Review: The Doctors Are In

(Crossposted to Mightygodking.com.)

Full disclosure: I've known Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? through a variety of online Doctor Who fan communities since the series was an obscure line of novels carrying on in the wake of the cancelled TV show. I have attended conventions with them, I'm big fans of them as people as well as authors, and I have been commissioned on occasion by Robert for essays in one book or another. (Including the recently released Outside In 2, by ATB Publishing, where I wax opinionated on "The Christmas Invasion". You know, if you're interested in that sort of thing.) The point is, I am probably magnificently biased when it comes to the recently released 'The Doctors Are In: The Essential and Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who's Greatest Time Lord'.

That said, it's tremendous fun to read. It's not an episode guide, because goodness knows we are spoilt for choice when it comes to that. (Including one by Burk and Smith?, as it happens.) It's also not a history of the program, because again, there are plenty of great ones out there. Instead, this is a book of critical analysis--the authors take a look at the various facets of the Doctor's magnificently complex personality, embroidered by thirteen actors and dozens of writers, directors and producers over the years, and try to figure out just what makes him tick. Is he a brooding and melancholy survivor of unimaginable devastation? A cold, alien wanderer in the fourth dimension? A puckish sprite who revels in making mischief for the wicked? (Um, yes to all of the above. Sorry, spoilers!)

Naturally, with fifty years of stories to mine for material, there are a wealth of interpretations to draw upon, and a wealth of conclusions to come to. That's where the book shines, really; Burk and Smith? are among those rare people who can disagree completely and totally and not get upset about it. Over the course of the book, they clash over topics from "Does 'Genesis of the Daleks' really live up to its reputation?" to "Was the Third Doctor too cozy with UNIT?" to "Was Matt Smith prone to trying to punch up a bad script by flailing his arms and shouting a lot?" And impressively enough, their answers are always well-reasoned and informative even when they disagree. Even more impressively, they disagree profoundly for much of the book and the tone is still light-hearted and humorous.

Is it essential reading? Well, it does serve as a basic reference guide to the series--Burk and Smith? do give a potted history of the making of the series as they discuss each Doctor, there's a list of recommended viewing that will certainly serve as a good place to start, and the back of the book contains a list of resources if you want to know more. But I will admit (as do they, in the back of the book) that there are other books out there that serve as a more comprehensive guide to the history of the show both in front of and behind the cameras. This is intended as light reading, not as reference material.

In other words, if you already have one of a dozen or so episode guides, behind the scenes books, or reference manuals on Doctor Who, this probably isn't going to tell you anything you don't already know. But if you're the sort of person who already has episode guides, behind-the-scenes books and reference manuals on Doctor Who, you're probably the sort of person who appreciates reading one that's well-written, entertaining and far from merely a dusty compilation of facts about the series. If that's the case (whether you own all those other books or not, really) you will get a lot of enjoyment out of 'The Doctors Are In'.

Review: Big Bang Generation

Gary Russell's revenge is best served cold.

In 2001, he published the novel 'Instruments of Darkness', which brought Big Finish audio companion Evelyn Smythe into the BBC Books and established her, and by extension the Big Finish audios, as "canonical" (for those who take such things seriously). It received lackluster reviews, primarily from people who felt that it was an exercise in nostalgia, excessive continuity references, filling in plot holes from other Gary Russell novels, and hagiography for a companion that Russell had created and clearly loved, but couldn't show and had to therefore tell with several scenes where people just stood around explaining how great she was.

(Shortly afterward, Gary Russell declared his stated belief that the audios and the books were separate canons and that he didn't care about tying them together anyway. Not that I'm suggesting these things are related.)

It took fourteen long years for Russell's plan to come to its ultimate fruition. Fourteen years of patiently waiting for Doctor Who to once again become a global televised phenomenon, for the TV series to adapt Big Finish audios and Virgin New Adventures in a way that cast doubt on the canonicity of the books and the CDs from the Wilderness Years, for River Song (a clear and loving pastiche of Bernice Summerfield) to be taken into fans' hearts while the original Benny languished in spin-offs and the memories of a tiny subset of the new fandom, for the phenomenon known as "NAstalgia" (an unthinking adoration for the Virgin New Adventures based on rosy memories of their output) to develop. Fourteen years for Gary Russell's masterstroke.

'The Big Bang Generation' weaponizes NAstalgia. It's a wafer-thin run-around that only makes vague stabs at coherence, with dull and unconvincing villains and dozens of pointless digressions that only serve to hang continuity references on. It's utterly disposable, not awful but mainly the sort of thing that you'd maybe give to an eight-year-old in an effort to keep them quiet for a few hours. BUT IT'S GOT BERNICE SUMMERFIELD IN IT.

More specifically, it has Bernice Summerfield's first-ever appearance in the New Series canon in any form, her first meeting with the Capaldi Doctor, her first official meeting with the Doctor since 1997's 'The Dying Days', and the first canonical appearance of any characters created for her Big Finish spin-off series in official Doctor Who media. In short, this is a book pretty much designed to settle the argument, to the extent that it can reasonably be settled, of whether the Wilderness Years are canon. And it comes down hard on the triumphant, fist-pumping, it-even-mentions-Keri-the-Pakhar, "Yes!" side of the equation.

And so Gary Russell's revenge is complete. Because I have to admit, it was totally worth the aimless plot, the unconvincing villains, and even having to put up with lifeless Big Finish tagalongs Ruth and Jack in order to get Bernice Summerfield and the Doctor together once more. God help me, I enjoyed this book even as I cringed at how many scenes were really just one character or another reminiscing about how great Bernice Summerfield was, and how she was the Best Companion Ever, and how her touch could cure scrofula. Because I can't help it, I agree with that. 'Big Bang Generation' proved that the only difference between me and the target audience of 'Instruments of Darkness' was the choice of companion to get all misty-eyed over.

I actually liked 'Big Bang Generation'. From hell's heart, Gary Russell, I salute you.

Review: Short Trips and Side Steps

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 13 September, 2000.)

In quickie form: ST&SS was another Doctor Who short story collection, full of plusses and minuses.

First, let me just say that the "theme" of ST&SS, that of "out-of-continuity" adventures, rarely if ever works. Most of the stories are ones that work just as well in continuity as out of it, and those that don't are usually distinguished by mind-numbingly painful badness. There's only one that a) is clever, and b) uses its status as being out of continuity to good effect...Face Value, by Steve Lyons, which does clever things with the idea of a musical version of Doctor Who, and is quite funny to boot. So, going down the line in quickie reviews...

The Longest Story in the World is an alright introduction to the series, but not really a 'story' in the sense that it has no ending. Then again, that might be the point. A Town Called Eternity (which is, appropriately enough, split into two parts) seems almost schizophrenic -- like either Lance was planning a farce and Mark a serious story, or the other way around. It's a clever idea, but the style is very inconsistent, which grates slightly. The first three Special Occasions stories are great, and then the fourth derails the whole concept by trying to link the first three into something (I think perhaps The Well-Mannered War, but I'm not sure), and the whole thing falls apart. Nothing At the End of the Lane, which is split into three sections, reminds me of how much I'd like to see Daniel O'Mahoney write for Doctor Who again. It's basically a retelling of An Unearthly Child via a plot device similar to 'Shades of Gray' (the ST: TNG episode), but O'Mahoney has a masterful love of the language that evokes the strange and terrifying in the everyday. It falls apart a bit at the end...OK, a lot at the end...but it's worth reading for its haunting text. Countdown to TV Action...at first, I wasn't sure whether to lambast Gary Russell for his agonizingly bad prose, or to let him off the hook by saying, "He's just duplicating the bad dialogue and plots of the comics." Then I thought about it for a moment, and decided to lambast him for deliberately celebrating that which should be left forgotten in the name of nostalgia. It's like doing a pastiche of Timelash, or trying to make a perfume that precisely re-creates the scent of dog vomit. Yes, it can be done, but _WHY_? The Queen of Eros is Doctor Who meets "The King and I", but well done for all that. The Android Maker of Calderon IV is the best story in the whole book, and one that I made all my friends sit down and read. Revenants is alright -- a clever little time puzzle. Doesn't fit into continuity, but who gives a rat's arse? Please Shut the Gate is a cute little one-joke premise that does a good job of nailing down the Second Doctor, and it's short. Turnabout is Fair Play is a nicely done twist on the old 'body switch' idea (nice one, Graeme.) The House on Oldark Moor is a good little story, but was there any reason why this had to be done with the Peter Cushing Doctor? Gone Too Soon is a great story about the Doctor indulging in a little bit of cosmic vandalism that's nicely paced, too. Reunion is a pretty bog-standard Doctor Who story, but not bad. Planet of the Bunnoids isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is. Monsters is a nice evocation of the Cartmel era of Doctor Who, right down to the scenes of the Doctor being strangely philosophical in ways that turn out to fit into the plot. Face Value is, as I said, quite clever. Storm in a Tikka is, as I've said, not -- and again, why did this have to take place in between Dimensions in Time and Search Out Science, other than the writer wanted to use K-9? Vrs is the second best story in the book, and I'm gonna miss Lawrence, dangit.

Review: Time Zero

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 6 November, 2003.)

Reading Time Zero is a bit like that joke about the man who wanted to test his turn signal. First it was working, then it wasn't, then it was, then it wasn't...

The book reads a bit like that. At first, when Justin is setting the scene and we're getting hordes of minor characters trooped through the place just long enough to give their name, rank, and serial number, it's quite off-puttingly dull. Later, as the action picks up and the characters either develop a personality or helpfully die off, it gets quite interesting. Then, as the Doctor and Sabbath debate quantum physics and the nature of reality, it gets eye-glazingly dull again. Then, as George has to decide whether he'll sacrifice his life to save the universe, it gains a certain grandeur... then it's back to debates on quantum physics, but if you can stay awake long enough to keep through that, there's a nice bit at the end.

The regulars are well done, particularly Anji... except that it's quite frustrating that after a whole book of her realizing she's had the time of her life in the TARDIS, that she misses the Doctor and Fitz terribly, and that she thinks of the TARDIS as "home" now... she then abruptly decides she doesn't want to travel any more in the TARDIS, just so that she can then not get her wish again. God, it's as if Tegan had just asked for a lift home from Amsterdam. :)

The prose is at Richards' usual standard; clear, intelligible, and crisp, if not particularly dazzling. (This may sound like damning with faint praise, but I've always felt that the ability to write clear and intelligible prose is one of the most underrated of writing skills. Sure, you want to be witty, but you also want to be understood.) There are some good bits here and there, and certainly nothing actively bad... except, of course, for the Doctor's habit of dropping in huge chunks of Quantum theory for no apparent reason save that people will need to understand it later when it becomes relevant to the plot. We also learn just what the creature from The Burning was, although I still feel that there are a lot of unanswered questions there.

Ultimately, it's another "mythos" book... you should probably read it, and it's got a decent enough plot that you won't walk away disappointed, but it definitely caters to my personal distaste for "hard science". Oh, and the Doctor broke the universe at the end. Gallifrey, reality... my goodness, the Eighth Doctor's clumsy!

Review: The Suns of Caresh

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 4 December 2003.)

According to rumor, The Suns of Caresh is the product of a disgruntled book reviewer who wished to show the authors of the line "how it should be done". While I have no idea as to whether or not this is true, I think that the book line could do far worse than a few people writing the best book they're capable of in order to improve the general quality of the range -- The Suns of Caresh isn't going to match the greats of the line, but it does go a far way towards keeping up a recent spate of excellent books.

Admittedly, Caresh is a bit thin on plot... actually, "thin" isn't the right word to use, but I'm not sure what is. The book basically breaks down into two sections, the first being on Earth and the second being on Caresh. However, the Earth section takes up the majority of the book, with the Doctor's trip to Caresh being confined to the last third or so. This unbalances the novel a bit, especially since most of the exposition occurs on Caresh; it leaves one with a lingering feeling that very little happens in the first two-thirds of the book.

Amazingly, though, one never gets that feeling while actually immersed in the book. When I'd heard that this was going to be "hard sci-fi", I physically winced -- "hard sci-fi" usually seems to be a euphemism for "sci-fi with bigger words and a smug sense of superiority to people who just call them 'rockets' and 'rayguns'." However, apart from making sure his model of Caresh works, Saint mixes his hard sci-fi in quite effortlessly with the story, letting his characters tell most of the tale. Troy Game, the Careshi trapped on Earth, is a well-drawn and well-realized character, as is Simon Haldane, the human who befriends her, and Roche, the Time Lord whose attitude towards collateral damage is a bit more cavalier than the Doctor's. The prose works nicely, and the time on Earth passes quite quickly (with lots of evil monsters from the Vortex, escapes, and a temporal anomaly that seems to get a bit of short shrift, considering.)

Once we get to Caresh, the exposition flows a bit more, although there's still time for a bit of the traditional Doctor Who runaround -- still, to be fair, the "capture-escape" does function to illuminate Roche's character quite well. (The natives mistake the Doctor for Roche, and we see through their eyes that although Roche is concerned about the welfare of Caresh, he's still terrifyingly amoral.) There's one very ham-fisted plot device on page 238 -- the Time Lord "mercy gun", which will stun the first time and kill the second, seems to be almost sign-posted 'THIS IS A PLOT DEVICE' when you hit it, and sure enough, it's a plot device. The book doesn't often hammer its ideas into your skull, though, so this stands out more or less as an isolated instance of creaky writing. The Doctor's final solution to the problem, too, is clever, and doesn't rely on pointless technobabble. However, something occurs to me about the Doctor's cunning solution to Caresh's problems that's rather disturbing... In the early, Earth-based portions of the book, we learn that the natives of Caresh have "fertile times", based on the proximity of the different suns. This stands out for Troy Game as a prominent difference between Earth and Caresh, since on Earth, we're fertile according to individual biological rhythms, whereas on Caresh, they're fertile (IIRC) at the mid-point between Beacon and Ember.

The Doctor's just shifted Caresh into permanent orbit around Ember.

Doesn't this mean that the Careshi won't be able to breed, and the race will die off of infertility?

On the whole, I'd consider this to be a very worthwhile debut novel, and I hope to see more from Mr. Saint... if that is his real name...

Review: The Doomsday Manuscript

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 26 February 2003.)

Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear oh dear. This is the first full-length novel from Big Finish, and they even went and got Justin Richards -- creator of Irving Braxiatel and one of the major influences on the character of Bernice Summerfield. Richards is known for his tightly-plotted thrillers, and this should have been no exception... so what went wrong? What turned this into the weakest novel Justin Richards has ever written, and a very unimpressive debut for the new Benny line?

What went wrong was the "tightly-plotted" part was missing from the "tightly-plotted thriller" that Richards usually writes. Again, let me say that I hate giving bad reviews to authors I enjoy, especially when said authors are in charge of commissioning books for the BBC Doctor Who line. However, this one has holes in the plot that you can drive a Mack truck through. The first and most fundamental one is the question of how Straklant, the villain of the piece, used Josiah Vanderbilt's identi-disc to get into the Braxiatel Collection when we're told, several times over the course of the novel, that the identi-discs are keyed to a person's individual bio-patterns. (Apparently, he "alters" the identi-discs. Well, if they can be altered so easily and thoroughly that nobody notices the difference between a thirty-something man with a false arm and a two-armed eighty-seven year old, it's not a very good security measure, is it?) Plot problems continue with Straklant, mainly because he's so laughably obvious a villain that it astonished me that Benny and Brax bought his line of patter for even thirty seconds, let alone four-fifths of the novel. He's an agent for a Nazi-esque government called the Fifth Axis, he's impersonating a scientist who can't be reached by any means, he's just killed a man right in front of your eyes, and yet nobody suspects for even a moment that he might be lying when he says it was all in self-defence because the other man was trying to steal an artifact... which wasn't recorded in the collection, and which the other man had no apparent motivation to steal. The story is so fishy that you could serve it with chips, and yet Benny and Brax buy it wholesale.

Add to that the fact that Straklant is so obviously, over the top, ludicrously evil. He kills people he has no reason to kill, and in fact every reason not to. He's traveling with Benny, he's trying to maintain cover, and so what does he do? He doubles back and/or lingers not once but twice to kill someone who's cooperated with them simply because he's that evil. Never once does it apparently occur to him that if Benny wonders what's taking him so long, he's just blown his cover six ways from Sunday. Oh, and when Benny asks about his delays, he gives those "bad guy puns" that always sound like announcements to the effect of "I JUST KILLED THAT MAN!!!!!!" Benny's failure to put two and two together about Straklant utterly sinks this novel.

Which is a shame, because apart from that huge, massive, gaping, grit-your-teeth-every-second-and-wonder-how-your-favorite-character-has-become-a-congenital-idiot plot hole, there's a lot to like in this book. Richards once again nails Benny and Brax perfectly, adding it to a string of great portrayals of the archaeologist. There's some funny bits, some touching bits, and a bizarre, yet cool chase/fight scene involving killer cameras. There are a few continuity holes from The Dead Men Diaries (Benny has Joseph Mark II throughout DMD, but receives him here for the first time), but on the whole, if not for the unbelievability of the villain and the horrible, horrible levels of stupidity required on the part of the heroes to advance the plot, this could have been a wonderful little romp. It's just that the one big plot hole is just too damned big to ignore.

Review: Perfect Timing

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 29 September, 2003.)

As the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who approaches, I now present to you my thoughts on an anthology designed to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the program. Let nobody ever state that my reviews aren't timely and current.

Seriously, the reason I'm just now reviewing Perfect Timing, five years after its release, is that it's nigh impossible to get ahold of. An anonymous philanthropist made a copy available to me at last, but in all probability, if you don't already have it, you're not going to get it. This is a shame, because Perfect Timing is one of the best anthologies of Doctor Who short fiction extant, easily beating all of Big Finish and the BBC's efforts and standing on a par with Decalog 3 (which remains, to my mind, the gold standard for Doctor Who anthologies.)

Why is this anthology so much better than all the others? Certainly, a part of it has to be the A-list talent that Mark Phippen and Helen Fayle assembled. The project benefited the Foundation for the Study of Infant Death, and as such generated a lot of goodwill among the community of Doctor Who writers. Many professional Doctor Who authors contributed to it, donating stories that wouldn't necessarily get by their normal editors. But it wasn't just the pros that contributed great work; looking at the list five years on, three or four of the unpublished authors later wound up getting novels for the range... clearly, Phippen and Fayle had a good eye for talent.

In addition, it doesn't hurt that the editors took a slightly loose attitude towards the beast that is 'canon'... although note that I say "slightly", there. There's nothing in here that overtly contradicts anything in the novels, TV series, or audios; it just adds things to the margins that raise an eyebrow or two. (If you're treating Perfect Timing as canon, and I see no reason why you shouldn't, then you should be aware of the following: the First Doctor and Susan had a companion, Jed, before Ian and Brbara; the Voord were good guys; Sarah Jane was married, at least briefly, to a private eye; Kamelion is the last of his kind, and was created to worship a dead god; the Nimon are actually little blobs in giant, unconvincing minotaur suits; Grant traveled with the Doctor for years, during which time the Doctor had a Legion (from Lucifer Rising and The Crystal Bucephalus) as his companion, before finally being dropped off at the Bi-Al Foundation after a severe injury; the Eighth Doctor had or will have a companion named Carmen at some point, during which time he has a multi-Doctor adventure with the Sixth Doctor; the Doctor visited Grace Holloway several times on her birthdays after the telemovie, but could never convince her to travel with him; Bernice Summerfield traveled again with the Eighth Doctor after The Dying Days, but before Oh No It Isn't!, but we still don't know whether they shagged or not; and, finally, after the Doctor dies in some distant future point, one or more people take on his name and mission.) The only piece that's irreconcilable with canon is From the Cutting Room Floor, David McIntee's alternate versions of scenes from The Dark Path, and even some of those work just fine.

So, now that you've borne with me thus far, a discussion of the individual stories...

Lumping all the very short stuff together... personally, I prefer to see longer pieces in an anthology. If it's not at least a full page, I question the need for its inclusion at all. That said, that's just my personal quirk, so it's hard for me to judge The Use of the Myth, These UNIT Things, Second Hand, Doing It Right, Cheeky Things, Nightmare, and Transitions. None of them really lasted long enough to make an impression on me -- but that's just me.

Bear Paw Adventure, by David Howe, isn't exactly what you'd expect from a story that says it's going to explain the "Mountain Mauler of Montana" reference from The Romans. It's actually a story of a teen's prank gone wrong, and most of the real action takes place off-screen; however, it's well-characterized, and certainly the central idea, that traveling with the Doctor doesn't always leave you better off afterwards, is nicely expressed through Jed.

Always Let the Conscience Be Your Guide, by Mark Clapham and Jim Smith, expands on the world only glimpsed in The Keys of Marinus, and shows the wider conflict through the eyes of Yartek, the Voord leader. It drives home the idea already expressed in Keys, that free will is more important than the guidance the Conscience provides, and it does so with some interesting imagery and vivid prose.

Birth Pains, by Damon Cavalchini, is interesting, if sometimes incomprehensible; it attempts to do an over-view of the series from the perspective of the TARDIS. It's well-written, but the problem with writing from the perspective of something totally alien to human thought is that you wind up with something totally alien to human thought. Worth struggling through, but the very nature of it means you have to struggle.

Venusian Sunset, by Paul Leonard, returns us to Venus, this time with the Second Doctor. (A side note: This story features Ben and Polly, but not Jamie, and is hence set between Power of the Daleks and The Highlanders. Many novels make use of this team, even though it had a very short TV run before Jamie joined the team. Many novels make use of the Second Doctor and Jamie, because the two are such a great team. But nobody seems to want to use Ben, Polly, and Jamie all together. I don't know if this means anything, but there you go.) In any event, we return to Venus, but this story doesn't quite have the impact that Venusian Lullaby did, because it doesn't have that funereal atmosphere that permeated the former. A nice story, but a bit of a let-down as a sequel.

From the Cutting-Room Floor, by David McIntee, consists of excerpts from the unpublished sections of The Dark Path. McIntee's been vocal, publicly and privately, in his condemnation of the editing of The Dark Path, and so I was quite interested to see what was lost. On the whole, I don't think much was. Don't get me wrong, the material here isn't bad; there's a nice little self-contained story that shows the Master and Ailla "at work" before the events of the novel, and establishes their partnership. But I think that part of what makes The Dark Path so good is the focus it shows, and the pieces contained herein would, I think, have diluted that focus. It's nice to see these pieces, though, just like it's always fun to see 'Deleted Scenes' on a DVD. (And I think you could probably do a whole set of short stories or even novels featuring Koschei and Ailla.)

Thicket of Thieves, by Kathryn Sullivan, suffers from a profusion of characters and alien races introduced to each other in rapid succession, all with similar goals but different motivations. That said, it's got some great comedy scenes with the Second Doctor (particularly well-characterized here) and Jamie (likewise).

Entertaining Mr. O, by Paul Magrs, features Iris Wildthyme, and as such, I hated it before finishing even the first page. Iris has long since worn out her welcome with me, having turned from a cleverly post-modern examination of the role of the storyteller within the story into an irritating Mary-Sue who goes about wittering about how much better she is than the Doctor. I'm sorry, but the very mention of her name sends me into fits of rage, and as such, I can't review this story objectively. If you don't utterly hate Iris Wildthyme, you'll probably like this. However, if you don't utterly hate Iris Wildthyme, your name is probably Paul Magrs.

Masters of Terror, by James Ambuehl and Laurence J. Cornford, feels like it was written as part of a bet to see if you could fit H.P. Lovecraft, the Master, and the Silurians all into a single story. Which, mind you, they do, and make it all seem quite natural... it's just that I'm still so amazed that there's a story that juxtaposes those three elements that I can't think about what actually happened. Worth reading, just to see how it all fits.

Baron (Count) Dracula and Count (Baron) Frankenstein, by Stephen Marley, is a beautiful confection that takes place in the same setting as his novel, Managra. Marley has a great comic sensibility, and this piece is a smooth, delightful little comic gem that goes down in moments and leaves a wonderful after-taste in the brain. It makes me wish he'd write another Doctor Who book, or failing that, that BBV, Big Finish, Telos, or one of the other people doing spin-offs would start commissioning a series set in his 'Europa'. It really has the potential for a full series there.

The Aurelius Gambit, by Helen Fayle, commits one of the occasional sins of a Doctor Who short story, that of biting off more than it can chew. It brings in a new love interest for Sarah Jane Smith, while introducing a pair of criminals with access to alien technology who are committing crimes, then framing the Master for them in the sure and certain knowledge that the Master isn't going to care, and UNIT isn't going to catch him. That's a lot of great ideas, but it's also a lot of work for a short story, and unfortunately it all feels terribly unfinished. I'd love to see this expanded, though.

Not Necessarily In That Order..., by Paul Ebbs, is another comic gem. It's a very simple story, more an extended, shaggy-dog joke than an actual "story" per se, but it gains a lot of humor from the fact that the punchline is actually the set-up, and the whole thing is cleverly told out of order. A short, sweet little story.

Child of Darkness, by Daniel Blythe, is a Terminator pastiche, but cleverly done, tied-in well to the mythos, and with a wonderful twist ending. It's also got great prose and nice characterization. But apart from that, you know...

The Zargathon Menace, by Jonathan Morris... well, by now, my admiration of Jonny Morris has solidified into a Salieri-like envious hatred, so you can imagine how reading yet another clever, hilarious, well-written short story from him made me feel. You'll probably be reading his obituary soon enough, and I'll be eating his brains to gain his writing skills. That is how it works, right?

One Perfect Twilight, by Craig Hinton, is basically a solidified chunk of fanwank dropped into the anthology, but frankly you should have figured that out when you saw the name 'Craig Hinton' under the title, right? Fanwank works or doesn't depending on my mood, and I happened to be in the mood for this one; Kamelion's origin story caught my interest, and I polished it off quickly. Others might like it or not, depending on their respective tolerance levels for references to the series.

Ghost in the Machine, by Trina Short, is a cute little story with Turlough solving a cute little problem; I liked it, in no small part because the author paced it well and didn't pad it. Turlough's a bit of a jerk, but then again, that's just excellent characterization more than anything else.

The 6th Doctor Sends A Letter, by Charles Daniels, is a bit OTT, but contains some great lines, and captures the bombastic side of the 6th Doctor well (if, again, exaggerating it a bit for comic effect.)

The Great Journey of Life Ends Here, by Gary Russell, is a story idea mentioned in his introduction to Placebo Effect, but I really thought he was joking. He wasn't. This story is, indeed, a Nimon vs. Macra story, which was turned down to make way for his Foamasi vs. Wirrrn story. Actually, this is better; given a short story instead of a novel, Russell eliminates a lot of the padding that afflicts his longer works, and while the two monsters don't get much time "on-screen", he at least gives them a sense of menace. And I think he's probably been waiting years to explain away the Nimon's costumes.

Wish Upon A Star Beast, by Steve Lyons, suffers from one flaw -- he never does explain why the villainous Santa Claus wants to unleash a horde of vicious killer Meeps upon the unsuspecting children of Earth on Christmas Eve by generating Black Star radiation from the Christmas Miracle Star. But frankly, if that's the plot of your story, who really needs an explanation for it? This is drop-dead hilarious, and a delight to read.

Schroedinger's Botanist, by Ian McIntire, is pretty much everything you ever need to know if you want to do a book set during Grant Markham's time as a companion. Which, admittedly, people haven't exactly been clamoring for, but if anyone does, they should read this story first. McIntire conveys the passage of years through smooth, elegant prose, and develops Grant quite a bit in the process. It also gives him a nice, if very sad, departure scene, something he never got in the books.

Chain Male, by Keith Topping, further develops that weird thing he, Martin Day, and Paul Cornell have worked out with Ian and Barbara's son John becoming a rock star and getting married to Tegan. I'm sure if I'd been following their fan-fiction for decades, I'd get a lot out of this, but I haven't, so it just confused me more.

Ascension, by Stephen Graves, takes place between So Vile A Sin and Bad Therapy, and feels like it fits in perfectly. It's got amazingly good characterization of the post-Roz relationship between Chris and the Doctor, and explores it quite nicely. The plot's another "life-force vampires luring in innocents" one, but well-executed for all that. Another excellent read. (Oh, and the Doctor gets one tremendous line that neatly encapsulates every fan's thought about Chris.)

Caveat Emptor, by Susannah Tiller, is a short, sharp story about the fate of the last human, and the role the Doctor plays in it. I liked it, but it's so short that it's hard to dislike. It certainly doesn't wear out its welcome.

Doctor-Patient Relationship, by Kate Orman and Jon Blum, is actually from the first draft of Vampire Science, but it's so far removed from what we finally got (since permission was withdrawn to use Grace Holloway) that it's essentially a separate, self-contained story now. And on that level, it works quite well. Wonderful prose, like I expected anything else; great characterization, like I expected anything else; a clever central idea, well-developed -- see points one and two. It's interesting to think that part of the reason they included the bit in Vampire Science about the Doctor making side trips away from Sam was to have room for this opening chapter; instead, that's now become justification for Stacy, Ssard, The Dying Days, and the entire Big Finish run. He must have been pretty eager to ditch her... not that I blame him.

Worm, by Lance Parkin, takes place in that same gap, suggesting that the Doctor and Benny took more than a few side trips on their way to Dellah. It's also a story that takes a great idea and develops it wonderfully -- finally, a race of monsters that takes the Doctor's advice and just surrenders. I've never heard of this "Lance Parkin" fellow before, but I think he just might be someone to watch.

The Ravages of Time, by Mags L. Halliday, shows yet another Eighth Doctor and Benny story, yet another story featuring Poe, and another famous person traveling with the Doctor (anyone want to do a multi-Doctor story with the Sixth Doctor, the Seventh Doctor, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe?) Yet, despite all this, it comes off as original, and in its brief space tells a lot of story. It could probably have done without the "story-in-a-story-in-a-story" device, but it's still a good piece.

Emerald Green, by Mark Phippen, isn't bad. It's not great -- for one thing, it labors under the weight of Sam Jones, the anchor who drags all stories down in which she appears -- but it's a decent enough piece of storytelling that doesn't falter or confuse itself.

Sad Professor, by Nick Walters, shamelessly panders to the fanboys by giving us a meeting between the Eighth Doctor, Sam, and Benny, set on Dellah not long before Where Angels Fear. Speaking as a fanboy, I say pander away! Highly enjoyable, but I confess a bias.

Dark Paragon, by Jon Andersen, I wound up not being fond of. The central idea, that the Doctor found a successor to carry on after he died and that she named herself the Doctor as well, is very clever; the further development, that the Master goes after the new Doctor in order to spite his old enemy is also good. But the problem is, there's no story to go with those ideas. The Master relentlessly stalks the new Doctor and, on all the worlds where he catches up to her, yammers on about how the old Doctor wasn't all that good of a person. The story never manages to rise above the three problems with this -- first, that the Master isn't exactly threatening when he relentlessly talks to his foes, second, that the Master complaining about the Doctor's lack of moral rectitude is like Adolph Hitler bitching that Ghandi forgot to buy a birthday card for his grandmother one year, and third, that after the third planet and conversation, the whole thing starts to feel like a Moebius loop. A lot of very good ideas, but I think it needed another draft or two.

So, after all that reviewing, what's my ultimate opinion? If anyone managed to last through what was, quite possibly, the longest review I've ever written (and I don't blame you if you haven't), I'd ultimately say that this was great. Doctor Who has had a slightly spotty record in the short story area, but I think this anthology shows that you can do something amazing with the form.

Review: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 15 July 2002.)

Part of it is that I think I just resonate with Lawrence Miles. Part of it is that I enjoy reading the non-fiction history books that Adventuress emulates. Part of it is that I'm loving finally seeing the consequences of The Ancestor Cell dealt with in some measure. But for all those reasons and more, I loved this book. Small print, thin margins, and all... I'm definitely looking forward to see what happens next. (And incidentally, I no longer believe anyone who tells me that the BBC has moved on to do continuity free adventures with a Doctor who's a tabula rasa, able to adventure free and clear of his convoluted past. Every single one of the above books, not just Mad Larry, had the Doctor remember bits and pieces of his past in throwaway dialogue, and every one of them "resonated" with Ancestor Cell in some way. It's as if all of the authors were champing at the bit to do continuity references, and were restraining themselves with great effort. With Adventuress, we finally start getting some overt continuity, and I for one welcome it. I just wish we had a reality where Lawrence Miles worked better with his fellow authors, instead of alienating them... bringing them along in his visions...*sigh* Oh well. We'll set that aside with our Harlan Ellison Doctor Who book.)

As for Sabbath, well... I'm curious to see what he'll do next. That's about all I can say -- there wasn't really enough of him that I felt I could like or dislike him. I did feel that he crossed a line when he took the Doctor's heart, and that if the Doctor had been in full possession of his faculties (and when he regains them, whenever that is) he would never have allowed it (and will reverse it). But I also felt like I was meant to feel that way -- that it was meant to seem like a violation of the Doctor, not like a "Yaaay!" sort of moment.

I'll be starting on Mad Dogs and Englishmen soon, and I have up through Trading Futures... beyond that, of course, it's down to the vagaries of the distribution system.

Capsule Review: The Eleven-Day Empire

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 30 March, 2004.)

I'm finally getting into the Faction Paradox audios now, and I have to say, these deserve to be getting more interest and praise than they are. The characters are immediately interesting, with Godfather Morlock stepping in, as it were, for the Doctor by acting as the enigmatic mentor, and Cousins Justine and Eliza are each well-drawn (although the first audio focuses more on Justine.) The dialogue is great, a staple of Miles' writing, and while the story doesn't go far (a limitation of one-CD audios), it certainly whets the appetite for The Shadowplay. I loved it.

Review: Doctor Who - The Audio Scripts

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on  31 March, 2003.)

I was a little surprised to find out that Big Finish was releasing a book of their audio scripts -- after all, they'd said on their website that they had no interest in putting out print versions of their audios, since the audio was a hard enough format to get people interested in. It's certainly been a hard format to get me interested in, mainly because a lifetime of reading has trained me to tune out the noises around me so I can concentrate on visual stimuli, which is a bad trait to have when you're trying to listen to an audio-only drama.

In other words, I was quite glad to see a book of audio scripts from Big Finish. I hadn't been avoiding their work on any principle of cost or quality, but simply because the medium didn't appeal to me... and this nice hardcover book was going to give me a chance to read some of the Doctor Who I'd missed out on as a result. As it turned out, there was quite a lot of good Who in here (and some bad, as well, but you can't have everything) -- it served as a good read, a nice work of reference on the four audios it contained, and enough of an advertisement that I'm probably going to be buying two of the four audios just to hear the voice performances. So on the whole, I'd call this an excellent success for Big Finish, and I hope very much that this is just the first volume of many.

Loups-Garoux, by Marc Platt, was one of the reasons I bought this book -- I'd heard a lot of raves about the story, and I've also been a huge fan of Platt ever since Ghost Light. I wasn't disappointed, either... this is a great story. Pieter Stubbe is a wonderful villain, filled with a dark and menacing charm, and I find myself wanting to buy the audio just to hear his voice when he delivers lines like, "Huh. Grandmothers. I've had my fill of grandmothers." Doctor Who has given us very few villains as utterly cool as Stubbe, and my only wish is to somehow see him again. The other characters are nice too, and the regulars are dealt with well (I love the Doctor's awkward, tentative stabs at romance), and although the plot sometimes seems a little vague, it's never contradictory and always engaging.

The Holy Terror, by Rob Shearman... wow. This has been billed by many as a comedy (sometimes prefaced with the words "dark"), but don't be fooled. This is actually an intense drama with comic moments strategically placed to relieve the tension like lightning bolts in a storm. The whole thing is an exploration of responsibility -- What responsibility does the Creator have to his Creation? -- and it's dealt with on many levels, from Frobisher hunting down the gumblejack he created out of the TARDIS databanks to Pepin VII refusing to become a god to his subjects to the final, shattering denoument in which we see who the Creator really is, and what he's been doing to his creations all along. It's violent, it's bloody, it's gory, but there's never a moment in which I don't believe that this is the natural, inevitable progress of events -- I've got to get this on audio, because I think it's possibly one of the best works of Who to have shown up in a while. It's on a very high plane, and I recommend it a lot.

The Fires of Vulcan, by Steve Lyons, is... solid. It's like a lot of Steve Lyons books -- the characterization is sound, the plot unfolds well enough, there are reasonably clever moments, and on the whole, there are far worse ways to pass an afternoon (or evening, in my case) than to read it. But don't expect something world-shatteringly good. It's solid. That's probably damning it with faint praise, but there's really nothing else you can say.

Neverland, by Alan Barnes... yeurgh. This is the "bad Who" I was talking about earlier. I understand that Gary Russell wants to show off not just the quality of the scripts, but also the storylines and writers that he's developed at Big Finish. Hence, instead of including a probable crowd-pleaser Eighth Doctor story such as The Stones of Venice, Invaders From Mars, or Seasons of Fear (I'm basing this on the writers involved, not on having heard the audios), he went with one of his own writers, and a story tied strongly in with the Big Finish Eighth Doctor mythos. This proves to be a mistake, in my opinion, because Barnes isn't a very good writer, and Neverland isn't a very good story. The whole thing reads like a second-hand-shop version of the War, and although there are a few cute ideas (dispersed Time Lords continuing to exist somewhere, Time Lords donating lives to soldiers in the fight), there's a lot of codswallop (why do anti-time creatures feed on time? Shouldn't they annihilate each other?) and blather (Zagreus, Zagreus, Zagreus, yadda yadda yadda.) The Eighth Doctor... I will never again claim that the Eighth Doctor in the books doesn't have a distinct character anymore, because now I've read Neverland, and I can at least tell you who he isn't. He's not this guy. Ironic, since Paul McGann actually voiced these lines, but this isn't the Doctor. There are further problems with this as the selection (it relies heavily on knowledge of previous audios, it ends on a cliff-hanger) but the biggest one is that it's just plain bad. Not the best way to end the book.

Still, with four stories and only one being dross (and two being spectacular), that gives it a pretty good claim to be worth picking up -- and it helps that this also doubles as a reference work, for those people who want to refer back to events in The Holy Terror but don't have a good fast-forward/rewind feature on their CD player. I'd love to see another volume of these, perhaps one featuring The Shadow of the Scourge or an all-Excelis edition... and Big Finish needn't worry about this cutting into their audio sales. If anything, it'll increase them.

Review: Campaign

(This post originally appeared on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 7 February, 2003.)

So, now we know what it takes to get blackballed from the BBC entirely.

Actually, that's not fair to Mortimore -- Campaign did not get shot down because of a judgement of its quality, it got shot down because it was not the book he told them he was going to write. I do feel that had he submitted the idea for Campaign as he wrote it, it could very well have been accepted -- it's a fascinating story that, somewhat in the manner of The Edge of Destruction, dissects the characters of the first TARDIS crew in great detail, even while pretty much ignoring the plot. There's a lot of fascinating, poetic writing in here, and a lot of amusing nods to such non-canonical stories as The Masters of Luxor and the novelization of The Daleks... but ultimately, I think, you'll get a lot more out of Campaign if you already know the twist at the end.

Spoilers for said twist...

In the end, we learn that the entire novel we've been reading -- the death of all the Tardis regulars, the destruction of the universe, their journeys with Alexander -- all of it was just one big trippy virtual reality game called 'The Game of Me'. This would have infuriated me had I not known it was coming -- there's just enough of a hint of a plot to Campaign that it does seem like Mortimore is leading somewhere with his references to Aristotle "fixing" the T.A.R.D.I.S., and the idea of "breaks in history" and discrepancies among the memories of the Tardis crew. It seems like something you can puzzle out -- is the TARDIS really pregnant? Did the Doctor and his companions destroy the universe by interfering with history in Alexander's timeline? Can all this be fixed? To learn that the answer is, "It's all just a big video game!" is a huge let-down.

Luckily, I already knew from the beginning that it was all just a big video game, and could focus on the writing involved. Which is... wow, it's nice. Mortimore has always focused on beautiful prose at the expense of the plot, so in some ways this is the culmination of that trend; the plot is utterly irrelevant, so he's free to write some amazing, hallucinogenic prose as he puts Ian, Barbara, Susan, Mandy, Lola, and Cliff through the wringer. For everyone who thinks of Mortimore as a companion-torturer, this won't change your opinions... every companion dies violent death after violent death. (The scene where Ian kills the Doctor a dozen or so times sticks out in the mind.)

Campaign fails on a number of levels, to be honest; the plot's pants, the whole thing turns incoherent towards the end, and I honestly can't say I'm surprised that the BBC rejected it. But if you're willing to accept those flaws and read it as, say, an extended prose poem, it's well worth taking a look at.

Review: Loving the Alien

(This post originally appeared on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 3 April, 2005.)

A Review by John Seavey 3/4/05

When I first heard about Loving the Alien, I was interested despite not enjoying any of Mike Tucker and Steve Perry's previous Doctor Who novels. The idea of a PDA that actually formed a story arc with Prime Time and Heritage, that followed up on the events of previous novels... well, it intrigued me, and so I approached Loving the Alien with cautious optimism.

Despite a promising opening, I think I can safely say that it wasn't justified.

The story is murky, muddled, confused and confusing; Ace's death, the hook that draws us into the novel, is dealt with in an irritating and disappointing fashion; the characters are dull, the Doctor's an idiot, the villain's lame, and the ending is incomprehensible. The "About the Author" section claims that this novel ends the story arc begun in Illegal Alien... my only prayer is that Perry and Tucker decide never to put pen to paper again.

The big important plot point of the book, of course, the thing that draws us into the novel, is an elegant idea -- the Doctor finds Ace's body, and has to try to figure out how to stop a murder that has already taken place. This is a great hook for a Doctor Who novel, and the opening scene with the Doctor conducting an autopsy on Ace's corpse, charting the course of events that will lead to her demise while swearing to save her, even if he has to break the Laws of Time, is a wonderful opening to the novel.

Then the Doctor lets Ace wander off on her own without him and she gets shot in the head and dies. Well, there goes the suspense and excitement... not to mention, the Doctor comes off looking like an idiot as well. We're told that when she wanders off at Woodstock, the Doctor utterly freaks out -- suddenly, he's blithely letting her traipse off to God-Knows-Where mere hours before he knows for a fact that her body's going to be fished out of the Thames, with only a homing beacon to locate her by. This isn't "saving her, even if he has to break the Laws of Time" -- this is "not even trying to save her, and letting events take their course." It doesn't deliver on the promise of the novel, it doesn't pay off later in the book, and it's a frankly awful way to deal with what could have been a truly great story.

After that, there's loads of wandering around and fighting, with alternate realities popping up left and right (the Doctor's explanations to Limb and O'Brien do contradict the way history is explained in Time Zero, but I can at least rationalize this away by believing that the Doctor, pressed for time, does not get into the details of time travel and alternate realities the way he does with Sabbath, who understands the physics involved.) Plenty of people die, others get saved, and we're never given any real reason to care about any of them. The authors clearly believe that we should care about Cody McBride, Chief Inspector Mullen, and Rita Hawks, because they devote loads of page time to them and because the Doctor and Ace like them, but giving more page time to boring characters fails to make them less boring. It just grates.

In the end, reality and the multiverse is saved because... um... apparently because James Dean crashed his car into George Limb's time machine, although I think that the Doctor must have done something else off-screen to repair the damage to reality, because that sure as heck doesn't make sense as an explanation. Then again, it's all you're going to be given, so go with it. Oh, and Ace's death doesn't matter, because the Doctor adopts a new Ace from another reality, and that makes it all better. I think the phrase "Yeurgh" neatly sums up my reaction to the last half of this novel. (And as a side note: Perry and Tucker's gargantuan retcon doesn't work as an explanation of why "their" Ace has a surname of Gale and the New Adventures Ace has a surname of McShane. They claim that the new, alternate reality Ace has trouble remembering her surname -- however, that wouldn't explain why Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart found records of the disappearance of a Dorothy McShane. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure they mention Ace's mum's name in Happy Endings...)

On the whole, if you quit reading at about page 110 and make up your own, far better ending, Loving the Alien is a decent book. If you read the whole thing cover to cover, though... you have my sympathies.

Review: Doctor Who: The Scripts - The Masters of Luxor

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to review 'The Masters of Luxor'. I mean, this is basically a discussion of a historical curiosity, a first draft of a script that wasn't deemed good enough to warrant a second draft, made for a production whose style of drama is now sitting comfortably at fifty-one years out of date. Is it even worth it to discuss the quality here? Does it even make sense to try?

In case the answer is "yes", I can say that 'The Masters of Luxor' as published isn't very good. There's a lot of random conjecture that turns out to be absolutely right for no reason beyond the writer having no real mechanism to deliver exposition about the dead, silent city and its robotic inhabitants. There's not much action over the six episodes, there's a lot of discussion about religion that seems weird and out of place as well as slow and talky, and the Perfect One is simply not very exciting as an adversary. There's some nice atmosphere at points, but it's really nothing that the city in 'The Daleks' didn't do better. Oh, and although the dialogue would certainly have been rewritten further in later drafts (and was rewritten for the script book already, according to the afterword) it still sounds clunky and not particularly like any of the regulars. Basically, it's not hard to see how they went a different direction after this.

But again, the quality isn't necessarily what we look at with this one. It's interesting to read it not because it's good, but because it demonstrates the thought processes of the people working on the series at the time. They knew they wanted to contrast the first "science fiction" episode of the series with the "historical" they'd already done, and their mental focus was obviously on the potential for sterility and inhumanity inherent in science. The unseen Masters of Luxor had gone down a path of eugenics, which wasn't (yet) a component of the Daleks' evil, but both of them shared the notion of a world where science gone mad had led to a world on the brink of death, and a city that was a scientific paradise with nobody left to live in it.

The discarded humanity is personified in both stories; in 'The Daleks', it's the Thals who skulk outside of the abandoned city, scarred by memories of a century-old war. In 'The Masters of Luxor', it's Tabon, who abandoned himself to exile and suspended animation rather than face the consequences of his experimentation. The Thals, of course, are just as responsible for the Daleks (in the original story, at least) as Tabon was for the Perfect One, but their ancestors' aggression and violence is downplayed to the point where the act of resuming the war against their old enemies is seen as a positive act and not a resumption of a campaign of genocide. Perhaps the production team weren't quite ready for Tabon's guilt, or perhaps they simply wanted more sympathetic characters? It's hard to sympathize with anyone outside of the regular cast in 'The Masters of Luxor', and Tabon's self-sacrifice seems more to be his just desserts than a tragic comeuppance.

Or honestly, it could have just been practical concerns. There are a lot of freaking robot costumes in this one, far more than the number of Daleks that appear on-screen. The TARDIS flies, something it did rarely in the Classic Series, and of course the story ends with the entire city exploding. It might very well have been judged unworkable in light of their budgetary concerns. (At the very least, 'The Daleks' stretched out the sets and costumes over an extra episode.)

Ultimately, we may never know exactly what caused this script to be rejected in favor of Nation's story, but I think we can answer one question. In the introduction, John McElroy asks, "In a universe of infinite possibilities, there are of course worlds in which [Masters] was the second story--I wonder if Doctor Who is still running there?" Based on this script, I'm guessing not.

Review: 12 Stories, 12 Doctors

I finally managed to get hold of a copy of the 50th anniversary novella collection, '12 Stories, 12 Doctors' (yes, I got what I'm calling the "Fuck You, Everyone Who Bought a Previous Edition" Edition) and I have to say, on the whole I was immensely satisfied. There were a few flaws--I'll get into them more as they crop up in specific stories, but they all seem to stem from a problem I'll call "Famous Writer, First-Time Who Writer Syndrome". It's what happens when someone who is an extremely talented writer decides to jump into the Doctor Who pool with what they think is a fantastically clever and original idea, all without being aware that it's already been done six times in five decades from every conceivable angle. The result doesn't feel as innovative as they no doubt hope for.

Nonetheless, this is an incredibly impressive collection of talent turning their collective hand to Doctor Who, and I think the results speak for themselves. Even so, I'm going to add my two cents. As follows...

1) "A Big Hand for the Doctor" by Eoin Colfer. This is a story that, depending on how you look at it, either "gets everything wrong" or "takes advantage of the wider scope available to a story that isn't written in 1963 for production in Lime Grove Studios with William Hartnell to do exciting and interesting things that simply weren't possible at the time, but that expand the conceptual space of the First Doctor". (Guess which side I'm on.) This is a fun story, albeit one that isn't attempting to slavishly recreate the Hartnell era, and it has an impish charm to the way it reinterprets canon without ever actually rewriting it. The coda is a bit twee--Colfer's FWFTWWS manifests here by having a Famous Author witness the events of the story and turn them into fiction, just like Wells and Dickens and Christie and and and...but the coda is short enough that the story doesn't suffer for it.

2) "The Nameless City" by Michael Scott. The Second Doctor and Jamie are manipulated into battle against vaguely Lovecraftian monsters by a thinly-disguised Delgado Master. So basically, here the FWFTWWS is Michael Scott not realizing that he's pastiching every third New or Missing Adventure. (Or maybe he does, and it's all done on purpose. Can't rule that out.) Nonetheless, it's well handled and spooky, with some interesting details that make the Doctor and his TARDIS seem strange and creepy all over again, and a resolution that's fun and clever.

3) "The Spear of Destiny" by Marcus Sedgwick. It wouldn't be a Third Doctor story without the Master showing up to provide the second-act twist, and I certainly won't fault Sedgwick for not being made aware that the previous story also involved the Master. (Especially since as originally published, there was a month-long gap between the two stories.) It certainly doesn't dampen what comes off as a letter-perfect pastiche of the Pertwee era, from the "UNIT family" to the cod-'In Search Of' fixation on weird and spooky legendary pseudo-archaeological artifacts (in this case, the titular Spear) and the sheer confounding Pertwee-ness of Pertwee. He gets that wonderfully frustrating paternalism dead on, and it's charming to watch him work in what feels like a slightly shortened version of a missing episode.

4) "The Roots of Evil" by Philip Reeve. This is definitely one of the highlights of the anthology. The Doctor and Leela get involved in some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey shenanigans involving a future incarnation (the Doctor is justly horrified to find out he will be wearing a bow-tie someday) that has set a lost human colony on a path of undying hatred against him. (One of the characters, "Ven", turns out to have a full name of "Vengeance-Against-The-Doctor-Shall-Someday-Be-Ours". The Doctor responds by admitting that would be a bit of a mouthful, and offering him a jelly baby.) Needless to say, there are horrific secrets at the heart of the colony, gruesome monsters, and witty bon mots dropped casually into the barking mad villain's monologues. It's not just a pastiche, it's a charming and clever story in its own right.

5) "Tip of the Tongue" by Patrick Ness. This is one of the ones that feels most like an actual children's story, perhaps because it focuses mainly on actual children. There's a certain sly understanding of the way that children deal with things that remain unspoken, yet are understood perfectly by all concerned; Nellie, one of the two main characters, is constantly dealing with emotions and realities too big to be spoken out loud. The thematic depth gives a lot of weight and realism to a story that might otherwise feel surreal or silly. The Doctor's barely in it, but I didn't mind that at all, given how well the prose flowed.

6) "Something Borrowed" by Richelle Mead. This was another favorite--telling the story from Peri's perspective gives some dramatic heft to a character that got stuck in the peril monkey role all too often in the series, and the Rani is a good choice of villain for an anniversary celebration. There's some material that's a little bit telegraphed, which is more a factor of the short space the author has to work with, but the whole thing is well-written and fun. (Although I did come away wondering what's going to stop the Rani from going ten miles down the road and doing the same thing all over again...)

7) "The Ripple Effect" by Malorie Blackman. This one, unfortunately, suffered from FWFTWWS big-time. The idea of the Doctor encountering Daleks that don't act like Daleks, and being unable to set aside his fear and hatred of them, is something that's already been done in stories like "Dalek", "Victory of the Daleks", and "Dalek Generation". The idea of the Doctor having to erase a parallel universe that's actually better than ours because of Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Reasons has already been done in "Genocide" and "The Girl Who Waited". And without the space to really develop either idea, it's hard to make this seem like anything other than a retread of things other authors have already done. If she'd had a chance to expand it to novel length, and had to do more than just reiterate these tropes, it might have turned out very special...but as it was, it kind of overstayed its welcome.

8) "Spore" by Alex Scarrow. Weirdly, it's the Eighth Doctor story that goes for the purely Hinchcliffian horror tale...but it does a reasonably effective job, with a space fungus that liquifies everything it touches and converts it into monsters. Perhaps a little too short to be effective--at novella length, the story barely has time to convey the threat before the Doctor resolves it--but it does a good job of what it sets out to achieve. And the pseudo-companion is a soldier who appears to be Asian-American, which is a nice change from the typical white dude/screamy white woman.

9) "The Beast of Babylon" by Charlie Higson. At first, this one seems like it might be going down a road that's a bit too kiddie--the Ninth Doctor teams up with a teenage girl named Ali for an adventure in Ancient Babylon! But just when you start expecting Ali to learn valuable lessons about Olden Times before coming back home, Higson makes clever use of the prose format to reveal a few details about Ali that weren't quite what was expected, turning the story into something of a shocking twist on the pseudo-companion tropes that are common to solo Doctor stories. Far from being FWFTWWS, this one feels like someone cleverly subverting the structure of a Who story in a unique and inventive way.

10) "The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage" by Derek Landy. This author and this Doctor seem made for each other. Landy has his finger perfectly on Tennant's lightning-fast patter, his gift of gab and his brilliant command of every situation (there's a wonderful sequence where the Doctor is challenged to a chess match, and announces that his opponent is so over-matched that there's no need to even play the game). Combine that with some hilarious jokes about children's literature and books in general (as they struggle to escape a world composed of Martha's literary tastes, they pass a scene from 'Twilight' and Martha simply hisses out, "Don't judge me") and you've got a story that brought a huge smile to my face.

11) "Nothing O'Clock" by Neil Gaiman. I don't wish to diminish any of the other authors in this anthology, all of whom are luminaries in their field and are immensely talented. But this is just a quantum leap beyond everything else in the book in terms of quality. It captures the Eleventh Doctor and Amy's voice perfectly. It expands on tiny details of their depictions on television in ways that really make me wish for more Past Doctor Adventures just to get this kind of contextualization on a more regular basis. It has one of the all-time great and creepy monsters in the Kin, which are not only great and creepy but perfectly encapsulate the fairy-tale ethos of the Moffat era without simply pastiching it. It has one of perhaps the best ever "Doctor fucks over the bad guy" moments, which I went back to read about five times (including one time reading the entire story out loud to my wife because it was just that much fun to revel in the prose). And oh by the way it's just awesome. Again, I don't want to suggest that the other stories in this book weren't great, but this is just a level of great that's above other levels of great, because Neil Gaiman is a one-in-a-billion talent and one of the best authors of our time. It is a pastiche, which is something that caused me a moment's pause because I would be interested in a take on Doctor Who that is solely Neil Gaiman's--a producer's take, if you will, instead of a writer's take. But that's merely a quibble that shouldn't stop anyone from picking up a must-read story.

12) "Lights Out" by Holly Black. This was probably a tricky brief, taking the Doctor with the fewest stories and trying to capture his voice. Black does a good job, though, capturing the spiky exterior of the Twelfth Doctor and the depth of feeling it conceals. The story is also in keeping with this Doctor, as well; it's a murder mystery, a character study and a moral dilemma all at once. You can easily see it fitting between 'Deep Breath' and 'Into the Dalek', and not just because that's where the author clearly sets it. A solid conclusion to the anthology, although I can understand being frustrated that Puffin seems to think it's worth sixteen bucks all by itself.

So there you have it. Plenty of good ones, very few weak ones, and one that's an absolute must-read. That's a pretty good record for a Who anthology, and it shows that in good hands, there's still a lot of interesting life to every Doctor. I look forward to another fifty years.

Review: Doctor Who - The Blood Cell

First, a bit of full disclosure--I pitched a Doctor Who novel back before the new series revival that featured a manipulative Doctor trapped in an inescapable asteroid prison, which may have colored my enjoyment of this book with the faint taste of nostalgia. That said, a big part of why I wrote my pitch for 'Heist' the way I did was because I wanted to evoke some of my favorite elements of 'Doctor Who' during the McCoy/New Adventures era, the unexpected reveals of the Doctor in bizarre situations and the way he put authority figures so brilliantly off-balance. So it's not really so much that James Goss wrote a book I would have loved to have written as it is that he wrote a book that fits squarely into the traditions of the series that I love best.

And boy, did he. The very first scene is an absolute marvel--it's not just the reveal of the Doctor, it's not just the reveal of the prison. It's the Governor. The narration of the entire sequence, indeed of the entire book, is from his point of view...and it's wrong. Not in any way you can pinpoint yet, but something about the Governor is magnificently, ineffably wrong. The Governor is a man with mysteries to unravel, and the Prison is a place that conceals more than just prisoners. That initial scene pulls you all the way through the narrative on the sheer force of its writing.

And the rest of the novel is paced brilliantly. Each revelation, from the power outages to Clara's arrival to the Doctor's interactions with the other prisoners to the...well, but that would be telling, wouldn't it? They all come at exactly the right time to immerse you further into the story, to tantalize you with the next set of questions and the next set of answers. The Governor's palpable wrongness is teased out of the story expertly, the confessions drawn out of him at exactly the right times. Goss really is performing a masterwork of plotting, and his quiet, almost serene style nonetheless exacerbates the constant tension in the book.

And of course, Goss has a perfect handle on Capaldi and Coleman's renditions of their characters. The book feels like it couldn't be done with anyone other than Twelve and Clara, and the interplay between them sparkles magnificently. (The scene where Clara asks the Doctor why he can't simply regenerate his way out of a stubbed toe is a thing of beauty.)

Ultimately, the ending is satisfying, although it perhaps tries to ramp up the scale of its threat just a bit too much for what has up until now been an entirely holistic and seamless sense of menace. But it is unquestionably excellent, a masterpiece as both a Doctor Who story and a character study. The Governor will stay with you long after 'The Blood Cell' ends, an impressive achievement for any book. This is definitely one of the reasons to stick with the Doctor Who novels even though the television series has taken over a lot of their primacy in the greater narrative; it's worth sticking with them because every once in a while, they give you a novel like this.

Review: Doctor Who - Silhouette

It's sometimes difficult to remember, but there are actually two Justin Richards out there. The first Justin Richards is Justin on autopilot, the Justin who's asked to write a 250-page novel on about three weeks' notice and comes up with something palatable in that span of time, or the Justin Richards who writes the messy "arc plot" novels that are more of a laundry list of plot elements than an actual idea. It's the Justin Richards who wrote books like 'Grave Matter' or 'Time Zero' or 'Apollo 23'--not a bad writer by any stretch, but not a great writer either. He's a competent, reliable writer, no more or less.

And then there's the Justin Richards who wrote 'Silhouette'. This is Justin Richards when he's engaged with the material, when he's challenged by the writers around him to do his best work. This Justin Richards instantly grasps the tiny nuances of dialogue and mannerism that separate the Capaldi Doctor from the Smith Doctor, and writes him with that simmering, icy anger just beneath the surface that Capaldi's performance brings out. This Justin Richards relishes the chance to write for characters like Strax, Vastra and Jenny, effortlessly displaying the character dynamics between them and showing why so many people feel like they should have their own spin-off by now.

This Justin Richards delivers a Victorian mystery with science-fiction elements that seamlessly evokes the current season of the television series. It's a pastiche, without question--Richards isn't trying to do something that couldn't be done on television, he's trying to do something that would fit right next to 'Deep Breath' in the Doctor Who canon. But it's a pastiche that's executed with verve and energy and joy, one that feels fresh and exciting simply because it's been done so well. Richards "gets" modern Who, and he's having fun playing with it. That's not to say there's nothing he does that couldn't be done on the show--the scene where Affinity, the villain's shapeshifting henchman, tries to cast his glamour on the Doctor and repeatedly gets the wrong incarnation out of it is a treat--but the main point is that right now, the televised Doctor Who is good enough that pastiching it well is something to be proud of.

This Justin Richards doesn't make as many appearances as he used to--which isn't surprising, since he's the editor of the Doctor Who range and his commissions usually mean that there was an emergency somewhere along the line that required that other Justin Richards to step in and whip out a book in a hurry. But when we do get this Justin, I'm reminded that he's a great writer who can come back and do another book any time he wants to.

Review: Doctor Who - The Crawling Terror

Review: Doctor Who - The Crawling Terror I'll be honest--I very nearly left this review as just the word, "Functional". Because that's all 'The Crawling Terror' is. It's a story that manages to tick off the requisite boxes in the "Doctor Who story" checklist and doesn't fail too hard at any of them. It's a book that achieves the goal of not irritating you, and nothing more. Which, given that it's being compared to the whirling fireworks of unpredictable creativity seen in the televised version, means that it actually fails very badly indeed.

In many ways, this is exactly the book for someone who thinks that the TV show is too unpredictable, because it couldn't be trying harder to be a "classic" Doctor Who story. The Doctor and his companion land in a quiet English village (tick!) where a mysterious, disfigured scientist (tick!) has been conducting strange experiments at his newfangled lab that the locals distrust (tick!). The experiments unleash monsters (in this case, giant insects--tick!) that mentally enslave the locals into doing their bidding (tick!) and it turns out that aliens were behind the whole thing and the evil scientist is collaborating with them (tick!). The monsters isolate the village from the outside world (tick!), with only a token heroic military presence just outside who is out of their depth when dealing with monsters but struggles on nonetheless (at this point, you can just go ahead and tick all remaining boxes on the list. If you made a Doctor Who Bingo game, this would be the blackout card.)

This isn't to say that you can't do anything with the classic Doctor Who tropes--Mark Gatiss is a hardcore traditionalist, and he makes his stories work by executing the tropes well and occasionally playing with them a bit. But here, everything is simply a sketch of things that were done better elsewhere. The Doctor is utterly generic, with none of the acerbic wit that marks Capaldi's performances, and Clara hits the beats in her story bible and nothing more. The supporting characters are caricatures, both the good and the bad, and the monsters are just big angry bugs of one sort or another. There's nothing to make this book stand out anywhere.

But even that isn't what makes 'The Crawling Terror' so frustrating. It's a bland, inoffensive TV tie-in novel pitched to tweens and teens, no different from many others on the market. It isn't bad, it isn't good, it's just a quick way to pass an hour or so before you move on to anothr book. That's what you get with Mike Tucker.

What's frustrating is that they knew they'd be getting that with Mike Tucker, and they commissioned him for this slot anyway. We've been getting fewer and fewer novels ever since the TV series restarted; why on Earth would you spend one of those precious slots on a bland timewaster when there are so many good Doctor Who writers out there? Why not slot in someone like Kate Orman, who can write a better novel than this while trapped in a safe underwater? Why not slot in some of the recent good writers that have done excellent Eleventh Doctor books, like Oli Smith, or Una McCormack, or Naomi Alderman? Even if you assume that they can't try an untested writer for the first few slots of the new Doctor, due to secrecy concerns for upcoming plot developments, there are better people out there than this. There are people out there who would try, and 'The Crawling Terror' doesn't try. It's content simply to be a book about the Doctor, and we all know that the line is capable of so much more.

Review: The Book of the Still

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on March 20, 03.)

The Book of the Still reminds me of no other debut novel in the history of the various ranges so much as Lawrence Miles' Christmas on a Rational Planet. Like Miles, Paul Ebbs brings so much energy, zest, and sheer swaggering charisma to the book that it feels like something new and ground-breaking, even though it's "just" a first novel. Both of them are flawed, as first-time authors tend to be, but both of them have a prose style that doesn't let even a single passage go by without trying to make it something special, something exciting, something that's never been done in Who before. It's that energy that lifts the book up to one of the better first novels I've read, and that makes me proud to be a fan of Doctor Who.

Right from the beginning, which Ebbs entitles the "Obligatory Spectacular Opening", we get a sense of amazing energy. The Doctor attempts to steal the eponymous Book through a plan that involves free-falling from orbit, a scene of dazzling excitement that sets the pace for the book to follow. We get lots of fun -- Anji stuck in a Bollywood movie, the Doctor trying to learn how to dance on a doomed planet, and Fitz... well, OK, Fitz does spend much of his time acting like a brainwashed idiot, which doesn't do wonders for him, but it's still a good book. The whole thing clips along with sparkling dialogue and a fascinating plot.

It's not flawless by any means -- the trio of villains who dog the Doctor throughout the book outstay their welcome by chapter two, and Carmodi is phenomenally irritating (although perhaps intentionally so). And I still couldn't tell you what Carmodi lost because of the Doctor, and why she believes the Doctor's responsible for it. But this was one of those rare times when I didn't care about the "whats" of a book because I was having so much fun with the "hows". I just had a blast reading this, and I can't wait for Paul Ebbs' next novel. If Lawrence Miles proves to be an accurate model, it'll be even better.

A Long-Winded, Discursive, and Possibly Educational Review of 'Shada'

(This review has been cross-posted to Mightygodking.com.)

It occurred to me that the novelization of 'Shada' might be something that readers here would be interested in, if they knew about it, and that it might also be something that readers here might not know about. So this is both a review, and an explanation of what exactly 'Shada' was, and how there came to be a novelization of it by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams' original script.

In addition to being tremendously famous for his 'Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series, Douglas Adams also spent a bit of time as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This was just before 'Guide' hit it big, when he was mainly known for contributing a few bits to the final series of "Monty Python's Flying Circus". (The one without John Cleese.) His big breaks came in a sudden burst, which is why he wasn't on Doctor Who for very long. But he did do three scripts--the modestly successful "Pirate Planet", the incredibly well-regarded "City of Death", and "Shada"...which never actually completed filming due to a strike at the BBC, and which wasn't remounted for the ensuing season because incoming producer John Nathan-Turner had no interest in doing anything his predecessor Graham Williams thought was a good idea.

"Shada", in other words, is that rare beast - an unproduced screenplay by a now-deceased legend of science fiction at the absolute height of his skill, which can't be filmed at this point due to a simply insurmountable number of practical hurdles. But this is where a peculiar tradition of Doctor Who comes in, a legacy of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy series out there to predate video recording in any of its media. Virtually every single episode of the classic series of Doctor Who was adapted as a novel, in order to allow fans to experience episodes that had been broadcast before their time and which (due to the BBC's policies at the time on repeats and the previously noted lack of home media) they would probably never have the chance to see again. These novels were occasionally done by the original author, but frequently they were adapted by other hands.

While he was alive, Douglas Adams' stories were among the few that had not been adapted into novels; Adams preferred to adapt his own stories, and the company with the rights to the Doctor Who books simply couldn't afford his page rate. (According to Adams, every time a new editor took over the line, they had the exact same conversation with him about the chances of adapting his books, and he politely gave them the exact same responses each time.) But tragically, Adams died far younger than anyone that brilliant has a right to, which meant that even the adaptations seemed like a longshot.

Enter Gareth Roberts. Those of you who are fans of the new series might recognize him as the screenwriter of "The Lodger" and "The Shakespeare Code", among others, but he made his reputation on Doctor Who as an author of several pastiches of the Graham Williams era of the show. His novel 'The English Way of Death' (now sadly out of print) is considered to be one of the finest encapsulations of that period's whimsy, effortless humor, and penchant for borderline fantasy, and he's always been an outspoken fan of Williams and Adams. As such, when the rights issues were finally sorted out with the Adams estate, Roberts was the first choice to adapt Adams' unfilmed script into a novel. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes I am aware that the script was also adapted for audio by Big Finish Productions with Paul McGann reprising Tom Baker's part, and that there is an unofficial animated adaptation done by Ian Levine using Paul Jones as a Tom Baker impersonator. This is the first mass-market adaptation.)

(Yes, I'm also aware that the sequences that were shot were released on video and DVD, with Baker providing linking narration. That's not a proper adaptation. Sheesh.)

So now that you know what the novelization of 'Shada' is, the question that undoubtedly follows is, "Is it actually any good?" And the answer is, "Yes. Not as good as you'd expect a lost Douglas Adams masterpiece to be, but it's definitely a fun read." Roberts doesn't quite have Adams' deft touch for comic prose, but singling him out for that is almost entirely unfair. He's not trying to be Douglas Adams. He's trying to write Gareth Roberts' very good adaptation of a Douglas Adams story, and he succeeds magnificently at that. His opening line alone is one of the better starts to a novel that I've read lately: "At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'"

The plot is a fairly classic Doctor Who concept - a megalomaniac (in about as literal a sense as you can get this time) plans to take over the universe using forbidden Time Lord secrets that have been concealed at Cambridge, and the Doctor (accompanied by Time Lady Romana and robot dog K-9) have to stop him. But there are a number of clever twists and elegant misdirections between Cambridge and the lost Time Lord prison of Shada, and I really don't want to give any of them away for the benefit of those of you who haven't had the whole thing summarized multiple times in old Doctor Who episode guides. Suffice to say that this is a perfect example of doing something new and clever with an old idea, and the story hangs together very well.

The only issue I had with the book, and this may be my reaction as a long-time Doctor Who fan who had heard about this one for years as a "lost classic", was that I couldn't help spending my time wondering which bits were taken directly from Adams' original script and which were added by Roberts with the benefit of thirty-odd years of hindsight. (The joke about "edible ball bearings", for example, I'm reasonably sure belonged to Roberts.) I wound up wishing they'd also simply published the shooting script, so that I could see what had been done and when and by whom. It was a bit of a distraction, but one that a less obsessive person might not have to deal with.

On the whole, though, I thought it was a great story well-told, and I think that any fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy it. Pastiches of classic authors have a shaky track record, especially of Douglas Adams (I don't think, for example, that I'll ever recommend Eoin Colfer's 'And Another Thing...') but this one stands out as a fun read in its own right.

Review: The King of Terror

(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on June 19, 2001.)

In a word: Errrrrr...

In several words, Topping tries to pull off a serious stunt, here, taking the "aliens in the boardroom" plot, which is almost more of a sub-genre than a cliche of Doctor Who by now, and strip it down to its bare minimum, counting on sheer style to keep us from noticing how little plot there is. It almost succeeds, too...clears the canyon, but perhaps skins its knees and scuffs its jacket here and there.

The book can more or less be divided into "things that worked" and "things that didn't." Things That Worked: Turlough's escape from his torturers; Paynter and Barrington's "squaddie eye view" of UNIT; the characterization of the Brigadier; characters' general reactions to odd, small moments, like Johnny Chess's guest appearance, or the UFO; the discussion at the end of what humanity will be remembered for; and, in general, the style of the book.

Things That Didn't: Turlough's torture (why do writers in the books always feel the need to torture the Doctor and his companions?); the plot, which is almost non-existent and has a deus ex machina ending that comes right out of Topping's arse; the cliched "first they fight, then they kiss" scenes between Paynter and Tegan; the American dialogue en masse; the six or seven mentions of the Waro when they're not in the sodding book; Control, who I just don't get... is this some in-joke Topping has going with someone?... and the first two pages of dialogue, which are so purple as to choke one.

On the whole, the book is very good unless you start to think about what's actually happening in it; then you rapidly realize that the plot can be summarized in about two sentences. :)

Next up, The Quantum Archangel, which I'm about five pages into and already dreading... haven't really enjoyed Hinton's first three books, and this looks to be no exception.