It's really no wonder that this story is so fondly remembered--this is really the finest example of this era of Doctor Who. The cast, both regular and incidental, are firing on all cylinders, and more importantly they've figured out exactly how to do this kind of story. The Doctor and his companions are separated from the TARDIS quickly and elegantly, kept apart by the thinness of a brick wall and by the distance of an entire civilization.
But at the same time, this is about more than simply getting back to the TARDIS and getting the heck out of Dodge; the scene between Barbara and the Doctor, one of the best in fifty-plus years of the series, showcases what the first Doctor era did better than any other. Barbara isn't willing to simply sit back and observe history, not when she knows where it ends. She must know, as a history teacher, that the Aztec practice of human sacrifice is more than mere superstition; equally, she must be aware that history has never been kind to rulers (especially women) who attempt to use their power to change the long-established and deeply-held customs of their people. But at the same time, she knows she has a chance that no-one else will ever have again. Her final line to the Doctor--"Not Barbara, Yetaxa," is delivered with such steely determination that you can't help root for her quixotic dream.
But of course, it fails. It fails not just because of the arc of history, or because of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey reasons...it fails because one person can't change the entire course of a civilization with a well-timed "No!" It fails because the 'victim' wants to honor the gods, and Barbara's intervention (no matter how well-intentioned) is nonetheless a condescending attempt to impose her culture on another because she thinks it's 'better'. What she's trying to do, while kinder in execution, is no less a destruction of the Aztec culture than Cortez and his successors attempted.
And more than that, it fails because it threatens the power of the priestly class. Tlotoxl is a master of realpolitik more than a true believer; he's fully aware that the rain will fall without blood. But he also knows that the Aztec military machine runs on the blood of its victims, that the sacrifices are as much a message to the empire's enemies as they are a devotion to its gods. He knows instinctively that Barbara is a threat--how could she not be? She interposes herself by her very existence between him and his gods, and his gods are all that make him who he is. And further, this is an era of the series where the past isn't presented as "just like the present, but everyone is stupid except for a chosen few who act just like us". Tlotoxl is religious, but he's by no means superstitious. He knows, from a thousand subtle and tiny cues, that Barbara is no reincarnation of a dead man. Even if she was, he'd have to destroy her...but the fact that she's a fraud and a charlatan make it not just a necessity but a duty as well. Tlotoxl is one of the best villains the series has ever produced.
And all that's just in the first episode. And all that doesn't even get into Ian's beautiful confidence as he fully recognizes that Tlotoxl is setting him up to be killed by Ixta and just doesn't give a solitary fuck because he's that badass, or the Doctor's flirtatious relationship with Cameca. That is a hell of a lot to pack into thirty minutes...small wonder, to bring it back full circle, that this one is held in such high esteem.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Monday, November 10, 2014
Review: Doctor Who - The Blood Cell
First, a bit of full disclosure--I pitched a Doctor Who novel back before the new series revival that featured a manipulative Doctor trapped in an inescapable asteroid prison, which may have colored my enjoyment of this book with the faint taste of nostalgia. That said, a big part of why I wrote my pitch for 'Heist' the way I did was because I wanted to evoke some of my favorite elements of 'Doctor Who' during the McCoy/New Adventures era, the unexpected reveals of the Doctor in bizarre situations and the way he put authority figures so brilliantly off-balance. So it's not really so much that James Goss wrote a book I would have loved to have written as it is that he wrote a book that fits squarely into the traditions of the series that I love best.
And boy, did he. The very first scene is an absolute marvel--it's not just the reveal of the Doctor, it's not just the reveal of the prison. It's the Governor. The narration of the entire sequence, indeed of the entire book, is from his point of view...and it's wrong. Not in any way you can pinpoint yet, but something about the Governor is magnificently, ineffably wrong. The Governor is a man with mysteries to unravel, and the Prison is a place that conceals more than just prisoners. That initial scene pulls you all the way through the narrative on the sheer force of its writing.
And the rest of the novel is paced brilliantly. Each revelation, from the power outages to Clara's arrival to the Doctor's interactions with the other prisoners to the...well, but that would be telling, wouldn't it? They all come at exactly the right time to immerse you further into the story, to tantalize you with the next set of questions and the next set of answers. The Governor's palpable wrongness is teased out of the story expertly, the confessions drawn out of him at exactly the right times. Goss really is performing a masterwork of plotting, and his quiet, almost serene style nonetheless exacerbates the constant tension in the book.
And of course, Goss has a perfect handle on Capaldi and Coleman's renditions of their characters. The book feels like it couldn't be done with anyone other than Twelve and Clara, and the interplay between them sparkles magnificently. (The scene where Clara asks the Doctor why he can't simply regenerate his way out of a stubbed toe is a thing of beauty.)
Ultimately, the ending is satisfying, although it perhaps tries to ramp up the scale of its threat just a bit too much for what has up until now been an entirely holistic and seamless sense of menace. But it is unquestionably excellent, a masterpiece as both a Doctor Who story and a character study. The Governor will stay with you long after 'The Blood Cell' ends, an impressive achievement for any book. This is definitely one of the reasons to stick with the Doctor Who novels even though the television series has taken over a lot of their primacy in the greater narrative; it's worth sticking with them because every once in a while, they give you a novel like this.
And boy, did he. The very first scene is an absolute marvel--it's not just the reveal of the Doctor, it's not just the reveal of the prison. It's the Governor. The narration of the entire sequence, indeed of the entire book, is from his point of view...and it's wrong. Not in any way you can pinpoint yet, but something about the Governor is magnificently, ineffably wrong. The Governor is a man with mysteries to unravel, and the Prison is a place that conceals more than just prisoners. That initial scene pulls you all the way through the narrative on the sheer force of its writing.
And the rest of the novel is paced brilliantly. Each revelation, from the power outages to Clara's arrival to the Doctor's interactions with the other prisoners to the...well, but that would be telling, wouldn't it? They all come at exactly the right time to immerse you further into the story, to tantalize you with the next set of questions and the next set of answers. The Governor's palpable wrongness is teased out of the story expertly, the confessions drawn out of him at exactly the right times. Goss really is performing a masterwork of plotting, and his quiet, almost serene style nonetheless exacerbates the constant tension in the book.
And of course, Goss has a perfect handle on Capaldi and Coleman's renditions of their characters. The book feels like it couldn't be done with anyone other than Twelve and Clara, and the interplay between them sparkles magnificently. (The scene where Clara asks the Doctor why he can't simply regenerate his way out of a stubbed toe is a thing of beauty.)
Ultimately, the ending is satisfying, although it perhaps tries to ramp up the scale of its threat just a bit too much for what has up until now been an entirely holistic and seamless sense of menace. But it is unquestionably excellent, a masterpiece as both a Doctor Who story and a character study. The Governor will stay with you long after 'The Blood Cell' ends, an impressive achievement for any book. This is definitely one of the reasons to stick with the Doctor Who novels even though the television series has taken over a lot of their primacy in the greater narrative; it's worth sticking with them because every once in a while, they give you a novel like this.
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Review: Doctor Who - Silhouette
It's sometimes difficult to remember, but there are actually two Justin Richards out there. The first Justin Richards is Justin on autopilot, the Justin who's asked to write a 250-page novel on about three weeks' notice and comes up with something palatable in that span of time, or the Justin Richards who writes the messy "arc plot" novels that are more of a laundry list of plot elements than an actual idea. It's the Justin Richards who wrote books like 'Grave Matter' or 'Time Zero' or 'Apollo 23'--not a bad writer by any stretch, but not a great writer either. He's a competent, reliable writer, no more or less.
And then there's the Justin Richards who wrote 'Silhouette'. This is Justin Richards when he's engaged with the material, when he's challenged by the writers around him to do his best work. This Justin Richards instantly grasps the tiny nuances of dialogue and mannerism that separate the Capaldi Doctor from the Smith Doctor, and writes him with that simmering, icy anger just beneath the surface that Capaldi's performance brings out. This Justin Richards relishes the chance to write for characters like Strax, Vastra and Jenny, effortlessly displaying the character dynamics between them and showing why so many people feel like they should have their own spin-off by now.
This Justin Richards delivers a Victorian mystery with science-fiction elements that seamlessly evokes the current season of the television series. It's a pastiche, without question--Richards isn't trying to do something that couldn't be done on television, he's trying to do something that would fit right next to 'Deep Breath' in the Doctor Who canon. But it's a pastiche that's executed with verve and energy and joy, one that feels fresh and exciting simply because it's been done so well. Richards "gets" modern Who, and he's having fun playing with it. That's not to say there's nothing he does that couldn't be done on the show--the scene where Affinity, the villain's shapeshifting henchman, tries to cast his glamour on the Doctor and repeatedly gets the wrong incarnation out of it is a treat--but the main point is that right now, the televised Doctor Who is good enough that pastiching it well is something to be proud of.
This Justin Richards doesn't make as many appearances as he used to--which isn't surprising, since he's the editor of the Doctor Who range and his commissions usually mean that there was an emergency somewhere along the line that required that other Justin Richards to step in and whip out a book in a hurry. But when we do get this Justin, I'm reminded that he's a great writer who can come back and do another book any time he wants to.
And then there's the Justin Richards who wrote 'Silhouette'. This is Justin Richards when he's engaged with the material, when he's challenged by the writers around him to do his best work. This Justin Richards instantly grasps the tiny nuances of dialogue and mannerism that separate the Capaldi Doctor from the Smith Doctor, and writes him with that simmering, icy anger just beneath the surface that Capaldi's performance brings out. This Justin Richards relishes the chance to write for characters like Strax, Vastra and Jenny, effortlessly displaying the character dynamics between them and showing why so many people feel like they should have their own spin-off by now.
This Justin Richards delivers a Victorian mystery with science-fiction elements that seamlessly evokes the current season of the television series. It's a pastiche, without question--Richards isn't trying to do something that couldn't be done on television, he's trying to do something that would fit right next to 'Deep Breath' in the Doctor Who canon. But it's a pastiche that's executed with verve and energy and joy, one that feels fresh and exciting simply because it's been done so well. Richards "gets" modern Who, and he's having fun playing with it. That's not to say there's nothing he does that couldn't be done on the show--the scene where Affinity, the villain's shapeshifting henchman, tries to cast his glamour on the Doctor and repeatedly gets the wrong incarnation out of it is a treat--but the main point is that right now, the televised Doctor Who is good enough that pastiching it well is something to be proud of.
This Justin Richards doesn't make as many appearances as he used to--which isn't surprising, since he's the editor of the Doctor Who range and his commissions usually mean that there was an emergency somewhere along the line that required that other Justin Richards to step in and whip out a book in a hurry. But when we do get this Justin, I'm reminded that he's a great writer who can come back and do another book any time he wants to.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Review: Doctor Who - The Crawling Terror
Review: Doctor Who - The Crawling Terror
I'll be honest--I very nearly left this review as just the word, "Functional". Because that's all 'The Crawling Terror' is. It's a story that manages to tick off the requisite boxes in the "Doctor Who story" checklist and doesn't fail too hard at any of them. It's a book that achieves the goal of not irritating you, and nothing more. Which, given that it's being compared to the whirling fireworks of unpredictable creativity seen in the televised version, means that it actually fails very badly indeed.
In many ways, this is exactly the book for someone who thinks that the TV show is too unpredictable, because it couldn't be trying harder to be a "classic" Doctor Who story. The Doctor and his companion land in a quiet English village (tick!) where a mysterious, disfigured scientist (tick!) has been conducting strange experiments at his newfangled lab that the locals distrust (tick!). The experiments unleash monsters (in this case, giant insects--tick!) that mentally enslave the locals into doing their bidding (tick!) and it turns out that aliens were behind the whole thing and the evil scientist is collaborating with them (tick!). The monsters isolate the village from the outside world (tick!), with only a token heroic military presence just outside who is out of their depth when dealing with monsters but struggles on nonetheless (at this point, you can just go ahead and tick all remaining boxes on the list. If you made a Doctor Who Bingo game, this would be the blackout card.)
This isn't to say that you can't do anything with the classic Doctor Who tropes--Mark Gatiss is a hardcore traditionalist, and he makes his stories work by executing the tropes well and occasionally playing with them a bit. But here, everything is simply a sketch of things that were done better elsewhere. The Doctor is utterly generic, with none of the acerbic wit that marks Capaldi's performances, and Clara hits the beats in her story bible and nothing more. The supporting characters are caricatures, both the good and the bad, and the monsters are just big angry bugs of one sort or another. There's nothing to make this book stand out anywhere.
But even that isn't what makes 'The Crawling Terror' so frustrating. It's a bland, inoffensive TV tie-in novel pitched to tweens and teens, no different from many others on the market. It isn't bad, it isn't good, it's just a quick way to pass an hour or so before you move on to anothr book. That's what you get with Mike Tucker.
What's frustrating is that they knew they'd be getting that with Mike Tucker, and they commissioned him for this slot anyway. We've been getting fewer and fewer novels ever since the TV series restarted; why on Earth would you spend one of those precious slots on a bland timewaster when there are so many good Doctor Who writers out there? Why not slot in someone like Kate Orman, who can write a better novel than this while trapped in a safe underwater? Why not slot in some of the recent good writers that have done excellent Eleventh Doctor books, like Oli Smith, or Una McCormack, or Naomi Alderman? Even if you assume that they can't try an untested writer for the first few slots of the new Doctor, due to secrecy concerns for upcoming plot developments, there are better people out there than this. There are people out there who would try, and 'The Crawling Terror' doesn't try. It's content simply to be a book about the Doctor, and we all know that the line is capable of so much more.
In many ways, this is exactly the book for someone who thinks that the TV show is too unpredictable, because it couldn't be trying harder to be a "classic" Doctor Who story. The Doctor and his companion land in a quiet English village (tick!) where a mysterious, disfigured scientist (tick!) has been conducting strange experiments at his newfangled lab that the locals distrust (tick!). The experiments unleash monsters (in this case, giant insects--tick!) that mentally enslave the locals into doing their bidding (tick!) and it turns out that aliens were behind the whole thing and the evil scientist is collaborating with them (tick!). The monsters isolate the village from the outside world (tick!), with only a token heroic military presence just outside who is out of their depth when dealing with monsters but struggles on nonetheless (at this point, you can just go ahead and tick all remaining boxes on the list. If you made a Doctor Who Bingo game, this would be the blackout card.)
This isn't to say that you can't do anything with the classic Doctor Who tropes--Mark Gatiss is a hardcore traditionalist, and he makes his stories work by executing the tropes well and occasionally playing with them a bit. But here, everything is simply a sketch of things that were done better elsewhere. The Doctor is utterly generic, with none of the acerbic wit that marks Capaldi's performances, and Clara hits the beats in her story bible and nothing more. The supporting characters are caricatures, both the good and the bad, and the monsters are just big angry bugs of one sort or another. There's nothing to make this book stand out anywhere.
But even that isn't what makes 'The Crawling Terror' so frustrating. It's a bland, inoffensive TV tie-in novel pitched to tweens and teens, no different from many others on the market. It isn't bad, it isn't good, it's just a quick way to pass an hour or so before you move on to anothr book. That's what you get with Mike Tucker.
What's frustrating is that they knew they'd be getting that with Mike Tucker, and they commissioned him for this slot anyway. We've been getting fewer and fewer novels ever since the TV series restarted; why on Earth would you spend one of those precious slots on a bland timewaster when there are so many good Doctor Who writers out there? Why not slot in someone like Kate Orman, who can write a better novel than this while trapped in a safe underwater? Why not slot in some of the recent good writers that have done excellent Eleventh Doctor books, like Oli Smith, or Una McCormack, or Naomi Alderman? Even if you assume that they can't try an untested writer for the first few slots of the new Doctor, due to secrecy concerns for upcoming plot developments, there are better people out there than this. There are people out there who would try, and 'The Crawling Terror' doesn't try. It's content simply to be a book about the Doctor, and we all know that the line is capable of so much more.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Review: The Book of the Still
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on March 20, 03.)
The Book of the Still reminds me of no other debut novel in the history of the various ranges so much as Lawrence Miles' Christmas on a Rational Planet. Like Miles, Paul Ebbs brings so much energy, zest, and sheer swaggering charisma to the book that it feels like something new and ground-breaking, even though it's "just" a first novel. Both of them are flawed, as first-time authors tend to be, but both of them have a prose style that doesn't let even a single passage go by without trying to make it something special, something exciting, something that's never been done in Who before. It's that energy that lifts the book up to one of the better first novels I've read, and that makes me proud to be a fan of Doctor Who.
Right from the beginning, which Ebbs entitles the "Obligatory Spectacular Opening", we get a sense of amazing energy. The Doctor attempts to steal the eponymous Book through a plan that involves free-falling from orbit, a scene of dazzling excitement that sets the pace for the book to follow. We get lots of fun -- Anji stuck in a Bollywood movie, the Doctor trying to learn how to dance on a doomed planet, and Fitz... well, OK, Fitz does spend much of his time acting like a brainwashed idiot, which doesn't do wonders for him, but it's still a good book. The whole thing clips along with sparkling dialogue and a fascinating plot.
It's not flawless by any means -- the trio of villains who dog the Doctor throughout the book outstay their welcome by chapter two, and Carmodi is phenomenally irritating (although perhaps intentionally so). And I still couldn't tell you what Carmodi lost because of the Doctor, and why she believes the Doctor's responsible for it. But this was one of those rare times when I didn't care about the "whats" of a book because I was having so much fun with the "hows". I just had a blast reading this, and I can't wait for Paul Ebbs' next novel. If Lawrence Miles proves to be an accurate model, it'll be even better.
The Book of the Still reminds me of no other debut novel in the history of the various ranges so much as Lawrence Miles' Christmas on a Rational Planet. Like Miles, Paul Ebbs brings so much energy, zest, and sheer swaggering charisma to the book that it feels like something new and ground-breaking, even though it's "just" a first novel. Both of them are flawed, as first-time authors tend to be, but both of them have a prose style that doesn't let even a single passage go by without trying to make it something special, something exciting, something that's never been done in Who before. It's that energy that lifts the book up to one of the better first novels I've read, and that makes me proud to be a fan of Doctor Who.
Right from the beginning, which Ebbs entitles the "Obligatory Spectacular Opening", we get a sense of amazing energy. The Doctor attempts to steal the eponymous Book through a plan that involves free-falling from orbit, a scene of dazzling excitement that sets the pace for the book to follow. We get lots of fun -- Anji stuck in a Bollywood movie, the Doctor trying to learn how to dance on a doomed planet, and Fitz... well, OK, Fitz does spend much of his time acting like a brainwashed idiot, which doesn't do wonders for him, but it's still a good book. The whole thing clips along with sparkling dialogue and a fascinating plot.
It's not flawless by any means -- the trio of villains who dog the Doctor throughout the book outstay their welcome by chapter two, and Carmodi is phenomenally irritating (although perhaps intentionally so). And I still couldn't tell you what Carmodi lost because of the Doctor, and why she believes the Doctor's responsible for it. But this was one of those rare times when I didn't care about the "whats" of a book because I was having so much fun with the "hows". I just had a blast reading this, and I can't wait for Paul Ebbs' next novel. If Lawrence Miles proves to be an accurate model, it'll be even better.
Friday, October 24, 2014
The Keys of Marinus
And then there are the times when the budget really hurts.
The episode starts well enough; Kala makes a convincing villain, and the scene where she plays the grieving widow contains some good acting on the part of Fiona Walker. It'd be tempting to overplay the sobs and telegraph the twist to the audience, but she delivers her grief very convincingly. She also does a good job of not over-emphasizing her inadvertent slip regarding Susan's whereabouts in order to clue in the audience, although Nation includes a scene that probably wasn't necessary where Barbara and company discuss the slip at length in order to make everything clear to the very tiny children watching the show.
That's not terrible in and of itself, but it does foreshadow a problem Nation has. He can't just have people figure things out and do something about them, he has to put in a scene where they hash out the logic behind their realization at great length for the slow of brain. Which, again, is not such a bad thing when you're explaining how Kala accidentally mentioned a tiny piece of information that she had no way of knowing about if she wasn't implicated in the theft/murder/kidnap plot, but...
...well, there's no getting around it. It is a lot more of a problem when your characters are discussing that something seemed a little bit off about Arbitan. Something suspicious. Perhaps it's that he acted like he didn't know Altos when the two of them had supposedly met? Yes, maybe that's it. It's the kind of subtle mistake that any master villain might make, the kind of slip-up that could ruin even the perfect plan of covering your ridiculously elaborate headgear with a hood that you can barely even fit over it, not bothering to disguise your voice even a little tiny bit or take off your heavy black gloves, and sit two feet away from the people you're trying to fool at an angle that doesn't really hide your features concocting a story on the fly about how you're radioactive and can't get up or come any closer.
Yeeeeee-ahhhhhh. The problem isn't just that this scene is terrible. It isn't even just that it's unbelievably, ludicrously terrible and it's the climax of the story. It's that if anyone had put even a tiny bit of thought into the sequence, it would have worked just fine. A line or two explaining that Yartek (who was otherwise a fine specimen of megalomaniac villain) couldn't take the suit off for some reason. A line explaining that he knew Ian would only give the key to the real Arbitan, and some sort of line about, "We can't take it by force--the key is too delicate, he'd break it." And instead of Ian's labored and idiotic-sounding discussion of whether or not there was something fishy about Arbitan's sudden foot-long head extension, an explanation on Ian's part that he knew all along that "Arbitan" was Yartek and gave him the fake key on purpose. (Which as it stands is even more unforgivably stupid, as the scene involves Ian being fooled but giving him a fake key anyway, apparently just for the lulz.)
That's the lesson to take away from this episode, and this story. Doctor Who can survive being cheap. It can survive being weird. It can survive random genre-hopping at every opportunity. It can even survive being a Flash Gordon pastiche with a railroad plot. But it absolutely cannot survive being this rock stupid.
The episode starts well enough; Kala makes a convincing villain, and the scene where she plays the grieving widow contains some good acting on the part of Fiona Walker. It'd be tempting to overplay the sobs and telegraph the twist to the audience, but she delivers her grief very convincingly. She also does a good job of not over-emphasizing her inadvertent slip regarding Susan's whereabouts in order to clue in the audience, although Nation includes a scene that probably wasn't necessary where Barbara and company discuss the slip at length in order to make everything clear to the very tiny children watching the show.
That's not terrible in and of itself, but it does foreshadow a problem Nation has. He can't just have people figure things out and do something about them, he has to put in a scene where they hash out the logic behind their realization at great length for the slow of brain. Which, again, is not such a bad thing when you're explaining how Kala accidentally mentioned a tiny piece of information that she had no way of knowing about if she wasn't implicated in the theft/murder/kidnap plot, but...
...well, there's no getting around it. It is a lot more of a problem when your characters are discussing that something seemed a little bit off about Arbitan. Something suspicious. Perhaps it's that he acted like he didn't know Altos when the two of them had supposedly met? Yes, maybe that's it. It's the kind of subtle mistake that any master villain might make, the kind of slip-up that could ruin even the perfect plan of covering your ridiculously elaborate headgear with a hood that you can barely even fit over it, not bothering to disguise your voice even a little tiny bit or take off your heavy black gloves, and sit two feet away from the people you're trying to fool at an angle that doesn't really hide your features concocting a story on the fly about how you're radioactive and can't get up or come any closer.
Yeeeeee-ahhhhhh. The problem isn't just that this scene is terrible. It isn't even just that it's unbelievably, ludicrously terrible and it's the climax of the story. It's that if anyone had put even a tiny bit of thought into the sequence, it would have worked just fine. A line or two explaining that Yartek (who was otherwise a fine specimen of megalomaniac villain) couldn't take the suit off for some reason. A line explaining that he knew Ian would only give the key to the real Arbitan, and some sort of line about, "We can't take it by force--the key is too delicate, he'd break it." And instead of Ian's labored and idiotic-sounding discussion of whether or not there was something fishy about Arbitan's sudden foot-long head extension, an explanation on Ian's part that he knew all along that "Arbitan" was Yartek and gave him the fake key on purpose. (Which as it stands is even more unforgivably stupid, as the scene involves Ian being fooled but giving him a fake key anyway, apparently just for the lulz.)
That's the lesson to take away from this episode, and this story. Doctor Who can survive being cheap. It can survive being weird. It can survive random genre-hopping at every opportunity. It can even survive being a Flash Gordon pastiche with a railroad plot. But it absolutely cannot survive being this rock stupid.
A Long-Winded, Discursive, and Possibly Educational Review of 'Shada'
(This review has been cross-posted to Mightygodking.com.)
It occurred to me that the novelization of 'Shada' might be something that readers here would be interested in, if they knew about it, and that it might also be something that readers here might not know about. So this is both a review, and an explanation of what exactly 'Shada' was, and how there came to be a novelization of it by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams' original script.
In addition to being tremendously famous for his 'Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series, Douglas Adams also spent a bit of time as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This was just before 'Guide' hit it big, when he was mainly known for contributing a few bits to the final series of "Monty Python's Flying Circus". (The one without John Cleese.) His big breaks came in a sudden burst, which is why he wasn't on Doctor Who for very long. But he did do three scripts--the modestly successful "Pirate Planet", the incredibly well-regarded "City of Death", and "Shada"...which never actually completed filming due to a strike at the BBC, and which wasn't remounted for the ensuing season because incoming producer John Nathan-Turner had no interest in doing anything his predecessor Graham Williams thought was a good idea.
"Shada", in other words, is that rare beast - an unproduced screenplay by a now-deceased legend of science fiction at the absolute height of his skill, which can't be filmed at this point due to a simply insurmountable number of practical hurdles. But this is where a peculiar tradition of Doctor Who comes in, a legacy of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy series out there to predate video recording in any of its media. Virtually every single episode of the classic series of Doctor Who was adapted as a novel, in order to allow fans to experience episodes that had been broadcast before their time and which (due to the BBC's policies at the time on repeats and the previously noted lack of home media) they would probably never have the chance to see again. These novels were occasionally done by the original author, but frequently they were adapted by other hands.
While he was alive, Douglas Adams' stories were among the few that had not been adapted into novels; Adams preferred to adapt his own stories, and the company with the rights to the Doctor Who books simply couldn't afford his page rate. (According to Adams, every time a new editor took over the line, they had the exact same conversation with him about the chances of adapting his books, and he politely gave them the exact same responses each time.) But tragically, Adams died far younger than anyone that brilliant has a right to, which meant that even the adaptations seemed like a longshot.
Enter Gareth Roberts. Those of you who are fans of the new series might recognize him as the screenwriter of "The Lodger" and "The Shakespeare Code", among others, but he made his reputation on Doctor Who as an author of several pastiches of the Graham Williams era of the show. His novel 'The English Way of Death' (now sadly out of print) is considered to be one of the finest encapsulations of that period's whimsy, effortless humor, and penchant for borderline fantasy, and he's always been an outspoken fan of Williams and Adams. As such, when the rights issues were finally sorted out with the Adams estate, Roberts was the first choice to adapt Adams' unfilmed script into a novel. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes I am aware that the script was also adapted for audio by Big Finish Productions with Paul McGann reprising Tom Baker's part, and that there is an unofficial animated adaptation done by Ian Levine using Paul Jones as a Tom Baker impersonator. This is the first mass-market adaptation.)
(Yes, I'm also aware that the sequences that were shot were released on video and DVD, with Baker providing linking narration. That's not a proper adaptation. Sheesh.)
So now that you know what the novelization of 'Shada' is, the question that undoubtedly follows is, "Is it actually any good?" And the answer is, "Yes. Not as good as you'd expect a lost Douglas Adams masterpiece to be, but it's definitely a fun read." Roberts doesn't quite have Adams' deft touch for comic prose, but singling him out for that is almost entirely unfair. He's not trying to be Douglas Adams. He's trying to write Gareth Roberts' very good adaptation of a Douglas Adams story, and he succeeds magnificently at that. His opening line alone is one of the better starts to a novel that I've read lately: "At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'"
The plot is a fairly classic Doctor Who concept - a megalomaniac (in about as literal a sense as you can get this time) plans to take over the universe using forbidden Time Lord secrets that have been concealed at Cambridge, and the Doctor (accompanied by Time Lady Romana and robot dog K-9) have to stop him. But there are a number of clever twists and elegant misdirections between Cambridge and the lost Time Lord prison of Shada, and I really don't want to give any of them away for the benefit of those of you who haven't had the whole thing summarized multiple times in old Doctor Who episode guides. Suffice to say that this is a perfect example of doing something new and clever with an old idea, and the story hangs together very well.
The only issue I had with the book, and this may be my reaction as a long-time Doctor Who fan who had heard about this one for years as a "lost classic", was that I couldn't help spending my time wondering which bits were taken directly from Adams' original script and which were added by Roberts with the benefit of thirty-odd years of hindsight. (The joke about "edible ball bearings", for example, I'm reasonably sure belonged to Roberts.) I wound up wishing they'd also simply published the shooting script, so that I could see what had been done and when and by whom. It was a bit of a distraction, but one that a less obsessive person might not have to deal with.
On the whole, though, I thought it was a great story well-told, and I think that any fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy it. Pastiches of classic authors have a shaky track record, especially of Douglas Adams (I don't think, for example, that I'll ever recommend Eoin Colfer's 'And Another Thing...') but this one stands out as a fun read in its own right.
It occurred to me that the novelization of 'Shada' might be something that readers here would be interested in, if they knew about it, and that it might also be something that readers here might not know about. So this is both a review, and an explanation of what exactly 'Shada' was, and how there came to be a novelization of it by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams' original script.
In addition to being tremendously famous for his 'Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series, Douglas Adams also spent a bit of time as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This was just before 'Guide' hit it big, when he was mainly known for contributing a few bits to the final series of "Monty Python's Flying Circus". (The one without John Cleese.) His big breaks came in a sudden burst, which is why he wasn't on Doctor Who for very long. But he did do three scripts--the modestly successful "Pirate Planet", the incredibly well-regarded "City of Death", and "Shada"...which never actually completed filming due to a strike at the BBC, and which wasn't remounted for the ensuing season because incoming producer John Nathan-Turner had no interest in doing anything his predecessor Graham Williams thought was a good idea.
"Shada", in other words, is that rare beast - an unproduced screenplay by a now-deceased legend of science fiction at the absolute height of his skill, which can't be filmed at this point due to a simply insurmountable number of practical hurdles. But this is where a peculiar tradition of Doctor Who comes in, a legacy of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy series out there to predate video recording in any of its media. Virtually every single episode of the classic series of Doctor Who was adapted as a novel, in order to allow fans to experience episodes that had been broadcast before their time and which (due to the BBC's policies at the time on repeats and the previously noted lack of home media) they would probably never have the chance to see again. These novels were occasionally done by the original author, but frequently they were adapted by other hands.
While he was alive, Douglas Adams' stories were among the few that had not been adapted into novels; Adams preferred to adapt his own stories, and the company with the rights to the Doctor Who books simply couldn't afford his page rate. (According to Adams, every time a new editor took over the line, they had the exact same conversation with him about the chances of adapting his books, and he politely gave them the exact same responses each time.) But tragically, Adams died far younger than anyone that brilliant has a right to, which meant that even the adaptations seemed like a longshot.
Enter Gareth Roberts. Those of you who are fans of the new series might recognize him as the screenwriter of "The Lodger" and "The Shakespeare Code", among others, but he made his reputation on Doctor Who as an author of several pastiches of the Graham Williams era of the show. His novel 'The English Way of Death' (now sadly out of print) is considered to be one of the finest encapsulations of that period's whimsy, effortless humor, and penchant for borderline fantasy, and he's always been an outspoken fan of Williams and Adams. As such, when the rights issues were finally sorted out with the Adams estate, Roberts was the first choice to adapt Adams' unfilmed script into a novel. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes I am aware that the script was also adapted for audio by Big Finish Productions with Paul McGann reprising Tom Baker's part, and that there is an unofficial animated adaptation done by Ian Levine using Paul Jones as a Tom Baker impersonator. This is the first mass-market adaptation.)
(Yes, I'm also aware that the sequences that were shot were released on video and DVD, with Baker providing linking narration. That's not a proper adaptation. Sheesh.)
So now that you know what the novelization of 'Shada' is, the question that undoubtedly follows is, "Is it actually any good?" And the answer is, "Yes. Not as good as you'd expect a lost Douglas Adams masterpiece to be, but it's definitely a fun read." Roberts doesn't quite have Adams' deft touch for comic prose, but singling him out for that is almost entirely unfair. He's not trying to be Douglas Adams. He's trying to write Gareth Roberts' very good adaptation of a Douglas Adams story, and he succeeds magnificently at that. His opening line alone is one of the better starts to a novel that I've read lately: "At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'"
The plot is a fairly classic Doctor Who concept - a megalomaniac (in about as literal a sense as you can get this time) plans to take over the universe using forbidden Time Lord secrets that have been concealed at Cambridge, and the Doctor (accompanied by Time Lady Romana and robot dog K-9) have to stop him. But there are a number of clever twists and elegant misdirections between Cambridge and the lost Time Lord prison of Shada, and I really don't want to give any of them away for the benefit of those of you who haven't had the whole thing summarized multiple times in old Doctor Who episode guides. Suffice to say that this is a perfect example of doing something new and clever with an old idea, and the story hangs together very well.
The only issue I had with the book, and this may be my reaction as a long-time Doctor Who fan who had heard about this one for years as a "lost classic", was that I couldn't help spending my time wondering which bits were taken directly from Adams' original script and which were added by Roberts with the benefit of thirty-odd years of hindsight. (The joke about "edible ball bearings", for example, I'm reasonably sure belonged to Roberts.) I wound up wishing they'd also simply published the shooting script, so that I could see what had been done and when and by whom. It was a bit of a distraction, but one that a less obsessive person might not have to deal with.
On the whole, though, I thought it was a great story well-told, and I think that any fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy it. Pastiches of classic authors have a shaky track record, especially of Douglas Adams (I don't think, for example, that I'll ever recommend Eoin Colfer's 'And Another Thing...') but this one stands out as a fun read in its own right.
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