The Highest Science

This one is stranger than usual, I think. It's the work of a first-time writer who will go on to big things, from his extremely well-regarded Missing Adventures to his work on the new series...and like all first works from future great writers, it's uneven as all hell. But most of the problems with the book lie with the lurches from extremely polished humor to frustratingly clumsy attempts at shock and horror; we've just seen the first NA from Gareth Roberts, but it pretty much exemplifies all of his experiences with the line. Gareth Roberts is not particularly interested in being a grown-up.

Or, to be far more accurate and charitable, Gareth Roberts subscribes to the Doctor's own philosophy: "What's the use of being a grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes?" His major antagonists in the book, the Chelonians, are giant cyborg hermaphroditic vegetarian turtles with a ludicrously extreme case of xenophobia (and rotten anthems.) Their opposition is a train full of British commuters who've accidentally found space guns. The Doctor attempts to construct "Diplomacy" as a literal super-weapon, knowing that the Chelonians wouldn't know what the word meant if they were presented with the definition on a neon sign. This is, at heart, a comedy.

But then you get Sheldukher, who's the kind of brutal and humorless thug that really doesn't belong in a book like this. You get a genuine psychopath like Molassi, who is genuinely effective as a murderous madman but who never feels like he fits in with the narrative. You get death, death, death and more death, ending with the Doctor catastrophically failing in his efforts to save the really sweet and nice humans and having to just up and leave. In another book, that might feel appropriate, but Roberts hasn't quite figured out how to stick that blend of humor and horror...or more accurately, he hasn't quite figured out which side to err on. He feels like he's trying too hard at times.

Which isn't to say he fails. For all that it never quite gels as the sum of its parts, 'The Highest Science' has some genuinely effective chills in its narrative (Benny's realization that the addictive drug she's drinking is killing her, even as she pops open another can, is inexplicably squicky. And even though you get the feeling that Sheldukher was intended more as a Julian Glover-esque charming villain, and Roberts was then asked to "NA it up a little", he's still very well-written for what he does.) And the comedy bits, though not as prevalent as in Roberts' later books, are funny indeed. (There's just something so surreal about the Chelonians that I'm still hoping we see them in the TV show, practical difficulties aside.) It's just that the divide between the funny bits and the creepy bits feels more like a chasm than a slope.

It's a good book, and I'm glad it was written...but at the same time, much better is on the horizon for this author.

Open to the Public!

Hi all! We've been working on this blog for a little while now, while we decided exactly what we wanted to do with it...but we've decided to make it public, so that you can all join in. A quick summary of what the whole thing is about:

I'm a lifelong Doctor Who fan whose heart belongs, deeply and truly, to the Virgin and BBC book lines. They're "my Doctor" the same way other people view the Tom Baker era or the David Tennant era as "their Doctor", and while I've shared a lot of my love of Doctor Who with my beautiful wife Dee, she's read a relatively small portion of the book lines. And so we decided to read them together, and write about them together, and then talk about what we read. For her, it's a brand new journey to a part of the series she missed; for me, it's a trip down memory lane and a chance to explore how the new series couldn't exist without the New Adventures. We don't have a set timetable, so updates will be irregular, but we hope that you'll all join in the adventure with us!

Chat: Transit

John: So admittedly, it’s taken us some time to schedule this little chat about ‘Transit’. Luckily, I’ve read this one so many times I’ve practically memorized it, so I’m not worried about losing anything.

Dee: I’ve read it before too, because it stands alone fairly nicely as a Doctor Who novel. And here’s where I start to think I sound like I don’t like any of the books: I loved this novel, but not as a Doctor Who novel. As a standalone SF novel, it’s utterly and totally fantastic. Clear characterization - I loved Kadiatu putting her back against a drink machine to cool off, for instance. Just lovely. Fun plot. But as a Doctor Who novel, I am not so sanguine.

John: I noticed that from your blog. And don’t feel bad, because that actually puts you more in touch with the majority of the Doctor Who fanbase at the time. Even by the standard set by the previous book, this one jars. We get very little Benny (although the bits we do get are choice), we get a Doctor who’s undergoing an emotional crisis and not handling it well...it feels like a cyberpunk novel that the TARDIS is passing through, and that ticked a lot of people off. And of course, other people were outraged by the sex, swearing, drugs and alcohol abuse, but I know you well enough to know that’s not an issue here.

Dee: Oh, the sex was fine. So was the threat of what would happen to Kadiatu if she couldn’t pay her debt. Honestly, the thing that turned me off was Benny. I felt like we didn’t know her well enough after one novel to know whether this was out of character for her or just a side not seen in the previous book. I felt like we were supposed to infer this was weird, and I could tell he wanted us to think it was weird, but... no. And that was sad, because I’m aware that Benny has a huge fan club in the DW fan community. I couldn’t have told you why based on this book, though.

John: As I say, it’s a common complaint. And a not unjustified one. But on the other hand, we do get the wonderful flashback to her childhood, the scene of the last time she saw her father...it’s a tiny moment in a book in which Benny is generally conspicuous by her absence, but it’s glorious. And it sets the tone for much of the later books. Almost like, “Okay, we’ve seen her deepest and most heartbreaking tragedy. Later books can focus on the superficial stuff.”

Dee: I see your point. But I really enjoyed this much more the first time I read it, when I wasn’t aware that Benny was brand-new. Let me focus for a moment more on things I liked, though. The world was fully realized. It was one of the clearest, sharpest societies we’ve yet seen in Doctor Who, and future novels will have a hard time capturing the same feel for their settings. The bar’s been set very high by this one. The bits about the Martians, little as we get, are absolutely awesome. I want to take Ming out for dinner.

John: Ming is, by the standards of this book, a relatively minor supporting character, and she is better drawn, more interesting, more sympathetic, has more quotable dialogue and is generally much more fun to read about than everyone in ‘Timewyrm: Apocalypse’. PUT TOGETHER. Really, there’s not a single character in here that couldn’t sustain their own book: Kadiatu, Old Sam, the Angel Francine, Zamina...even the razvedka are compellingly creepy. And they work in service to the story, not to distract from it, the same way the setting does. It’s important that the story is set in a post-Thousand Day War world, but it never overwhelms the plot.

Dee: And there is a huge, Ace-shaped hole in the story. On purpose. Aaronovich is drawing our attention to it without being a jerk. “What would it have been like had Ace been here?” is one of the questions the Doctor is asking himself, and Aaronovich’s talent is to make the reader ask it as well without being maudlin. (The Doctor gets to be that himself.)

John: Oh, and the Doctor is great in this. I remember getting a copy of the Writer’s Guide for the New Adventures so that I could pitch for them (I have a great knack for deciding to pitch right as a book line is ending), and they actually made a rule about Not Writing From the Doctor’s Perspective, because they’d read so damn many lousy first-person Doctor Who samples by then. But Aaronovitch does it and nails it so well that the Writer’s Guide pretty much says, “If you have to do it, do it like Ben Aaronovitch does it.” And he gets some of the best dialogue in a book full of sharp, witty lines, too. “Oh no.” “Oh yes.” “Oh no.” The best six-word exchange in literature.

Dee: I don’t think many people do well at writing truly alien, but yes, Aaronovich pulls it off. Like I said, I like the book. I just don’t enjoy it as a DW novel.

John: I think it helps a bit if you’re not reading them in sequence. It also helps if you’re more familiar with Benny...and the next book is one of the more Benny-centric novels. And our introduction to another future TV luminary!

Transit

I never imagined how hard this post would be to write.

This was one of the only Doctor Who books I'd read before we started this project. I liked it because it was good, semi-hard SF. I liked it because the characters made sense and were internally consistent. I liked it because I liked the protagonists, from Blondie to Ming to Kadiatu. Even the razvedka bad guys were at least understandable. Ben Aaronovich is an incredible writer who takes you on an amazing ride, from dropping country names like Burkina Faso to the blind pilot to talking about the meteor dropped on Paris by a war in the not-too-distant past. (And I'm being deliberately elliptical, because I want people who haven't read it before to enjoy it immensely without my spoilers.)

But as a Doctor Who novel, I didn't like it as much on the second read.

Partly it is because we just met Benny, and to drop her into this and have the things happen to her that happen to her... well, it's hard to realize how out of character they are. Partly it's because I'm coming off the previous book and not terribly sympathetic to the Doctor. I think if this book had come two books later, I would have enjoyed it much more. And as I said, I really like it as a SF book. This is not at all a "don't waste your time" post... read it, by all means!

But as a Doctor Who book, well, I just don't enjoy it as much.

Transit

'Transit' is a rarity, not just among Doctor Who books but among books in general; it's a book that keeps getting better every time you read it. Ben Aaronovitch, who I previously described as the creator of modern Doctor Who, wrote a novel that works on multiple different levels. It's primarily a cyberpunk take on the classic Doctor Who thriller; Something Creepy(tm) has gotten out into the transit system due to explorations of places Man Was Not Meant To Go(tm), and the Doctor has to banish the monsters back to the spaces beyond. But at the same time, it's a brilliant exploration of the Doctor's effect on history, told through two simultaneous and intercutting plot threads; one that plays almost continuously in the background, exploring the knock-on effect of a single intervention of the Doctor's, and the other that builds over the course of the book, showing how his interaction with humanity has produced Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart. Aaronovitch is genuinely thinking about his theme and subtext, working to produce something that's more than the sum of its parts.

The primary plot, while nothing we haven't seen before, is proably about as well-executed as it's ever been in Doctor Who. The STS virus, named by the Doctor with perfectly appropriate whimsy as "Fred", is an interestingly alien alien, with goals and motivations and planning styles that feel genuinely like something not of this universe. Unlike the vast majority of pseudo-Lovecraftian monsters that populate Doctor Who (and most genre fiction), Fred seems authentically unknowable, not merely a moustache-twirling bad guy that happens to drive people insane when they look at it. And the Doctor's solution, concealed beneath layers of subtlety by the author, comes as both genuinely surprising at the time and brilliantly thought out in retrospect.

(It does take a bit of retrospection, of course. One of the things that's most noticeable about 'Transit' is the prose style; form follows function in this book, as the theme of "transit" encapsulated in the title is incorporated into the way the story flows. The sentences are staccato bursts of text, the scenes are short, and there's frequent cutting from place to place and character to character. We are constantly in motion in 'Transit', and there's really no point at which Aaronovitch pauses to let the slower readers catch up. This is a book that almost demands re-reading.)

At the same time, 'Transit' functions as a sequel to the Troughton-era story, 'The Seeds of Death'. Back in the 60s, when Doctor Who was primarily seen as a kiddie show with spooky monsters for the Doctor to beat, the Ice Warriors were nothing more than that week's bad guys, and the Doctor consigning their invasion fleet to a one-way trip to the heart of the sun was just that week's gimmick for defeating them (conveniently off-camera, so as not to have to pay for any model effects.) But 'Transit' shows the way that this tiny skirmish was just the first battle in a much larger and more brutal war that transformed human culture, and the way that the Doctor's casual interference and refusal to stick around to deal with the long-term consequences has had major ramifications for the whole human race. The post-war society of 'Transit' is never lingered on, of course. Nothing in 'Transit' ever is. But it permeates the entire novel.

And then there's Kadiatu. Years later, of course, the TV series would pick up the general idea behind the character, dust it off, mix it with some bits of Benny that were left lying around and call it "River Song"...but here, Kadiatu is something far more interesting and dangerous. She's a human response to a Time Lord poking around into their affairs, but she's nothing so simple as a living weapon created by an eyepatch-wearing band of supervillains. Kadiatu is presented as something quite possibly necessary, someone who can operate on the Doctor's level without being defined by him. She's not the Doctor's lover or his sidekick or his partner or his assassin. She is our representative to the greater universe, a higher being who can operate on the plane of the Time Lords and the Daleks and the various time-active powers with humanity's interests paramount. Which raises all sorts of interesting questions as to whether or not that's true of the Doctor, and whether we can really trust someone so alien even if he does claim that human beings are his favorite species, and whether Kadiatu's struggles with her inbuilt propensity to violence make her worse than the Doctor, or just more human...all of which is pretty heady stuff for a novel that's been consigned to a ghetto even within the ghetto of science fiction. If you ever wondered why I defend the Doctor Who novels, this is Exhibit A.

And of course, there's so much more to talk about. The subtle jokes in the glossary at the end, the casual brilliance of Ming as a character, what exactly the book was that Benny was trying to decrypt...as mentioned, this is a book that rewards re-reading. And lucky us, it's so damn amazing that you can't help wanting to read it again, too.

Chat: Love and War

John: Paul Cornell’s back...and this time, it’s personal! I know you thought this was a bit of a sophomore slump for Cornell, but I actually thought it was a bit better as a novel. Not as much fun as ‘Revelation’, perhaps, but it’s kind of hard to write an upbeat novel about Ace and the Doctor having a falling-out over his callous treatment of her fiance and his gruesome, untimely death.

Dee: I wouldn’t say “Revelation” was fun, so much... people getting heads cut off, a crucified Doctor, and so forth. But I felt like it hung together better in some ways. And this one wasn’t bad, at all. One thing that I thought was interesting was the way at the end, the TARDIS took away Ace’s ability to understand languages before she’d even really left... a bit final, that.

John: It’s one of the things that happens in a more “mature” version of the series, I think. They tend to explore some of the logical consequences of things that were just lampshaded in the old series. You can see how the books influenced the new series in that sense; the scene where Rose suddenly begins understanding the Sycorax is a distant descendant of this book. But to get back to your more general thrust, “final” is really a good word for this whole book. It’s all about the way things end, and at the time, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ace was gone for good. (That’s not spoilers, right?)

Dee: The worst of it was that she’d be right. The Doctor was more of a Right Bastard to her than he’d been to anyone in hundreds of years. Ace was perfectly entitled to be pissed at him. And “forgive me” only works so many times. He’d pretty much used his up. Seven might have big soulful eyes, but actions speak so much louder than those.

John: But you know, no matter how many times I read this one, I’m still never sure whether the Doctor planned all along for Jan to be on that ship at that time, or whether that was his backup backup backup backup plan and everything he did leading up to that was an attempt to save everyone including Jan...and it just failed. He definitely knew from the beginning what was going on, as soon as he sniffed the soil and saw Jan. Everything after that...the Doctor is a very opaque figure in this novel. This is Ace’s book.

Dee: To me the theme of this novel is trust, and how when it’s not given everything falls apart. The lack of trust between Roisa and Jan, Roisa and Maire until the last second, Jan and most everyone, the Doctor and Ace... and the places where things work, it’s because of trust: Jan and Christopher, the military guy and the Doctor, Ace and Benny.

John: But it’s important, I think, to note that it’s not as simple as just, “If you trust people, everything will all work out great!” The Hoothi really do have spies and eyes everywhere, and the Doctor plays it close to the vest because he has to. Some of the saddest parts of the novel, I think, are the ways that Roisa winds up betraying the people she loves so much, all through no fault of her own. The scene where the priest asks her if she has a hole in her shoe is utterly chilling and note-perfectly ominous.

Dee: No argument there, except that had she trusted them earlier it wouldn’t have been so bad. I agree with you that it’s perfectly executed, don’t get me wrong. I just think there’s a lot of meditating on trust in it. And in the end, it was Julian and Jan’s trust in Ace that ended the menace, despite them being controlled and even killed.

John: And in a way, Jan’s trust in the Doctor. I think that Jan is the only one who trusts completely in this novel; even though he doesn’t consciously go along with the Doctor’s plan, he does let the Doctor know that he’s willing to do anything to save his friends, and in the end, he does what the Doctor asks of him with all that’s left of him. He’s kind of a twit at times, and a bit clueless and inept with his interpersonal skills, but you have to give him that. (Or did you not think he was a bit of a clueless twit?)

Dee: A bit? Very. I thought the “Ace Goes For The Bad Boy” thing was a bit too pat. She didn’t thwap him upside the head (metaphorically) enough. But he did have the strength to keep up with her, and in ten years he might have been quite a decent guy.

John: Oh, yes. Tremendously immature, no question. Which plays, I think, into the reason that he couldn’t make a poly couple work very well. His motivations for being with Roisa were not good ones, he couldn’t let go of her and he couldn’t be what she wanted him to be, which was more committed (I never got the feeling that she wanted him to be exclusive to her, only that she wanted him to be her husband...) He hurt her a lot by trying not to hurt her too much. Even though it was a portrait of a poly relationship that wasn’t working, I thought it was a poly relationship that wasn’t working for real reasons, not just because “poly relationships never work”.

Dee: I’d agree with you if we’d seen one that worked. I get the feeling that Cornell thinks they don’t, but well-meaning people can try to make them work. Call it a hunch, we’ll see if it plays out at all in future books. But yes, he did give it real reasons, which is refreshing.

I’m still having a hard time fitting this Ace into the Ace from a few books back. I don’t see how you can deescalate from warrior with gunsights to the calmer Ace here.

John: I think you’re right. I think they actually made the break here the way they did because the direction they wanted to take the character couldn’t really work as a gradual transition; it was like the ghost of the character we saw on TV kept hovering over the Ace of the books, constantly dragging her back to fit into that mold. By taking her off the scene for a while, and then bringing her back as almost a new character with a new character bible, the editors stopped people from writing her like it was still Season 25. I think this is really the major transition point for the series, where they finally leave the TV show behind completely, and leaving behind the TV version of Ace is a big part of that.

As is introducing Benny. It’s funny, but as much as Cornell puts into showing you the character in this one, I don’t think she really does much here. She basically spends the whole book waiting to step into the TARDIS, only occasionally contributing to the plot. (I liked your idea of Maire on the TARDIS, though. But given the way the Doctor acted, she’d never have gone with him.)

Dee: I’m not quite sure why Benny did, given how she backed up Ace.

John: I think the opportunity of traveling through all time and space, combined with the not-quite-buried thought that she could find out what really happened to her father, was just too much to resist no matter how badly she thought of the Doctor. (Hmm, and years later we’d get “Father’s Day” from the same author...have I mentioned lately that the new series drew heavily on these books?)

Anyhow, next time we’ll get another plot that Benny is involved in both very much and almost not at all, but in an entirely different way...

Love And War

Paul Cornell is really a brilliant and creative writer. This feels like a bit of a sophomore slump to me, but it's still head and shoulders above many of the books we've read so far.

This book does have some wonderful characters. We meet Benny, and I love how she stands up to the Doctor and defends Ace. We meet Maire and Christopher and the other Travellers. We meet Jan and Roisa and Cornell shows that he's familiar with the concept of polyamory, although he seems to think it can't work well.

One of the things I liked about this novel was the way the setting itself seemed to become a character. Actually, I liked the way two settings became characters: Heaven and Puterland. Cornell does a good job of making VR seem so much more alive than Real Life, and I mean that both in the sense of vibrancy and in the sense of Heaven being a zombie planet.

Of all of the characters, I liked Maire the best. She was responsible, intelligent, strong, and honestly if she hadn't been so devoted to the Travellers she would have made an excellent Companion herself. (In fact, if I hadn't known what would happen with Benny I would have been rooting for her to be the one to walk onto the TARDIS.) Christopher was remote and yet somehow still likeable.

All that said... I don't know what Ace saw in Jan. He's not the kind of character we've seen her falling for, at least recently. And you know, I get the whole "wild child" thing and Ace is not going to settle for someone quiet and gentle, probably. But if we assume she does like this type, then some of the pairings in previous books appear even more unlikely.

On the gripping hand, the way Jan and so many of the others went out was terrifying. Snakes? No problem. Daleks? It's over fast, at least. Cybermen? Chilling. Space-traveling fungus that drink blood and incorporate victims into a group mind and use their bodies as zombies? AAAHHH!!

And after everything that's happened, Ace leaving the Doctor was believable. I could completely understand why she would do so in that moment. Less credible was, given what she had just seen, Benny's hopping onboard. But then, no one is perfect, and that includes Paul Cornell.