(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on February 7, 2004.)
When Doctor Who fans think of Andrew Cartmel, they immediately think of the Seventh Doctor; before Virgin published anything other than novelizations of the televised episodes, Cartmel had already established himself as a major force in the Doctor Who creative pantheon with his tenure as script editor of the show. He did a lot to reinvent the lead character in the final years of the series, re-establishing him as a man of mystery and magic and bringing in an element of manipulation to the character -- Cartmel's Doctor isn't an explorer of the universe so much as a grand-master playing chess against it. Some traditional fans claimed that he'd gone too far... but when the time came for Virgin to begin the New Adventures, Cartmel's books for the Doctor Who series (Cat's Cradle: Warhead, Warlock, Warchild, and the later Foreign Devils for Telos Press) showed that if anything, he'd been restraining himself.
The three books for Virgin, Warhead, Warlock, and Warchild, are frequently referred to as a trilogy, but they don't really take a single plot and progress it as trilogies usually do. Rather, they're three distinct and separate novels that share common characters and themes, and many of these shared themes involve the vision of the Doctor that Cartmel had when he was script editor for the program. In fact, he pushes these boundaries so far that at times, the Doctor doesn't seem like the same character we see elsewhere in the books and on TV; he's more judgemental and less compassionate, acting almost as a supernatural force in defense of Earth against its own inhabitants. (Indeed, a common theme running through all four of Cartmel's books is an acceptance that magic is just as real as science, if not moreso -- a complete departure from established Who canon prior to his tenure on the series, but now just accepted as another aspect in the highly flexible Whoniverse.) Cartmel's Doctor also amps up his manipulative tendencies; in Warhead, his first novel, the Doctor works behind the scenes for the entire novel, appearing only in a few short sequences in the middle and at the end. (Of course, Cartmel adheres to long Doctor Who tradition by having the plan spectacularly collapse at the end, forcing the Doctor to succeed through a combination of luck and brilliant improvisation.) Warhead also introduces Justine and Vincent, who would become in many ways the central focus of the trilogy.
Warlock doesn't pick up the story of 'Warhead' at all, though; instead, it takes the central characters of Warlock and involves them, along with several new characters introduced in the second book, in an entirely different story. But again, the Doctor stays predominantly "off-screen"; most of the book is devoted to Ace and to Creed McIlveen, one of the new characters created. The Doctor steps onto the stage at the end to set things right, but Cartmel still tries to keep him very much at arm's length from the reader... and, in long-standing Doctor Who tradition, the Doctor's way of setting things right is haphazard, succeeds in no small part through chance, and leaves a lot of loose ends lying around waiting to blow up in someone else's face.
Warchild, the final book in the trilogy, concerns itself mostly with wrapping up those loose ends, and is as such rather light on plot. In fact, all of Cartmel's books are fairly light on plot, but that doesn't seem to concern him over-much; Cartmel writes very much to evoke a sensation of tangibility in the reader, a feeling that one could literally step into the scene he's describing. As such, he spends a lot of time describing the sensations, the emotions, the details of a scene to great effect; his books have a very immersive quality to them. It does mean that he takes a lot of time to describe very simple events, though; Warlock, which is one of the longer Doctor Who books, takes almost fifty pages to describe a drug bust. It's almost the opposite approach to writers like Lawrence Miles and Ben Aaronovich, although it's not without its charms.
Until relatively recently, the 'War' trilogy summed up Cartmel's contributions to prose Who, but he did contribute to Telos' line of Doctor Who novellas with Foreign Devils. This is a slice of nostalgia, which seems almost surprising coming from an author like Cartmel; still, you can see his stylistic influences creeping in on the cozy and traditional Second Doctor. It's a world where magic exists and the Doctor knows it (indeed, the book acts as a cross-over with an early 1900s character named Carnacki, an investigator into the spiritual world.) Cartmel's attention might be elsewhere, but his interest in Doctor Who has, apparently, not yet entirely faded.
Showing posts with label retrospectives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label retrospectives. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Friday, June 13, 2014
Retrospective: Barry Letts
In order to understand Barry Letts' three efforts as a Doctor Who novelist (The Ghosts of N-Space, Deadly Reunion, Island of Death), you first need to understand the period in which they were written. The Wilderness Years, as they've become known, was an era in which Doctor Who had no presence on television--the only way to experience the show was through an alternative medium such as books, comics or radio. However, there was still a large audience for Doctor Who stories.
More accurately, there were still two large audiences for Doctor Who stories. On the one hand, there were a large number of fans who felt like the series had been cancelled just as it was hitting its stride and reinventing itself, and they best loved those stories that pushed the boundaries of what Doctor Who had been doing over the last few years of its televised existence. (Doctor Who stories that fell into this category were usually called "rad".) On the other hand, there were a large number of fans who felt like the series had gotten too far away from its roots, and preferred stories that returned to a storytelling style more in keeping with the older episodes. (Doctor Who stories that fell into this category were called "trad".)
Barry Letts, as a former writer, producer and director for the show, was much beloved as an elder statesman figure by the fans who enjoyed "trad" Doctor Who. His heyday, the Jon Pertwee era, was to some the epitome of what the series did best. This audience was present in sufficient numbers to get Letts, along with Jon Pertwee and Lis Sladen, to reprise their roles for two radio plays on the BBC's radio network written and directed by Letts. As was generally the case, Virgin Books (who were starved for new material during the Wilderness Years) adapted the first one as a standalone novel, and the second one as part of their Missing Adventures series.
This second novel, 'The Ghosts of N-Space', proved to be something of a sticking point. Because although there were a lot of "rad" fans, and a lot of "trad" fans, they didn't necessarily congregate in the same places or look to the same sources for their Doctor Who enjoyment. And Virgin Books, with its New and Missing Adventures, was definitely the home at the time of "rad" Doctor Who. 'The Ghosts of N-Space' felt very out of place next to the New Adventures, and even somewhat out of place along the more overtly nostalgic Missing Adventures. Later, when he published 'Deadly Reunion' (with Terrance Dicks, his script editor during the Pertwee era) and 'Island of Death', the situation had in some ways gotten worse--"trad" fans had moved to the Big Finish audios, which featured the original actors reprising their parts, and Letts' novels were even less welcome. Because fundamentally, Barry Letts hadn't really changed anything about his style since the early 1970s.
His novels fell very much into the "Boy's Own" style of pulp adventures, with very thin and very straightforward plots driven by villains without much motivation beyond the desire for power for its own sake. His prose could best be described as similar to the Target novels of the 1970s, serving mainly to transcribe the events of the story with very little in the way of the stylistic flourishes that were in vogue at the time. Most of the characterization in his books came from recreating the actors' performances, although Letts did introduce a new companion in the form of Jeremy Fitzoliver. You could say that this was a radical thing to do, as Jeremy didn't fit into the mold of most companions; he wasn't very bright, or very brave, or very interesting, or even tolerable to be around for more than a few minutes. But the same qualities that made him somewhat experimental as a companion made him also pretty difficult to stomach reading about.
In short, Letts was primarily a producer and director who was asked to write, in order to please an audience that primarily wasn't paying attention to novels. As a result, the novel-reading audience that did pick up Letts' books was anything but charitable to his old-fashioned style. This isn't to say that his novels are terrible; in fact, divorced from the expectations that were placed upon them during the Wilderness Years, they're quite readable, if fairly forgettable, action-adventure novels. If they'd come out during the period they were set in, Barry Letts' tenure as producer of Doctor Who, they'd probably be quite fondly remembered. But Doctor Who had moved with the times, and it's hard not to feel as if Letts might not have been better off serving as a beloved elder statesman than as a modern author.
More accurately, there were still two large audiences for Doctor Who stories. On the one hand, there were a large number of fans who felt like the series had been cancelled just as it was hitting its stride and reinventing itself, and they best loved those stories that pushed the boundaries of what Doctor Who had been doing over the last few years of its televised existence. (Doctor Who stories that fell into this category were usually called "rad".) On the other hand, there were a large number of fans who felt like the series had gotten too far away from its roots, and preferred stories that returned to a storytelling style more in keeping with the older episodes. (Doctor Who stories that fell into this category were called "trad".)
Barry Letts, as a former writer, producer and director for the show, was much beloved as an elder statesman figure by the fans who enjoyed "trad" Doctor Who. His heyday, the Jon Pertwee era, was to some the epitome of what the series did best. This audience was present in sufficient numbers to get Letts, along with Jon Pertwee and Lis Sladen, to reprise their roles for two radio plays on the BBC's radio network written and directed by Letts. As was generally the case, Virgin Books (who were starved for new material during the Wilderness Years) adapted the first one as a standalone novel, and the second one as part of their Missing Adventures series.
This second novel, 'The Ghosts of N-Space', proved to be something of a sticking point. Because although there were a lot of "rad" fans, and a lot of "trad" fans, they didn't necessarily congregate in the same places or look to the same sources for their Doctor Who enjoyment. And Virgin Books, with its New and Missing Adventures, was definitely the home at the time of "rad" Doctor Who. 'The Ghosts of N-Space' felt very out of place next to the New Adventures, and even somewhat out of place along the more overtly nostalgic Missing Adventures. Later, when he published 'Deadly Reunion' (with Terrance Dicks, his script editor during the Pertwee era) and 'Island of Death', the situation had in some ways gotten worse--"trad" fans had moved to the Big Finish audios, which featured the original actors reprising their parts, and Letts' novels were even less welcome. Because fundamentally, Barry Letts hadn't really changed anything about his style since the early 1970s.
His novels fell very much into the "Boy's Own" style of pulp adventures, with very thin and very straightforward plots driven by villains without much motivation beyond the desire for power for its own sake. His prose could best be described as similar to the Target novels of the 1970s, serving mainly to transcribe the events of the story with very little in the way of the stylistic flourishes that were in vogue at the time. Most of the characterization in his books came from recreating the actors' performances, although Letts did introduce a new companion in the form of Jeremy Fitzoliver. You could say that this was a radical thing to do, as Jeremy didn't fit into the mold of most companions; he wasn't very bright, or very brave, or very interesting, or even tolerable to be around for more than a few minutes. But the same qualities that made him somewhat experimental as a companion made him also pretty difficult to stomach reading about.
In short, Letts was primarily a producer and director who was asked to write, in order to please an audience that primarily wasn't paying attention to novels. As a result, the novel-reading audience that did pick up Letts' books was anything but charitable to his old-fashioned style. This isn't to say that his novels are terrible; in fact, divorced from the expectations that were placed upon them during the Wilderness Years, they're quite readable, if fairly forgettable, action-adventure novels. If they'd come out during the period they were set in, Barry Letts' tenure as producer of Doctor Who, they'd probably be quite fondly remembered. But Doctor Who had moved with the times, and it's hard not to feel as if Letts might not have been better off serving as a beloved elder statesman than as a modern author.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Retrospective: Russell T Davies
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on September 25, 2003. Which should explain a lot.)
By the later stages of the Virgin New Adventures, word had spread far beyond the fan community about its quality and willing to take risks. Authors with friends and connections at the BBC, such as Ben Aaronovitch and Mark Gatiss, had communicated the enjoyment of writing for the range to other authors who'd not yet done a novel. Presumably it was this that attracted Russell T Davies, an award-winning TV dramatist, to write his novel Damaged Goods for the line. Whatever the reason, he brought a powerful intensity and a darkly different sensibility to the series.
Davies' previous work included the soap opera 'Revelations', and one can easily spot a "soap opera" influence on the novel; not in the pejorative sense it's usually used in, of cheap melodrama and endless shock revelations, but in a setting of all-too-human people, each concealing a life-time's worth of secrets and interacting with each other in a toxic cat's cradle of lies, anger, love, sorrow, and hatred. The Doctor beautifully describes the Quadrant, the housing settlement that forms the setting of Damaged Goods, as "76 fortresses", and Davies makes it seem as though he's worked out a complete life's story for each of those fortresses' inhabitants.
That's not to say that he ignores the science fiction elements of Doctor Who, though. Damaged Goods ties in quite well with the psi-powers arc it's a part of, neatly bridging The Death of Art and So Vile A Sin, even if the Brotherhood themselves play a small part. It also ties in with Gallifreyan history and legend in a way that neatly betrays Davies as a closet Doctor Who fan; no other could know not just about the War against the vampires, but also about the different colleges of Gallifreyan society as well (and the cameo by an ancestor of Benny is just the icing on the cake.) It all ties together with its human elements in a glorious tragedy that tears at the heartstrings.
But to laud the plot and characterization is to ignore Davies' true strength, his ability to generate atmosphere. When I say "glorious tragedy", I mean it; Damaged Goods generates an atmosphere of suffocating horror, despair, and dread so profound that when you finally do stop reading, it feels almost like you're surfacing. This is a book you could drown in, and it doesn't let up for even a moment.
I feel sure that Russell T Davies won't write for the range again; after all, he must have had opportunities in the almost seven years since Damaged Goods has been published. That's unfortunate, since his one novel for the range was a genuine triumph, a powerful and brilliant piece right down to its perfectly apt title. He's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive.
By the later stages of the Virgin New Adventures, word had spread far beyond the fan community about its quality and willing to take risks. Authors with friends and connections at the BBC, such as Ben Aaronovitch and Mark Gatiss, had communicated the enjoyment of writing for the range to other authors who'd not yet done a novel. Presumably it was this that attracted Russell T Davies, an award-winning TV dramatist, to write his novel Damaged Goods for the line. Whatever the reason, he brought a powerful intensity and a darkly different sensibility to the series.
Davies' previous work included the soap opera 'Revelations', and one can easily spot a "soap opera" influence on the novel; not in the pejorative sense it's usually used in, of cheap melodrama and endless shock revelations, but in a setting of all-too-human people, each concealing a life-time's worth of secrets and interacting with each other in a toxic cat's cradle of lies, anger, love, sorrow, and hatred. The Doctor beautifully describes the Quadrant, the housing settlement that forms the setting of Damaged Goods, as "76 fortresses", and Davies makes it seem as though he's worked out a complete life's story for each of those fortresses' inhabitants.
That's not to say that he ignores the science fiction elements of Doctor Who, though. Damaged Goods ties in quite well with the psi-powers arc it's a part of, neatly bridging The Death of Art and So Vile A Sin, even if the Brotherhood themselves play a small part. It also ties in with Gallifreyan history and legend in a way that neatly betrays Davies as a closet Doctor Who fan; no other could know not just about the War against the vampires, but also about the different colleges of Gallifreyan society as well (and the cameo by an ancestor of Benny is just the icing on the cake.) It all ties together with its human elements in a glorious tragedy that tears at the heartstrings.
But to laud the plot and characterization is to ignore Davies' true strength, his ability to generate atmosphere. When I say "glorious tragedy", I mean it; Damaged Goods generates an atmosphere of suffocating horror, despair, and dread so profound that when you finally do stop reading, it feels almost like you're surfacing. This is a book you could drown in, and it doesn't let up for even a moment.
I feel sure that Russell T Davies won't write for the range again; after all, he must have had opportunities in the almost seven years since Damaged Goods has been published. That's unfortunate, since his one novel for the range was a genuine triumph, a powerful and brilliant piece right down to its perfectly apt title. He's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Retrospective: David A. McIntee
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on May 29, 2003.)
David A. McIntee has never been an author I've been personally fond of. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've singled him out as particularly worthy of disdain among Doctor Who authors, using him as an example of a "bad" writer for the series. In fact, as I realized after reading his complete library (White Darkness, First Frontier, Sanctuary, Lords of the Storm, The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, Mission: Impractical, The Wages of Sin, Autumn Mist, Bullet Time), McIntee has a lot to recommend him as a writer of Doctor Who...just not as a writer of Doctor Who novels.
I think the problem is that he's working in the wrong medium. His ideas and plots are actually quite clever and innovative when you describe them -- First Frontier, to cite one example at random, would have been a wonderful TV episode, re-invigorating the stale and cartoonish Master into a genuinely ruthless and menacing villain and playing with fifties sci-fi ambience to boot. (At this point, I should add the caveat that McIntee would do well to write for that Doctor Who series with an unlimited budget that we've all imagined.) He's also a meticulous and careful researcher, thoroughly grounding all of his stories in period history (with the obvious exception of Mission: Impractical.) When you summarize any McIntee book, it sounds like a great idea.
But when you read them, it's an entirely different story. McIntee's writing style is something akin to being drowned in porridge -- it's good, healthy stuff, but it's not meant to be taken in all at once, and you certainly want to spice it up with something. He uses very little humor in his novels, and what humor he does use is of the "dry" variety; stylistically, his novels almost read like a police deposition of their events. It doesn't help that he has a certain sameness to each scene within the novel; every scene must begin with a meticulous description of the area in which it's set, like he's writing a supplement for a role-playing game and needs to make sure his players know what they're walking into. Again, in a television show this wouldn't be a problem, because the visuals don't get described, but in prose, it drags down the story. Ditto with his action sequences -- McIntee loves martial arts, space battles, and gunfights, but those are exactly the things that don't translate well to prose, and his style of describing them as though he's putting down a report for the cops doesn't help matters.
His characterization would also be aided in a different medium -- with actors speaking the lines, they'd be able to add their own nuances, making his dialogue a little more "user-friendly". As it is, the Doctor comes off as so generic as to make the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Second, and Seventh seem exactly alike, and even Ace and Benny wind up feeling flat. His own characters come out of the realm of "movie stock characters", which again wouldn't be so bad with actors inhabiting them. (It also doesn't help that McIntee seems to have a blood-lust regarding the population of his novels; if he wrote a cop movie, every single member of the force would be One Day From Retirement. He apparently wanted to kill off Barbara and Sam in addition to his bumping off Dibber and possibly Sarah Jane, but luckily wiser heads prevailed.)
He did make some good additions to the Who mythos, though; the Tzun, the alien race that form the Doctor Who equivalent to the Greys and appear in four of his novels in some form, make an interesting change from the snarling thugs that usually try to conquer the Earth. Nobody else made use of them, but they do have a certain dry charm to them that epitomizes McIntee's work.
And, of course, no retrospective of McIntee would be complete without discussing the Master -- his first novel, White Darkness, featured a red herring in the form of a character named LeMaitre who was older than he seemed, but it wasn't long before we got the genuine article, and it seemed sometimes like all of the effort in characterization that should have been spread throughout his novel went instead into the Master. His trilogy of Master novels (The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, and First Frontier) redefine the melodramatic and one-dimensional villain of the television series into a ruthless, brilliant, calculating enemy worthy of the Doctor's opposition. When McIntee wrote the Master, you had a sense that he might win, which was most welcome given the character's tendency to degenerate into "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtop me now!" cartoonishness.
On the whole, I do think that McIntee has more talent than I've given him credit for, and that he's an intelligent and innovative writer who probably has more to contribute to the range. I just don't think I could stand to read another of his books anytime soon.
David A. McIntee has never been an author I've been personally fond of. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've singled him out as particularly worthy of disdain among Doctor Who authors, using him as an example of a "bad" writer for the series. In fact, as I realized after reading his complete library (White Darkness, First Frontier, Sanctuary, Lords of the Storm, The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, Mission: Impractical, The Wages of Sin, Autumn Mist, Bullet Time), McIntee has a lot to recommend him as a writer of Doctor Who...just not as a writer of Doctor Who novels.
I think the problem is that he's working in the wrong medium. His ideas and plots are actually quite clever and innovative when you describe them -- First Frontier, to cite one example at random, would have been a wonderful TV episode, re-invigorating the stale and cartoonish Master into a genuinely ruthless and menacing villain and playing with fifties sci-fi ambience to boot. (At this point, I should add the caveat that McIntee would do well to write for that Doctor Who series with an unlimited budget that we've all imagined.) He's also a meticulous and careful researcher, thoroughly grounding all of his stories in period history (with the obvious exception of Mission: Impractical.) When you summarize any McIntee book, it sounds like a great idea.
But when you read them, it's an entirely different story. McIntee's writing style is something akin to being drowned in porridge -- it's good, healthy stuff, but it's not meant to be taken in all at once, and you certainly want to spice it up with something. He uses very little humor in his novels, and what humor he does use is of the "dry" variety; stylistically, his novels almost read like a police deposition of their events. It doesn't help that he has a certain sameness to each scene within the novel; every scene must begin with a meticulous description of the area in which it's set, like he's writing a supplement for a role-playing game and needs to make sure his players know what they're walking into. Again, in a television show this wouldn't be a problem, because the visuals don't get described, but in prose, it drags down the story. Ditto with his action sequences -- McIntee loves martial arts, space battles, and gunfights, but those are exactly the things that don't translate well to prose, and his style of describing them as though he's putting down a report for the cops doesn't help matters.
His characterization would also be aided in a different medium -- with actors speaking the lines, they'd be able to add their own nuances, making his dialogue a little more "user-friendly". As it is, the Doctor comes off as so generic as to make the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Second, and Seventh seem exactly alike, and even Ace and Benny wind up feeling flat. His own characters come out of the realm of "movie stock characters", which again wouldn't be so bad with actors inhabiting them. (It also doesn't help that McIntee seems to have a blood-lust regarding the population of his novels; if he wrote a cop movie, every single member of the force would be One Day From Retirement. He apparently wanted to kill off Barbara and Sam in addition to his bumping off Dibber and possibly Sarah Jane, but luckily wiser heads prevailed.)
He did make some good additions to the Who mythos, though; the Tzun, the alien race that form the Doctor Who equivalent to the Greys and appear in four of his novels in some form, make an interesting change from the snarling thugs that usually try to conquer the Earth. Nobody else made use of them, but they do have a certain dry charm to them that epitomizes McIntee's work.
And, of course, no retrospective of McIntee would be complete without discussing the Master -- his first novel, White Darkness, featured a red herring in the form of a character named LeMaitre who was older than he seemed, but it wasn't long before we got the genuine article, and it seemed sometimes like all of the effort in characterization that should have been spread throughout his novel went instead into the Master. His trilogy of Master novels (The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, and First Frontier) redefine the melodramatic and one-dimensional villain of the television series into a ruthless, brilliant, calculating enemy worthy of the Doctor's opposition. When McIntee wrote the Master, you had a sense that he might win, which was most welcome given the character's tendency to degenerate into "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtop me now!" cartoonishness.
On the whole, I do think that McIntee has more talent than I've given him credit for, and that he's an intelligent and innovative writer who probably has more to contribute to the range. I just don't think I could stand to read another of his books anytime soon.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Retrospective: Dave Stone
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on April 13, 2003.)
Every once in a while, when reading and writing reviews of any sort, it becomes clear that there is no "Everyman" reviewer. Everyone brings their own personal quirks and preferences to the judgement of a creative work. Frequently, this doesn't matter because the work in question is either so self-evidently good or so self-evidently bad that a consensus can be reached... but every once in a while, you get an author who divides opinion sharply, and who cannot be categorized. Dave Stone (Sky Pirates!, Death and Diplomacy, Burning Heart, Ship of Fools, Oblivion, The Mary-Sue Extrusion, Return to the Fractured Planet, Heart of TARDIS, The Slow Empire, The Infernal Nexus, Citadel of Dreams) is one such an author, and I for my part have to pin my colors to the wall at this point and stand on one side or the other of the "love him or hate him" line.
For me, it's adoration. Dave Stone is one of my favorite authors for Doctor Who and its spin-offs, and it's not because I'm unaware of his flaws as an author; it's simply because I don't care about them. Yes, he recycles character names, characters, place names, places, races, jokes, and in a few notorious incidents entire passages of text simply because he likes them (and if I'd included his Judge Dredd novels in this retrospective this trend would be even more pronounced). Yes, he does dwell obsessively on a single theme and has made a whole career out of variations on it. Yes, his writing style does come off as a mix of Douglas Adams, Clive Barker, and a maddened thesaurus. Yes, he does veer back and forth between groan-worthy, shaggy-dog jokes and visceral, shocking body-horror sequences. Yes, yes, yes, and yes to all that as well. Everything you hear about Dave Stone, personally or professionally, is very probably true. But I don't care.
For one thing, I think he's funny. Humor is one of those incredibly personal things, and it's really not possible for me to either say why I find Stone's writing funny, or why other people don't. But when Stone features "great detective" Emil Dupont explaining away the murders in Ship of Fools as the work of limbo-dancing midgets, I laugh. When he includes, at the end of The Infernal Nexus, the porno-movie synopsis of that novel, it's funny to me. His style is digressive and expansive, and tends towards footnotes, parenthetical comments, and irrelevant appendices... and yet, he's all the funnier for it.
For another, I do find his central obsession interesting. Stone dwells in all his novels, to a greater or lesser extent, on how we shape the world we live in through our perception of it -- not in any sort of magical, "what we don't want to happen doesn't happen" sense, but just in the way that things that we don't like, we ignore if we can just as thoroughly as if they don't exist... and how contact with those things that are "non-existent" in that sense can drive you just as crazy as an injection of LSD. This idea is large enough to fuel any number of stories, from the cartoony world of the System in Sky Pirates! all the way to Hokesh, the city of his most recent work Citadel of Dreams, and still bear fruit.
Third, I think he's got a good sense of character. It's easy to forget that his first novel, Sky Pirates!, was in fact the first novel about Roz and Chris not written by their creator, Andy Lane -- and he does an excellent job of capturing them as real people, both in that book and in his follow-up. His Bernice Summerfield vies with Justin Richards and her creator, Paul Cornell, for the title of "definitive", and more than that, he seems to have a nice general sense that people are more fuzzy-minded, morally ambiguous, and generally contrary than the dictates of fiction normally allow for.
And fourth, he's contributed some excellent material to the Doctor Who universe. He gave us the Sloathes, which have propagated through his books under various names and provided much enjoyment for us pretend-move monkey-hominid things. And, of course, he gave Benny her fiancee, husband, ex-husband, lover, straight man, and general bete noir, Jason Peter Kane. Jason is probably his best-realized character, and one of Stone's amazing achievements is to give the reader the sense that Jason is off doing interesting, novel-worthy things on his own while we're off following Bernice.
So, in short, yes, I am looking forward to another Dave Stone novel, should we get one, and yes, I'm well aware that many others aren't. But me, I'm a Dave Stone fan, and I don't care who knows it.
Every once in a while, when reading and writing reviews of any sort, it becomes clear that there is no "Everyman" reviewer. Everyone brings their own personal quirks and preferences to the judgement of a creative work. Frequently, this doesn't matter because the work in question is either so self-evidently good or so self-evidently bad that a consensus can be reached... but every once in a while, you get an author who divides opinion sharply, and who cannot be categorized. Dave Stone (Sky Pirates!, Death and Diplomacy, Burning Heart, Ship of Fools, Oblivion, The Mary-Sue Extrusion, Return to the Fractured Planet, Heart of TARDIS, The Slow Empire, The Infernal Nexus, Citadel of Dreams) is one such an author, and I for my part have to pin my colors to the wall at this point and stand on one side or the other of the "love him or hate him" line.
For me, it's adoration. Dave Stone is one of my favorite authors for Doctor Who and its spin-offs, and it's not because I'm unaware of his flaws as an author; it's simply because I don't care about them. Yes, he recycles character names, characters, place names, places, races, jokes, and in a few notorious incidents entire passages of text simply because he likes them (and if I'd included his Judge Dredd novels in this retrospective this trend would be even more pronounced). Yes, he does dwell obsessively on a single theme and has made a whole career out of variations on it. Yes, his writing style does come off as a mix of Douglas Adams, Clive Barker, and a maddened thesaurus. Yes, he does veer back and forth between groan-worthy, shaggy-dog jokes and visceral, shocking body-horror sequences. Yes, yes, yes, and yes to all that as well. Everything you hear about Dave Stone, personally or professionally, is very probably true. But I don't care.
For one thing, I think he's funny. Humor is one of those incredibly personal things, and it's really not possible for me to either say why I find Stone's writing funny, or why other people don't. But when Stone features "great detective" Emil Dupont explaining away the murders in Ship of Fools as the work of limbo-dancing midgets, I laugh. When he includes, at the end of The Infernal Nexus, the porno-movie synopsis of that novel, it's funny to me. His style is digressive and expansive, and tends towards footnotes, parenthetical comments, and irrelevant appendices... and yet, he's all the funnier for it.
For another, I do find his central obsession interesting. Stone dwells in all his novels, to a greater or lesser extent, on how we shape the world we live in through our perception of it -- not in any sort of magical, "what we don't want to happen doesn't happen" sense, but just in the way that things that we don't like, we ignore if we can just as thoroughly as if they don't exist... and how contact with those things that are "non-existent" in that sense can drive you just as crazy as an injection of LSD. This idea is large enough to fuel any number of stories, from the cartoony world of the System in Sky Pirates! all the way to Hokesh, the city of his most recent work Citadel of Dreams, and still bear fruit.
Third, I think he's got a good sense of character. It's easy to forget that his first novel, Sky Pirates!, was in fact the first novel about Roz and Chris not written by their creator, Andy Lane -- and he does an excellent job of capturing them as real people, both in that book and in his follow-up. His Bernice Summerfield vies with Justin Richards and her creator, Paul Cornell, for the title of "definitive", and more than that, he seems to have a nice general sense that people are more fuzzy-minded, morally ambiguous, and generally contrary than the dictates of fiction normally allow for.
And fourth, he's contributed some excellent material to the Doctor Who universe. He gave us the Sloathes, which have propagated through his books under various names and provided much enjoyment for us pretend-move monkey-hominid things. And, of course, he gave Benny her fiancee, husband, ex-husband, lover, straight man, and general bete noir, Jason Peter Kane. Jason is probably his best-realized character, and one of Stone's amazing achievements is to give the reader the sense that Jason is off doing interesting, novel-worthy things on his own while we're off following Bernice.
So, in short, yes, I am looking forward to another Dave Stone novel, should we get one, and yes, I'm well aware that many others aren't. But me, I'm a Dave Stone fan, and I don't care who knows it.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Retrospective: Andy Lane
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, September 15, 2003.)
Most authors in the Doctor Who range have certain distinct elements that stand out in their writing; whether a certain style, a recurring set of characters or locations, or a fascination with a particular era of the show, each author handily carves out a distinct niche in the series. Andy Lane, though, at first proves frustratingly elusive in that regard. Some of this comes from the fact that a good percentage of his published work (Lucifer Rising, All-Consuming Fire, Original Sin, The Empire of Glass, and The Banquo Legacy) has been written with other authors, and even those novels that he wrote on his own, he wrote while in close contact with other authors for the range. In addition, his novels vary widely in style -- All-Consuming Fire is a conscious attempt to pastiche Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while Lucifer Rising deliberately mimics the style of his co-author Jim Mortimore. For someone trying to discern a common thread, a distinct "Andy Lane" that sets him apart from any other writer, one must look to the common thread that unites all his novels -- a fascination with the past, both historical and fictional.
Much of this love of the past comes out in the form of love of the past of the TV series Doctor Who, and it's no real surprise that Andy Lane is one of the worst offenders in regard to that peculiarly Whovian pastime known as "fanwank". Every novel he's written is solidly grounded in the series' history, from his explications of the Armageddon Convention (mentioned once in Revenge of the Cybermen) and setting of one of his novels (just before The Dalek Invasion of Earth) to his re-use of Tobias Vaughn, a villain from the Troughton era who'd only made one appearance, or his creation of a character who'd been married to a crewman on the ship Hydrax, which was in the TV story State of Decay, and... you get the idea. He even has one scene, early in Original Sin, in which he actually has the Doctor rummage through the TARDIS boot cupboard and reminisce about his old boots and which adventures he wore them in. Sometimes it's silly, as the above example, but sometimes, like an archaeologist or historian, he can use these elements of the series to illuminate something stronger. Though set far in the future, the Earth Empire from The Mutants becomes a dynamic, vivid society in his hands, and he fleshes out quite well eras and ideas only hinted at on the series.
This same historian's passion comes out in his other novels, those set solidly in real eras of Earth's past. He spends as much time working to re-create Victorian London, distant Bombay, and 16th-century Venice as he ever does with the plots of his stories, and a good part of his skill lies in vividly decribing these places and times, showing them as exotic and foreign lands -- even when they should seem familiar. He has a passion for tiny details that lend verisimilitude to the story, whether they be the tendency for British barkeeps to add strychnine to beer, the convoluted politics of Venice, or the exact origins of the word "posh" (POrt in, Starboard Home). Even his style evokes the elegant past -- The Banquo Legacy and All-Consuming Fire both take the form of journals written by men of another age, and feel authentic.
Beyond the passion for history, Lane comes off as a solid writer. His plots, while not necessarily as intricate as some other authors, still come off as intelligent and straight-forward, while his characters make themselves likeable (if occasionally veering towards caricatures.) And two of his characters, the police duo of Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, have wound up becoming vital parts of the Doctor Who mythos and fondly-remembered companions. Roz, in particular, is given a solid and deep background without Lane dumping loads of information on the reader in her first appearance. The New Adventures were better for the appearance of two such well-realized companions.
It's uncertain whether we'll see another Andy Lane novel; never one of the more prolific authors for the line, his books have come with far less frequency now that they have moved from Virgin to the BBC. Still, a return engagement wouldn't be unwelcome -- or, perhaps, he might consider writing a reference guide for the series. For someone with such a passion for history, it seems like a natural occupation.
Most authors in the Doctor Who range have certain distinct elements that stand out in their writing; whether a certain style, a recurring set of characters or locations, or a fascination with a particular era of the show, each author handily carves out a distinct niche in the series. Andy Lane, though, at first proves frustratingly elusive in that regard. Some of this comes from the fact that a good percentage of his published work (Lucifer Rising, All-Consuming Fire, Original Sin, The Empire of Glass, and The Banquo Legacy) has been written with other authors, and even those novels that he wrote on his own, he wrote while in close contact with other authors for the range. In addition, his novels vary widely in style -- All-Consuming Fire is a conscious attempt to pastiche Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while Lucifer Rising deliberately mimics the style of his co-author Jim Mortimore. For someone trying to discern a common thread, a distinct "Andy Lane" that sets him apart from any other writer, one must look to the common thread that unites all his novels -- a fascination with the past, both historical and fictional.
Much of this love of the past comes out in the form of love of the past of the TV series Doctor Who, and it's no real surprise that Andy Lane is one of the worst offenders in regard to that peculiarly Whovian pastime known as "fanwank". Every novel he's written is solidly grounded in the series' history, from his explications of the Armageddon Convention (mentioned once in Revenge of the Cybermen) and setting of one of his novels (just before The Dalek Invasion of Earth) to his re-use of Tobias Vaughn, a villain from the Troughton era who'd only made one appearance, or his creation of a character who'd been married to a crewman on the ship Hydrax, which was in the TV story State of Decay, and... you get the idea. He even has one scene, early in Original Sin, in which he actually has the Doctor rummage through the TARDIS boot cupboard and reminisce about his old boots and which adventures he wore them in. Sometimes it's silly, as the above example, but sometimes, like an archaeologist or historian, he can use these elements of the series to illuminate something stronger. Though set far in the future, the Earth Empire from The Mutants becomes a dynamic, vivid society in his hands, and he fleshes out quite well eras and ideas only hinted at on the series.
This same historian's passion comes out in his other novels, those set solidly in real eras of Earth's past. He spends as much time working to re-create Victorian London, distant Bombay, and 16th-century Venice as he ever does with the plots of his stories, and a good part of his skill lies in vividly decribing these places and times, showing them as exotic and foreign lands -- even when they should seem familiar. He has a passion for tiny details that lend verisimilitude to the story, whether they be the tendency for British barkeeps to add strychnine to beer, the convoluted politics of Venice, or the exact origins of the word "posh" (POrt in, Starboard Home). Even his style evokes the elegant past -- The Banquo Legacy and All-Consuming Fire both take the form of journals written by men of another age, and feel authentic.
Beyond the passion for history, Lane comes off as a solid writer. His plots, while not necessarily as intricate as some other authors, still come off as intelligent and straight-forward, while his characters make themselves likeable (if occasionally veering towards caricatures.) And two of his characters, the police duo of Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, have wound up becoming vital parts of the Doctor Who mythos and fondly-remembered companions. Roz, in particular, is given a solid and deep background without Lane dumping loads of information on the reader in her first appearance. The New Adventures were better for the appearance of two such well-realized companions.
It's uncertain whether we'll see another Andy Lane novel; never one of the more prolific authors for the line, his books have come with far less frequency now that they have moved from Virgin to the BBC. Still, a return engagement wouldn't be unwelcome -- or, perhaps, he might consider writing a reference guide for the series. For someone with such a passion for history, it seems like a natural occupation.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Retrospective: Marc Platt
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on April 21, 2003.)
When the Virgin publishers decided to begin presenting "New Adventures" of Doctor Who, one of the first places they turned to was the pool of writers that the TV series had used in its last few seasons. Marc Platt, writer of Ghost Light and one of the principal architects of the infamous "Cartmel Masterplan" that laid out the ancient history of Gallifrey and the hitherto untold secrets of the Doctor's youth, still had a couple of unused scripts from the planned Season 27, and was glad for a place to put them. All in all, then, it's not surprising that his three books written for the Virgin line (Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Downtime, and Lungbarrow) seem like a case of unfinished business.
Time's Crucible and Lungbarrow form an almost perfect matched pair; one, near the beginning of the line, laying the ground-work for the other's revelations about ancient Gallifrey near the end of the line. Stylistically, they're eerily similar; the unearthly, grey majesty of the City in Time's Crucible and the decrepit, buried mausoleum of Lungbarrow in Lungbarrow seem as though they could be in the same neighborhood. Platt's always stated that he's a fan of the Gothic novel, and nobody would have any difficulty believing it after reading Lungbarrow. Burns that never heal even after three regenerations, a living House that buries itself out of shame, a Ghost that haunts the halls until its missing will is found -- it's straight out of Poe or Peake, a compleat Gothic primer.
Platt's chilly, almost mathematically-precise prose style in the above books is hard to take for some; it's hard going to read at times, because there doesn't seem to be much emotion to it. However, once you get into the mind-set, there are gems to be unearthed. His Doctor, for one, is very much in the mode of the later seasons of the TV series -- strange, wonderful, and unknowable. His Ace in <>a href=cctim.htm>Time's Crucible sometimes seems as though she's skipped the previous four books of character development (most likely a legacy of its origins as a TV script), but his Ace in Lungbarrow is very much a creation of the books, and an elegant extrapolation of them at that. Plus, he does a wonderful job with the interaction between Chris and the Doctor and that sense of uncertainty between them that followed the death of Roz; I'd forgotten how well that was handled in those four books. Plus, of course, he writes the only appearance of Leela in the 94 Virgin novels, and does an interesting job of developing her out as a character post-Invasion of Time. It does make me wish we'd seen more of this version of the character.
Of course, no examination of Marc Platt's writing would be complete without discussing his take on Gallifrey and the Doctor, and after digesting it all, I still find it to be quite cleverly done. Everyone talks about how it removed the mystery from the Doctor, but I feel that the Doctor's mysteries had been removed quite effectively long before that -- towards the end of the Sixth Doctor's era, he was popping back and forth to Gallifrey like a Monday-morning commute, and mentioning Rassilon's name like he was just another historical figure he'd rubbed elbows with. By introducing the Other, the Pythia, and Lungbarrow, Platt added depth to the Gallifrey mythos, and I personally love it all.
This all just leaves Downtime, the odd man out in the trio -- it's actually a novelization of the script he wrote for a direct-to-video production, not an unused script that he turned into a novel. It's also stylistically different from the other two -- instead of being a chilly Gothic novel, it's a UNIT techno-thriller that fits neatly in between Mawdryn Undead and Battlefield in showing us the Brigadier's journey back to relevancy and redemption; here, the Brigadier learns about his grand-child and discovers that he doesn't need the Doctor or UNIT to be a hero. We also see loads of development to UNIT as well; Crichton from The Five Doctors shows up, as does Bambera (still a Corporal here), and we get hints of how the organization develops from the small group we see in the Pertwee era to the serious armed force that shows up in Battlefield. It's a trifle thin -- wide margins, big print -- but not bad for all that. Still, it's not the same sort of Marc Platt we see in his New Adventures.
On the whole, I doubt that we'll see another novel from Platt -- he's continued to work in other media, including some excellent audio plays from Big Finish, and I think that the novel was more a passing fling for him than a true love affair. Still, he's left us readers with loads of material to chew over, and he's not left Doctor Who behind... which is something of a relief, in my opinion.
When the Virgin publishers decided to begin presenting "New Adventures" of Doctor Who, one of the first places they turned to was the pool of writers that the TV series had used in its last few seasons. Marc Platt, writer of Ghost Light and one of the principal architects of the infamous "Cartmel Masterplan" that laid out the ancient history of Gallifrey and the hitherto untold secrets of the Doctor's youth, still had a couple of unused scripts from the planned Season 27, and was glad for a place to put them. All in all, then, it's not surprising that his three books written for the Virgin line (Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, Downtime, and Lungbarrow) seem like a case of unfinished business.
Time's Crucible and Lungbarrow form an almost perfect matched pair; one, near the beginning of the line, laying the ground-work for the other's revelations about ancient Gallifrey near the end of the line. Stylistically, they're eerily similar; the unearthly, grey majesty of the City in Time's Crucible and the decrepit, buried mausoleum of Lungbarrow in Lungbarrow seem as though they could be in the same neighborhood. Platt's always stated that he's a fan of the Gothic novel, and nobody would have any difficulty believing it after reading Lungbarrow. Burns that never heal even after three regenerations, a living House that buries itself out of shame, a Ghost that haunts the halls until its missing will is found -- it's straight out of Poe or Peake, a compleat Gothic primer.
Platt's chilly, almost mathematically-precise prose style in the above books is hard to take for some; it's hard going to read at times, because there doesn't seem to be much emotion to it. However, once you get into the mind-set, there are gems to be unearthed. His Doctor, for one, is very much in the mode of the later seasons of the TV series -- strange, wonderful, and unknowable. His Ace in <>a href=cctim.htm>Time's Crucible sometimes seems as though she's skipped the previous four books of character development (most likely a legacy of its origins as a TV script), but his Ace in Lungbarrow is very much a creation of the books, and an elegant extrapolation of them at that. Plus, he does a wonderful job with the interaction between Chris and the Doctor and that sense of uncertainty between them that followed the death of Roz; I'd forgotten how well that was handled in those four books. Plus, of course, he writes the only appearance of Leela in the 94 Virgin novels, and does an interesting job of developing her out as a character post-Invasion of Time. It does make me wish we'd seen more of this version of the character.
Of course, no examination of Marc Platt's writing would be complete without discussing his take on Gallifrey and the Doctor, and after digesting it all, I still find it to be quite cleverly done. Everyone talks about how it removed the mystery from the Doctor, but I feel that the Doctor's mysteries had been removed quite effectively long before that -- towards the end of the Sixth Doctor's era, he was popping back and forth to Gallifrey like a Monday-morning commute, and mentioning Rassilon's name like he was just another historical figure he'd rubbed elbows with. By introducing the Other, the Pythia, and Lungbarrow, Platt added depth to the Gallifrey mythos, and I personally love it all.
This all just leaves Downtime, the odd man out in the trio -- it's actually a novelization of the script he wrote for a direct-to-video production, not an unused script that he turned into a novel. It's also stylistically different from the other two -- instead of being a chilly Gothic novel, it's a UNIT techno-thriller that fits neatly in between Mawdryn Undead and Battlefield in showing us the Brigadier's journey back to relevancy and redemption; here, the Brigadier learns about his grand-child and discovers that he doesn't need the Doctor or UNIT to be a hero. We also see loads of development to UNIT as well; Crichton from The Five Doctors shows up, as does Bambera (still a Corporal here), and we get hints of how the organization develops from the small group we see in the Pertwee era to the serious armed force that shows up in Battlefield. It's a trifle thin -- wide margins, big print -- but not bad for all that. Still, it's not the same sort of Marc Platt we see in his New Adventures.
On the whole, I doubt that we'll see another novel from Platt -- he's continued to work in other media, including some excellent audio plays from Big Finish, and I think that the novel was more a passing fling for him than a true love affair. Still, he's left us readers with loads of material to chew over, and he's not left Doctor Who behind... which is something of a relief, in my opinion.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Retrospective: Craig Hinton
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, April 1, 2013.)
I originally started doing these retrospectives for the Jade Pagoda mailing list, now sadly inactive; that was about ten years ago, and this retrospective was part of the reason I finally stopped. While Craig Hinton was alive, he was a member of Jade Pagoda and a frequent poster, and his presence greatly enlivened the discussions he participated in. I enjoyed talking with him about Doctor Who, and I didn't want to spoil the fun by admitting that his five Doctor Who novels (The Crystal Bucephalus, Millennial Rites, GodEngine, The Quantum Archangel, Synthespians) had always grated on my nerves when I read them. I knew it would hurt his feelings to read about someone not liking his work, no matter how I put it, and I didn't want to do that.
Then he died. He died far too young, and his passing was a shock to all of us in the (rather large) community of Doctor Who fans. If I'd had little taste for slagging off his novels before he died, I had even less taste for doing so afterward. Knowing that I'd have to skip Craig left me with little taste for completing the retrospectives, and the idea languished. But time gives us perspective on everything, I decided, and I disliked leaving something half-done; so despite the lack of a Jade Pagoda, I went back to re-reading Doctor Who, author by author... and Craig Hinton was bound to come up again. With not inconsiderable trepidation, I went back to re-read his books.
I was surprised to find that I liked them quite a bit. They're not High Art; they're very different in style and tone to the books around them. Hinton aimed for a voice closer to the epic comic book sagas of Doctor Who Monthly... or, to be more accurate, he aimed for the "cosmic" tone of many Marvel comics stories that DWM often imitated and sometimes duplicated. 'Millennial Rites' could stand next to The Tides of Time as a bookend, in some ways, but it feels more appropriate to compare it to Chris Claremont's X-Men comics. Not just because the plot bears some similarity to Claremont's "Inferno" storyline, either; like Claremont, Hinton has no interest in creating naturalistic dialogue or even naturalistic characters. Everyone is meant to be larger-than-life, filled with tragic secrets, shocking revelations and seething passions, waiting to be revealed as the novel progresses.
At the time, this felt like the worst kind of mistake. In retrospect (and this is, after all, a retrospective), Craig Hinton's biggest sin wasn't a lack of quality, it was that he was striking out in a different direction from everyone else writing at the time. The operatic sweep of gods and monsters in Millennial Rites, battling it out with magic as the Doctor battles to avoid becoming his darker self, reads more like a comic book translated into prose than it does like a novel. When read a few months after Paul Cornell's consciously literary Human Nature, and a few months before Ben Aaronovitch's transcendent The Also People, it sticks out like a sore thumb. But read on its own, or better yet next to other books steeped in that same atmosphere, it feels much easier to understand what Hinton was aiming for.
Even Hinton's least well-received book, The Quantum Archangel, makes sense when viewed in this light. It's meant to be a cosmic crossover, an epic "summer event" that features the return of the Chronovores, the true explanation of the nature of the Whoniverse, the Doctor and the Master teaming up, the Doctor gaining cosmic godhood and duking it out against a monstrous foe who nearly annihilated the Time Lords, the Daemons, the Exxilons, the Uxarieans, the Kastrians, the Sontarans, the Rutans... OK, at this point it's probably time to digress a bit and discuss the fanwank.
"Fanwank" is a term that Craig himself coined, and it's such a wonderfully vulgar, yet brilliantly evocative word that I think it will be remembered long after the Doctor Who novels are forgotten. It refers to continuity points inserted into a book for their own sake, digressions made by the writer simply to enshrine their pet fan theory into canonical print. When the Doctor suddenly says, in an aside, "Oh, and by the way, Jamie regained his memory after the Time Lords wiped it," that's fanwank. When a writer writes in a monologue that explains what happened to the second Zygon fleet, in a novel that features no Zygons, that's fanwank. And Craig Hinton wrote fanwank so grandiose and absurd that it almost transcended the term. His novels functioned in part as a sort of Grand Design for the Doctor Who universe, filled with explanations of how the different dimensions and the Time Vortex and the various cosmic entities we've seen over the years interacted. It makes sense, it forms a self-consistent whole... but I don't think it was ever particularly wanted or needed. That may have been the biggest reason why Hinton's novels were never accepted; Doctor Who is a series that never pays much attention to its own rules. Russell T Davies doesn't want to try to fit the Beast into the cosmology of the Six-Fold Realm, so he simply ignored it. (Assuming he was aware of it to begin with. That's the other thing that happens a lot in Doctor Who.)
And The Quantum Archangel sets out to be the ultimate triumph of fanwank, Craig Hinton's final statement on How It All Fits Together. It's about four hundred pages too short to contain its own plot, it makes obscure figures like the Celestial Toymaker and the Chronovores (each of whom appeared in exactly one story over the twenty-six year televised history of the original series) into major figures in the Doctor Who mythos, it is squarely aimed for an audience of obsessive fans that probably doesn't exist anymore, and it's been roundly ignored by subsequent creators. But on re-reading the novel, as part of Hinton's total works, I at least understand what he was aiming at.
I can't tell him any of that. I normally wind up these pieces by talking about what it would be like to see another book from this author, but we all know that this is one time it won't happen. Craig Hinton is gone, and it's just now hitting me that I finally got around to writing the piece I was afraid to publish during his lifetime for fear of hurting his feelings, and seven years too late I want to tell him that I was wrong and he did a great job with Doctor Who after all. Life is like that sometimes; we don't get to say everything we should say to the people who need to hear it. But at least I can let you know: Craig Hinton wrote some really great Doctor Who books. They were mad, they were melodrama, but they were glorious. Rest in peace, Craig.
I originally started doing these retrospectives for the Jade Pagoda mailing list, now sadly inactive; that was about ten years ago, and this retrospective was part of the reason I finally stopped. While Craig Hinton was alive, he was a member of Jade Pagoda and a frequent poster, and his presence greatly enlivened the discussions he participated in. I enjoyed talking with him about Doctor Who, and I didn't want to spoil the fun by admitting that his five Doctor Who novels (The Crystal Bucephalus, Millennial Rites, GodEngine, The Quantum Archangel, Synthespians) had always grated on my nerves when I read them. I knew it would hurt his feelings to read about someone not liking his work, no matter how I put it, and I didn't want to do that.
Then he died. He died far too young, and his passing was a shock to all of us in the (rather large) community of Doctor Who fans. If I'd had little taste for slagging off his novels before he died, I had even less taste for doing so afterward. Knowing that I'd have to skip Craig left me with little taste for completing the retrospectives, and the idea languished. But time gives us perspective on everything, I decided, and I disliked leaving something half-done; so despite the lack of a Jade Pagoda, I went back to re-reading Doctor Who, author by author... and Craig Hinton was bound to come up again. With not inconsiderable trepidation, I went back to re-read his books.
I was surprised to find that I liked them quite a bit. They're not High Art; they're very different in style and tone to the books around them. Hinton aimed for a voice closer to the epic comic book sagas of Doctor Who Monthly... or, to be more accurate, he aimed for the "cosmic" tone of many Marvel comics stories that DWM often imitated and sometimes duplicated. 'Millennial Rites' could stand next to The Tides of Time as a bookend, in some ways, but it feels more appropriate to compare it to Chris Claremont's X-Men comics. Not just because the plot bears some similarity to Claremont's "Inferno" storyline, either; like Claremont, Hinton has no interest in creating naturalistic dialogue or even naturalistic characters. Everyone is meant to be larger-than-life, filled with tragic secrets, shocking revelations and seething passions, waiting to be revealed as the novel progresses.
At the time, this felt like the worst kind of mistake. In retrospect (and this is, after all, a retrospective), Craig Hinton's biggest sin wasn't a lack of quality, it was that he was striking out in a different direction from everyone else writing at the time. The operatic sweep of gods and monsters in Millennial Rites, battling it out with magic as the Doctor battles to avoid becoming his darker self, reads more like a comic book translated into prose than it does like a novel. When read a few months after Paul Cornell's consciously literary Human Nature, and a few months before Ben Aaronovitch's transcendent The Also People, it sticks out like a sore thumb. But read on its own, or better yet next to other books steeped in that same atmosphere, it feels much easier to understand what Hinton was aiming for.
Even Hinton's least well-received book, The Quantum Archangel, makes sense when viewed in this light. It's meant to be a cosmic crossover, an epic "summer event" that features the return of the Chronovores, the true explanation of the nature of the Whoniverse, the Doctor and the Master teaming up, the Doctor gaining cosmic godhood and duking it out against a monstrous foe who nearly annihilated the Time Lords, the Daemons, the Exxilons, the Uxarieans, the Kastrians, the Sontarans, the Rutans... OK, at this point it's probably time to digress a bit and discuss the fanwank.
"Fanwank" is a term that Craig himself coined, and it's such a wonderfully vulgar, yet brilliantly evocative word that I think it will be remembered long after the Doctor Who novels are forgotten. It refers to continuity points inserted into a book for their own sake, digressions made by the writer simply to enshrine their pet fan theory into canonical print. When the Doctor suddenly says, in an aside, "Oh, and by the way, Jamie regained his memory after the Time Lords wiped it," that's fanwank. When a writer writes in a monologue that explains what happened to the second Zygon fleet, in a novel that features no Zygons, that's fanwank. And Craig Hinton wrote fanwank so grandiose and absurd that it almost transcended the term. His novels functioned in part as a sort of Grand Design for the Doctor Who universe, filled with explanations of how the different dimensions and the Time Vortex and the various cosmic entities we've seen over the years interacted. It makes sense, it forms a self-consistent whole... but I don't think it was ever particularly wanted or needed. That may have been the biggest reason why Hinton's novels were never accepted; Doctor Who is a series that never pays much attention to its own rules. Russell T Davies doesn't want to try to fit the Beast into the cosmology of the Six-Fold Realm, so he simply ignored it. (Assuming he was aware of it to begin with. That's the other thing that happens a lot in Doctor Who.)
And The Quantum Archangel sets out to be the ultimate triumph of fanwank, Craig Hinton's final statement on How It All Fits Together. It's about four hundred pages too short to contain its own plot, it makes obscure figures like the Celestial Toymaker and the Chronovores (each of whom appeared in exactly one story over the twenty-six year televised history of the original series) into major figures in the Doctor Who mythos, it is squarely aimed for an audience of obsessive fans that probably doesn't exist anymore, and it's been roundly ignored by subsequent creators. But on re-reading the novel, as part of Hinton's total works, I at least understand what he was aiming at.
I can't tell him any of that. I normally wind up these pieces by talking about what it would be like to see another book from this author, but we all know that this is one time it won't happen. Craig Hinton is gone, and it's just now hitting me that I finally got around to writing the piece I was afraid to publish during his lifetime for fear of hurting his feelings, and seven years too late I want to tell him that I was wrong and he did a great job with Doctor Who after all. Life is like that sometimes; we don't get to say everything we should say to the people who need to hear it. But at least I can let you know: Craig Hinton wrote some really great Doctor Who books. They were mad, they were melodrama, but they were glorious. Rest in peace, Craig.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Retrospective: Gary Russell
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 8/23, 2003.)
It's been a bit of a struggle trying to come up with this particular retrospective; firstly, it's been a struggle trying to read through Gary Russell's contributions to Doctor Who (Legacy, Invasion of the Cat-People, The Scales of Injustice, Business Unusual, Deadfall, Placebo Effect, Divided Loyalties, Instruments of Darkness). Secondly, it's been a bit of a struggle trying to find a way to express my opinions on Gary Russell's contributions to Doctor Who without sounding overly negative. Russell himself has admitted that he writes Doctor Who not out of a passion for writing, but out of a passion for the series itself, and that he finds writing to be a struggle. As a reader, it's hard not to notice his flaws.
So to begin with, what's positive about Gary Russell as a Doctor Who writer? Exactly what I already mentioned in the previous paragraph -- he's a fan of the series, and has a strong and passionate love for the characters involved. Russell's Doctor Who isn't just a TV series that got a bunch of tie-in novels; it's a myth, a legend, a history, a universe to inhabit and explore. That passion does come off as fanwank, but sometimes it transcends it; his books will sometimes have pages-long sequences where all he does is extrapolate the history of UNIT, or hypothesize as to the nature of Peladon beyond the five rooms we saw on TV, or show Mavic Chen before he became Guardian of the Solar System. His Doctor and his companions take delight in each other's company and long stretches of his novels just show them interacting as characters, something we didn't get enough of in the series. When he^'s working with an expert editor, Gary Russell can go a long way just on the nostalgia value of these scenes and the goodwill we have towards our favorite series, turning out novels that are, if not exactly good, at the very least readable and enjoyable. (It's my theory that this is why Divided Loyalties is his least-well regarded novel, even though it's not actually that much worse than his other books; he gives us a supercilious and arrogant Adric, a hateful Tegan, a bitter Nyssa, and a weak-willed, incompetent Doctor. The novel might not be particularly worse than Placebo Effect, but the former shoves us away where the latter welcomes us in.)
So, that mentioned, how does Gary Russell fare overall as a writer? Not well, unfortunately. He severely underplots his novels, usually padding them out to the requisite word-count with alternating descriptions of the villain doing something horrible to a random stranger and of the Doctor and companions doing something cheerful and companionable. The overall effect reminds one of Eddie Izzard's description of a mass murderer's day planner: "Death, death, death... lunch... death, death, death..." Frequently, the novel is three-quarters over before the plot actually begins. His prose is a little better, since he cares strongly about his characters and stories and wants to convey it, but it's still the sort of breathless, over-excitable prose that teenage fan-fiction writers use. He seems uncertain as to how to convey plot and characterization through his prose; when he wants to show how trustworthy the Doctor is, or how terrifying the Wirrrn are, he more or less just outright says so. His characters, the regulars aside, are quickly-sketched caricatures, but as with Bulis, they're caricatures the reader is usually familiar with and can inhabit with their own imaginations. They're not deep, but they feel comfortable most of the time.
Gary Russell is currently harnessing his passion for Doctor Who as producer of the Big Finish series of audios, and I think that this is the best of all possible worlds for Gary and for the fans. He can find and nurture the new generation of great Doctor Who writers, giving them the chance to produce Doctor Who stories actually voiced by the classic Doctors from the series. The fans get audios produced by someone with a deep and abiding love for the series and its traditions. And, as a not-inconsiderable side benefit, Gary's schedule keeps him from writing novels too often.
It's been a bit of a struggle trying to come up with this particular retrospective; firstly, it's been a struggle trying to read through Gary Russell's contributions to Doctor Who (Legacy, Invasion of the Cat-People, The Scales of Injustice, Business Unusual, Deadfall, Placebo Effect, Divided Loyalties, Instruments of Darkness). Secondly, it's been a bit of a struggle trying to find a way to express my opinions on Gary Russell's contributions to Doctor Who without sounding overly negative. Russell himself has admitted that he writes Doctor Who not out of a passion for writing, but out of a passion for the series itself, and that he finds writing to be a struggle. As a reader, it's hard not to notice his flaws.
So to begin with, what's positive about Gary Russell as a Doctor Who writer? Exactly what I already mentioned in the previous paragraph -- he's a fan of the series, and has a strong and passionate love for the characters involved. Russell's Doctor Who isn't just a TV series that got a bunch of tie-in novels; it's a myth, a legend, a history, a universe to inhabit and explore. That passion does come off as fanwank, but sometimes it transcends it; his books will sometimes have pages-long sequences where all he does is extrapolate the history of UNIT, or hypothesize as to the nature of Peladon beyond the five rooms we saw on TV, or show Mavic Chen before he became Guardian of the Solar System. His Doctor and his companions take delight in each other's company and long stretches of his novels just show them interacting as characters, something we didn't get enough of in the series. When he^'s working with an expert editor, Gary Russell can go a long way just on the nostalgia value of these scenes and the goodwill we have towards our favorite series, turning out novels that are, if not exactly good, at the very least readable and enjoyable. (It's my theory that this is why Divided Loyalties is his least-well regarded novel, even though it's not actually that much worse than his other books; he gives us a supercilious and arrogant Adric, a hateful Tegan, a bitter Nyssa, and a weak-willed, incompetent Doctor. The novel might not be particularly worse than Placebo Effect, but the former shoves us away where the latter welcomes us in.)
So, that mentioned, how does Gary Russell fare overall as a writer? Not well, unfortunately. He severely underplots his novels, usually padding them out to the requisite word-count with alternating descriptions of the villain doing something horrible to a random stranger and of the Doctor and companions doing something cheerful and companionable. The overall effect reminds one of Eddie Izzard's description of a mass murderer's day planner: "Death, death, death... lunch... death, death, death..." Frequently, the novel is three-quarters over before the plot actually begins. His prose is a little better, since he cares strongly about his characters and stories and wants to convey it, but it's still the sort of breathless, over-excitable prose that teenage fan-fiction writers use. He seems uncertain as to how to convey plot and characterization through his prose; when he wants to show how trustworthy the Doctor is, or how terrifying the Wirrrn are, he more or less just outright says so. His characters, the regulars aside, are quickly-sketched caricatures, but as with Bulis, they're caricatures the reader is usually familiar with and can inhabit with their own imaginations. They're not deep, but they feel comfortable most of the time.
Gary Russell is currently harnessing his passion for Doctor Who as producer of the Big Finish series of audios, and I think that this is the best of all possible worlds for Gary and for the fans. He can find and nurture the new generation of great Doctor Who writers, giving them the chance to produce Doctor Who stories actually voiced by the classic Doctors from the series. The fans get audios produced by someone with a deep and abiding love for the series and its traditions. And, as a not-inconsiderable side benefit, Gary's schedule keeps him from writing novels too often.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Retrospective: Terrance Dicks
(Originally posted at the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on 2/13/14.)
It's worth mentioning right at the start that, unlike previous retrospectives, I did not try to read the entirety of Terrance Dicks' published output, or even his published Doctor Who output. "Uncle Terry" has been inextricably linked to the series since before I was born, and his prose stylings practically defined the Doctor for an entire pre-VCR generation. Ask any Doctor Who fan over thirty-five, and their memories of their favorite classic series episode are probably going to be at best half-actual-TV-show, half-novelization. And since Terrance Dicks wrote about a third of the novelizations, the simple math means that Doctor Who as we know it is about 1/6th Terrance Dicks' output by volume. So, for these purposes, I made the cut-off at the start of the Wilderness Years, and read my way through Timewyrm: Exodus, Blood Harvest, Shakedown, The Eight Doctors, Mean Streets, Catastrophea, Players, Endgame, Warmonger, Deadly Reunion, World Game, Made of Steel, and Revenge of the Judoon.
The overall experience was a bit like sitting through the stage show of a magician you remember seeing in childhood, now well past his prime. The robes are a bit threadbare at the sleeves, the collapsible hat creaks dangerously as it expands, and every once in a while one of the tricks goes horribly wrong. But he's got his patter down to a polish so fine that even as you spot the sleight-of-hand, you can't help but be charmed by the act all over again.
The "patter" is a big part of the Terrance Dicks experience. After writing over a hundred books, most of them featuring the same exact character with a change of face here and there, Dicks developed a few turns of phrase that served him well over the course of his Target novelizations. The TARDIS always dematerializes with a wheezing, groaning sound; the Doctor's face is variously "open", "young-old", or "teeth and curls", depending on the incarnation; and the Doctor breezes through situations with a calm, "In an authoritarian society, people tend to obey the voice of authority" or "A path once trodden is never forgotten." It's either brilliantly economical or ferociously lazy, depending on how generous you tend to feel during any given book.
This same ruthless economy of effort extends through to his plots. Terrance Dicks never comes up with anything just to use it once. Looking at the list above, Dicks reuses plot elements from The War Games, State of Decay, Shakedown (once you've written it as a video, why not write it again as a novel?), The Sea Devils, The Daemons, The Five Doctors, Shakedown (again, actually...once you've created some new characters to flesh the script out to novel length, why not reuse them?), Mean Streets (once you've reused your characters, why not reuse the story elements in the new story?) Players (multiple times; if Dicks was going to have to create a new villain, he at least wanted to get some use out of her) and The Brain of Morbius. All of which just happen to have been written or script-edited, by sheerest coincidence, by one Mister Terrance Dicks. (The effect is stronger when one reads the books back to back to back, of course. By the time World Game rolled around, with entire sections quoted word for word from Players, it started to feel like Dicks wasn't so much writing as reprinting.)
Still, the same instinct for economy serves him very well most of the time. Even his most frustratingly lazy works, like Warmonger and The Eight Doctors, are plotted and scripted so concisely that the prose flows with remarkable speed and rapidity. There's never a point where a Terrance Dicks novel feels bogged down or dull; the plot constantly moves from event to event, with no doldrums or unnecessary sequences. Uncle Terry doesn't see the point in writing something that he doesn't absolutely have to in order to move the story along, and while that can sometimes mean that the plots rely on coincidence and the Doctor develops superpowers as needed to get him out of a tight spot (or the right people believe him simply because of his "commanding nature"), it also means that you're never bored reading a Dicks Doctor Who novel. Occasionally flabbergasted, but never bored.
Ultimately, the best of Dicks' original Who is his early and his late work. His first novel, Timewyrm: Exodus, was written for an editor who clearly challenged him to go above and beyond his usual party-pieces. The result is a savagely brilliant, witty indictment of the corrupting nature of power that lingers long after The Eight Doctors has been blessedly forgotten. And his recent Quick Reads books, Made of Steel and Revenge of the Judoon, have deprived him of his usual fallback of reusing his own material. The result is a pair of taut, fast-paced reads that remind you just how much of Doctor Who is, and always will be, the work of Uncle Terry. And just how much we look forward to more.
It's worth mentioning right at the start that, unlike previous retrospectives, I did not try to read the entirety of Terrance Dicks' published output, or even his published Doctor Who output. "Uncle Terry" has been inextricably linked to the series since before I was born, and his prose stylings practically defined the Doctor for an entire pre-VCR generation. Ask any Doctor Who fan over thirty-five, and their memories of their favorite classic series episode are probably going to be at best half-actual-TV-show, half-novelization. And since Terrance Dicks wrote about a third of the novelizations, the simple math means that Doctor Who as we know it is about 1/6th Terrance Dicks' output by volume. So, for these purposes, I made the cut-off at the start of the Wilderness Years, and read my way through Timewyrm: Exodus, Blood Harvest, Shakedown, The Eight Doctors, Mean Streets, Catastrophea, Players, Endgame, Warmonger, Deadly Reunion, World Game, Made of Steel, and Revenge of the Judoon.
The overall experience was a bit like sitting through the stage show of a magician you remember seeing in childhood, now well past his prime. The robes are a bit threadbare at the sleeves, the collapsible hat creaks dangerously as it expands, and every once in a while one of the tricks goes horribly wrong. But he's got his patter down to a polish so fine that even as you spot the sleight-of-hand, you can't help but be charmed by the act all over again.
The "patter" is a big part of the Terrance Dicks experience. After writing over a hundred books, most of them featuring the same exact character with a change of face here and there, Dicks developed a few turns of phrase that served him well over the course of his Target novelizations. The TARDIS always dematerializes with a wheezing, groaning sound; the Doctor's face is variously "open", "young-old", or "teeth and curls", depending on the incarnation; and the Doctor breezes through situations with a calm, "In an authoritarian society, people tend to obey the voice of authority" or "A path once trodden is never forgotten." It's either brilliantly economical or ferociously lazy, depending on how generous you tend to feel during any given book.
This same ruthless economy of effort extends through to his plots. Terrance Dicks never comes up with anything just to use it once. Looking at the list above, Dicks reuses plot elements from The War Games, State of Decay, Shakedown (once you've written it as a video, why not write it again as a novel?), The Sea Devils, The Daemons, The Five Doctors, Shakedown (again, actually...once you've created some new characters to flesh the script out to novel length, why not reuse them?), Mean Streets (once you've reused your characters, why not reuse the story elements in the new story?) Players (multiple times; if Dicks was going to have to create a new villain, he at least wanted to get some use out of her) and The Brain of Morbius. All of which just happen to have been written or script-edited, by sheerest coincidence, by one Mister Terrance Dicks. (The effect is stronger when one reads the books back to back to back, of course. By the time World Game rolled around, with entire sections quoted word for word from Players, it started to feel like Dicks wasn't so much writing as reprinting.)
Still, the same instinct for economy serves him very well most of the time. Even his most frustratingly lazy works, like Warmonger and The Eight Doctors, are plotted and scripted so concisely that the prose flows with remarkable speed and rapidity. There's never a point where a Terrance Dicks novel feels bogged down or dull; the plot constantly moves from event to event, with no doldrums or unnecessary sequences. Uncle Terry doesn't see the point in writing something that he doesn't absolutely have to in order to move the story along, and while that can sometimes mean that the plots rely on coincidence and the Doctor develops superpowers as needed to get him out of a tight spot (or the right people believe him simply because of his "commanding nature"), it also means that you're never bored reading a Dicks Doctor Who novel. Occasionally flabbergasted, but never bored.
Ultimately, the best of Dicks' original Who is his early and his late work. His first novel, Timewyrm: Exodus, was written for an editor who clearly challenged him to go above and beyond his usual party-pieces. The result is a savagely brilliant, witty indictment of the corrupting nature of power that lingers long after The Eight Doctors has been blessedly forgotten. And his recent Quick Reads books, Made of Steel and Revenge of the Judoon, have deprived him of his usual fallback of reusing his own material. The result is a pair of taut, fast-paced reads that remind you just how much of Doctor Who is, and always will be, the work of Uncle Terry. And just how much we look forward to more.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Retrospective: Lawrence Miles
The thing that's most difficult, when reading through the work of Lawrence Miles (Christmas on a Rational Planet, Down, Alien Bodies, Dead Romance, Interference Books One and Two, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and This Town Will Never Let Us Go) it determining whether he actually means anything he says. On the one hand, most of his works are highly polemical and charged with arguments guaranteed to infuriate his reading audience. On the other hand, his work is so densely packed with irony that it's hard to determine whether he's actually saying what he believes, or whether he's just enfolded his beliefs in yet another layer of deliberate controversy. When Sam Jones is swayed by the arguments of the Remote, is that because Miles legitimately believes that there's no underlying ethical structure to the universe and we all follow our cultural programming? Or is he just implying that Sam Jones has always been written as a straw woman by every other author, so why not take that to its logical conclusion and have her completely convinced by Compassion's eighth-grade debating tactics? How seriously can you take a man who suggests that pain and suffering is a necessary part of the universe when the story ends with Benny almost literally shoving the argument up the arguer's ass sideways? When dealing with someone who resolutely refuses to take anything entirely seriously, including himself, it's hard to say.
On the other hand, it's possible to be so sharp you can cut yourself. At this point, Miles is as famous for being "Mad Larry" as he is for any of his books; he's managed to alienate pretty much everyone in a position to get him more work, whether in 'Doctor Who' or anything else. His books are notorious for containing thinly-veiled cheap shots and insults towards his fellow authors, and his public statements are, if anything, even more controversial. Even if he is taking the piss, he's never managed to do so in a way that makes it clear to the people he's talking to or about. If your irony is so fine that the only person who knows it's ironic is you, you have probably failed at the task of communication, if nothing else. Even if Miles isn't sincere, he fakes it so well it hurts.
But then again, it's impressive to read someone who commits so fully to their narrative. Miles does an excellent job of getting inside the head of his characters, writing them with absolutely no efforts to impose his own views onto their narrative frame. The ending of 'Christmas on a Rational Planet' is absolutely brilliant in that both the Carnival Queen and the Doctor are fully committed to their respective worldviews, even though they're mutually incompatible and even though they're both entirely unreliable as narrators. The important thing isn't which one of them is "right", it's how they react to their beliefs. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Sam and Compassion, of Christine and Chris, of Inangela and Valentine. Miles' books don't so much take a side as they throw the arguments up into the air and let you decide where they come down. As a result, you wind up thinking about his books long after you've finished them. (Even if one of the thoughts is, "Seriously, Sam? 'You don't care about people who die in car crashes'? You couldn't come up with an answer to that?")
Of course, all of these polemics and arguments and debates and philosophies would be boring if they weren't written in Miles' prose; for all that he's an infuriating and frustrating human being, he's at the top of the pack when it comes to writing style. 'Alien Bodies' is a fabulously well-written romp with some of the best jokes in the series, and a clear influence on the new 'Doctor Who' TV series. (In fact, I'd argue that it's the last truly influential Doctor Who novel.) 'Dead Romance' is one of the all-time best written novels in the entire range of 'Who' and its spin-offs. His prose drips wit, power, fury, sadness, and horror, sometimes all in the same sentence. Given that, it's no wonder that he was commissioned at least once even after he managed to piss off every single person he's ever worked with. (Although some of the blame for that should rest with the editors. Did Steve Cole never think about cutting the lines that were clearly aimed at other writers? Did Rebecca Levene never say, "No, we're taking out the cheap shot about 'Walking to Babylon'"? But I digress.)
Ultimately, reading Lawrence Miles is both an immensely frustrating and amazingly rich experience. It's difficult to read his books without getting upset, simply because so many of the points he's making are wrong-headed or insulting or insultingly wrong-headed (or wrong-headedly insulting). But at the same time, I've not read a 'Doctor Who' book that's done such a good job of making me re-examine my ideas; Miles has a way of getting under your skin, poking at you and asking if you've really thought about what you've been saying all this time. You wind up looking at the world a little bit differently after reading his books, and that's high praise for any writer. I may not agree with everything he says, I may not agree with anything he says, and I may not even be able to tell you if Miles agrees with anything he says...but it's well worth listening to him say it. It would be nice if, some day, he managed to focus and control his talent for irony and got back in the good graces of the BBC long enough to do another 'Doctor Who' book, because they are well worth reading.
Then again, maybe there isn't any irony at all and he means all the stupid things he's said. That's the problem with irony; there's always the danger that people will start seeing it even when it's not there.
On the other hand, it's possible to be so sharp you can cut yourself. At this point, Miles is as famous for being "Mad Larry" as he is for any of his books; he's managed to alienate pretty much everyone in a position to get him more work, whether in 'Doctor Who' or anything else. His books are notorious for containing thinly-veiled cheap shots and insults towards his fellow authors, and his public statements are, if anything, even more controversial. Even if he is taking the piss, he's never managed to do so in a way that makes it clear to the people he's talking to or about. If your irony is so fine that the only person who knows it's ironic is you, you have probably failed at the task of communication, if nothing else. Even if Miles isn't sincere, he fakes it so well it hurts.
But then again, it's impressive to read someone who commits so fully to their narrative. Miles does an excellent job of getting inside the head of his characters, writing them with absolutely no efforts to impose his own views onto their narrative frame. The ending of 'Christmas on a Rational Planet' is absolutely brilliant in that both the Carnival Queen and the Doctor are fully committed to their respective worldviews, even though they're mutually incompatible and even though they're both entirely unreliable as narrators. The important thing isn't which one of them is "right", it's how they react to their beliefs. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Sam and Compassion, of Christine and Chris, of Inangela and Valentine. Miles' books don't so much take a side as they throw the arguments up into the air and let you decide where they come down. As a result, you wind up thinking about his books long after you've finished them. (Even if one of the thoughts is, "Seriously, Sam? 'You don't care about people who die in car crashes'? You couldn't come up with an answer to that?")
Of course, all of these polemics and arguments and debates and philosophies would be boring if they weren't written in Miles' prose; for all that he's an infuriating and frustrating human being, he's at the top of the pack when it comes to writing style. 'Alien Bodies' is a fabulously well-written romp with some of the best jokes in the series, and a clear influence on the new 'Doctor Who' TV series. (In fact, I'd argue that it's the last truly influential Doctor Who novel.) 'Dead Romance' is one of the all-time best written novels in the entire range of 'Who' and its spin-offs. His prose drips wit, power, fury, sadness, and horror, sometimes all in the same sentence. Given that, it's no wonder that he was commissioned at least once even after he managed to piss off every single person he's ever worked with. (Although some of the blame for that should rest with the editors. Did Steve Cole never think about cutting the lines that were clearly aimed at other writers? Did Rebecca Levene never say, "No, we're taking out the cheap shot about 'Walking to Babylon'"? But I digress.)
Ultimately, reading Lawrence Miles is both an immensely frustrating and amazingly rich experience. It's difficult to read his books without getting upset, simply because so many of the points he's making are wrong-headed or insulting or insultingly wrong-headed (or wrong-headedly insulting). But at the same time, I've not read a 'Doctor Who' book that's done such a good job of making me re-examine my ideas; Miles has a way of getting under your skin, poking at you and asking if you've really thought about what you've been saying all this time. You wind up looking at the world a little bit differently after reading his books, and that's high praise for any writer. I may not agree with everything he says, I may not agree with anything he says, and I may not even be able to tell you if Miles agrees with anything he says...but it's well worth listening to him say it. It would be nice if, some day, he managed to focus and control his talent for irony and got back in the good graces of the BBC long enough to do another 'Doctor Who' book, because they are well worth reading.
Then again, maybe there isn't any irony at all and he means all the stupid things he's said. That's the problem with irony; there's always the danger that people will start seeing it even when it's not there.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Retrospective: Simon Bucher-Jones
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on September 23, 2003.)
Retrospective: Simon Bucher-Jones
Many of the authors who have contributed to the various lines of Doctor Who novels (and their spin-offs) can be summed up in a single word. For Paul Cornell, it's "charming"; for Christopher Bulis, it's "comfortable"; for Ben Aaronovitch, it's "brilliant". For Simon Bucher-Jones, author or co-author of The Death of Art, Ghost Devices, The Taking of Planet 5, and Grimm Reality, it's "challenging". In fact, frequently the challenge implicit in his novels has turned off many a reader; that's a genuine shame, because he's got a lot of wit and style to offer to those who are willing to undertake those challenges.
Most of the challenge to Bucher-Jones' works comes from his plots. Bucher-Jones is a devotee of "hard science fiction", and virtually all his novels concern themselves with the intricacies of quantum physics and their implications. From the Quoth of The Death of Art, sub-atomic life-forms that feed on the psychic potential of the living mind, to the budding universes that breed from the super-structure of even larger universes in The Taking of Planet 5, a lot of Bucher-Jones' work requires a physics degree to comprehend on the first read. Failing that, one can simply read and re-read the book until it all makes sense, or take notes, but to the casual reader (myself included), it can wind up being downright impenetrable.
It doesn't help that Bucher-Jones doesn't slow down for the faint of brain. The Death of Art explains how the Brotherhood evolved from your bog-standard Masonic order into a group of powerful psionics that would go on to manipulate the galaxy's politics for centuries to come, but it's kind of shoe-horned in with the explanation of the breeding of the Quoth and the development of the Shadow Directory and the plots of Montague and Chris impersonating the Fifth Doctor and it never slows down for even a moment. Didn't catch any of that? Read it again, is the implied answer. The book's not going anywhere.
However, like Lawrence Miles and Ben Aaronovitch, two other controversial authors, being too clever isn't the problem it seems. What was a tough, incomprehensible read the first time around melts into a sharp, wickedly witty novel the second, and Bucher-Jones shows a flair for the poetic in his prose style that complements his gifts for plotting. Whether describing the Vo'lach, aliens ensnared in a temporal paradox that tricks them into racial suicide, or creating a monster that rips ideas out of people's minds (and for a truly inspired piece of writing, read page 223 of The Taking of Planet 5 -- my apologies in advance to Mark Clapham if that turns out to be one of his bits) -- Simon Bucher-Jones dazzles the reader with wild imagination coupled to a beautiful writing style.
Really, Simon Bucher-Jones is the complete package as a writer, even if it does behoove the reader to take notes (and, possibly, a class on quantum physics) before reading his novels. He's remained active in Who circles, and it'd be nice to see another novel out of him in the not too distant future. I just plan to read it very, very, very carefully.
Retrospective: Simon Bucher-Jones
Many of the authors who have contributed to the various lines of Doctor Who novels (and their spin-offs) can be summed up in a single word. For Paul Cornell, it's "charming"; for Christopher Bulis, it's "comfortable"; for Ben Aaronovitch, it's "brilliant". For Simon Bucher-Jones, author or co-author of The Death of Art, Ghost Devices, The Taking of Planet 5, and Grimm Reality, it's "challenging". In fact, frequently the challenge implicit in his novels has turned off many a reader; that's a genuine shame, because he's got a lot of wit and style to offer to those who are willing to undertake those challenges.
Most of the challenge to Bucher-Jones' works comes from his plots. Bucher-Jones is a devotee of "hard science fiction", and virtually all his novels concern themselves with the intricacies of quantum physics and their implications. From the Quoth of The Death of Art, sub-atomic life-forms that feed on the psychic potential of the living mind, to the budding universes that breed from the super-structure of even larger universes in The Taking of Planet 5, a lot of Bucher-Jones' work requires a physics degree to comprehend on the first read. Failing that, one can simply read and re-read the book until it all makes sense, or take notes, but to the casual reader (myself included), it can wind up being downright impenetrable.
It doesn't help that Bucher-Jones doesn't slow down for the faint of brain. The Death of Art explains how the Brotherhood evolved from your bog-standard Masonic order into a group of powerful psionics that would go on to manipulate the galaxy's politics for centuries to come, but it's kind of shoe-horned in with the explanation of the breeding of the Quoth and the development of the Shadow Directory and the plots of Montague and Chris impersonating the Fifth Doctor and it never slows down for even a moment. Didn't catch any of that? Read it again, is the implied answer. The book's not going anywhere.
However, like Lawrence Miles and Ben Aaronovitch, two other controversial authors, being too clever isn't the problem it seems. What was a tough, incomprehensible read the first time around melts into a sharp, wickedly witty novel the second, and Bucher-Jones shows a flair for the poetic in his prose style that complements his gifts for plotting. Whether describing the Vo'lach, aliens ensnared in a temporal paradox that tricks them into racial suicide, or creating a monster that rips ideas out of people's minds (and for a truly inspired piece of writing, read page 223 of The Taking of Planet 5 -- my apologies in advance to Mark Clapham if that turns out to be one of his bits) -- Simon Bucher-Jones dazzles the reader with wild imagination coupled to a beautiful writing style.
Really, Simon Bucher-Jones is the complete package as a writer, even if it does behoove the reader to take notes (and, possibly, a class on quantum physics) before reading his novels. He's remained active in Who circles, and it'd be nice to see another novel out of him in the not too distant future. I just plan to read it very, very, very carefully.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Retrospective: Christopher Bulis
(Originally published June 11, 2003 on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide.)
On the surface, Christopher Bulis is an unlikely choice for the label of "controversial author". Yet, in his own way, he's become something of a focus for controversy just as polar opposites like Lawrence Miles and Ben Aaronovitch have. To fans who enjoy the ground-breaking efforts of the aforementioned "rad" authors, Chris Bulis' work stands as an example of exactly the sort of pot-boiler the range should avoid. Yet he's been commissioned more than any author save Justin Richards, with twelve novels (Shadowmind, State of Change, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, The Eye of the Giant, Twilight of the Gods, A Device of Death, The Ultimate Treasure, Tempest, Vanderdeken's Children, City At World's End, Imperial Moon, The Palace of the Red Sun) to his name. So why, if he's a bland and boring author as some (myself included) claim, does he have so many champions, both in fandom and at the BBC? And if he's good enough to get commissioned twelve times, why do so many people hate his books?
Fundamentally, I think a lot of people dislike his books because they don't seem like Bulis spent a lot of effort on them. The characters never really rise above their own one-sentence descriptions; The Eye of the Giant is about a Disgraced Scientist, an Alcoholic But Likeable Movie Star, a Disabled Person Who Gracefully Handles It, a Cold-Hearted But Pretty Movie Star, and a Father Who Just Wants the Best For His Little Girl going out to a mysterious island, and those brief phrases are about as deep as Bulis ever gets. All of these characters feel as though they should have a stat block under their names, and instructions to the Game Master on how to play the characters. Even the Doctor and his companions come off as remarkably generic.
His plots, too, come out of the "generic" school. State of Change, the world where Rome never fell. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the world where magic works. The Ultimate Treasure, the quest for a mysterious treasure that throws together unlikely companions. It's all so generic and cliched that by his third or fourth novel, he's having the characters themselves comment on how cliched it all seems, as though he feels a subconscious need to apologize. (The ultimate example of this comes in Imperial Moon, where Turlough and the Doctor find the diary of one of the main characters and Turlough laughs at how bad the concepts within seem, even predicting major chunks of the rest of the book based on the excerpts.) The worst part comes when his characterization and his plotting interact -- after all, one of the usual concepts of Doctor Who is that the Doctor shows up and solves the mystery/ends the deception that the society, expedition, refugees, whatever, are trapped in. Since Bulis' deceptions and mysteries are so simple, his only option is to make his characters progressively more idiotic until they can't solve the simple mysteries he puts before them, then lets the Doctor come in and tell them what the audience already realized 200 pages ago.
So, given all his considerable short-comings, why do people still like him? Why did I not commit suicide rather than read twelve of his books in a row? Why, in fact, would I recommend him again for the range?
The answer lies in his prose, I think. It's not brilliant, world-beating, white-fire-across-your-soul stuff like the Paul Cornells and Ben Aaronovitchs of this world produce, but it's pleasant, comfortable writing that feels like that old, worn sweater that you wear on cold days. He's a breeze to read -- whole books pass by in less than two hours, and even though the plot is old, it's still entertaining to hear it again. He's a good raconteur, I think; even as you chuckle at the same old tricks, you have to admire that he continues to use them. He's also got a reasonable sense of humor about his work, which helps.
So, overall, I wouldn't mind seeing another book out of Chris Bulis. I don't think he represents a good model for the range, and I'd hate to see his style of unassuming pot-boilers become the norm, but as an occasional diversion, or a rest between Lawrence Miles world-shatterers, you could definitely do worse.
On the surface, Christopher Bulis is an unlikely choice for the label of "controversial author". Yet, in his own way, he's become something of a focus for controversy just as polar opposites like Lawrence Miles and Ben Aaronovitch have. To fans who enjoy the ground-breaking efforts of the aforementioned "rad" authors, Chris Bulis' work stands as an example of exactly the sort of pot-boiler the range should avoid. Yet he's been commissioned more than any author save Justin Richards, with twelve novels (Shadowmind, State of Change, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, The Eye of the Giant, Twilight of the Gods, A Device of Death, The Ultimate Treasure, Tempest, Vanderdeken's Children, City At World's End, Imperial Moon, The Palace of the Red Sun) to his name. So why, if he's a bland and boring author as some (myself included) claim, does he have so many champions, both in fandom and at the BBC? And if he's good enough to get commissioned twelve times, why do so many people hate his books?
Fundamentally, I think a lot of people dislike his books because they don't seem like Bulis spent a lot of effort on them. The characters never really rise above their own one-sentence descriptions; The Eye of the Giant is about a Disgraced Scientist, an Alcoholic But Likeable Movie Star, a Disabled Person Who Gracefully Handles It, a Cold-Hearted But Pretty Movie Star, and a Father Who Just Wants the Best For His Little Girl going out to a mysterious island, and those brief phrases are about as deep as Bulis ever gets. All of these characters feel as though they should have a stat block under their names, and instructions to the Game Master on how to play the characters. Even the Doctor and his companions come off as remarkably generic.
His plots, too, come out of the "generic" school. State of Change, the world where Rome never fell. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the world where magic works. The Ultimate Treasure, the quest for a mysterious treasure that throws together unlikely companions. It's all so generic and cliched that by his third or fourth novel, he's having the characters themselves comment on how cliched it all seems, as though he feels a subconscious need to apologize. (The ultimate example of this comes in Imperial Moon, where Turlough and the Doctor find the diary of one of the main characters and Turlough laughs at how bad the concepts within seem, even predicting major chunks of the rest of the book based on the excerpts.) The worst part comes when his characterization and his plotting interact -- after all, one of the usual concepts of Doctor Who is that the Doctor shows up and solves the mystery/ends the deception that the society, expedition, refugees, whatever, are trapped in. Since Bulis' deceptions and mysteries are so simple, his only option is to make his characters progressively more idiotic until they can't solve the simple mysteries he puts before them, then lets the Doctor come in and tell them what the audience already realized 200 pages ago.
So, given all his considerable short-comings, why do people still like him? Why did I not commit suicide rather than read twelve of his books in a row? Why, in fact, would I recommend him again for the range?
The answer lies in his prose, I think. It's not brilliant, world-beating, white-fire-across-your-soul stuff like the Paul Cornells and Ben Aaronovitchs of this world produce, but it's pleasant, comfortable writing that feels like that old, worn sweater that you wear on cold days. He's a breeze to read -- whole books pass by in less than two hours, and even though the plot is old, it's still entertaining to hear it again. He's a good raconteur, I think; even as you chuckle at the same old tricks, you have to admire that he continues to use them. He's also got a reasonable sense of humor about his work, which helps.
So, overall, I wouldn't mind seeing another book out of Chris Bulis. I don't think he represents a good model for the range, and I'd hate to see his style of unassuming pot-boilers become the norm, but as an occasional diversion, or a rest between Lawrence Miles world-shatterers, you could definitely do worse.
Monday, July 8, 2013
Retrospective: Ben Aaronovitch
(Originally posted on 5/5/03 to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide.)
It's truly difficult to do a retrospective on Ben Aaronovich without lapsing into full-on "gush" mode; after all, we're not only talking about the writer of Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield, two of the most influential (and best) Seventh Doctor TV stories, we're also talking about the man who novelized Remembrance and turned out something even better than what was seen on-screen, bringing up the first appearance of the Rassilon/Omega/Other trilogy along the way. Even before he wrote Transit, The Also People, and co-wrote So Vile A Sin, he'd already earned a high place among the creators of Doctor Who.
So what did his Virgin novels add to his reputation? For one thing, they cemented his status as an inspiration to the leading lights of Who writers. Paul Cornell, Kate Orman, Lawrence Miles, Marc Platt, Jim Mortimore, and Lance Parkin, just to name a few, are all playing the game that Ben Aaronovich wrote the rules to; he'd already defined the main elements of the Doctor's character before the New Adventures even began, and his novels showed that a greater level of stylistic depth was possible in the books. (At this point, I'd like to remind everyone that I did warn them about going into "gush" mode.)
Aaronovich's books are dense, complex works -- each sentence is pressed into double, triple, and sometimes quadruple duty in order to squeeze the maximum amount of story out of each page. This can sometimes bewilder first-time readers (Transit winds up confusing a lot of people on the first read-through because it's simultaneously an action thriller, a character study of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, a history of the Hundred Days War, and a tragedy involving Blondie and Zamina, and that's skipping all the ancient Gallifrey stuff worked in there as well.) But if you're patient, the results are incredibly rewarding; the prose is so rich that even on your seventh (or eighth, or ninth) read, there's still new things to discover and old things to enjoy. The Doctor getting buried in the sand in The Also People ("it could be part of some cosmic plan..."), the Angel Francine playing chicken with a Vulture missile over the skies of Mars, the thousands of Doctors swarming out of a hole in reality to assault the Brotherhood -- Aaronovich just seems to overwhelm you with intelligent writing, to the point where it sometimes seems like drinking out of a fire-hose.
Each of his two solo books takes a very different approach to style -- Transit, naturally, is about motion, with short, choppy scenes and lots of transition from person to person, place to place, flash-backs and flash-forwards giving a sense of speed and urgency to the work. (Again, this can disorient a first-time reader, part of what gives Transit its poor reputation.) The Also People, on the other hand, is languid, lyrical, almost casual in its pacing and revelations; it's about a vacation, and it gives that sense of restfulness even during its big events. Yet it's never dull, an achievement that almost seems paradoxical.
I can't leave off his characterization, either, despite my knowledge that it's going to be more gushing; he does a surprisingly good job with Benny, considering that she's possessed for most of Transit, and his portrayal of Roz in The Also People remains the definitive characterization, its background details and emotional resonance shading every subsequent appearance of the character. He even handles Chris, a fairly shallow (but likeable) character well, by bringing out the puppy-dog enthusiasm of the character. And, of course, he remains one of the few authors to ever pull off scenes showing how the Doctor thinks.
His final (and I hope sincerely only in the sense of "to date") effort for the Doctor Who range was So Vile A Sin, and most fans know that he couldn't complete it. When I first read it, I suspected that he had finally set before him a task too daunting, a book that pulled together the threads of the Psi-Powers series, while also working in the N-Forms from Damaged Goods, sequelizing Original Sin, and depicting an interstellar war and the collapse of an empire as well. However, reading it right after his previous two works, I don't think it was too much for him; instead, I feel that his "somewhat loose perception of linear time as it pertains to deadlines" was all that was at fault. (Of course, the official explanation remains a hard drive crash, and far be it from me to cast doubt on such an august personality; however, given his habitual lateness in the past, I think we may safely be as suspicious as we like.)
Kate Orman essentially wrote the novel based on his outline and using what material he had finished, but the result is more noticeably Orman's than it is Aaronovich's; Kate Orman is, of course, no slouch herself at writing Doctor Who books, and the result is eminently readable, but it doesn't quite flow with the seamless ease that Aaronovich's two solo works do. Orman even admits in the afterword that she can't duplicate Ben Aaronovich's skills, and must simply do the best she can.
Ultimately, I believe that Ben Aaronovich is the finest author the Doctor Who novel lines have produced; whenever anyone questions me about why I read a silly TV tie-in series like Doctor Who, I simply lend them a copy of The Also People. I've never had to answer the question from the same person twice.
It's truly difficult to do a retrospective on Ben Aaronovich without lapsing into full-on "gush" mode; after all, we're not only talking about the writer of Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield, two of the most influential (and best) Seventh Doctor TV stories, we're also talking about the man who novelized Remembrance and turned out something even better than what was seen on-screen, bringing up the first appearance of the Rassilon/Omega/Other trilogy along the way. Even before he wrote Transit, The Also People, and co-wrote So Vile A Sin, he'd already earned a high place among the creators of Doctor Who.
So what did his Virgin novels add to his reputation? For one thing, they cemented his status as an inspiration to the leading lights of Who writers. Paul Cornell, Kate Orman, Lawrence Miles, Marc Platt, Jim Mortimore, and Lance Parkin, just to name a few, are all playing the game that Ben Aaronovich wrote the rules to; he'd already defined the main elements of the Doctor's character before the New Adventures even began, and his novels showed that a greater level of stylistic depth was possible in the books. (At this point, I'd like to remind everyone that I did warn them about going into "gush" mode.)
Aaronovich's books are dense, complex works -- each sentence is pressed into double, triple, and sometimes quadruple duty in order to squeeze the maximum amount of story out of each page. This can sometimes bewilder first-time readers (Transit winds up confusing a lot of people on the first read-through because it's simultaneously an action thriller, a character study of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, a history of the Hundred Days War, and a tragedy involving Blondie and Zamina, and that's skipping all the ancient Gallifrey stuff worked in there as well.) But if you're patient, the results are incredibly rewarding; the prose is so rich that even on your seventh (or eighth, or ninth) read, there's still new things to discover and old things to enjoy. The Doctor getting buried in the sand in The Also People ("it could be part of some cosmic plan..."), the Angel Francine playing chicken with a Vulture missile over the skies of Mars, the thousands of Doctors swarming out of a hole in reality to assault the Brotherhood -- Aaronovich just seems to overwhelm you with intelligent writing, to the point where it sometimes seems like drinking out of a fire-hose.
Each of his two solo books takes a very different approach to style -- Transit, naturally, is about motion, with short, choppy scenes and lots of transition from person to person, place to place, flash-backs and flash-forwards giving a sense of speed and urgency to the work. (Again, this can disorient a first-time reader, part of what gives Transit its poor reputation.) The Also People, on the other hand, is languid, lyrical, almost casual in its pacing and revelations; it's about a vacation, and it gives that sense of restfulness even during its big events. Yet it's never dull, an achievement that almost seems paradoxical.
I can't leave off his characterization, either, despite my knowledge that it's going to be more gushing; he does a surprisingly good job with Benny, considering that she's possessed for most of Transit, and his portrayal of Roz in The Also People remains the definitive characterization, its background details and emotional resonance shading every subsequent appearance of the character. He even handles Chris, a fairly shallow (but likeable) character well, by bringing out the puppy-dog enthusiasm of the character. And, of course, he remains one of the few authors to ever pull off scenes showing how the Doctor thinks.
His final (and I hope sincerely only in the sense of "to date") effort for the Doctor Who range was So Vile A Sin, and most fans know that he couldn't complete it. When I first read it, I suspected that he had finally set before him a task too daunting, a book that pulled together the threads of the Psi-Powers series, while also working in the N-Forms from Damaged Goods, sequelizing Original Sin, and depicting an interstellar war and the collapse of an empire as well. However, reading it right after his previous two works, I don't think it was too much for him; instead, I feel that his "somewhat loose perception of linear time as it pertains to deadlines" was all that was at fault. (Of course, the official explanation remains a hard drive crash, and far be it from me to cast doubt on such an august personality; however, given his habitual lateness in the past, I think we may safely be as suspicious as we like.)
Kate Orman essentially wrote the novel based on his outline and using what material he had finished, but the result is more noticeably Orman's than it is Aaronovich's; Kate Orman is, of course, no slouch herself at writing Doctor Who books, and the result is eminently readable, but it doesn't quite flow with the seamless ease that Aaronovich's two solo works do. Orman even admits in the afterword that she can't duplicate Ben Aaronovich's skills, and must simply do the best she can.
Ultimately, I believe that Ben Aaronovich is the finest author the Doctor Who novel lines have produced; whenever anyone questions me about why I read a silly TV tie-in series like Doctor Who, I simply lend them a copy of The Also People. I've never had to answer the question from the same person twice.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Retrospective: David Bishop
There are some writers out there that are only as good as their ideas. When they come up with a good concept, all they need to do is get out of its way and let the story shine through. These writers tend not to be remembered as great wordsmiths, but that doesn't matter so much; their prose is nothing to write home about, but they've got such inventive, puzzle-box minds that you have to admire the purity of their plots even if none of the individual moments stand out.
In some ways, David Bishop (Who Killed Kennedy, Amorality Tale, The Domino Effect, Empire of Death) is the exact opposite of that kind of writer. He does come up with great ideas--in fact, I'd say that if you reduced every Doctor Who novel to a one-sentence synopsis, there'd be no question that these four would rank among the highest. "An outside-in view of the UNIT era, as told by an investigative reporter who believes them to be a sinister conspiracy!" "The Doctor teams up with the Krays to fight aliens in the East End in the 50s!" "Sinister aliens prevent the computer from being invented, and the Doctor has to free Alan Turing from the Tower of London to save humanity!" "Queen Victoria colonizes the afterlife!" All great stuff, but he doesn't seem to be able to develop them properly. It feels like he rushes through the follow-up work needed to turn a great idea into a great novel, and as a result books that should soar feel like they slog along.
'Empire of Death' is the perfect example. With the spiritualism craze going full-bore in the Victorian era, it seems like the perfect place to set a novel about the afterlife. (Arguably, it seems like a mistake to set it in 'Doctor Who', where you know you're going to have to undermine your own concept by hedging your bets on the exact nature of the Other Side, but let's grant him a bit of leeway on that because it's so easy to think that the Doctor can fit into any story concept and make it better.) Having a physical portal to the afterlife is also a great idea, because it allows you to contrast Victoria's obsession with spiritualism with her role as one of history's biggest imperialists. The scene where troops invade Heaven in order to conquer it for the British Empire is a fine piece of social satire.
But having come up with the idea, Bishop never seems to refine it. Long stretches of the novel linger on incidental characters and minor dramas, there's a strange anti-abortion sub-theme that's awkwardly shoehorned in and not allowed to develop logically (presumably due to concerns about controversy, but it seems odd to include the topic in the first place if you're going to remove any exploration of it) and the interesting parts of the plot don't really feature until the end, and then only tangentially. The characters are all stock Victorian archetypes who never inhabit their roles convincingly, the plot runs along on rails to a predefined conclusion, and at the end, the ghosts have to turn out to be aliens because it's a 'Doctor Who' novel. (As predicted at the beginning of the previous paragraph.) Ultimately none of it lives up to its potential.
A similar analysis could be performed for any of Bishop's novels (with the possible exception of 'Who Killed Kennedy', which succeeds primarily because it's a pastiche of a cheesy "true conspiracy" book and so the flaws in its prose and characterization feel like little marks of authenticity.) His characters always feel like they stepped whole out of TVTropes.com holding their Idiot Balls firmly with both hands, his actual plots run on forced coincidence and authorial fiat, and there's never any sense of surprise to any of his endings. (Admittedly, that's unfair in the case of 'The Domino Effect', which suffers from being part of an arc where none of the authors' books ever feel like they're part of the same storyline, but 'The Domino Effect' has other problems.) It's hard to escape the idea that Bishop is capable of writing a much better book than he has so far, simply because his ideas are so good; but that only exacerbates the frustration involved in reading them, because you're simultaneously rewriting them in your head to make the concepts involved work.
On the whole, I wouldn't say no to another novel by David Bishop, if for no other reason than 'Who Killed Kennedy' showed so much promise that I'd like to see him fulfill it someday. But I don't think his best work will ever be his 'Doctor Who' books, simply because I think he needs an editor who will challenge him to work harder on making his ideas click on the page, and I don't think that authors get that kind of personal attention from the editors in the 'Doctor Who' line. The deadlines are too stringent and the workload too great to force someone to go back for draft after draft after draft...and after reading all of David Bishop's output, I think the clearest impression I got was that his books had a draft too few.
In some ways, David Bishop (Who Killed Kennedy, Amorality Tale, The Domino Effect, Empire of Death) is the exact opposite of that kind of writer. He does come up with great ideas--in fact, I'd say that if you reduced every Doctor Who novel to a one-sentence synopsis, there'd be no question that these four would rank among the highest. "An outside-in view of the UNIT era, as told by an investigative reporter who believes them to be a sinister conspiracy!" "The Doctor teams up with the Krays to fight aliens in the East End in the 50s!" "Sinister aliens prevent the computer from being invented, and the Doctor has to free Alan Turing from the Tower of London to save humanity!" "Queen Victoria colonizes the afterlife!" All great stuff, but he doesn't seem to be able to develop them properly. It feels like he rushes through the follow-up work needed to turn a great idea into a great novel, and as a result books that should soar feel like they slog along.
'Empire of Death' is the perfect example. With the spiritualism craze going full-bore in the Victorian era, it seems like the perfect place to set a novel about the afterlife. (Arguably, it seems like a mistake to set it in 'Doctor Who', where you know you're going to have to undermine your own concept by hedging your bets on the exact nature of the Other Side, but let's grant him a bit of leeway on that because it's so easy to think that the Doctor can fit into any story concept and make it better.) Having a physical portal to the afterlife is also a great idea, because it allows you to contrast Victoria's obsession with spiritualism with her role as one of history's biggest imperialists. The scene where troops invade Heaven in order to conquer it for the British Empire is a fine piece of social satire.
But having come up with the idea, Bishop never seems to refine it. Long stretches of the novel linger on incidental characters and minor dramas, there's a strange anti-abortion sub-theme that's awkwardly shoehorned in and not allowed to develop logically (presumably due to concerns about controversy, but it seems odd to include the topic in the first place if you're going to remove any exploration of it) and the interesting parts of the plot don't really feature until the end, and then only tangentially. The characters are all stock Victorian archetypes who never inhabit their roles convincingly, the plot runs along on rails to a predefined conclusion, and at the end, the ghosts have to turn out to be aliens because it's a 'Doctor Who' novel. (As predicted at the beginning of the previous paragraph.) Ultimately none of it lives up to its potential.
A similar analysis could be performed for any of Bishop's novels (with the possible exception of 'Who Killed Kennedy', which succeeds primarily because it's a pastiche of a cheesy "true conspiracy" book and so the flaws in its prose and characterization feel like little marks of authenticity.) His characters always feel like they stepped whole out of TVTropes.com holding their Idiot Balls firmly with both hands, his actual plots run on forced coincidence and authorial fiat, and there's never any sense of surprise to any of his endings. (Admittedly, that's unfair in the case of 'The Domino Effect', which suffers from being part of an arc where none of the authors' books ever feel like they're part of the same storyline, but 'The Domino Effect' has other problems.) It's hard to escape the idea that Bishop is capable of writing a much better book than he has so far, simply because his ideas are so good; but that only exacerbates the frustration involved in reading them, because you're simultaneously rewriting them in your head to make the concepts involved work.
On the whole, I wouldn't say no to another novel by David Bishop, if for no other reason than 'Who Killed Kennedy' showed so much promise that I'd like to see him fulfill it someday. But I don't think his best work will ever be his 'Doctor Who' books, simply because I think he needs an editor who will challenge him to work harder on making his ideas click on the page, and I don't think that authors get that kind of personal attention from the editors in the 'Doctor Who' line. The deadlines are too stringent and the workload too great to force someone to go back for draft after draft after draft...and after reading all of David Bishop's output, I think the clearest impression I got was that his books had a draft too few.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)