Andrew’s Book Club 4: Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles
The more I read of Miles the more convinced I become that he is to science fiction novels what Grant Morrison is to comics.
Miles is clearly influenced by Morrison, in much the same way the Morrison himself is influenced by Alan Moore – I recently read a message board thread in which a fan had written to Miles asking if he’d ever read Doom Patrol, to which the reply was just ‘how do you think I learned to write like that?’ – but he has his own style, one far more suited to novels. (Miles is also as abrasive and – quite often – irritating in his public persona as Morrison was twenty years ago, when for a long time I wouldn’t read his comics because his interviews put me off. I was eleven at the time, so can probably be forgiven)
The problem is, much as Morrison does most of his work using the mythology he grew up with – superheroes – as the basis for his stories, Miles uses Doctor Who, which limits his readership enormously.
The TV spin-off novel is not somewhere where one naturally looks for literary merit, and if TV spin-off novels are often poor, then spin-offs of those spin-offs could be expected to be truly horrible, full of terrible writing and fannish in-jokes, aimed at only the most insanely obsessive completist.
So when people hear that Dead Romance is a book originally written for the New Adventures, a series that started off as Doctor Who spin-off novels before continuing on based on a supporting character when they lost the Doctor Who license; that it doesn’t even feature that supporting character but a new character who is possibly connected to her in an initially-unspecified way; and that this edition of the novel is a reprint as a semi-apocryphal part of the Faction Paradox series, a series of novels that span off from *another*, unconnected, line of Doctor Who books, one might forgive them for assuming it was illiterate dribble fit only for consumption by Ian Levine.
In fact this is one of the most interesting and intelligent SF novels I’ve read in a long time. If, as Millennium’s Daddy Richard once said to me, The Book Of The War is the BBC/Doctor Who version of The Invisibles’ ITC serials, Dead Romance is volume 4 of Zenith, seen through a filter of Doctor Who rather than old British adventure comics, and written by Kurt Vonnegut.
In fact, the Vonnegut comparison is very valid. There’s a similar fascination here with the actual physical page, the actual text itself, the same slightly distanced tone, the same ‘big picture’ view of human beings as being only (or possibly less than) their component parts, the same slightly non-linear, rambling structure. It came as no surprise to me to find an interview with Miles (and quite a fascinating one) speaking of Vonnegut as one of the few writers he admired – one of the few who was trying to actually *write*, rather than put films onto the page.
And you could read this without having ever heard of Doctor Who and come away without ever knowing it was connected to something else. It’s just a science fiction (or really science fantasy) novel. The few elements from the Who ‘mythos’ included are so radically reworked that someone who didn’t know where they came from would think the influence was Lovecraft or Philip K. Dick rather than Doctor Who.
Apparently Dead Romance is regarded as in some way an ‘experimental’ novel by fans of the Doctor Who novels. This says *far* more about the Doctor Who novels (which can roughly be split into four groups – those by hacks who’d worked on the TV show and needed a quick pay cheque, those by fans who wanted to answer all the continuity questions they’d been bothered by, those by fans who wanted to show that Doctor Who was really grown up adult entertainment by mentioning bare ladies and the spliffs and the young persons’ rock and roll music, and those by people who could actually write and wanted to do something interesting. Sometimes these categories overlapped.)
The ‘experimental’ nature of Dead Romance only extends as far as Miles doing things like having a slightly unreliable narrator, having the story be told in a discursive manner rather than a strictly linear one – in short, the things I would think of as being basic for anyone who wants to do actual *good writing* rather than just being interested in the plot and ideas. Certainly, the writing is no more ‘experimental’ than, say, anything in PEP!, and a lot less ‘experimental’ than Sean’s piece… it’s on the level of a rock band who know how to play a diminished seventh or minor sixth chord, rather than being Stockhausen. It’s sad that fans of Doctor Who – a programme that at its best was all about pushing boundaries and experimenting – could be so illiterate (there’s really no other word for it) that they’d see this as experimental (which is not to say that all, or even most, Doctor Who fans are that illiterate – this often topped polls of the best books in the New Adventures series – but enough are that it’s saddening).
And while this book is full of SF Big Ideas, it’s not really *about* them. Rather, it’s about the changing of the sixties to the seventies, the death of the spirit of optimism in popular culture, the Manson murders, growing older, the way Britain fictionalises and romanticises its past, both the Victorian and Swinging London eras. It’s about serial killers, and fantasy lives, and about the aching sense some of us have that the world we’re living in simply isn’t as interesting as the one we were promised. It’s about how fundamentally shallow much of the Sixties’ counterculture was. It’s about Bobby Fuller and Jack The Ripper and people who create their own pick-n-mix spirituality. It’s about identity.
In his introduction, Miles refers to this book as The Spy Who Loved Me of the New Adventures line (the book, not the film), and this is a very apt comparison. It’s an intriguing example of how you can turn pop-culture mythology into genuine art. It’s not the greatest novel of all time or anything, but it’s a *very good* novel, and that’s *FAR* more than anyone would have the right to expect of it, and it’s very sad that its existence is only known to a subgroup within a subgroup within Doctor Who fandom, rather than Miles’ work being as mainstream as, say, Iain Banks (with whose work this shares a number of characteristics. Miles is better).
As the original novel was rather short, the reprint is rounded out with a few other pieces. There’s Miles’ introduction (“The original Dead Romance had commas in places where commas should never be, and anyone who knows me will know that I’d rather have an editor give a story a happy ending than let him fiddle with the punctuation.”), a rather lovely short story called “Toy Story” which *is* set firmly enough in Doctor Who continuity that it won’t make much sense to non-fans, an essay on the way the universe of the Faction Paradox works (containing a number of ridiculously good ideas) and a beautiful short story called Grass, unconnected in any obvious way to any of the other material, but *well* worth reading.
At this point, having read three books in the range, I am now convinced that the Faction Paradox range of books is the best multi-author fictional universe I’ve ever read. I would suggest that anyone who enjoys my blog – or who enjoyed PEP! 1 – would almost certainly enjoy these books, and I plan to purchase the rest – and the audios – as fast as my credit card will allow. You don’t need to be a Doctor Who fan to enjoy them, any more than you need to have been a Charlton comics fan to enjoy Watchmen, and I think it’s a real shame that, partly because of their origin and partly because of the abrasive persona of the main writer, they’re not reaching a mass audience.
The Faction Paradox books can all be purchased from Mad Norwegian (who publish all but one of them). I recommend just buying the lot…
ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 3 – 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks
Don’t worry, this isn’t only the third new-to-me book I read this year – between the last of these posts and this one I also read five other books I’d not read before (as well as usual rereads, comics etc) but I’m planning on submitting some writing to the series that they are connected to (part of the reason for reading them) so don’t want to review them here. I’ve also just picked up a few more books (it’s payday) so over the next couple of days expect posts on Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles and The People’s Manifesto by Mark Thomas.
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brook is one of the most interesting – and recommendable – pop-science books I’ve read in a long time (and I read a lot of pop-science books).
One of the things that worries me about the New Atheism and the Rationalist movement is its attitude to what Charles Fort referred to as Damned Data. A lot (by no means all) of the media representatives of this movement seem to regard disagreement with the current scientific consensus as being heresy – which seems to me to be a fundamentally unscientific attitude. (Richard Dawkins, for example, has condemned a creationist documentary that interviewed him under false pretences and re-edited the footage in ways he disagreed with, but he did exactly the same to Rupert Sheldrake. I happen to think that Sheldrake is wrong, but one should still use intellectually honest arguments, even against those who *are* wrong…)
(Which is not to say the majority of such disagreements aren’t cranks and quackery – they are. But some are very far from that. I *MUST* at some point get round to blogging about orthomolecular medicine, for example…)
Brooks, a consultant to New Scientist, takes the opposite – and to me, more scientific – approach here, by looking at anomalous results – the places where our theories and the data don’t quite match up.
Opening with a quote from Isaac Asimov – “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny…’” – Brooks takes us on a tour through most of the major scientific disciplines and looks at what we *don’t* know. He divides this into thirteen ‘things that don’t make sense’ as follows:
The Missing Universe – he looks at ‘dark matter’, ‘dark energy’, and various not-yet-accepted physical theories that do away with these concepts.
The Pioneer Anomaly – the Pioneer probes, sent out in the 1970s, are now thousands of miles away from where the theory of Relativity says they should be.
Varying Constants – the growing evidence that the ‘universal constants’ used to be different.
Cold Fusion – the growing body of evidence that suggests Pons and Fleischmann found *something* – maybe not cold fusion, but *something* – in their career-ending experiments.
Life – why have we not yet been able to synthesise life from elementary chemicals?
Viking – the Viking probe found evidence of life on Mars – one of the experiments that it ran gave *exactly* the result predicted if there were living organisms in the Martian soil. This has never been followed up on.
The WOW! Signal – a brief (sub-second) signal that looks very much like the work of intelligent life, but has never been repeated.
A Giant Virus – a virus found in Bradford that appears to be an evolutionary ‘missing link’ (sorry for the term) between bacteria and viruses.
Death – why *do* we die? Can it be stopped?
Sex – why all the current evolutionary explanations for sex fall down.
Free Will – scientific evidence that it doesn’t exist, and what this might mean for society.
The Placebo Effect – the evidence that it’s much stronger than thought when it comes to depression and pain, but has *no effect whatsoever* when it comes to physical problems, and what this means for the current medical orthodoxy of double-blind placebo-controlled trials.
And most controversially of all, Homeopathy – he shows that there is a *tiny* bit of evidence that a *small* proportion of homeopathic ‘medicines’ might actually work, and some suggested physical mechanisms for this, even while clearly showing that most of it is the nonsense we all accept it to be.
Looking through this list, some of it is probably explicable by experimental error or outright fraud (my guess is that the evidence for homeopathy falls into that category), but at least some of these things will radically rewrite parts of our understanding of the universe.
But the good thing about this book is that even when he’s talking about these things, Brooks is *NOT* doing it in a new-agey, ‘there are things that science will never understand, wisdom of the ancients’ kind of way. He is motivated by an excitement in discovery, and in the scientific method. For him, the idea that there are things we don’t know, or things we’ve got wrong, is not a threat, and it’s better to waste time on a wild goose chase occasionally in order to find something genuinely revolutionary than to dismiss out-of-hand any anomalous data or wild hypotheses.
My guess is that at least seven or eight of the things talked about in this book will turn out to be wild-goose chases of that nature, but that among the others is an account of someone who in a century will be spoken of in the way we now speak of Einstein, Darwin or Newton (or at least Crick or Watson or Curie or Pauling).
This has fired up my imagination far more than most books of its ilk, and as long as you accept (as Brooks clearly states) that the stuff talked about in it is the very opposite of ‘established fact’, I can guarantee it will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in science.
ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 1 : Of The City Of The Saved…
Laura Tobin is a Private Investigator in the City, where the human race lives. All of it, from the first Australopithecus to the posthumans of ten million AD and beyond. A hundred undecillion people, resurrected at the end of time in new, immortal bodies incapable of being physically harmed. So she’s more than a little surprised to get her first murder case…
One thing I’ve decided to do this year is to write a blog entry reviewing every book I read (specifically every book in paper format that I read for pleasure and that I haven’t read before). Unfortunately, this is going to mean a certain amount of Doctor Who-heaviness at the beginning – Big Finish recently had an online clearance sale on books they’ve lost their license to publish, and so I bought four, which should be in the post now – but that’s not especially representative of my reading habits, which actually stretch at the moment mostly to pop-science, political comedy and 20th century history.
Of The City Of The Saved… by Philip Purser-Hallard is sort of a Doctor Who book, but not really. During the 1990s, after Doctor Who was taken off the TV, there were many novels written about the character. While the BBC owned things like the Doctor, the TARDIS, the Time Lords and so on, all the writers of the novels owned any characters or concepts they came up with.
So when the editor of the books decided he didn’t like some of Lawrence Miles’ ideas any more, Miles took his ball away with him and started his own fictional universe, notionally separate from the main Doctor Who line, with a thinly disguised Gallifrey, Time Lords, Master and so on, plus not-at-all disguised characters from his Doctor Who books (or those of others who allowed him to use their characters) like companion Chris Cwej and half-human half-TARDIS Compassion (although Miles wasn’t allowed to use the word TARDIS of course, so she was just half-’timeship’…)
But what he mostly took from the Doctor Who books was the concept he’d created of a War between the Time Lords and an unknown Enemy – a Time War where the whole of reality would regularly get rewritten. Yes, it does sound a little bit like some of the things in the Welsh Series, doesn’t it? (And if you think it does, you might want to read Richard Flowers’ article in PEP! when it finally, belatedly comes out…)
And he, and a group of other writers, fleshed out this universe in Faction Paradox: The Book Of The War, one of the best SF/Fantasy books I’ve read in years – somewhere between encyclopedia, short story collection and RPG sourcebook, it is denser with ideas than almost any SF book you’ll read – and good ones.
And one of the best was the City Of The Saved – a city in a point straight after the destruction of this universe, as big as a galaxy, or bigger, in which every human being (or cyborg, or human-alien hybrid – but *not* any fully non-human lifeforms) was resurrected on the same day, to live forever, without being told who had resurrected them, or how it had happened.
Of The City Of The Saved… is the second novel in the Faction Paradox series that came after The Book Of The War, and generally regarded as the best. And it is an extraordinarily good novel, teeming with ideas, from the Reproduction Tanks in which ‘clones’ of people who never lived to be grown, to the Manfolk with their lethal means of reproduction.
Those who like their SF to be full of ideas will definitely enjoy the book – fans of Warren Ellis’ better work, or Philip K Dick, will find much to their taste here. I was unsurprised to see in the notes at the end that the concept of the City owed much to the Omega Point idea of Frank Tipler, as put on a more rational footing by David Deutsch in his book The Fabric Of Reality (which I’ve spoken about here), as this is the kind of ultra-speculative SF/Fantasy that feeds off the most imaginative scientific ideas.
But unlike much of that kind of material, Purser-Hallard appears to have a good grounding in the humanities as well. A crucial plot-point is telegraphed for those who know their Roman history (and in fact the whole book exhibits a reasonable knowledge of Ancient Rome), and the book is actually well-written rather than just functionally written (a surprising amount of SF is written by people whose prose style is merely adequate even when their ideas sing). Purser-Hallard has obviously read (or at least flicked through) Ulysses and picked up some of Joyce’s ideas, and can also write convincingly in the voices of very different people from different societies.
The story itself is a little unsatisfying – set up as a murder mystery (if one were to try to assign a genre to this, the best one could do is to call it post-Singularity noir), it’s not a ‘fair play’ mystery – there’s no way one could guess in advance the true reasons behind the murder – but the fun is in the twists and turns it takes to get there. (Also, for those interested in the overall War plotline, some of the themes of the story make for an interesting suggestion as to who Purser-Hallard, at least, believes the Enemy to be).
The one really significant flaw, though, actually comes from the book’s strengths – the City is such a wonderful environment, and such a beguiling mystery, that the climax of the novel, in which all its secrets are revealed, can only be a let-down. (I’m personally going to take the view that we’ve only seen a possible origin of the City).
While it’s not quite up to Book Of The War standards, I’d still say that this was one of the best SF novels I’ve read from the last thirty years. And for those who, reading this, are uninterested because they aren’t Doctor Who fans, don’t be – the links between Doctor Who and this novel are so tenuous that the traces of Who in there are practically homeopathic. Everything you need to know is set out in the book itself, though it almost certainly would lose something without reading The Book Of The War first.
The Faction Paradox novels are published by Mad Norwegian, and after having read this and the Book Of The War, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending them to anyone who reads my blog. I’ll certainly be picking up all the remaining novels as quickly as I can.
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