In November of 1997, as was the pattern of the time, Virgin Publishing and BBC Books both put out new instalments of their respective series of “present-grounded” Doctor Who – or, perhaps more appropriately in the case of the former, Doctor Who-adjacent – novels.
Of these two books, one offered up a complicated and timey-wimey tale, rife with paradoxes and discussion of atypical weaponry and warfare, with the Time Lords operating on the periphery of the narrative. Not to be outdone, it also saw the introduction of elements that would go on to play a pivotal role in its overarching series’ subsequent brushes with big, show-stopping epics that kept one eye firmly planted on the idea of serving as a literary “event.”
The other was Alien Bodies.
This is not, as it may initially appear, a purposeless bit of facetiousness on my part, but rather a revealing snapshot of the deeply confusing nature of attempting to review Ghost Devices. Let’s not beat around the bush here: this is the New Adventure which had the bad fortune of being published in the exact month in which the Eighth Doctor Adventures finally managed to conjure up something sufficiently interesting to allow them to command their audience’s long-term attentions.
One can, handily enough, see this gap in relevance reflected in even the most cursory examination of the authors on hand for the month. Alien Bodies, as should hopefully go without saying this close to my review of it, was the product of Lawrence Miles, and was indeed largely responsible for Miles’ rapid ascent to the position of Doctor Who‘s leading artistic light.
Even if that ascent was curtailed less than three years later by an equally rapid decline in the wake of Vanessa Bishop’s high-profile slagging off of Interference in Doctor Who Magazine and the subsequent erasure of every trace of the writer’s ideas in The Ancestor Cell, several of those same ideas went on to exert a strong gravity over the programme’s eventual revival in 2005, most obviously in the general notion of a vast temporal conflict culminating in the destruction of Gallifrey.
Granted, Miles cannot strictly lay claim to being the sole originator of these basic concepts. To pick just one example, the legendary planet of Ardethe in the original Audio Visuals production of Gary Russell’s Deadfall was explicitly meant to be a ruined Gallifrey after its destruction by the Daleks in Planet of Lies, and that’s saying nothing of Alan Moore’s DWM backup strips in the early 1980s. All the same, it remains true that Miles was the most visible proponent of said concepts within the Wilderness Years.
On the other side of the present/past Doctor divide, meanwhile, readers could sample Mark Gatiss’ The Roundheads. Gatiss has been an infrequent presence around these parts for a little over five years at this time, even if he hasn’t actually written a full-length novel for somewhere in the ballpark of three, and he will hang around for a good twenty years or so more come the revival.
It’s almost certainly a bridge too far to credit Gatiss with being a pivotal architect of the New Series or anything quite so dramatic, but for better or worse he serves as something of a unifying thread across the first ten series of the revival. All told, he ended up penning at least one script each for Doctors Nine through Twelve and was even afforded the privilege of writing the final, past-focused part of the series’ opening “present/future/past (change order where applicable)” triptych, a structure which ended up sticking around for so long that he was eventually asked to pull the exact same duty again on Victory of the Daleks.
(This much, at least, we can pretty firmly place in the “for worse” camp.)
Which just leaves us with Ghost Devices, the sophomore effort by Simon Bucher-Jones, who had previously written The Death of Art some fourteen months prior. Whereas Miles and Gatiss loom large in the post-Alien Bodies history of Doctor Who – and ironically enough, the two even infamously crossed paths more directly in 2005 when Miles took Gatiss’ The Unquiet Dead to task for its alleged status as a xenophobic anti-immigration screed aired in the heat of the Iraq War – Bucher-Jones’ career ends up taking a somewhat different path from this point on.
To see just what I mean by this, let’s go through that career in a reasonable amount of detail. Past this point, we’ll be talking about Bucher-Jones on no less than three separate occasions, with his 1998 short story War Crimes, and his two co-writing stints for the EDAs with The Taking of Planet 5 in 1999 and 2001’s Grimm Reality. Beyond the remits of the blog, he also contributed Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield short stories to Big Finish’s The History of Christmas and Collected Works anthologies, respectively.
More instructive by far, however, is the vast array of credits for spin-off series with an even more tenuous claim to “legitimacy” than that enjoyed by Bernice’s adventures. Over the years, Bucher-Jones has racked up short stories for everything from the Iris Wildthyme series for Obverse Books, through to the same company’s 2021 Build High for Happiness anthology set in the world of Stephen Wyatt’s Paradise Towers, and even Arcbeatle Press’ Cwej.
But the most consistent ancillary world in which the writer has distinguished himself is ultimately that of Faction Paradox, and this can hardly be considered especially surprising. Even at this early stage, it’s clear that Bucher-Jones and Miles enjoy some level of creative harmony, with The Death of Art being the only other book in the latter-day NAs’ loose Psi Powers Arc to so much as mention Christmas on a Rational Planet‘s Shadow Directory. In Ghost Devices, this thematic unity ends up proving twofold, with the novel’s plot not only echoing eerily forward towards Alien Bodies, but also following up on Miles’ reintroduction of God and the People in Down.
Past this point, you’ve also got The Taking of Planet 5‘s status as one of the most direct engagements with the War arc outside of Alien Bodies and Interference themselves. Really, one suspects that the only reason Grimm Reality isn’t quite as straightforward a riff on an existing Miles novel might simply have something to do with its being the rare Bucher-Jones book to come out in the months before one of the EDAs’ regularly scheduled Miles outings rather than in their immediate aftermath.
When Miles eventually ended up storming over to Mad Norwegian Press, Faction Paradox license in tow, Bucher-Jones followed him, writing the second-highest number of entries in The Book of the War. All indications seem to be that a not inconsiderable proportion of these entries were concerned with setup for his eventual 2013 novel, The Brakespeare Voyage, which is rather impressive in a way given the eleven-year gap separating the two books. This was followed up by a number of short story contributions, to say nothing of his performing editorial duties on 2018’s The Book of the Enemy and, as recently as this past January, on the second volume of Obverse’s Worlds of the Spiral Politic sub-series.
A less charitable interpretation of this CV might try and spin this out into a broader indictment of Bucher-Jones’ spin-off friendliness. In this reading, we’d probably posit Ghost Devices, his first substantial engagement with the artform, as the original sin that’s going to see him left behind in the “influence” stakes by folks like Miles and Gatiss as the franchise marches on. The best he can hope for under this paradigm is a kind of “trusted lieutenant” status, forever playing with ideas and concepts created by those with a higher profile than him.
There are a few rather obvious reasons why we’re not going to opt for this route, mind you. To begin with, it’s ultimately somewhat laughable to point to this “trusted lieutenant” status as a failing on Bucher-Jones’ part while simultaneously positioning him in opposition to Mark Gatiss.
I might have a sneaking fondness for scripts like The Crimson Horror or Robot of Sherwood – and even, less defensibly, for Night Terrors, though that’s primarily down to nothing more complex than its having scared the bejesus out of my eight-year-old self – but his being brought back for every season of the Moffat Era was primarily a matter of his general ability to turn in an episode of vague competence on time. The fact that he worked quite closely with Moffat on Sherlock and was thus presumably broadly in tune with his sensibilities as a showrunner certainly can’t have hurt matters either.
Not entirely unrelated is the question of who, exactly, Bucher-Jones would be deferring to in this situation. Miles seems the obvious choice, but in practice his last fully-fledged credit on Faction Paradox came with his spell as co-editor of A Romance in Twelve Parts in 2011, while 2009’s The Judgment of Sutekh marked the final occasion on which he actually wrote a story for the range.
For all that Miles is the one who came up with the bulk of the central concepts that initially animated the series, in other words, the actual burden of writing new tales set in that world has long since been passed on to other people. And if you’re looking at a list of said other people, it’s hard not to single out Bucher-Jones as being among the most prominent movers and shakers in the field.
Certainly, the only other contributor to The Book of the War who might feasibly be said to match him for consistency of engagement with the series over the years is Philip Purser-Hallard, and even he ended up largely drifting away to work on ancillary projects at Obverse like The City of the Saved and The Black Archive.
This leads naturally to my next major point, which is that, as far as Doctor Who spin-offs go, Faction Paradox is probably one of the more intriguing ones. At a minimum, it generally manages to sustain a compelling level of ambient weirdness, even if it doesn’t always translate into transcendent quality. If I’m being entirely honest with you, I’m far more likely to be positively disposed to an author who opts to play around in the slightly surreal, jagged margins of Faction Paradox than I am to one who just wants to try and turn the bloody Dominators into an actual recurring threat, or whatever other brilliant ideas Candy Jar Books have cooked up of late.
(Ironically enough, having only ever read the Faction Paradox stuff put out by Mad Norwegian Press and Random Static, I’m almost entirely unqualified to actually speak to the quality of Bucher-Jones’ work for Obverse. I mean, I know I’ve got a copy each of A Romance in Twelve Parts and Tales of the City knocking around here somewhere, but even if I wrenched my mind away from the blog for long enough to give them a read, he didn’t write anything for those particular collections, so… sorry.)
And at the risk of stating the obvious, dear reader, well… clearly I don’t have much of a problem with spin-offs in the general case. We’re barrelling ever closer to having spilled 120 reviews’ worth of ink on the subject of the Wilderness Years and its various forms of literature, so it’d frankly be a bit rich to turn around and sell that same literature entirely down the river at this juncture. Yes, our foreknowledge of Rose and the revival will always exert a certain inescapable gravity over the project, but we’re not even halfway done yet. Let’s save the teleologies for a later time, yeah?
(Like later in this post, perhaps.)
With all of that being said, Ghost Devices seems practically tailor-made to invite the colouring of one’s reading with this retrospective context, even outside of the purely coincidental resonances it acquires when juxtaposed against BBC Books’ contemporary output. As the very title of the novel implies, this is a work concerned with the relationship between the past and the future, and the intrusion of one into the other in a manner which we might – somewhat ostenatiously but not, I think, entirely unreasonably – term a haunting.
So, if you’ll indulge me, I want to break from the usual format a little here and offer a more free-form preliminary dissertation on that aspect of the work, and we’ll leave it as a test of my general competency as a critic to see if I can manage to satisfactorily tie it back in to the main thrust of my argument.
Cool? Cool.
Going off initial appearances, at least, what this haunting reveals resembles nothing so much as the Third Doctor’s old admonition in Day of the Daleks that the possibility of ghosts from the past also implies the existence of ghosts from the future. But wait a minute… does it? I mean, sure, it goes without saying in the case of Doctor Who, a show which routinely features time travel as a means of getting into and out of stories within the hundred-minute blocks of its serials. Normal service may have been temporarily suspended in that regard during the Pertwee Era, but even there the same season that housed Day of the Daleks would see the production team handwave the TARDIS’ immobility with a handy invocation of the Time Lords on two separate occasions.
In the newly copyright-mandated Doctorless world that Bernice Summerfield now inhabits, however, time travel occupies an altogether more ambiguous position. It has to, if for no more profound a reason than the characters’ basic inability to so much as think the words “TARDIS” or “Time Lords” for fear of inviting the litigious wrath of the BBC.
Perhaps the best illustration of the consequences of this attitude can be found in Jason, who reveals himself to be even more Problematic (capitalisation very much intentional) than we began to suspect last time. In his marriage to Benny, and the Doctor’s gift of the Time Rings, he provides the most obvious “out” for any potential Bernice-focused spin-off to involve itself in time travel. Indeed, when Big Finish decide to go all-out on a time-travelling Benny story in a few years’ time with their adaptation of Walking to Babylon, it’s predicated on that very out, with the story recast as the first instalment in a so-called Time Ring Trilogy.
The couple’s divorce in Eternity Weeps, therefore, ends up causing much greater ructions than one typically associates with such an upheaval, as befits the ludicrously heightened stakes of a Jim Mortimore novel. If a divorce can be conceptualised as a profoundly intimate apocalypse – and since these apocalyptic themes will likely prove of great relevance in this and the next review, we ought to make our obligatory acknowledgement that Glen Morgan and James Wong were in the midst of independently broaching similar ideas on the second season of Millennium – and the end of a world, the separation of the Time Rings denies Benny and Jason the ability to access a multitude of other worlds besides.
(Actually, Paul Cornell acknowledges this as far back as Happy Endings, with Bernice quite pointedly observing that “divorce equates with being marooned,” offering further compelling evidence in the “How far ahead was Benny and Jason’s divorce planned out by Virgin?” debate.)
This leads naturally to one of the strangest “glitches” in Virgin continuity, though it might be something of an overstatement to label it as such. Simply put, there’s a substantial and barely-referenced gap in Jason’s personal history which somehow sees him going from a promise to remain on Earth in 2003 to showing up on Apollox 4 in Beyond the Sun in the late twenty-sixth century.
It’s undeniably odd, and only narrowly avoids rating as an outright “glitch” in my estimation by dint of the fact that there’s a relatively easy explanation waiting in the wings regarding his getting a lift off the Doctor. Which hints, of course, at one of the central fulcrums of what I’ve dubbed the Problem of Jason in a rather shameless nod to this project’s increasingly Sandiferian bent, in that that’s the one excuse that the New Adventures can never actually come out and explicitly state at this moment in time. Jason becomes at once essential to Bernice’s world as one half of an ongoing “Will they?”/”Won’t they?” relationship, and strangely difficult to account for.
But crucially, this elision of Jason’s personal history is seemingly about time travel in the abstract more than it is about Jason in particular. The closest thing to an honest-to-God “time-travelling Bernice” story that we’ve had so far is still Lawrence Miles’ The Judgment of Solomon, which was equally conspicuous in its lacking any explanation for Benny’s ability to go on a casual jaunt to eighth-century Baghdad to prove one of her archaeological colleagues wrong.
It’s here that another piece of Matthew Jones’ coyness on the subject of time travel in Beyond the Sun proves particularly instructive, with a cheeky moment in which he has Bernice’s internal narration relay the information that “time travelling was something [she has] a great deal of experience at,” before seemingly pulling back to clarify that “all archaeologists [do.]” Even so, casual academic pleasure cruises to ancient Baghdad seem to be a case of taking that statement a tad too literally, no?
In short, then, time travel was set up by the new New Adventures as a force that would, by its very presence, impose some measure of distortion upon the narrative and social context in which Benny routinely operates. And while Ghost Devices doesn’t bear that out directly in terms of its sketching an actual bona-fide “time travel story” – again, we’ll have to wait until Walking to Babylon for that – it’s more obviously willing to play around with the mechanics of time and time travel than any of the first six Benny novels. In this respect, the comparisons to Day of the Daleks seem oddly apropos, as no serial prior to 1972 had really dared to engage with time travel as anything more than a generative mechanism for Doctor Who stories, with the possible exception of fringe cases like The Space Museum or The Ark.
There is, once more, no shortage of bitter irony to be found in the observation that the most complex and least straightforwardly nostalgic premise to be found in the four-book run of NAs between Deadfall and Tempest should be the one lumped with the release slot that ultimately ended up permiting BBC Books’ monthly offering in the EDAs to completely overshadow it.
Dave Owen, in reviewing this same stretch of books as a means of welcoming Bernice back to the pages of DWM‘s Shelf Life feature after Gary Gillatt and Alan Barnes decided to let up on their NA embargo, seems to nod towards Ghost Devices‘ exceptional status in this regard:
Tempest is dignified and graceful, but only counts as SF by its location, whereas Deadfall uses SF devices in abundance but feels just as formulaic as Mean Streets by using them only as tools rather than themes. Of this quartet, only Ghost Devices really belongs in the SF section, and is coincidentally the funniest too. I’d like to see the ‘wacky’ box filling up faster.
It’s worth returning once more to the numbers, if only to underscore just how extensively and swiftly Ghost Devices‘ aspirations towards relevance were quashed. Per the Shannon Sullivan rankings, Alien Bodies not only wound up becoming the first EDA to score higher than its concurrent NA competitor, but it did so with an astonishing fourteen percentage point lead.
If the priorities of Doctor Who as a franchise weren’t clear enough after Down temporarily became the last New Adventure to be reviewed in DWM, there could surely be no doubt after this. Yes, the Eighth Doctor Adventures had given rise to unfathomable horrors like War of the Daleks, but they’d also provided an outlet for the wonderfully bonkers creativity of Lawrence Miles. One may tolerate a world of Kursaals for the sake of an Interference, and all that.
Under these circumstances, much like the Spire that proves so crucial to its plot, Ghost Devices becomes a curiously malformed and insubstantial thing through no fault of its own, standing as a monument to a possible future that was eclipsed and erased almost as soon as it was brought into this world.
Yet as we must surely be well aware by now, a piece of art can retain a certain power even in its erased state. That is, after all, no small part of our devoting so much energy to the Wilderness Years, to see how the ghostly impressions of novels gone by remain in the larger canvas of Doctor Who. Even if Ghost Devices has an appreciably smaller footprint than most novels of its ilk, that’s no reason to give it anything less than a full hearing.
As it happens, this decision is a delightfully fortuitous one, as I found myself enjoying Bucher-Jones’ second novel far more than his first. It expands upon the writer’s penchant for a wilfully loquacious and colourful prose style, something that was only glimpsed intermittently between the interminable descriptions of Parisian alleyways and catacombs in which The Death of Art was practically drowning. Moreover, it manages to turn this distinctive voice towards a plot that is not only broadly dramatically satisfying, but frequently peppered with dialogic gems and moments of genuine hilarity to boot.
This, by extension, provides the groundwork for one of the more convenient and well-worn critical gambits under the sun. Boiled down to its most essential elements, we can express the central impetus of this gambit in terms of an inquiry as to what makes one novel in an author’s oeuvre succeed where another failed.
On the face of it, the most tempting possibility is to file Ghost Devices‘ merits under the broad umbrella categorisation of “making more sense than The Death of Art,” particularly since that’s a phenomenally low bar for a novel to clear. That was, ultimately, the primary stumbling block for Bucher-Jones’ debut story, featuring as it did the power struggles of no less than three separate psi-powered factions and subfactions vying for control of an English dollhouse that doubled as the dwelling of the Quoth, a delightfully Gothically named race of subatomic beings.
As you can probably ascertain from that summary, things rapidly became more than a little confused, to put it mildly. In fact, the finished novel was so phenomenally incoherent that I genuinely had to go back and check Cameron Dixon’s Doctor Who Reference Guide to refresh my memory and ensure that I’d got the myriad details of the plot correct just now. And I’m still not entirely certain that I succeeded…
But while there is a certain logic to this line of argumentation, it should be remarked that any attempt to argue that Ghost Devices is an especially simple or comprehensible book is a rather strained one. The difference, ultimately, is not one of complexity but rather of context.
Temporal shenanigans, in all their flavours, are one of those select few science fiction conceits which naturally lend themselves to a degree of impenetrability. Shadowy psionic conspiracies, on the other hand, generally require some more concrete signposts by which the audience may orientate themselves. The biggest exception to this general rule of thumb, by my reckoning, would probably be those works that are simply aiming to tap into a broader and deeper vein of paranoia than can be convincingly painted by most first-time authors, as Bucher-Jones was in September 1996.
This doesn’t mean, as some folks would like to have you believe, that a writer can just plop down any old nonsense on the page, give it a coat of non-linearity with some tachyons to garnish, stand for two minutes and serve up a complete and utter masterpiece. In recent years, it’s become particularly fashionable to level accusations of doing just that against folks like Steven Moffat, usually accompanied by some choice declarations that the audience can’t follow his supposed habitual style of overcomplicated crap.
The fact that my eight-year-old self was quite able to follow such putatively incomprehensible pieces of television as The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang and the entirety of Series 6 should give you some idea of where I stand on such claims when applied to Moffat, and they hold just as little water in the case of Ghost Devices.
(Ironically enough, the story I remember being most confused by was actually Davies’ own Last of the Time Lords. For whatever reason, the workings of the Paradox Machine stubbornly refused to make sense within my brain, despite not being especially complicated on reflection. Make of this what you will.)
At the core of this general increase in coherence on Bucher-Jones’ part is the recognition that one can largely trust in the audience’s ability to follow the plot’s convoluted physics-related contortions with the assistance of a few impressively lyrical turns of phrase. Even if Fellows’ rather cerebral explanation of the relationship between tachyons and the speed of light fails to entirely sink in, the basic idea of a device that sends visions of the future back to the inhabitants of the past is evocative enough to make a hazy, dreamlike kind of sense, even once the novel’s denouement starts bandying about temporal paradoxes like they’re going out of style.
Further contributing to my much improved opinion of Ghost Devices in comparison to The Death of Art is the larger sandbox in which the novel’s paradoxes and mysteries have been allowed to play out. If nineteenth century Paris felt like it was much too crowded a landscape for the sprawling story Bucher-Jones clearly wanted to tell, it’s hard to imagine a setting that provides quite as stark a contrast as the Benny novels’ vision of humanity’s spacefaring future. The degree to which proceedings can feel unduly claustrophobic is severely lessened, if not outright eliminated, when the distance between the major players is routinely measured in star systems and light-years. But even more importantly, the nature of Ghost Devices as a book set in Earth’s imagined future is actually crucial when it comes to understanding its themes and ideas.
It’s no secret at this point that the New Adventures have invested no small amount of effort in charting the general contours of Earth’s future history. This process began all the way back in Bernice’s own introductory story, Love and War, which doubled as the first instalment in what was dubbed, in a display of blistering originality, the Future History Cycle.
This being the height of the 1990s, what this meant in practice was a whole lot of generally misguided and clumsy nods to the trappings of the era’s most popular sci-fi television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, much to my repeated chagrin over the course of the blog.
Underneath all these coy tips of the hat, however, there was always a certain strangeness to the manner in which TNG‘s aesthetic was incorporated into the world of Doctor Who. Although it might have aired well over half its episodes in the 1990s – and I’ll leave it to the more Trek-obsessed members of my audience to determine which episode serves as the dividing line between the eighties and the nineties – The Next Generation‘s outlook never felt like a comfortable fit for the more cynical climate that took root in the latter half of the decade.
In truth, the broadly utopian future into which Patrick Stewart and friends so boldly strutted in their gaudy space pyjamas was always more suited to the cheerful optimism of Ronald Reagan’s so-called “Morning in America.” As spin-drenched electoral slogans go, the tagline for the 40th President’s 1984 re-election campaign serves as an uncomfortable reminder of a time in which vast swathes of the United States were seemingly able to convince themselves of the general pleasantness of their circumstances. That the country was actually sliding into a neoliberal hellscape whose full consequences we are still working through nearly forty years later is, in this respect, almost entirely irrelevant.
Early TNG, accordingly, took an oftentimes sickeningly sweet view of mankind’s future and generally presupposed the inherent virtue of the Federation’s liberal utopia. In one of the most infamous examples of this tendency towards an unquestioning valorisation of the state, Gene Roddenberry loudly protested against Melinda Snodgrass’ classic script The Measure of a Man on the basis of his belief that Data ought to willingly surrender himself to Starfleet’s experiments, which shouldn’t actually be remotely surprising coming from the man who brought us The Omega Glory and A Private Little War.
What I’m getting at here, I suppose, is that TNG habitually exhibited an adamantine certainty in the idea that humanity was destined to progress towards a more enlightened and tolerant social order, even as it casually established that the road to that paradise was paved with more than a few scattered atrocities and nuclear wars along the way.
Yet by the time of Love and War in October 1992, there was a sense that a change in the national mood was in the air. Published mere weeks before Bill Clinton’s electoral victory brought an end to twelve straight years of Republican presidential domination, and six months after Neil Kinnock singularly failed to do the same to thirteen years of Conservative government in the United Kingdom, Cornell’s second novel was thus positioned all but perfectly on one of the myriad of tipping points that one could identify as an answer to the surprisingly ambiguous question of “When did the 1990s begin?”
Utopia, in other words, was beginning to look a lot less teleologically assured. In the gap between Transit and The Highest Science, the third live-action Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine, would premiere. Although it was generally a far warmer and more humanist show than its most vocal detractors would claim, it was nevertheless frequently sceptical of the power structures underpinning the larger Star Trek franchise.
Even Voyager, launching a few days prior to the release of Andrew Cartmel’s Warlock, seemed to view the universe as a considerably more hostile place than had been the norm for any Star Trek series since the earliest days of Kirk’s travels, being a series based around the premise of retreating towards the comfort of familiar space.
In its worst moments, this manifested in the treatment of the Delta Quadrant as a region existing for little reason other than to validate a bunch of reactionary beliefs about “less civilised” parts of the world, from the Kazon’s status as blatant allegories for the anxieties of white middle-class Angelenos over gang violence in the wake of the 1992 riots, through to Displaced‘s descending into a forty-five minute Great Replacement tirade.
As time progressed, the ramifications of this general societal uncertainty went on to shape the future history provided by the New Adventures, though any direct causal relationship between Star Trek and the novels remained nebulous and indirect at best.
Accordingly, the period of history which this latter-day stretch of NAs have adopted as their native stomping grounds becomes rather difficult to classify under any sort of ironclad, science-fictional utopia/dystopia dichotomy. On the one hand, the very fact that Bernice needs to hold down a stable employment as a university tutor, with a salary measured in the quaintly Anglocentric currency of “shillings,” puts the series far outside the realm of the vaguely socialist post-scarcity economics of the United Federation of Planets, even as Ghost Devices itself confirms the existence of a technology vaguely analogous to the replicator.
(This fact could also, admittedly, be just as easily surmised from the dominance of monolithic corporate entities like the Spinward Corporation or Krytell Industries, the Federation not generally being big on privatisation and laissez-faire capitalism.)
At the same time, the world around St. Oscar’s seems to be largely free of any of the markers of overt totalitarianism or environmental/social collapse that tend to accompany science fiction of an unequivocally dystopian persuasion. Happy Endings had even made a point of suggesting that the Earth would manage to bounce back from the extreme pollution witnessed in books like Warhead. While I’m by no means possessed of an expert opinion in these matters, I’d wager good money that you could pick out any of the contemporaneous stories from the pages of 2000 AD, say, and the New Adventures would invariably end up seeming far more optimistic by comparison, their reputation for oppressive darkness notwithstanding.
Here, then, we can at last begin to reintegrate our musings on time travel and make a stab at quantifying the scope of Ghost Devices‘ disruption to the established pattern of the NAs. One of the tenets of the Virgin line, after all, has always been a general dismissal of the concept of parallel universes, barring extraordinary circumstances like those occasioned by the Monk’s manipulations in the Alternate History Cycle or the influence of the Nexus on the events of So Vile a Sin.
Coupled with this is the generally unspoken rule that the presence of a TARDIS and its inhabitants at a given point in history serves to “fix” a potential future in place, a theory which probably received its most explicit formulation courtesy of Ruath in Goth Opera. For our purposes, it must surely be seen as significant that the Silurian Earth of Blood Heat is ultimately undone by the Doctor’s use of a Time Ram to presumably annihilate his original TARDIS, only to eventually be reunited with it in Happy Endings, a novel which we’ve already identified as a pivotal turning point in Benny’s conceptual relationship to time travel.
At its core, this is a vision of the future in rough accord with the zeitgeist of the nineties, a long unipolar moment that stretched off into infinity after the apparent triumph of liberal democracy over its numerous challengers ranged across the twentieth century. The Fukuyaman End of History writ large, in essence.
It cannot be taken as a monumental surprise that Bucher-Jones, as a writer with a higher than average affinity for the ideas of Lawrence Miles, opts for a rather more nuanced conception of history. Indeed, the Down/Ghost Devices duology – or, for that matter, the Ghost Devices/Alien Bodies duology – is arguably little more than a reiteration of the Christmas on a Rational Planet/The Death of Art pairing in this regard.
Where Miles used the Carnival Queen’s invasion of Woodwicke as a means to show up the recursive and insignificant nature of the late 1990s’ preoccupation with millennarianism, Bucher-Jones opted to go straight for the jugular of fin de siècle ideology by setting the Brotherhood’s machinations against the doctrine’s origins in Paris at the height of La Belle Époque in the late 1800s. Even the decade’s more extreme flareups of millennial hysteria, The Death of Art seemed to suggest in its more lucid moments, were far from wholly original. For every David Koresh or Shoko Asahara, there was a precedent in the crimes of Sante Geronimo Caserio or Émile Henry.
Much as Down expanded on some of Christmas‘ bolder suggestions as to the nature of Doctor Who and the wider corpus of science fiction literature, Ghost Devices represents a comparable evolution from The Death of Art, threatening the Benny novels with the largest destabilisation of their vision of the future to date.
None of this is especially groundbreaking in the abstract, mind you. The New Adventures have repeatedly proven themselves to be exceedingly fond of an aesthetic of lurking, Lovecraftian cosmic horror dating all the way back to The Pit, of all things, a pet interest which carried through to the controversial reworking of various iconic Doctor Who foes as members of Lovecraft’s Elder Things.
Bucher-Jones himself has already dipped a toe into these proverbial waters with his “Roz tries to convince Montague that the Doctor is actually Nyarlathotep” sequence in The Death of Art. Looking forward to his next novel, he’ll also go on to throw the single biggest wrench into David A. McIntee and Andy Lane’s attempted integration of the Lovecraftian pantheon into the world of Doctor Who with The Taking of Planet 5‘s firm fictionalisation of the creatures.
(The surprising centrality of The Pit to the mythos of Faction Paradox, as execrable a novel as it is, is only further confirmed by Miles’ decision to borrow the Yssgaroth from Neil Penswick for use in The Book of the War, as well as his essay The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic which accompanied Mad Norwegian Press’ 2004 reprint of Dead Romance.)
No, what’s most intriguing about Ghost Devices‘ understanding of the fundamental nature of history is not its mere suggestion of cosmic horror, but rather the particulars of what it’s identified as the source of that horror. Where the orthodox position has been, until now, to treat the universe’s possible unreality and irrationality as the chief instigator of humankind’s existential angst and, in extreme cases, outright gibbering insanity, we’re presented here with an alternative proposition in which the fact of the future’s fixity is treated as anything but reassuring.
Repeatedly throughout the course of the novel, Bucher-Jones stresses the fact of the Spire-induced precognition as a force inherently inimical to the basic functioning of most lifeforms. It’s the foreknowledge of their own descent into a race of warlike, imperialist arms traders that drives the Vo’lach to their grand act of suicide, while Bernice’s brief experience with the Spire’s visions is framed in unmistakably horrific terms, breaking down all sense of comprehensibility in an overwhelming torrent of information.
The implications of the future’s being recast as an object of horror for a book series like the New Adventures, almost perfectly bounded by the lacuna of the 1990s, are inevitably profound and multifarious. This is especially true of the series’ current form, where we’ve been arguing since at least the time of Dragons’ Wrath that the world of the novels is heavily informed by the unique geopolitical status quo as it stood in the nations of the erstwhile Third World between the Cold War’s anticlimactic conclusion and the fresh belligerences of the War on Terror.
On this matter – and many others besides – Ghost Devices is hardly what one could call subtle, but when a novel’s prose style is sufficiently rich and characterful, understatement ceases to be as strong a necessity as it might otherwise be. At one point, Bucher-Jones even dabbles in that old favourite of science fiction authors everywhere, as Bernice directly calls attention to the historical parallels between the attempts of the Vo’lach’s remaining machines at maintaining a galactic balance of power through strategically targeted arms trading and the historical realities of Cold War statecraft.
Indeed, many of the novel’s individual parts will probably be reasonably familiar to any mildly savvy readers of the Virgin books, or viewers of nineties popular culture as a whole. The Vo’lach themselves are arguably just a juxtaposition of the decade’s broader fascination with the immorality of arms trading – having previously fuelled such novels as The Empire of Glass, A Device of Death and, yes, going on to be central to Alien Bodies – against the aforementioned post-Cold War trappings of the Benny novels.
Even the finer details of their scheme, having inadvertently set themselves up as gods to the inhabitants of a science fictional analogue for the developing, post-colonial nations of the nineties, bring to mind the Hollow Gods’ manipulation of the Dagellan Cluster back in Death and Diplomacy.
Those of us with an inclination towards unnecessarily grandiose readings of the Benny books’ general thematic arc might fairly view this as a minor gold mine, what with the series’ post-Cold War trappings starting to come undone like this in the very first book after the remarriage and subsequent five month absence of Jason. As the most enduring legacy of Death and Diplomacy, the implication that his presence as a bridge between the early twenty-first century and the late twenty-sixth serves to fix the geopolitics of Benny’s world is a tantalising one, though perhaps not one to take entirely seriously.
But even if we pull back from these more gonzo and outlandish hypotheses, the general impression of Ghost Devices is as a novel that readily proves that most hoary of axioms as to the relative merits of the whole and the sum of its parts. The pleasure of the novel is derived not so much from its individual constituents in isolation, but in their very specific form of interplay. Sure, Andy Lane and Christopher Bulis might have hit upon the nature of arms trading in the 1990s, but would either of them have thought to wed that to a sentient air vent or a living weapons factory that simply wants to change its stock-in-trade and go into the grocery business?
(Dave Stone might have done, but even he would probably balk at the zeal with which Bucher-Jones embraces some of the more esoteric branches of theoretical physics and pseudoscience, namedropping everything from tachyons and the theories of Paul Dirac to the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and convicted fraudster Erich von Däniken.)
Along these lines, one of the more fascinating ideas contained within the novel’s pages is the extent to which the Vo’lach and the Spire quite literally wield the very possibility of an elemental universal teleology as a weapon with which to strike down other life forms. The notion of a race that would willingly eradicate all life on its home planet just for containing the merest hint of the potential that a stray microbe might, through the mechanisms of evolution, bear out the Spire’s predictions of blood-stained, warlike imperialism is horrifying enough on its own.
It’s surely not for nothing that this is essentially the inverse of a similar twist Gary Russell and Alan Barnes will go on to pull with regards to Rassilon and the Time Lords in Zagreus six years from now. Indeed, with the conspicuous presence of a pair of “Watchmakers” – borrowing Matheson Catcher’s name for the Time Lords from Christmas on a Rational Planet – within the narrative, the repeated identification of the Vo’lach as the “capital G” Gods of the Canopusi is especially eyecatching here in the light of later developments in the New Adventures in the wake of Where Angels Fear, to say nothing of Dead Romance‘s suggestions as to the true nature of the Dellahan Gods.
More than any granular theories of continuity, however, no small part of the horror of such an idea stems from its embrace of an overly neat and linear interpretation of evolution. Certainly, human history is already replete with enough examples of the horror that can be wrought by colonialist powers seeking to lean on Darwin et al. as a means of propping up a eugenicist agenda to ensure that these musings aren’t entirely theoretical in nature, lending a pleasant barbedness to the novel to leaven out the hard, mind-bending physics.
On a much smaller scale, however, the presentation of this mentality as a monstrous and warped thing also doubles as a solid rebuke of the oftentimes shonky understanding of evolution demonstrated by mainstream science fiction. Star Trek in particular repeatedly suggests, with dubious appeals to the mechanisms of natural selecton, that the arc of humanity’s development is a straight line leading from the primordial soup to… well, something, the franchise is always a bit unclear on what exactly.
If you’re watching Genesis, it might be a spider – and simultaneously a small, lemur-like primate, because predetermined evolutionary pathways that somehow lead to different outcomes for individuals of the same species is totally a coherent worldview – whereas Threshold, as we all know, favours the chances of the salamander. This once again serves to demonstrate the basic compatibility of Bucher-Jones and Miles’ artistic sensibilities, slotting neatly alongside Down‘s casually answering “Yes” to the age-old fan debate of “Does the transporter actually just kill you?” and thereby reforging the trappings of Trek as an object of dread.
There is, throughout Ghost Devices, a sense that an overly deterministic attitude towards the arc of history is shown up as being fundamentally inadequate. The faux-Tenomi is, going by initial appearances at least, able to survive the attempt on his life thanks to the complex evolutionary advantage of his additional stomachs, even if it transpires that the Vo’lach Negotiator operating under the guise of Doctor Steadman had planned for that eventuality all along.
During his interrogation at the hands of Mandir, Elspet reflects on his captor’s unduly tidy perception of scientific history, formulating a plan to turn the non-linear nature of science’s progress through the ages to his own purposes. As an additional bonus, this also provides Bucher-Jones with the basis for one of the novel’s best bits, as Elspet’s internal monologue lays down the credoes of his new “Liar’s Theory of Science.”
The precociously, psychopathically violent Morry, meanwhile, is the perfect encapsulation of the perennial nineties fear that the next generation of humanity might be little more than a crop of disaffected, cruel-hearted sadists, and we’re still some seventeen months out from the biggest flashpoint of that line of thought in the wake of the Columbine shooting.
All of these anxieties build naturally and inexorably towards the novel’s climax and probably its boldest and most provocative idea, as Bernice allows the Vo’lach’s missiles to travel back along the history of the Spire, with the structure becoming caught up in a vicious cycle of temporal paradoxes. Eventually, the paradoxes resolve themselves in such a manner as to leave the Spire standing, but with its functioning impeded enough to prevent its stream of tachyons from travelling back across the entirety of the universe’s history.
Confronted with the realisation that said tachyons may have been responsible for the regulation of the universe’s rate of expansion, Benny ends up pondering the possibility that she may have doomed the future to an uncertain wasteland of rampant, unfettered cause and effect. Far from fretting over the cosmological implications, however, the main source of her anxiety lies in the prospect of her having annihilated all the possible futures she’d been witness to in the course of her travels in the TARDIS, eventually driving her to attempt suicide in a rather strikingly bleak coda to what has generally been a relatively fluffy book with moments of implicit darkness. Indeed, it’s probably worth quoting a brief – well, relatively speaking – excerpt from her climactic journal entry here:
Now randomness is seeping under the doors of the universe, and outside it is cold and dark.
From the moment the Spire ceased to function, the future began to be affected by quantum drift, by the endless clatter of the dice that so horrified Einstein, the ultimately meaningless causality of subatomic events. Without the Spire’s relentless time pressure tweaking the universe into certain preordained paths, every non-causal subatomic event that happens now points us towards a spread of futures opening out infinitely in a fractal nightmare. I have planted a tree that has branches upon branches upon branches. Everything I do now, every decision I take, every decision anyone takes now, every drop of sweat that in falling hesitates between two equally probable paths upon a lover’s back splits the world. The future is a grey mist of probabilities.
So obviously, this is the point at which our recurring apophenic fascination with the idea of Ghost Devices as some kind of psychic foreshock of Alien Bodies truly breaks through in full force. It’s almost too perfect: in the book immediately before the Wilderness Years make their most explicit and sustained engagement with the notion of a War in Heaven, Bucher-Jones teases the prospect of Benny’s having brought about a complete collapse of the Doctor Who universe’s underlying chains of causality and comprehensibility. This, in turn, also serves to nod towards the eventual post-revival fate of this period as a walled off lacuna within the franchise’s larger continuity.
The implications spanning out from this one seemingly unassuming book, by any reasonable yardstick, are truly dizzying, almost rivalling those of Alien Bodies itself. The fact that we’re needing to lean rather heavily on the “almost” in “almost too perfect” here is, in a sense, largely immaterial, as is the novel’s pulling back from these most Earth-shattering of its intimations.
When all is said and done, Benny can’t ever really be explicitly responsible for the complete teleological unshackling of the universe and the consignment of Original Sin to a nebulous, Ancestor Cell-like haze of non-canonicity, if for no deeper reason than that we’re just one month away from a Raymond Chandler riff starring Chris Cwej. Written by Terrance Dicks, no less, an author who manages the improbable feat of being even less likely than someone like Lane or Bulis to turn out a treatise on the nature of history and paradox.
But in its own way, this feels entirely appropriate. Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the period of Doctor Who in which writers are actively playing with the War and all its attendant concepts is defined by nothing so much as a consistent pulling back from the series-demolishing conclusions to their own trains of thought. The prospect of Bernice Summerfield killing herself in a fit of nihilistic dejection is of a piece with the Doctor’s being slain in the first battle of the War in Heaven, in that they’re both potential futures that can never be concretely depicted without entirely disposing of any pretensions towards a novel line based around those characters.
All of this might very well sound as if I’m building up to a criticism of the essential nature of Ghost Devices, but I’m not, or at least not entirely. Taken as a novel, Ghost Devices is an exceedingly fascinating and worthwhile piece of work, even if I could quite fairly point to any number of minor annoyances within it.
To pick just one example, while Bucher-Jones might share an affinity for the ideas of Lawrence Miles, one can’t entirely avoid the sneaking suspicion that he also shares Miles’ weaknesses in the business of creating actual characters rather than individuals with snappily high-concept backstories. Regardless, I’m almost certain that it’ll wind up being my favourite book in the five-month period between Down and Walking to Babylon, all told, unless Dicks and Bulis improbably choose to pull out all the stops for their own efforts.
The bigger problem here, insofar as there is one, is that the tricks Ghost Devices tries to pull simply aren’t sustainable in this particular context, at least in the long term. Even this wouldn’t necessarily be nearly so awkward on its own, especially since the book’s status as a Benny novel largely liberates it from the business of having to be overly concerned with how it moves Doctor Who forward.
For better or for worse, though – and the fact that the War arc ended up giving rise to any number of books which are still reasonably well-regarded among those corners of fandom devoted enough to still be giving them the time of day means that I could definitely see it going either way – we’re about to enter a period of time in which these same unsustainable tricks are going to become standard operating procedure, and it thus behooves us to be a tad more thoughtful in our appraisal than we might have had cause to under different circumstances.
“The future [is] alive,” Bucher-Jones’ final sentence reassures us. Now all that remains is to put that theory to the test.
Miscellaneous Observations
He kind of got lost in the shuffle of my grand game of word association and historiographic musings, but Clarence is a rather nice addition to the NAs’ increasingly robust supporting cast. Having him named by Benny herself in a deliberate reference to It’s a Wonderful Life was a particularly deft touch that manages to fit with her well-established love of twentieth century popular culture while also obliquely foreshadowing his role in saving her from her attempted suicide at the close of the novel.
The most remarkable thing about his character as presented here is just how well his amnesia-clouded backstory fits with the eventual twist introduced by Justin Richards in Tears of the Oracle. (And it was, indeed, primarily a retrospective twist on the part of Richards, at least if The Inside Story‘s citation of an old mailing list message from Bucher-Jones himself is to be believed.)
Lawrence Miles’ “I always intended for the NAs and EDAs to be set in different, bottled universes” claim also continues to take more and more damage ahead of the namechecking of Tyler’s Folly in Alien Bodies, with Bucher-Jones referencing Ordifica a little under two years prior to Interference. Actually, Miles himself got there first back in Down, because this whole situation wasn’t remotely confusing enough.
There’s probably something to be said for Bucher-Jones’ dabbling with simulationism in giving Benny a mild existential crisis over whether she can be sure that she isn’t just another predictive algorithm in the mind of God back. We could trot out the standard roster of late nineties texts dabbling in similar ideas, from eXistenZ and The Matrix through to The Truman Show and Dark City.
One would probably also want to note here Bucher-Jones’ own recurring preoccupation with the particulars of the relationship between art and reality – consider once more the title of his debut novel, most obviously – but this post is getting more than long enough as is, so I vote we put a pin in these ideas and circle back around to them when we do The Taking of Planet 5 and Grimm Reality, yeah?
With that being said, Bernice’s troubled reaction at the prospect of her being handed a God-generated final draft of her eternally in-progress sequel to Down Among the Dead Men has certainly aged uncannily well in this era of AI-generated writing.
Final Thoughts
Welp, that was definitely one of my more abstruse posts in a while. I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope it was just as enjoyable to read. All of this could simply be a case of my succumbing to the joys of post-COVID brain fog, but I like to think there’s still something worthwhile to be found in amongst my ramblings. And really, hasn’t that always been the blog’s mission statement in a nutshell?
In any event, I won’t keep you here for too long, since I think we’ve danced around the main event for long enough. Next time we dive headfirst into the War in Heaven as Lawrence Miles makes his first contribution to the Eighth Doctor Adventures with Alien Bodies. Until then, however…
Kind regards,
Special Agent Dale Cooper
Dale's Ramblings 