Category Archives: Books

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, ,

There’s a moment in Cat’s Cradle: Warhead when Ace comes across a turtle crawling onto a highway. She picks it up, carries it to safety, gently sets it down–and it turns around and crawls patiently back into danger. This moment says everything about Warhead’s view of humanity–as does the moment later when Ace, in danger, comes upon the turtle’s crushed body and picks it up to use as a weapon.

I hadn’t read Warhead–the debut novel from TV script editor Andrew Cartmel–since it was published almost 15 years ago. I remember liking it a lot at the time. It’s a well-written book, with precise, intense prose and lucid imagery, something I’ll write more about later. I didn’t remember it was also such a sour, humorless and self-righteous book. Warhead is an emotionally underdeveloped teenager that thinks it’s the first person in the world to learn about evil. Warhead has decided that it just knows best. I can understand why I was impressed by the writing. I can’t think why the hell I didn’t mind the attitude. Of course, in 1992 I was an emotionally underdeveloped teenager. I don’t know what Cartmel’s excuse was.

Let’s take a look at the point where I got really, really pissed off at Warhead: chapter three. Go back and read it, if you like. It stands on its own, almost a short story. Here we meet Maria. She’s been poor all her life. She escaped from Los Angeles just before the inner cities became virtual prisons. She works as a janitor for the Butler Institute because jobs are scarce and it’s her only chance to make a living. She almost has enough money to buy her son a better life in Canada. Sometimes she has trouble heating her apartment in the winter. She’s dying from the chemicals her employers give her to clean their toilets.

One night Maria finds the Doctor hacking into the computers. He trips an alarm. She helps him out. And then, having risked everything to rescue the Doctor from his own incompetence–not only her much-needed job, mind you, but her life, because those security people are armed and crazy–she asks him to take her with him. And he says no. Why not, Doctor?

“The fifty-first floor of this building. You know what goes on there…. You’ve known for years, and you’ve let it happen.”

Yes. Of course. Because a desperately poor single mother clinging precariously to the only job she can find by her melting fingernails has so many options.

(Warhead is muddled on this point. On page 195, the Doctor says of the impending environmental collapse, “Ordinary people don’t have the ability to alter the course of events. Only the big corporations and the very rich have the power to do that.” So do ordinary people have a responsibility to act even in hopeless situations? Or are they helpless sheep? Which is it, Doctor?)

You know what chapter 3 reminds me of? This casually oblivious condemnation from a man who’s never had to worry about money, the owner of a time machine full of comfortable furniture and good tea and cool gadgets, a man who, if in trouble with the local authorities, can simply pick up and move anywhere else in space and time? It reminds me of the nice privileged middle class people watching hurricane Katrina on their big-screen plasma televisions, who asked in vague puzzlement why all those unseemly poor people didn’t just walk out of New Orleans before the disaster. Congratulations, Warhead. You’ve just made me hate the Doctor.

But that’s not fair, really, because this isn’t the Doctor we know. He’s been bent out of shape to deliver a Message. You can tell a book’s gone wrong when the characters act strangely to prop up a Message. This comes up again in chapter 16, when pompous pseudo-pagan Justine announces “It can be devastating to have your view of reality challenged… And now you’ve made me angry. So that’s what I’m going to do to you,” and, with lines like “You have your necessary illusions as well. But in your case they involve science,” and “You don’t believe in magic but you believe he’s from another planet and you’re his girl companion,” sends Ace into a violent screaming panic. Which is ridiculous. Because, unlike Justine, Ace has seen other worlds, and travelled in the TARDIS, and in just the previous book met a bunch of guys from the Doctor’s home planet who were testing the prototype, for God’s sake. By the third paragraph of this drivel, Ace should have collapsed on the ground in helpless giggles, just like Porky Pig watching Daffy Duck play Robin Hood. But Andrew Cartmel–or the Andrew Cartmel of 14 years ago, anyway–is terminally humorless as Justine, and he has a Message: that a “person’s belief system is their world.” Which probably sounded terribly sophisticated in 1992. Today, when thousands of people have been killed or maimed in a war that started because the White House thought they could create their own reality by cherry-picking the evidence that supported their world view, it’s just obviously vile and stupid.

After a few chapters I got paranoid and started wondering if random details were propaganda. Like the Butler Institute’s habits of harvesting organs from prisoners and experimenting on unwilling human subjects. I got the impression that Cartmel included this less because it made sense than because anyone who would research uploading minds into computers must be Evil. In an era when most SF is busy expanding the definition of human–treating cyborgs, AIs, clones, the genetically modified, and uploaded minds as just different kinds of people–this has begun to look a bit old fashioned. BI’s plan doesn’t make sense, anyway–if they’re going to upload the whole human race, then who’s going to maintain the computers? Silurians? Even the Doctor’s plan doesn’t make much sense. The simplest thing to do if he really wants to help Earth’s environment would be to help BI finish the upload program without hurting anyone else. Once the people who weren’t interested in fixing the environment were uploaded and out of the way, the rest of the world could get on with things. Then again, maybe Cartmel doesn’t think that ordinary people, working together, can get anything done–see that quote from page 195 again. Does he think things will go all Atlas Shrugged once the rich guys are uploaded?

And yet… Warhead’s philosophical assumptions may have lodged deep in my craw, but it was a surprisingly enjoyable read, just because there’s so much there to at least potentially enjoy. Starting with the worldbuilding.

This was the New Adventures’ first attempt at any kind of credible near future. “All too near,” says the blurb. Which is true, in more than one sense. Warhead’s future is our present–Lance Parkin’s Ahistory places it c. 2007–and futures don’t often age well. Which is no problem, because most SF isn’t really about prognostication, anyway. Still, there’s a certain pleasurable schadenfreude in the pedantic cataloging of all that some hapless decades-old futurist got wrong. Even some good stories have grown unintentionally comedic… like the ones where humankind made it into outer space but all the women are nurses and secretaries and telephone operators. Actually, that was Star Trek, wasn’t it? But there are also those stories which don’t look like the future we have, yet still work as plausible sort of alternate universes. And that’s what we have with Warhead. Our environmental problems are more subtle than Cartmel’s day-glo toxic pollutants, it’s still illegal in the U.S. to take organs from prisoners, and even in the big cities youth gangs rarely mount massive attacks on libraries, but on its own terms Warhead’s world is still among the most vivid and credible in Doctor Who.

The difference is in the details–specifically, in that Warhead has them at all. For comparison I grabbed a random EDA off the shelf–Coldheart, as it turned out–and skimmed the first few pages. The Doctor was in a cave. Not any particular cave, mind you. We’re told it’s a bit chilly, but otherwise it’s a stock set pulled from the BBC warehouse. It’s a side effect of the Stephen Cole/Justin Richards era’s conflation of novels and big-budget Hollywood movies. A scriptwriter can write “cave” and the set designer will come up with a fully realized environment… so, heck, why not a novelist? And the writer types the word “cave” and expects the reader to fill in the massive, gaping blanks.

Cartmel is big on specifics. The thing that makes Warhead a joy to read is his particular talent for choosing exactly the right details to build a complete, vivid mental image in the reader’s mind. When Ace visits an airport, he tells us how sound echos in the large tiled spaces, and what the other travelers are doing, and what the duty-free shop sells. We learn what the nameless soldier who tries to strike up a conversation looks like and what magazine he’s carrying. The plastic chairs aren’t just plastic chairs in general, they’re specifically plastic Eames chairs. All this for a location we only see for a couple of pages. The most important thing is that so many of these details mean something–like the fact that the duty-free shop sells cheap computer memory alongside the booze and cigarettes. It’s “incluing” again–c.f. my Time’s Crucible review, from ages ago. Cartmel picks out details that both set the scene and have implications beyond it, giving the reader a way into his world, a way to infer some of its history and culture.

Warhead is a densely packed story, so it comes as a surprise when you realize how simple its plot is. It’s the story of how the Doctor brings two people together for a specific purpose at one specific moment, and how that moment doesn’t play out as expected. A particularly efficient writer could cover it in a few pages… but Warhead is 262 pages long and doesn’t feel padded at all. A lot of the BBC Books-era novels have plots just as frail, but bulk themselves up to the standard 280 pages by making the characters run back and forth a lot to no purpose, smoothing over everything that might have made them unique with a fine plaster of meaningless digressions and authorial cul-de-sacs, until what was left was indistinguishable from the other busy but forgettable installments to either side. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened, you know?

Where those books are straight lines, Warhead is a branching diagram, examining every implication of the Doctor’s plan, taking up the threads he brings together and following them back to their sources. It leads us through the histories of everyone affected by the Doctor’s actions, showing us how their lives are connected and how they reached the point where they tripped over the Doctor’s plans. Often when a Doctor Who book starts in on the biography of a secondary character it’s a sign that, five paragraphs from now, he’s going to be eaten by the monster. Warhead isn’t like that. In a sense, it doesn’t even have secondary characters, because in Warhead, everybody’s important. These aren’t just supporting players in the Doctor’s story, but the central figures in their own stories in which the Doctor himself plays a minor role. It’s significant that parts of Warhead could stand on their own as short stories.

And it’s also significant that none of the book–at least, nothing that I recall–is told from the Doctor’s point of view. And that this is one of the few books in which the Doctor’s actions really are almost as morally ambiguous as the fanboys always complained they were. The typical mediocre Doctor Who book is about its plot. Warhead is about what its plot means. The secondary characters are at its center–weirdly, even Ace comes off as one of the locals rather than the Doctor’s companion. To these people the Doctor looks weird and incomprehensible and scary, and for once we’re thinking about what his plans mean for them. And here is where Cartmel, for once, outgrows his adolescent certainty. He’s not delivering a pat moral, but asking a question, and it doesn’t have a simple answer.

Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

In retrospect, the most significant thing about Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible is what it did for Gallifrey. Which is interesting, because it’s also the smallest part of the book.

For years, Gallifrey was a mysterious, rarely seen planet of space gods who, in their first appearance, casually sent the Doctor spinning into a big black void with his head missing. Subsequently they did crazy crap like unexpectedly appearing in midair outside of radio telescopes, or pulling transmat beams halfway across the galaxy and thousands of years into the past, all the time wearing relaxed, bemused expressions that suggested this kind of thing was just part of the morning routine, and after they’d had their coffee they’d really get going.

This changed with “The Deadly Assassin.” Robert Holmes gave Gallifrey layers of down-to-earth corruption and politics which added interesting story possibilities but were not immediately accepted by fans. A now-legendary review from a fan club newsletter, written by one Jan Vincent Rudzki, was reprinted 20 years later in Paul Cornell’s book License Denied. It’s worth tracking down, if only as a reminder that the style of writing that dominates many internet forums–a sort of breathless, half-literate nitpicking –did not originate there. As with a lot of this stuff, Rudzki’s criticisms are mostly based on unwarranted assumptions and personal hobby-horses, like his innocent faith in the notion that all Time Lords have easy access to “time scanners.” Most awesomely, he ends his review with “WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO?” in big capital letters, which should end every post on rec.arts.drwho. Even so, he does get something right: “This story really showed up the infatuation for Earth people in Doctor Who. It could have been set on Earth and no one would have known the difference.”

Robert Holmes’s Time Lords are mundane. They’re very, very human–almost indistinguishable from a herd of aging Oxford dons. Later writers took the wrong lesson from Holmes, making the Time Lords more and more prosaic until by “Arc of Infinity” they were pretty much a bunch of nice middle-class office workers hanging out in the food court at the mall.

Until Time’s Crucible. Marc Platt made Gallifrey weird again. Ancient Gallifrey is a world of telepaths dominated by those few with the will to make their thoughts entirely their own, ruled by a mad old seer whose office is a cage suspended above a fissure. The nice office workers don’t speak the language, and will probably lose their travelers checks within a couple of days.

What’s less immediately obvious is the skill with which Platt drew this society. Time’s Crucible displays an easy mastery of the technique that fantasy writer Jo Walton calls “incluing,” conveying more background through implication than infodumps. He trusts the readers enough to know that, from phrases like “strange-featured people who thought in strange accents” and the stress placed on words like “Individuals,” they can infer a great deal about this world, orienting the readers so that, by the time he states outright that everybody’s telepathic, they already have some idea of what this means.

I’m not blathering on about this because I think the art of suggesting more background than is shown was new to Doctor Who. Robert Holmes had mastered of the technique, as is obvious from something like “The Ribos Operation.” What’s important about this is that Time’s Crucible–to a greater extent than the more mythic Revelation–signals the point when Doctor Who seriously began learning from the themes and techniques of mainstream literary SF. This was a break with the TV series, which naturally was more influenced by other visual media, especially Hammer films and Nigel Kneale. Its literary sources tended to be writers old or famous enough to have works adapted to film, so that, when books like The Left Hand of Darkness and Stand on Zanzibar were winning SF awards, Doctor Who was broadcasting “The Dominators” and “The Space Pirates.” The New Adventures brought Doctor Who to the point where it was only about five or ten years behind the times, rather than twenty or thirty–which sounds snide, but it really was a major accomplishment. Their literary influences were a huge shift in tone for Doctor Who, and a sign of the writers’ recognition that this was a series of novels and not novelizations. The new direction alienated those few fans who wouldn’t accept anything but a TV episode frozen in print, but gained a stable audience and led to an artistically successful line of books. (I’ll repeat that, just so you realize how amazing it is: an artistically successful line of TV tie-in novels. That’s huge.) This success is only more obvious in comparison with the BBC Books, so many of which looked away from literary influences towards Hollywood blockbusters and modern media properties–and suffered as a consequence.

There are a couple of things you realize about Time’s Crucible on a second reading. First, that there’s a lot less Gallifrey in it than you remember. Second, that the issues the rest of the book deals with, which you didn’t remember at all, are a bit… well, abstract.

Judging from online reviews I’ve skimmed through, this is thought to be a difficult book. At first it’s hard to understand what the Process is trying to do, or what the hell it’s even talking about most of the time. But Time’s Crucible is less complex than it seems. There’s a reason why the Process’s goals are hard to understand: it doesn’t understand them itself–it doesn’t even know it doesn’t understand them. The Process’s plans, its blather about the “stolen future” and the conflict between its older and younger incarnations are all, in themselves, meaningless. The Process is an unwitting character in a psychodrama, acting out the conflict between Rassilon and the Pythia on ancient Gallifrey, absorbed through the Pythia’s mental link to Vael. The barren city where the biggest chunk of the action takes place is an empty stage for a few actors to play a stripped-down burlesque of the Pythia’s fall, a planetwide political revolution boiled down to its essence.

(Time’s Crucible was originally a TV proposal, by the way, and here we see how some version of this story, rewritten to require fewer special effects, might have worked–about six or seven actors besides the regulars in a setting that could be cobbled together from whatever sets and locations were on hand. Keep the Gallifrey bits brief, and you could suggest an offstage political coup with just Rassilon and the Pythia arguing in a cave.)

Time’s Crucible is a political satire. It’s about what happens when the powerful become complacent; when political power is something to be held onto for its own sake, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Usually at that point a special kind of denial sets in. It’s a defense mechanism. Powerful people don’t like to admit, even to themselves, that they could stop being powerful. They see the future as a kind of eternal Now, which their heirs will rule forever. Often this extends even to the past, which they conceive of as a place of eternal “traditional values,” unchanging and unchallenged until the decadent present. Anything that suggests even the possibility of change is blasphemy.

U.S. politics provide an illustration. In a recent (at the time of writing) primary election in Connecticut, a longtime Democratic senator who had lost the trust of his constituents was thrown out in favor of a new candidate. This is the kind of thing that happens in a democracy, and always a disappointment to the loser… but the senator and his supporters reacted like a dog had walked into their dinner party on its hind legs, climbed on the table and recited dirty limericks. It was his right to run for reelection, damn it, and anything that challenged that was unnatural. Something of his attitude is demonstrated by the name of the third party he immediately formed in order to stay in the race. In the U.S. political parties usually take names that communicate their values: Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, Green. Senator Lieberman named his new party “Connecticut for Lieberman.”

The Pythia can’t imagine a future she hasn’t chosen. As she becomes entrenched in power her denial grows stronger, until she literally can’t see the future that it’s her function to predict. Meanwhile, the city reduces the struggle to retain power and deny history to absurdity. Time has looped back on itself, creating three eternal presents. The Process, unable to admit any change, struggles not with successors but with other versions of itself to preserve not only its reign but a particular moment of its reign as the true reality.

Despite this, the Process talks a lot about the future. Just what it’s saying about the future is one of the less clear things about Time’s Crucible, mostly because none of its dialogue means very much. It’s convinced the future was “stolen” because the Pythia believes that Rassilon has stolen her future, but it has no real idea of what the future is, beyond something that ought to belong to it. In the mouths of the Process “the future” becomes political jargon–the kind of word that shows up in speeches because of its great emotional appeal and slight intellectual content. Every government has jargon words, and the more self-aggrandizing and inbred the government the more of them there are: just think of the piles of inane buzzwords associated with communism. Closer to home, “freedom” has been taking a beating lately from George W. Bush, and if you sat him down and asked him what the word meant to him I doubt he’d have a coherent answer.

Taken to its furthest extreme, the obsession with holding on to power leads to a totalitarian state, arranged to suppress anything that might threaten the rulers. We don’t see a lot of Gallifrey, but what we do see suggests that the Pythia’s reign approaches totalitarianism. (Who needs telescreens when everyone constantly hears everyone else’s thoughts? And the Pythia seems to have no qualms about probing Vael’s brain at whim.) The city again reduces the situation to its barest essentials: a tiny closed ecosystem where the State is all that exists. With all else stripped away, the ruler’s preoccupations are revealed as pointless, egocentric absurdities. The citizens are literally made to participate in their own oppression, as the brainwashed guards from the final phase police their own past selves.

But the city, though useful for satire, is also Time’s Crucible’s big weakness. It’s a high-concept world of big ideas and mind-blowing set pieces, but curiously lifeless in its chapter-to-chapter existence. The only inhabitants are the Process, a group of mostly indistinguishable early Time Lords, the Doctor and Ace–and the Doctor vanishes for most of the book, leaving Ace to carry whole chapters on her own. This book apparently bores a lot of readers, and I don’t blame them; I liked it, but even I wanted less Ace and more Gallifrey. It probably wouldn’t have hurt the book to be about 50 to 75 pages shorter. The biggest problem is that Time’s Crucible is so very sedate. It needs more wit of the dry, not quite laugh-out-loud kind found in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or Eugen Ionescu’s play Rhinoceros. It needed, in other words, to be a true absurdist novel.

Even so, Time’s Crucible isn’t nearly as much of a slog as its reputation suggests. It didn’t equal Timewyrm: Revelation, but if you’ve never reread it–or never read it for the first time–it’s worth going back to.

P.S. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO?

Timewyrm: Revelation

Books, Doctor Who, , ,

Three books in, the word for the New Adventures was safe. Each book took one or two big ideas, nestled them in comfortably predictable Doctor Who plots, and politely sat down to tea. And then Timewyrm: Revelation rode in on a huge motorcycle, punched out everybody in the room, sprayed the walls with neon graffiti, and escaped through the window, laughing manically as it sped away into the night. Revelation was the book that slapped Doctor Who awake and screamed in its face. Nigel Robinson heard it, rubbed his chin speculatively, and wrote Birthright. John Peel and Terrence Dicks were left stunned in its dust, mumbling “Oo ar? OO AR?” like the bicycle guy from “The Claws of Axos” as they watched it recede into the distance. Revelation was just that sort of different, as is still immediately obvious when you notice that half the action takes place in a talking church on the moon.

The great thing is that it’s an entirely naturalistic talking church on the moon. A lesser writer, given these concepts, might instinctually write a wacky campfest. Taking them seriously (not the same thing as humorlessly) is harder and riskier but makes for a better book.

The other half of the book–this is supposedly a Big Reveal, by the way, but anyone paying attention guesses by the end of Chapter Three–takes place in the Doctor’s brain. Which is appropriate, because if there’s one thing the NAs needed to do, it was explore the Doctor’s mind.

It’s commonly argued that the seventh Doctor and Ace were among the best developed characters in Doctor Who’s history. This is more or less true, but no matter how well they were written on the screen, they weren’t yet adequate for a novel. TV is about the characters’ exterior lives; any sense of an interior life comes from the actors’ interpretations of their roles. A novel gets right into a character’s brain and roots around; its characters need to be deeper and more complete.

Ace in particular needed work; due to the requirements of what was still considered an old-fashioned “family” program, she couldn’t be the modern urban teenager the writers wanted; instead she spoke in a strange mock-street kid dialect. Combined with Sophie Aldred’s more-enthusiastic-than-subtle performances you had a character who could come off as a broad caricature on the page. So besides literally running through every nook and cranny of the Doctor’s mind, Revelation gives Ace huge swathes of background. At times she seems to remember something almost every other paragraph. The extent to which both characters are built up can be judged by the increased depth of almost all the books that came after Revelation–as well as the fact that Virgin called on Cornell again when the Missing Adventures started and they needed to prove that the older characters could work in a novel too.

The most important thing for Revelation to flesh out was motivation. The Doctor can hardly land anywhere without someone trying to kill him. He sees more dead bodies in a year than a really observant morgue attendant. And yet the TARDIS crew makes no effort to avoid all this trouble. They actively seek it out. Why not steer the TARDIS towards safe, civilized garden spots? Why not stick to tourism? Why do they do this stuff?

Less thoughtful stories answer the question by pretending it doesn’t exist. In something like, say, Genesys, the Doctor’s adventures are all a big lark. There’s no danger! Those guys getting killed over there aren’t anyone we know or care about! La la la! By the end of the book, Ishtar is punching holes in people’s heads and a few pages later they’re fine. It’s so unserious that Ace meets some aliens willing to wipe out the human race and take over Earth, and she’s not at all offended; in the end, the Doctor happily fixes their spaceship and allows them to leave. Presumably to exterminate some other species we don’t know or care about.

The other option–one that’s been explicitly adopted by the new series, as seen in “World War 3”–is to argue that the rewards are worth the risks. Revelation describes a moral system based on a variation on Achilles’s choice: most people have safe, comfortable lives, at the cost of stultifying conformity and partial obliviousness to the world around them. Given Revelation’s occasional Buddhist imagery, it’s tempting to say that they’re not “enlightened,” a term I’ve recently seen translated more evocatively as “awake.” (I can’t remember where. It may not even be an accurate translation– I’m not an expert on the subject. But is sounds so much less vague.) A smaller number of people embrace their inner weirdness, living as geeks and outsiders, fighting and changing the world. Both the Doctor and Ace are explicitly presented with this choice at different points in the book, albeit from different directions. Going along with the Buddhist imagery, Ace experiences a life in which she’s gained friendship and popularity by subsuming her real self, becoming “asleep.” She returns to the real world, rejecting the illusion, when she awakens to her true identity. The Doctor attains peace through enlightenment, leaving the normal universe and seeing the whole thing from outside; he chooses to return to a painful life in the world in order to continue his work, like a Bodhisattva who delays his own enlightenment for the chance to help others.

The choice offered by Revelation is, of course, simplistic and much too black-and-white. It’s also remarkably flattering towards the primary market for Doctor Who fiction, which includes a number of smart but weird outsider types, and vastly more people who just like to believe they’re smart but weird outsider types. But what the hell–anyone who thinks a novel can give them a complete philosophical framework for understanding life is probably reading Ayn Rand instead of Doctor Who anyway.

Besides deepening the characters, Revelation made the universe bigger. You finish the book with the impression of some vast weight of history reaching back into time… mainly because Revelation is hugely allusive. It constantly references other parts of culture, from literature to pop music to its own continuity. The references ground the story, giving it a wider, deeper context and a sense that this story is one small part of a big universe. Going back to Revelation is almost a shock after the BBC novels, too many of which appeared to take place in hermetically sealed worldlets constructed solely for the Doctor to have an adventure in. There’s so much stuff here that I’m sure I couldn’t catalog all of it… and if this is done in a very first-novel manner, ideas stuffed in wholesale with more enthusiasm than careful selection, what the hell–just then, that’s what the series needed.

Most notably, Revelation borrows imagery from myth and legend, especially from Norse, Christian, and Buddhist mythologies. What’s interesting isn’t just that Revelation does this, but how it does it. Occasionally you see someone using Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces as a sort of recipe book–a prescription for writing a story. (Perfect example: John Leekley’s attempted reintroduction of the series in the mid-nineties, one of a whole series of appallingly misconceived revivals detailed in Jean-Marc L’Officier’s The Nth Doctor.) Revelation uses myths like jazz riffs, co-opting the imagery, absorbing some of its power in the process, to tell its own kind of story. Often it blends its allusions with imagery taken from Doctor Who, as is the case with the Doctor’s other incarnations, who represent aspects of his mind–the first Doctor his memory, the third his striving for wisdom, the fifth his conscience, and the absent sixth his repressed id. They may represent mythic archetypes as well. Having read Lewis Hyde’s book Trickster Makes This World not long before I reread Revelation, I was struck by the resemblance between Cornell’s fourth Doctor–who appears as a ferryman able to travel between areas of the Doctor’s mind–and Hyde’s view of the archetypical trickster as a figure with a special ability to navigate and cross boundaries.

By adapting mythic imagery, and by alluding to Doctor Who’s own history in the same space, Revelation gives the reader the impression that these things are interchangeable, that the series is itself a mythology. Revelation incorporates pieces of legend, literature, music and myth, and demonstrates that the Doctor’s fictional universe can be big enough to incorporate all those things too. This is the book that prepared the readers for the trip to come–and freed the writers to make that trip weirder and better than it ever had been on television.

Timewyrm: Apocalypse

Books, Doctor Who, , ,

And now we come to Timewyrm: Apocalypse: The little book everybody forgot. At least, I did. I hadn’t read it since it came out, and I can’t remember what I thought about it at the time. Nigel Robinson was another Target author, albeit one of the better ones–his The Edge of Destruction was an intelligent and readable expansion of a script that would have become a short story in the hands of Terrance Dicks. In 1991, this might have looked pretty good.

Today, though… not so much. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a lot of BBC books, to be honest. Apocalypse slides through your brain and leaves few memories. You might recall a sea monster. And wasn’t there some blue lady? Come to think of it, aren’t you just remembering the cover?

Which is odd. A book set at the end of the universe should be memorable. But not in this case, because the first really noticeable thing about Apocalypse is that the distant, distant future is oddly like the present. On her first morning in Kirith Town, Ace wakes up in a four-poster bed, puts on a silk dressing gown, and sits down to a complimentary hotel breakfast. This is not the last time we’d see this lack of imagination, although it wasn’t until the BBC books that it got pathological. Then again, given the big plot twist, it makes sense that Kirithon society seems artificial; Justin Richards didn’t have the same excuse in Sometime Never.

The second thing you notice about Apocalypse is that it has pretty much the same plot as “The Krotons”–a peaceful village’s best and brightest youngsters are recruited for mysterious purposed by their technocratic overlords, and never seen again. The Krotons, being crap, went to all that trouble merely to fix their spaceship, but the Panjistri are more ambitious: they want to force- grow the Omega Point, a phenomenon famously hypothesized by Frank Tipler (and less famously hypothesized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). For anyone unfamiliar with this theory–because, hey, it’s not that famous–I’ll take the lazy route and quote Wikipedia:

The implication of this theory for present-day humans is that this ultimate cosmic computer will essentially be able to resurrect (“simulate” might be a more modest verb) everyone who has ever lived, by recreating all possible quantum brain states within the master simulation. This will be manifested as a simulated reality, except without the necessity for physical bodies. From the perspective of the simulated “inhabitant,” the Omega Point represents an infinite-duration afterlife, which could take any imaginable form due to its virtual nature.

Whoa. Dude. (Despite this, Timewyrm: Apocalypse is still boring, which is in a sense an accomplishment.)

To accomplish this, the Panjistri wad up the local gifted and talented kids into a big amorphous ball of group-mind-ness. They also make a couple of angry blobby monsters, because… actually, I can’t remember what the hell that was supposed to be about. Possibly because they’re Mad Scientists, and that’s What Mad Scientists Do. Apocalypse seems a bit leery of science. You get the impression that, to Robinson, biologists are a lot like the Panjistri– mysterious beings who spend their time in activities both incomprehensible and a little scary.

The most noticeable thing about Timewyrm: Apocalypse in the post-EDA age is that it exactly fits the expressed goals of the current BBC book line. It’s a young adult novel, for ages twelve to fourteen. It focuses on, and sympathizes with, Ace and Raphael, a local teenager. Parents are mostly absent. Instead we have the Doctor and Raphael’s tutor Miril, non-threatening and more or less with-it mentor figures–perfect for kids who might be embarrassed to have Mom and Dad around during an adventure, but who aren’t ready to throw off adult protection altogether. The story is driven by the concerns of youth: the feeling that they’re living in a world shaped arbitrarily and incomprehensibly by powerful grown-ups. The fear that joining adult society might involve conformity and the subsumption of their identities. Their psychological need for rebellion. And, of course, the ever-popular melodramatic adolescent romance, complete with an ex-girlfriend who betrays Raphael to the Panjistri merely because she’s jealous of Ace.

What’s weird about this is that Timewyrm: Apocalypse keeps flashing back to scenes with the Second Doctor, Ben and Polly–the TARDIS crew that would have been least familiar to young fans. (None of the “orphaned” episodes were available on video then, although I think the BBC had experimented with putting a few audio tracks out on cassette.) It’s hard to imagine what a young audience would have made of these bits, since there’s no background to bring them up to speed. It’s like the target audience for Apocalypse is twelve to fourteen year olds somewhere around 1972. If anyone ever invents a time machine, we can send copies of Apocalypse back to the Pertwee era and totally blow those kids’ minds.

Timewyrm: Exodus

Books, Doctor Who, , ,

All the early New Adventures read differently now than they did fifteen years ago, but Timewyrm: Exodus reads differently in two entirely opposite ways at the same time. In a way it seems much worse now, because in 1991 I had no idea how good the series was going to get. At the same time, Exodus is shockingly better than everything else Terrance Dicks has ever written. Is this the same guy who wrote The Eight Doctors and Warmonger? Terrance, what happened?

To kick off the New Adventures, Virgin Books drew on their stable of Target novelizers, who could be counted upon to deliver manuscripts on time and of technically publishable quality. It was inevitable that one of them would be Terrance Dicks. Dicks wasn’t just a Target writer–he was the Target writer, the most prolific novelizer in the bunch. In the Target days, the average Who fan’s personal library might be composed of at least forty per cent Terrance Dicks–more if he was a real weirdo. Month after month after month, Dicks extruded 128 pages of the literary equivalent of baloney on Wonder bread.

The prose in Timewyrm: Exodus is as bland as anything Dicks has written. He does little more than provide basic descriptions of settings, characters, and actions. Metaphor is absent. A lot of the adjectives are vague generalities like “incredibly” or “huge.” But in contrast with Genesys, this is competent bland prose. Dicks rarely lets the narrative point of view wander (although when it does it reads a lot like the POV in Genesys). Every sentence functions as it was meant to. The dialogue sounds more or less natural. Exodus is pretty artless, but written with care and a minimally acceptable level of craft.

Still, in retrospect, you can see the quirks that later took over Dicks’s writing. Like his fondness for recycling. Dicks uses his every idea over and over again until he’s run it into the ground. It’s amazing the milage he gets out of the things. His brain is the most efficient carburetor in the world. You could drop him into the jungle with nothing but a videotape of “The Five Doctors,” and when you came back in a month you’d find a thriving civilization of Terrence Dickses cloned from his fingernails, worshipping Borusa and fighting Nazis. After Exodus his books suffer from increasing nostalgia creep, but here he just brings back the War Lords, which works beautifully and was incredibly cool in 1991. I remember getting to the point where Kriegslier’s aide slips on a pair of glasses before questioning Ace, and suddenly realizing what was going on, and feeling terribly clever to have guessed. I was fifteen at the time, and probably needed a hobby.

Another Terrence Dicks trademark is the sudden descent into bathos when he deals with anything alien–like the Sontaran in The Eight Doctors who hopes that killing the Doctor will get him into the “Sontaran Hall of Fame”.1 Wild ideas, alienness and big SFnal concepts seem to freak him out. He’s only happy when he can tame them with a little jokey coziness. Here we have a “Gallifreyan Army Knife” and “Doctor Solon’s Special Morbius Lotion.” Just to reassure us that the Time Lords are regular guys, and not alien life forms with intellects vast, cool, and only semisympathetic.

“So what is Timewyrm: Exodus about?” you ask. Actually, you probably don’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s an alternate history novel. As you read this, please remember that there was a time when the words “alternate universe” did not provoke uncontrolled convulsive retching among Doctor Who fans.2 Alternate history is an old and honorable subgenre in the wider world of speculative fiction, large enough to have its own cliches, including worlds where the Confederacy won the Civil War, worlds where a popular historical figure is working an incongruous job,3 worlds where contemporary people are thrown back in time and lord it over the natives through superior know-how and gumption, and Harry Turtledove.

Inevitably, Doctor Who’s first proper alternate history4 was the biggest cliche of them all: the world where Germany won World War II.

This scenario is nearly the first thing anyone will come up with if you mention alternate history. Why this creepy trope should have a white-knuckled death-grip on the collective unconscious is a question requiring essays of its own. Still, that’s no reason not to throw out a half-assed theory here. It’s worth pointing out that the formative years of science fiction–when it became defined as a genre separate from the larger mass of fiction–included the 1940s. With 60 years of hindsight, we’re used to thinking of the Allied victory as inevitable–so it’s easy to forget that the people actually living through the war couldn’t be sure of anything.5 They could only hope for the best… and sometimes, probably, fear the worst. Fears that the war effort might go wrong would have given that first generation of SF pulp ghetto dwellers a good few churned stomachs and sleepless nights. So after it was all over they worked their fears out in their fiction, and passed them down to the next generation.

Terrance Dicks lived through the WW2 era, too, but this nightmare is a little different. Dicks’s Nazis haven’t just conquered England. They’ve conquered the cozy cartoon England of early 1970s Doctor Who. This is the England populated entirely by comical rustics, government bureaucrats, businessmen, and scientists wearing turtleneck sweaters and black horn-rimmed glasses; all of whom live either in London or one of a number of small rural villages, connected by narrow, deserted highways. The resistance fighters could be the local poacher and his wife in any episode from 1970 to 1977. There’s even an incongruously amiable bobby so dense he never wonders why Ace doesn’t seem to know the most basic facts about occupied London.

And yet this isn’t quite a cozy cartoon fascist state. It comes close, of course–Dicks has problems imagining anything entirely not cozy, so his occupied England is ruled by reassuringly befuddled stooges whom the Doctor can run big sweeping rings around. But it’s about as close to a brutally realistic fascist state as Dicks is ever going to get. He seems to have done some research about how someplace like this might work, just as John Peel did his research on Mesopotamia for Genesys. That’s one of the really striking differences between the New Adventures and the BBC Books–the BBC Books often gave the impression that the authors’ research consisted of going for a beer, flipping on “Survivor: Beirut,” and trying to remember what they heard thirty years ago in Mrs. Peebles’s fourth grade Social Studies class. Most of the New Adventures, even the lesser entries, look like someone thought about them.

But this is only half the book–Dicks wrote two substories, like a pair of Target 128-pagers stuck together. Having outwitted the local collaborators, the Doctor travels back to the war to correct the timeline–and discovers that the War Lords were helping Hitler’s rise to power all along. Observing a Nazi rally, the Doctor insists that it’s been “‘Arranged, preplanned–by someone with a very sophisticated knowledge of the psycho-dynamics of crowds. Knowledge that doesn’t really belong in this century.’” This is completely asinine… and also incredibly tasteless. And yet, somehow, not many of Exodus’s readers seem to have been offended. There are at least a couple of reasons why this might have been the case. For one thing, Doctor Who fans have a certain amount of permanent goodwill for Terrance Dicks. No matter what drivel he comes up with, the fans treat him like their favorite old uncle, who might sometimes embarrass them but is still family. Also, we’ve seen this kind of thing before, in mirror-image.

In 1968, Erich von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, in which he argued that the greatest accomplishments of ancient civilizations were all down to the intervention of space aliens. Native American earthworks? Built to be seen from space. Egyptian pyramids? Put together with anti-gravity devices. Apparently aliens have nothing better to do than cross millions of light years to play Lego with big rocks. It was crappily pseudointellectual drivel… but it was also a bestseller. The public ate it up. A lot of people like to believe that history is progress, a straight line that moves from less advanced to more, and the knowledge that these “primitive” people, unaided, accomplished feats that would stump later civilizations doesn’t fit. Von Daniken’s theories were wish fulfillment. They seemed to make history make sense.

Doctor Who ate this stuff up, too. After Nigel Kneale plagiarism, von Danikenism was 1970s Doctor Who’s biggest cottage industry. Egyptian religion, Greek myth, Scottish monster legends–everything in history was caused by aliens. Von Danikenism even showed up in stories that didn’t depend on it, like “Death to the Daleks,” which insists, for no relevant reason, that the Incas were too stupid to come up with their own architecture. There’s a major difference, of course–Doctor Who’s writers and viewers understood that this was fiction. But my point is that seeing von Daniken’s influence over and over again in Doctor Who made it familiar, almost expected. After a while, seeing it again wouldn’t even register. Which makes it easy to slip increasingly weird variations on von Daniken past the audience. And this is why the premise of Exodus failed to offend most of the readers. Most readers didn’t think about it, maybe didn’t even notice it. It was von Daniken again, and he’s part of the furniture.

In Timewyrm: Exodus we again have aliens interfering in human history–not to improve the old, “less advanced” societies, but to worsen a modern civilization in 20th century Europe. And, in a way, it’s wish fulfillment again, because no one likes to think that human beings could be responsible for the grotesque evils of Nazi Germany. It’s upsetting to realize that the Germans who participated in–who even stood by and permitted–these crimes were ordinary people. Exodus presents a fantasy world where that guilt is taken away, displaced onto an alien intruder. “This can’t be us doing this,” Terrance Dicks says. “This isn’t the human race I know.” Which would be a pleasant thing to believe. Dicks is imagining a world where evil comes from outside, where ordinary people are, absent intervention, just not that depraved. But the idea that humans aren’t capable of this kind of evil is a fantasy… one as misleading, in its own way, as the fantasy that humans aren’t capable of the good things built by the Egyptians or the Incas.

  1. Presumably located in Branson, Missouri. ↩

  2. The “Alternate Universe” story arc was an Eighth Doctor storyline that lasted from Time Zero in September 2002 to Timeless in August 2003. It may not be quite the worst stretch of books the BBC ever published, but it’s up there. Or possibly down, as the case may be. The effect was heightened because the arc started at about the same point that the EDAs went from monthly to bimonthly publication, stretching a six-month story out to the length of a year. ↩

  3. The August 1993 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction featured, I swear to God, two stories in which Fidel Castro became a professional baseball player, both of which had been submitted to the magazine at the same time. ↩

  4. Aside from “Inferno,” which featured an alternate universe but not enough historical speculation to really count. ↩

  5. Something that was also played up in “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances.” ↩

Timewyrm: Genesys

Books, Doctor Who, , ,

Just to have something to post tonight, here’s a review of a _Doctor Who_ tie-in novel, which I originally posted on a mailing list. I have a couple more half-written which may show up here eventually, if I can make myself finish them.

In 1991, Virgin Books, who owned the Target Books imprint, ran out of televised Doctor Who stories to novelize. Fortunately, there was a way to keep the cash flowing: start a series of original novels, called the New Adventures. Even more fortunately, the BBC seems to have had a lackadaisical attitude towards the Doctor Who license. The New Adventures suffered from relatively little corporate oversight and interference, and for a while became something more interesting than the usual TV tie-in pap.

You wouldn’t guess any of this from John Peel’s Timewyrm: Genesys. But it is the first in the series, so bear with me while I discuss this dreary, half- assed little mediocrity in far more detail than it deserves.

Timewyrm: Genesys reads almost like fan fiction. The NAs were often called fan fiction by grumpy Usenet cranks, but this one really does come off as fanfic. It’s a fan’s idea of a generic Doctor Who story: A historical setting (ancient Mesopotamia) is invaded by an evil alien (Qataka) posing as an entity from human myth (Ishtar), who is defeated by the Doctor with the help of a famous guest star (Gilgamesh). This mass of cliches is mixed with some odd ideas, the first being the decision to start the book with the Doctor accidentally wiping Ace’s memories. There is a reason for this–it’s the first New Adventure, and this was an excuse for Peel, in the optimistic assumption that readers entirely new to Doctor Who might give the book a try, to have the Doctor explain the premise of the series. But it’s a very weird way to do it. It means we get two sequences within a few pages in which we’re introduced to a mysterious, unnamed, and therefore uninteresting viewpoint character–the first being the villain, the second being one of the regular cast. And these hypothetical new readers would have been baffled a few pages later when, in an act of blatant fanwank, the TARDIS sends the Doctor a “message” consisting of random video clips of old companions.1 They’d have been even more lost during the book’s climax when the Doctor, for no logical reason, suddenly announces that he’s going to channel a previous incarnation and starts acting like Jon Pertwee.

After what feels like fifty chapters of setup, the Doctor arrives in Mesopotamia. There’s one good thing about this book: John Peel did his research. He goes to some trouble to make ancient Mesopotamia foreign. This would not always be the case–by the BBC books era, most of the alien planets and historical eras felt a lot like contemporary Earth. On the other hand, sometimes it’s a little too obvious Peel’s done his research, and he comes off like a tour guide who keeps tugging at your sleeve to deliver another fun fact. And Mesopotamia is never as amazing and exotic as it should be because the entire book is written in a flat, affectless prose reminiscent of a sixth grade social studies textbook, and it sucks the life out of everything.

Including the characters. Gilgamesh, the historical guest celebrity of the week, is a cardboard drunk. Ishtar is a ridiculous Snidely Whiplash villain. As for the dialogue… well, at the beginning of Chapter Five, Enkidu, last of the Neanderthal race and companion to the legendary Gilgamesh, manages within a single page to say both “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this” and “It’s too quiet.” Meanwhile, Ishtar is given to statements like “‘Ah… morality. The weakness that marks the fool from the genius.” I don’t know how this stuff comes out of John Peel’s head. This is a man with a successful writing career, for certain values of “successful” and “writing.” I assume he has opportunities to observe and talk to people. Yet he writes with the insight into character of some guy living in a basement whose only social interactions are with his X-Men action figures. The impression is exacerbated by the weird, unpleasant, adolescent prurience that lies just beneath the surface of Peel’s Doctor Who work. (See also War of the Daleks.) At one point he manages to make even the Doctor sound like a dirty old man: “‘I like things to be tidied up and smelling pretty.’ He smiled at the young priestess. ‘Like this young lady.’”

Yuck. Thanks a lot, John–it’s going to take me years to scrub that line out of my brain.

So far, this is all just bad writing… but there are a couple of stylistic quirks I want to take a closer look at. Partly because they tell us something about this particular book, but also because they’re going to come up again. And again.

First, John Peel has some terrible problems with point of view. At times he appears to be trying to write in third person limited, but he doesn’t stick to one character for any length of time. The narrative point of view jumps from head to head like a hyperactive louse, occasionally slipping into third person omniscient. This can get confusing, as it sometimes takes a moment to realize you’re suddenly reading a new character’s thoughts.

So you can see what I’m talking about, let’s look at a passage from Chapter Eight which, up to this point, has been told from the POV of one of the temple priestesses:

Lost in her thoughts, En-Gula almost screamed when a strange figure stepped out of the shadows and politely raised his hat.

“Good evening,” the Doctor said, blessing her with his best smile. “I do hope I’ve not called at an inconvenient hour?”

Realizing that this strangely-attired little man could not be one of Ishtar’s messengers sent to call her to retribution, En-Gula managed to catch her breath.

You might wonder how En-Gula knows that this “strange figure” is the Doctor, especially since she immediately thereafter forgets, and can only identify him as a “strangely-attired little man.” What’s going on here?

The answer is that she doesn’t know. The first and third paragraphs are En- Gula’s POV, but the second paragraph isn’t–in fact, it isn’t the POV of anyone in the novel at all. It’s the POV of the audience watching the imaginary TV episode in John Peel’s head. It knows that this is the Doctor because it can see him, and unlike En-Gula it’s been watching the show from the beginning.

Peel can’t maintain a constant POV because he’s transcribing an imaginary television show. He follows what the camera shows him. He focuses on the Doctor when the camera does. He switches to Ace’s POV when the shot changes. He switches to third person omniscient when no one character dominates the scene. Think of his prose as an unconscious shooting script, and a lot becomes clear.2

Problems with point of view came up repeatedly in the Doctor Who novels, but not in every book. Another of Timewyrm: Genesys’s stylistic quirks would prove near-universal among Who fiction. It’s the way the novel is broken up into a series of short passages–ranging from a few paragraphs to a few pages–which intercut between different characters and plot strands. Unlike the roving point of view, this isn’t really a problem. Lots of good Who novels were written like this. But that’s because–and this is the striking thing–almost the entire series is written like this. And after a while you realize that it’s less a deliberate stylistic choice than an unconscious assumption that this is what a Doctor Who book looks like.

Again, to understand where this comes from we have to look to television. The New Adventures, for all their newfound length and eventual sophistication, were still the mutant children of the Target books. In the Target days the short scene format made it easy to novelize a television story: one scene in the script became a few paragraphs in the book. The first three original novels were all by former Target writers, and the generation of new writers who started with Paul Cornell were fans who’d absorbed the Target style into their psyches. No one ever questioned that this was the way to write Doctor Who. A lot of good novels were written like this, so obviously it didn’t hurt the series too much… but it’s interesting that this style was still the standard as of the final BBC past Doctor novel, Atom Bomb Blues–which also has the same floating POV problem as Timewyrm: Genesys, probably for the same reason. Virgin Books may have advertised the New Adventures as “too broad and too deep for the small screen,” but it seems the Who books never entirely managed to separate themselves from their television origins.

  1. The most interesting thing about this bit is the implication that the TARDIS likes to record videos of the Doctor’s companions screaming in fear. ↩

  2. This kind of thing actually turns up a lot in bad fiction these days, and there’s a good explanation of this in an essay at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction website; it’s partway down the page under the heading “The Voyeur Camera.” ↩

The Classification of Bad Amazon Reviews

Books

Among the links floating around in blogdom this weekend was this great collection of bad book reviews from Amazon.com. It took me back to the days—there were three or four of them, in early 2002—in which I spent far too much time hunting down terrible reader reviews on Amazon.

Most Amazon reviews are worthless; many items have dozens of five-star reviews that say nothing helpful, with maybe one or two by people who sound like they know what they’re talking about. And, if you’re lucky, some really *bad* reviews. Badly written reviews can tell you a lot. Almost any book on Amazon has those five-star reviews… but if you also see a couple silly, poorly argued, or incoherent one-star reviews, then chances are you’ve found something interesting.

Technorati Tags: ,


Continue reading The Classification of Bad Amazon Reviews →