapsmiths” alongside such luminaries as Rebecca Levene, Lance Parkin, Paul Cornell and, indeed, Roberts himself.
This, in turn, contributed directly to his being offered the position of script editor on Russell T. Davies’ Queer as Folk, which we can now plainly recognise as being not just Jones’ proverbial “big break,” but also an absolutely pivotal part of the larger story of how Doctor Who managed to pull itself out of the rut of irrelevance and widespread public mockery in which it found itself throughout the Wilderness Years.
In much the same way that we made a big deal out of Keith Topping and Martin Day’s decision to announce their arrival to BBC Books sans Cornell with The Devil Goblins from Neptune, we’re once again faced with the impression that the strongest narrative thread running through 1997 for the Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield novels is predominantly one of transition, and of trying to figure out how to continue telling worthwhile stories in the face of a rapidly shifting status quo.
As it turns out, Beyond the Sun‘s answer to this conundrum is just about the same as that arrived at by Justin Richards with Dragons’ Wrath, reintroducing a prominent recurring guest star from the NAs’ past. In this case, rather than the enigmatic and erudite schemer Irving Braxiatel, Jones opts to reacquaint us with one Jason Peter Kane, making his first appearance since the breakdown of his marriage to Benny in Eternity Weeps some six months prior.
While it might have been possible to have a solo Benny series without the character of Braxiatel – yes, as Richards says, it certainly helps to have a Doctor-like raissoneur to hand, but there’s no inherent reason that this has to be Brax, besides the quite reasonable point that he’s just a terribly fun character to have around – the return of Jason feels virtually inevitable. He’s a character wholly original to Virgin who is fundamentally tied to Bernice, having been tailormade to offer up a reason for her departure as a regular travelling companion of the Doctor all the way back in Death and Diplomacy.
Even if the writers had chosen to never bring him back at all – which was already looking unlikely in the extreme once it became clear that Dave Stone was going to be writing one of the first four novels in the retooled line – the emotionally turbulent dissolution of the chief protagonist’s marriage is the type of event that is quite difficult to brush past.
(Then again, I imagine Charlene Connor might have a thing or two to say on this subject once we get around to Deadfall…)
So sure, while the decision may have been made to split up the Summerfield-Kanes just eight months after they were married in a big, show-stopping fiftieth New Adventure extravaganza, Jason pretty much always had a non-zero chance of returning to the series, in-the-flesh or otherwise.
In fact, Virgin have proved commendably reluctant to define Benny’s arc solely around the absence of Jason. While books like The Dying Days and Oh No It Isn’t! referred back to the emotional fallout of the divorce, it never felt as if Bernice’s character was being boiled down to nothing more than a vehicle for exploring some brand new divorce-tinged flavour of the proverbial NA angst that is somewhat reductively viewed as having been the series’ stock-in-trade.
On the contrary, Parkin and Cornell seemed far more concerned with the rather pressing business of proving that they had inherited a lead character who was well-rounded enough to compete with the Doctor in the protagonist sweepstakes. For the record, it’s also interesting to note that Dragons’ Wrath never once directly invokes Jason’s name at all.
Entering into Beyond the Sun, then, it would be all too easy to run with an overly superficial reading of Jason’s return and suggest that Jones has somehow betrayed the convictions of the NAs in keeping our two time-travelling adventurers apart until this point, but such a reading isn’t really supported by the text of the novel itself.
Even if we perform a very rudimentary and basic examination of the novel’s structure, the most significant warping of narrative gravity that Jason is able to achieve is only brought about as a consequence of his kidnapping by the Sunless. He is, in effect, little more than a gender-swapped “damsel in distress” here, which is a gesture so profoundly and cheekily casual in its needling of the standard heteronormative underpinnings of this sort of adventure fiction that one can only imagine the outcry among the usual suspects of modern Doctor Who fandom if it were tried today.
(In fact, this sense of an uninhibited ruffling of heteronormativity’s proverbial feathers runs through the whole book. It’s not for nothing, after all, that the novel also features an extended sequence in which Benny, Emile and Tameka manage to incite a riot by putting on a particularly politically incendiary drag show which directly evokes one of the more iconic scenes from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and that’s before you get to the more blatant manifestations like Emile’s entire character arc being predicated upon the same explicit grappling with themes of queer identity that fuelled so much of Bad Therapy.)
This reflects another important fundamental truth of Beyond the Sun, which is to say that it is undeniably Bernice’s story, even if it is perhaps a bridge too far to label it an out-and-out character piece rather than an action-adventure lark with more dashes of introspection than the statistical average established by its two direct predecessors. By July 1997, we’ve seen Benny take a prominent role in nearly fifty full-length novels spanning almost half a decade, and the extent to which her place in the New Adventures needs to be properly and categorically outlined at this stage is lessened considerably by sheer dint of that self-same longevity.
Accordingly, every novel since The Dying Days has really just been an exercise in crashing Bernice Summerfield into whatever type of narrative takes the authors’ fancy, carrying on the type of inter-genre experimentation that had practically become second nature to Doctor Who by the nineties.
While there are certainly shades of this peculiarly Who-like narrative alchemy to be found in Beyond the Sun‘s final form – most obviously in Jones’ quite plainly having taken inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 classic of science fiction, The Dispossessed, to the point of extending a suitably cordial and knowing tip of the hat in the naming of the Ursulans – the novel ultimately seems preoccupied with the question of what it really means for Benny to have assumed the role of the New Adventures’ chief protagonist, which is a question that the novels have largely shied away from interrogating in too much depth to this point.
In this respect, it is arguably in its final passages that the novel most plainly articulates its underlying conception of Bernice as a character, as she reflects upon a necklace she had fashioned earlier on as a statement of her own personal ethics, reading thus:
Bernice Summerfield is a human being. And as such she is all too capable of being cruel and cowardly. And yet, while she is often caught up in violent events, she endeavours to remain a woman of peace.
The resonances with Terrance Dicks’ famous description of the Doctor in 1972’s The Making of Doctor Who as being a man of peace who is never cruel or cowardly are so obvious as to almost go without saying, but it should be noted that Jones subtly tweaks the phrasing of that original quote in reiterating it here.
The Making of Doctor Who favoured a more overtly and unambiguously absolutist stance in its proclamations, as one might perhaps expect from Dicks. As a writer, his moral and political compass can pretty reliably be characterised as being possessed of a rather adamant and strident certitude in what he sees as the basic truths of the world.
At its best, this is an approach which can be rather endearing in the simplicity of its black-and-white ethical pronouncements. And really, for all that Dicks has come in for a bit of a lashing in the pages of this blog lately, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that there’s also a completely understandable reason why quotes like “Never cruel or cowardly” have endured, to the point where Steven Moffat could build the entire emotional arc of the programme’s fiftieth anniversary out of the line in The Day of the Doctor.
Yet at its worst, it’s just as easy for this sense of surety and conviction to become a vice rather than a virtue. If you want me to provide evidence for this claim… well, like I say, I think I’ve ragged on The Eight Doctors and its embarrassingly reductive take on the rise of crack cocaine quite enough for the moment, so we’ll just leave it at that.
Moreover, the overall aesthetic of the New Adventures actively cut against Dicks’ uncompromising moral ethos, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why novels like Exodus, Blood Harvest and Shakedown often felt like strange – albeit generally entertaining – artistic cul-de-sacs when placed among their contemporaries.
The claim I’m making here isn’t, as you so often hear from some of the NAs’ more vocal detractors, that the books wholeheartedly embraced “morally ambiguous” storytelling. On the contrary, the series was, in its shrewder moments, extremely unambiguous as to the more heinous and objectionable aspects of the Seventh Doctor’s modus operandi. However, this understanding was frequently balanced with a willingness to suggest that the character was still desperately trying, in his own way, to live up to the kind of classical and virtuous heroism so clearly favoured by writers like Dicks.
In regards to Benny and her climactic personal epiphany in Beyond the Sun, it’s undoubtedly deeply significant that the novel in which Paul Cornell introduced the character was also among the first to explicitly incorporate the Dicks quote into its narrative, pulling the line from the ethereal realm of the paratext into the text itself.
What’s more, it’s particularly telling that this trick was performed as a means of establishing the series’ newfound Doctor-companion relationship, particularly when contrasted against the recently-imploded dynamic enjoyed by the television incarnation of Ace.
The suggestion that the Doctor found himself incapable of recognising the person hinted at by the descriptor of “Never cruel or cowardly,” as reinforced by a typically cutting reply from Benny, very quickly and concisely outlined our not-quite-Professor’s unique ability to cut through the Ka Faraq Gatri’s grandiose aspirations towards mystique. Not to be outdone, it also effectively marked the point at which it became undeniable that the NAs would be taking it upon themselves to tell the story of the Doctor’s journey back to that more heroic archetype.
(Well OK, that was the theory. In practice, this idea really developed in fits and starts, as evinced by the way the books were just as likely to serve up riveting stories about the Doctor teaming up with William Blake to take on the Jack the Ripper murders. But hey, the intent was there!)
If we wanted to be unduly snide and acerbic about all this, we could perhaps crack wise about how Jones hasn’t actually managed to escape his being labelled a Cornell imitator in quite as successful a fashion as he might have hoped, but really, at that point we’re just skirting dangerously close to snark for snark’s sake.
In a very real sense, it was pretty much inevitable that any attempt to tackle the question of what distinguishes Bernice from the Doctor as the New Adventures’ chief protagonist was going to have to pull heavily from Cornell in one way or another. After all, between Love and War and Oh No It Isn’t!, he’d now managed the rather surreal feat of defining the character’s place within the series not once, but twice.
So for all that Jones is quite clearly riffing on the single most influential author to ever write for Benny, and arguably for the NAs as a whole, he’s doing so in a way that feels endearing rather than hackneyed or plagiaristic. It feels like a wholly logical extrapolation from the series’ prevailing attitude towards the Doctor’s heroism, with all manner of wonderful antecedents I could point to, whether that be the juggling scene in The Also People or the conversation in Return of the Living Dad where the Time Lord decides – in conversation with Benny herself, no less – upon “He really did the best he could” as the most apt epitaph for his hypothetical gravestone.
Here, at long last, the New Adventures seem truly content with the knowledge that they have found themselves a decidedly human protagonist, wholly divorced from any of the more supernatural or mythological trappings associated with Time’s Champion. Even if Benny can never realistically hope to live up to the splendour and valour implicit in Dicks’ conception of the Doctor, that doesn’t make her efforts to hold herself to that high moral standard any less worthwhile.
Indeed, in introducing Bernice, Jones stresses her peculiar sense of warmth and humanity, making the rather shrewd choice to keep the character at a distance for the first few chapters. We join the action – barring a brief prologue featuring Kitzinger on Ursu – not with Benny herself, but with the two archaeology students who basically assume the role of her pseudo-companions for the duration of the book, allowing Tameka to offer her own assessment of her tutor ahead of their first proper meeting. Even when we transition to the dig on Apollox 4, we don’t get treated to a scene from Bernice’s perspective until her conversation with Jason at the restaurant.
It’s an approach which feels rather consciously chosen, effectively signalling at the earliest opportunity that this is a novel which is going to be more directly concerned with questions of character relationships and interactions than was true of the series’ two previous releases. Furthermore, Jones is just about talented enough that the final results prove rather complimentary, as one might have been led to expect from a writer who made their debut with a book like Bad Therapy.
Actually, it’s worth taking our regularly-scheduled pause at this juncture to note one of the more glaring issues with the Big Finish audio adaptation, namely the complete omission of any scenes set before the Apollox dig. Like so many of the changes in that first season of audio dramas, it’s clearly just a concession to the realities of financing and recording such a production, but the removal of some rather effective early character moments for Emile and Tameka speaks well to some of the pitfalls of this particular adaptation, as Jones himself – having been the only author to actually choose to adapt their own book rather than just handing the job to Jacqueline Rayner – quite readily concedes in The Inside Story.
It’s not that the adaptation is quite as amateurishly unlistenable and clunkily truncated as was the case with Dragons’ Wrath, but more than any other novel chosen to receive the audio treatment, Beyond the Sun feels extremely poorly-suited to the process, with the nature of the medium pretty much requiring characters to loudly declaim reflections that had been wholly internal in the original book. All of this is very much a tangent – I know, I know, spare your gasps of surprise that I would go on tangents in one of these reviews – but I do think it’s a good way of illustrating just how much of the story’s success is tied up in its characters rather than its plot.
(And on the plus side, you’re now spared my discussing the audio drama adaptations at least until the time of Walking to Babylon.)
Viewed from a plot perspective, the story of Beyond the Sun is really one of the most traditional New Adventures narratives imaginable for much of its length. Stripped to its bare essentials, it’s really just the tale of Benny finding herself caught up in the perilous hunt for a McGuffin believed to be a crucial component of a hideously powerful ancient weapon. Granted, a weapon might not perfectly fit the “evil from the dawn of time” bill quite as well as someone like Fenric – it’s a bit like comparing a .45 Colt to Cthulhu, really – but we’re clearly still riffing on conceptual territory that is very familiar for the series at this late stage of its life-cycle.
The final twist in the story, then, is actually supremely clever on Jones’ part, without being needlessly deceptive to the point of unfairness. By the climax the audience has long since been lulled into a reasonable state of security, thinking that they’ve got a handle on the narrative stakes, simple though they are in order to allow the character stuff room to breathe.
More to the point, the novel has pitched its tent pretty squarely in the bleaker end of the tonal spectrum, what with the stark dismality of its portrait of Ursulan life under Sunless occupation, complete with a particularly harrowing flashback sequence that probably comes closer than any New Adventure since Just War to sketching the brutal mechanics of collaboration with an occupying enemy regime.
In this context, the revelation that the visionary figurines do not in fact power a weapon with powers beyond the sun, but rather power the native star of the Sunless’ homeworld beyond its natural life, is a nice little piece of optimistic subversion that manages to land with just the right amount of showiness to be satisfying without becoming infuriating.
It’s certainly a far cry from “Just this once, everybody lives!”, but it’s clever nonetheless, particularly with the added touch that Benny manages to suss out the truth before anyone else by cluing into the improper syntax in an earlier computerised translation of some ancient symbols. Not only does this provide a nice affirmation that it won’t just be Justin Richards who’ll allow the character to apply her archaeological know-how to the problems at hand, but it also handily reiterates the novel’s core idea of the human element being the most crucial of all, and of the inability of cold and detached logic to replicate it.
But on top of all of that, we have the rather delicious added irony that is Nikolas and Iranda being the real visionaries, having to sacrifice themselves to the device in order reignite the sun, and it’s this reveal which really introduces an extra layer of complexity to everything we’ve just sat through, while still feeling organically set up by a number of clues scattered throughout the book.
Admittedly, the only developments of any great thematic import here are primarily centred around Iranda, as it’s very difficult to get a proper handle on Nikolas’ character beyond his rather generic status as a suitably moustache-twirling, smarmy villainous creep. It’s no doubt significant that Jones saw fit to elide his character in the audio drama with that of Iranda to become Miranda, as voiced by Sophie Aldred. Even accepting the extent to which this might have just been another purely budgetary decision, it’s a little hard not to read it as something of a quiet admission that the two characters fill very similar narrative niches and aren’t particularly distinct from one another, and it’s a rare instance of the audio drama’s storytelling proving more elegant than the novel’s.
Putting all of that aside, however, (M)iranda becomes a deeply interesting character in light of this third-act twist. As might be expected of an author who made a name for himself writing a non-fiction column in Doctor Who Magazine, Jones proves no stranger to layering on the paratextual allusions, starting with the title of Beyond the Sun itself, which was a working title for at least The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction in the very earliest days of Doctor Who, if not An Unearthly Child as well. Because apparently it’s an unspoken rule that every review of this book must draw attention to that fact…
With the big hubbub made over Iranda and Nikolas having been an illicit addition to their Eight, and the conspicuous naming of the Blooms – genetic engineering devices which allow Ursulans to reproduce without sex – Beyond the Sun can’t help but evoke Marc Platt’s controversial deep dive into Gallifreyan history and the Doctor’s own rather anomalous biological beginnings in Lungbarrow some four months earlier, a connection which Dave Owen proved all too eager to point out in his review. Even the choice of the number eight feels particularly notable in a post-TV movie fandom, to say nothing of the way that Jason is quite literally described as having become Iranda’s “travelling companion” since last we saw him.
The natural assumption here would be to say that Iranda is plainly meant to be a Doctor stand-in, but the case for that claim certainly doesn’t appear as clear-cut as one might expect upon closer examination. If anything, there’s just as much grounds to label her role as being somewhat analogous to that of a traditional companion, even before you factor in stuff like the audio’s casting of Aldred, an actress inextricably tied to the same McCoy era milieu that spawned the New Adventures and, ultimately, Benny herself.
A further tangential irony sets in – although at this point “coincidence” feels an increasingly appropriate descriptor – when one takes into account the fact that Bernice had, at this point, come to be associated with Lisa Bowerman, who had herself played Karra, the last character to die in the classic series in Survival.
While I fully submit that I’m perhaps not so much reaching for straws here as I am spontaneously collapsing a sufficiently large star in the hopes of catching a few tufts of vegetation in the resultant black hole’s event horizon, it does still strike me that this blurring of the roles of companion and Doctor should figure so prominently in a book concerned with questions of individual self-determination – surely at least partially another legacy of the novel’s taking such heavy inspiration from Le Guin – particularly as it applies to the New Adventures’ first and most popular original companion.
Naming the character Miranda, or an abridged form thereof, also carries deeper resonances beyond Doctor Who, bringing to mind her namesake from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose presentation within the play has served as the foundation for a veritable bevy of feminist analysis. Most such analyses of the Shakespearean Miranda typically focus on her status as the play’s only female character, reading her as something of an idealised Jacobean era representation of female virtue, being defined primarily by her subordination to her father Prospero.
The application of her name to a character in a novel that seems to so consciously blur the lines between Doctor and companion consequently feels like a rather pertinent choice on Jones’ part. Indeed, the reveal of Iranda being one of the visionaries is a satisfyingly layered twist. On the most superficial of levels, it’s a loud and forceful reiteration of Beyond the Sun‘s sympathy for a humanist, empathetic sort of individualism.
(In fact, it ought to be acknowledged that this is a theme with an established precedent in Jones’ debut novel as well, with Bad Therapy effectively grounding Doctor Who‘s genesis in the human capacity for empathy in the face of the cruel and chaotic world of 1950s Britain; the revival of the Sunless’ native star with the use of humans – well, Ursulans – as fuel is really just another, more literal iteration of the pseudo-Ebertian “empathy machine” suggested by the earlier novel.)
Yet at the same time, there remains something faintly horrifying about Iranda’s fate. It’s certainly hard to imagine you’d be able to find many readers who’d argue that she didn’t deserve some form of comeuppance for the whole “aiding a brutal, militaristic regime in the invasion of her home planet” thing, but in being forced into her slot in the machine by Bernice, she finds herself reduced to an object even as the triumph of individuality is asserted.
That’s not a criticism of the novel by any means, and I do like that the book is willing to push Benny to some murky places, while still demonstrating greater thoughtfulness about the whole thing than having her blow up a ship of religious zealots without batting an eye like St Anthony’s Fire. Which we still haven’t received a single further reference to after over thirty NAs, by the way. Just in case you were keeping track.
You could even construct a reasonably plausible reading of Benny’s besting Miranda as a particularly dramatic manifestation of her capacity to overcome Sandifer’s age-old Problem of Susan. In managing to displace the Doctor and anchor her own spin-off series – and to prove so successful at it that said series is still going strong over twenty-five years later – she has effectively stepped outside the tension between objectification and self-actualisation that so frequently defines the role of the companion within Doctor Who.
Emile and Tameka only reinforce the sense that there’s an attempt here to move the franchise beyond its stereotypical mould of companions, even in the absence of a Doctor proper. The former’s grappling with his sexuality provides him with a nice arc, feeling like the next logical step for gay representation in the New Adventures after Chris and David’s dalliance in Damaged Goods, and ever-so-subtly sows the first seeds of a chain of causality linking that book to Queer as Folk and eventually to characters like Jack Harkness in the 2005 revival.
Tameka is, perhaps, slightly closer to the conventional companion archetype, but she still feels subversive in her own way. For all that the idea of a hot-headed, vaguely gothic university student with a penchant for wearing makeup and dressing in “Vampire Chic” fashion might sound like a bit of a recipe for disaster, she actually comes across as a far more believable and well-rounded character than Sam Jones ever did in The Eight Doctors, and it’s nice that her makeup is allowed to be essential to the resolution of the plot, even if it isn’t perhaps the most elegant of storytelling shortcuts.
(I also can’t help but wonder if the inclusion of a story relating the waning of her childhood passion for chemistry after her teacher’s unenthusiastic response to her successfully performing a litmus test was intended as an inversion of a similar beat involving Susan and Ian in An Unearthly Child. I know, I know, black holes and tufts of vegetation, but even so…)
It also helps convey the idea that these new Bernice-led NAs are continuing to commit to the expansion of their recurring cast rather than just reintroducing old series favourites, a notion which has largely been conspicuous by its absence since every author besides Paul Cornell seemingly decided on a whim to ditch the colourful cast of academics he set up in Oh No It Isn’t!
Even at this stage there’s still a certain amount of hedging from the series, as Emile and Tameka go on to pretty much disappear from the books after a short return in Deadfall in three months’ time. While Emile would be lucky enough to eventually figure pretty prominently in the Gods arc after Where Angels Fear, Tameka wouldn’t be quite so lucky, only returning for the naming ceremony of Peter Summerfield in 2002’s The Glass Prison. Still, the intent is clearly there to create a robust recurring cast, even if it took the writers a little while to fully capitalise on the potential of their characters.
Finally, it’s interesting to see the series further develop its distinctly post-Cold War conception of galactic geopolitics, along with the notion that Dellah is basically surrounded by a bunch of smaller, developing planetary systems picking up the pieces after the Galactic War that was certainly not fought with any genocidal pepperpots I could care to name.
The Sunless are, on one level, quite plainly supposed to be generic stand-ins for fascism, and yet, as with the description of Nusek as a “warlord” in Dragons’ Wrath, the decision to cast them as victims of corporate colonialism also roots them in a far more interesting sort of political allegory. The extent to which companies like Krytell can casually dominate conversations among Emile and Tameka might just be some none-too-subtle foreshadowing for Ship of Fools, but it also speaks rather well to the decade’s fears of a global economy that was becoming increasingly centralised in the hands of a few ultra-powerful megacorporations.
Re:Generations had already suggested that the history of Earth and the history of the corporations were, in many key respects, nigh indistinguishable, and the attention paid to ensuring general cohesion in the series’ view of Earth’s future history, much like the efforts to establish a recurring guest cast, does wonders when it comes to marking the series out as having its own distinct identity.
Even if the basic structure of Ursu might be lifted from The Dispossessed, the underlying idea that some might choose to opt out of Earth’s influence – paging Michael Eddington… – feels logical enough given all the available evidence suggesting that the Earth of the NAs’ future is a pretty crappy place on the whole, which I feel helps offset any potential criticisms of unoriginality. Look, if I can give The Also People a pass despite Aaronovitch’s self-admitted transplantation of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, I don’t think I have much of a leg to stand on here when it comes to decrying artistic appropriation.
(For the sake of illustrating how much Beyond the Sun feels of a piece with the New Adventures of yesteryear, not only does Jones manage to hit on the same presciently pessimistic view of a post-Google Internet dominated by corporations as Lance Parkin did in Secrets of the Black Planet, but he also works in an affectionate nod to Warhead with the naming of the academically stingy Butler Project, which feels appropriate given that Cartmel and his War trilogy were really the first up to bat when it came to these ideas of big business dominating Earth’s future, at least in the New Adventures.)
So, does Beyond the Sun live up to its status as the canonical “best” Benny NA thus far? Well, it’s difficult to compare it with a novel like Oh No It Isn’t!, given just how much of a departure from form that outing was, but I’d say it manages to rise comfortably above something like Dragons’ Wrath, and I can certainly understand why fans would respond more strongly to it.
It’s got some big sci-fi ideas to which it commits wholeheartedly, even if they mightn’t be the most original in the world, it’s populated with a cast of likeable characters while never losing sight of Bernice, and it tactfully handles Jason’s reintroduction and the establishment of Benny’s conflicted emotions towards him. Three books in, and the New Adventures have a pretty solid batting average so far. What more could a fan wish for?
(And perhaps most importantly of all, the Björk reference was cute. Clunky, but cute.)
Miscellaneous Observations
For all that I generally enjoyed the whole drag sequence, it was slightly soured by the decision to have Tameka drop the T slur in describing a dragged-up Emile at one point. It’s a throwaway line, but it’s enough to make you go “Oh wait we’re still in the nineties, aren’t we?”
In a similar vein, and freely accepting that this doesn’t have anything to do with the book itself, I can’t help but roll my eyes at the part in Dave Owen’s review where he says that his only real criticism of Beyond the Sun is its “politically correct” use of pronouns in referring to a singular indiviual as “they.” The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess…
I know I praised the novel for feeling relatively cohesive when placed against the larger tapestry of Virgin’s well-established future history, but I couldn’t help wondering if the references to a gang of Vilmurians consuming copious amounts of “bubblejack” was an attempted reference to bubbleshake from The Highest Science. Really though, this is the pickiest of nits, and even I had to go back to The Highest Science to double check the name of the drink.
Hey, I haven’t read it in a while, because… well, you know why.
It’s pretty well-known at this point that Jones’ lone script for the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, was heavily retouched by Russell T. Davies, but it’s still interesting that one can almost see the nascent kernels of some of that two-parter’s imagery, most prominent of which is the important role both stories ascribe to a great big pit in the ground surrounded by a ring of indecipherable symbols. Both of said pits are even on an inhospitable lump of rock surrounding a dead or dying star, just for good measure.
Final Thoughts
Well, it’s the first review of the New Year, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. As ever, these Bernice reviews really force me to operate in a different wheelhouse to that in which I’ve grown comfortable, and I think I end up running down some interesting avenues of thought I might have otherwise neglected.
I don’t know how quickly I’ll be able to turn out reviews for the time being, as I’m dealing with some health problems at the moment that are leaving me very drained a lot of the time, but regardless, join me next time as the Eighth Doctor returns to San Francisco with Sam, and we see if Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman can best Uncle Terrance’s poor opening showing for the EDAs. All of that and more, coming in Vampire Science. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 