It’s difficult to know how much information to give in a review of Shada, the latest in the BBC’s line of Doctor Who prestige hardbacks, because it’s aimed at at least three different, though overlapping, audiences – Doctor Who fans, Douglas Adams fans, and people who would, when in a bookshop, be interested in a book about Doctor Who if it’s got the name of someone they recognise on the cover but wouldn’t otherwise consider themselves a fan. I am, of course, a member of both the first two groups.

In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams (who almost everyone reading this will know was to become the best-selling author of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Dirk Gently series before dying too young) wrote three scripts for Doctor Who, as well as script-editing the TV series for a year. The first of these, The Pirate Planet, is a passable romp, while the second, City Of Death, is often regarded as the single best story the TV show ever did. Shada was the third, and was meant to be broadcast at the end of the series Adams script-edited, but filming was stopped two-thirds of the way through because of strike action, and the story was never completed.

It’s not quite as lost as the publicity material around this book suggests – a VHS release about twenty years ago, now long-deleted, with Tom Baker doing linking narration, and a remake as a cartoon for the BBC website featuring eighth Doctor Paul McGann (the soundtrack CD of which is available from Big Finish for five pounds, and is well worth getting) mean that many of us have experienced this story in a relatively complete form already. However, it is true that it was never completed in the way Adams intended – and it’s also true that Adams was unhappy with his scripts and thought they needed more polishing – so it’s a perfect candidate for novelisation.

Gareth Roberts, the author of the book, will be less familiar than Adams by a long way, but is a reasonable choice for the job. I’m not a huge fan of Roberts’ work, but he’s what is generally called a safe pair of hands. He’s written for Doctor Who on TV, audio dramas, novels and comics before, including a novel (The Well-Mannered War) featuring the Fourth Doctor, who appears here, and his usual style is a sort of whimsical mildly parodic SF that is clearly influenced by Adams.

Roberts is nowhere near the writer that Adams was, but he doesn’t need to be for this. What he *is* good at is functional storytelling, and structure, two things that were among Adams’ weaker points. So while he keeps all the plot beats and important scenes from Adams’ script, and at least 90% of Adams’ dialogue, he fixes at least one big plot hole, completes a sub-plot that Adams seemed to start and then give up on, and provides a lot of back-story and character motivation.

For the most part, Roberts’ inventions fit perfectly with the Adams material, to the point where I’d challenge anyone unfamiliar with the source material to say what came from where. And it’s still recognisably the same story – the story of Skagra trying to turn the entire universe into his own mind in a Darkseid-like fashion, and of his search for the ancient Time Lord criminal Salyavin, and how the Doctor gets involved with this when visiting his old friend Professor Chronotis at St Cedd’s College, Cambridge. Reading it at times does feel spookily like reading a ‘new’ late-period Adams book – like a third Dirk Gently novel. (The first Dirk Gently novel, of course, used some characters and dialogue from Shada, along with the basic plot of City Of Death).

There are a couple of places where it goes wrong, though. For the most part, Roberts’ prose is functional, but he occasionally tries to ape Adams’ style, with predictably poor results. Adams’ tics are very easy to emulate, the sensibility behind them much less so – Roberts actually feels far more like Adams when he’s not copying his prose style but just telling Adams’ story.

Also, the jokes Roberts adds in the descriptive passages are nowhere near up to the standard of those in Adams’ dialogue, and often descend into an almost Peter Kay like “Remember the late 1970s? Things were slightly different then, weren’t they? What’s that all about?”. The occasional pun (the status quo one stands out in the memory as particularly bad) seems to be put in more because this is ‘a Douglas Adams book’ and therefore has to be funny, rather than because it makes any kind of artistic sense.

Even less excusable are the occasional continuity references, thrown in merely in order that people like myself will recognise them – “Wow, the Fourth Doctor mentioned the Rani!” There are quite a few knowing winks to the status of Doctor Who as a national institution, as well, which quite frankly just feel smug (and a rather more forgivable single one acting as a tribute to Adams).

But this is, fundamentally, nit-picking. What we have here is the best actual story Douglas Adams ever wrote for Doctor Who, adapted as well as one could reasonably expect. If it’s not as funny, clever, or exciting as it thinks it is, it’s still funnier, cleverer and more exciting than it has any right to be given its tortured genesis.

If Amazon allowed half-stars in reviews I’d probably give this three and a half, because it’s not going to change anyone’s life or make anyone think differently about the world. But it’s a very pleasant way to spend a few hours, and that’s still worth a lot, so I’ll round up to four.

I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Grant Morrison, and more, between my book on Seven Soldiers and Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!. But then Sandifer (who, if you don’t know, is the writer of the alternately wonderful and infuriating TARDIS Eruditorum blog goes and says something as an aside which starts me pacing around the house like a maniac and saying “Is this just a blog post or is it another sodding book?”

It’s just a blog post, but not because I don’t have enough to say on this subject, but because I can’t justify writing a *third* book that’s mostly about Morrison’s ideas.

Now let’s have a look at the latest post on TARDIS Eruditorum – the one about Lance Parkin‘s book Cold Fusion. In this post, Sandifer says (talking about his own ideas about Doctor Who):

The root idea is, for once, borrowed from Grant Morrison instead of Alan Moore. Morrison has several times suggested that the DC Universe line of superheroes is sentient and has an animating consciousness. My disagreement with Morrison is not on this point, but rather on the implications of it – Morrison seems rather to like this fact, whereas I think that the DC Universe is, while sentient, a dangerous sociopath (albeit one capable of moments of staggering beauty). But the underlying idea, obviously, appeals.

I think Sandifer may be reading Morrison a little too simplistically here (odd, because his reading of Final Crisis as narrative collapse is absolutely correct). And it will surprise no-one who’s read… well, anything I’ve ever written… that I’m going to use Seven Soldiers as a counter-example.

Before I start talking about this though, I just want to say that the idea of a fictional universe being sentient is, while far-fetched, not one that should be entirely dismissed out of hand. Certainly, if one is to make the assumption that neural networks embody intelligence (an assumption made by many, with little or no reason that I can see — the argument appears to be ‘the neurons are the bit of the brain where we can tell some of what they’re doing, so therefore they must be the important bit, not all those glial cells and such’. I exaggerate slightly.) then the collaboration network of Marvel Universe characters has some very interesting features. This is not to say I agree with Morrison or Sandifer — I don’t — but that their contentions are not utterly dismissible, and are at least an interesting way to look at things. The DC Universe, and Doctor Who, are not sentient themselves, but treating them as sentient entities can provide interesting readings.

So — *does* Morrison seem to think that the sentient DC Universe is an ultimately benevolent one?

Certainly, that would be the implication of Morrison’s early work. In The Coyote Gospel we get this:

Borrowing some of the structure from Michael Maltese’s script for Duck Amuck (and incidentally, does anyone else get as annoyed at the attribution of authorship of classic cartoons to their director as I do? Chuck Jones was great, but Maltese scripted and storyboarded those great cartoons), Morrison (and Truog, Hazlewood, etc, but here and from here on I’m talking specifically about the writing) creates a strictly hierarchical set of fictional universes. The Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies universe is lower than the DC Universe is lower than ours, and in each of these, there is a creator who delights in causing pain to the more innocent people in the universe below.

However, this hierarchy of universes has never really fit with Morrison’s thinking, and so later we get to a view more like the one Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad use in The Blue Angel (which I’ve quoted earlier):

‘Oh?’ asked the dog, sounding rather withering. ‘Listen, Fitz. Learn to think of all these things as stories. And stories can’t contradict each other because, in the end, they’re all made up. Nothing can take precedence then. All right?’
‘I’m not sure I know what you’re on about.’
‘Well, you reckon the world you live in takes precedence over the world you’re reading about. So you’ve established a hierarchy, yeah?’
‘Of course! I’d be out of my tree not to!’
The dog was looking sceptical again. He gave a kind of shrug and started nibbling the herbs once more. ‘Maybe. But think how happy you might be if you didn’t have to make those choices about what you should invest belief in. Here in the Obverse you can think of it all as a kind of fugue.’
‘Fugue?’
‘Hmm,’ said the dog, chewing. ‘No contradictions anymore. Every story holding equal sway. It means there are always alternatives. And it means no natural ending.’
Fitz took his last drag on his cigarette and ground it out on the window sill.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘No?’ asked the dog.
‘No. One reality has to be more valid than the other. It has to be realer.’
The little dog laughed and said, ‘Well… what if you found out that the one you’re in was the less real one? What if you found out that you yourself are less than real?’
Fitz laughed and looked at the moon.
‘You’re one hell of a dog. Do you know that?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Canine primly.

(Incidentally, this view of Doctor Who, as a set of mutually-contradictory, equally-valid stories rather than a single continuous narrative, was one that was only possible when Doctor Who stopped being ‘a TV show’ made by a single creative team at a time and became instead a set of TV shows, books, comics, audio dramas and so on created by different people with different agendas, one which was almost impossible for a single human being to experience in full, just like DC Comics’ universe with its multiple publication per month for 70 years. It may be significant in this light that Ian Levine, the man who in Doctor Who fandom most represents the antithesis of this view, and who holds that ‘if it wasn’t on TV it didn’t happen’, is also the only person in the world to own a copy of *every* DC Universe comic. His admirable work in tracking down so many lost episodes of Doctor Who probably comes from the same basic instinct – of wanting a closed, complete story rather than an open-ended one.)

In fact, Morrison’s later take on the relative positions of the various universes seems closer to Lawrence Miles’ use of bottle universes in his Doctor Who fiction. In Miles’ New Adventure Christmas On A Rational Planet the Seventh Doctor sees the Eighth Doctor living in a bottled universe, but in his BBC Book Interference he has the Eighth Doctor looking into a bottle universe containing the New Adventures version of the Seventh Doctor. (And in Dead Romance a universe very like our own is revealed to be inside another bottle).

Anyone who’s read anything I’ve ever written knows I’m going to get into Seven Soldiers now – or at least the prequel to it in JLA: Classified

In various of Morrison’s stories, he has our universe personified as the infant universe of Qwewq. And in All-Star Superman #10, possibly the finest single comic issue Morrison has ever written, he has this happen (the giant black cube is Qwewq – our universe):

This is a far more nuanced idea of creator and creation than the one in Animal Man. At first sight, the hierarchies have been reversed – Siegel and Shuster’s universe, here, is the one inside the DC Universe. Except that this is absolutely the moment of creation of the DC Universe – the first ever drawing of Superman. And that creation is inspired by the influence of Superman from outside. This is more like a resonance between two universes than a straightforward hierarchy.

But it still seems to confirm Sandifer’s reading – Superman is, in All-Star Superman, pretty much goodness and decency personified, while we are fallen, helpless creatures who need raising up.

But why did we fall? For that we must look to JLA: Classified.

That’s the infant universe all grown up, as Ne-Bul-Oh The Huntsman. The seed of evil he’s talking about there is an infiltration into our universe from the DC Universe by a supervillain. I’ve argued at ludicrous length (40,000 words of it!) that when Ne-Bul-Oh refers to ‘fruit’ here, there’s a deliberate reference to the tree in the Garden of Eden. The DC Universe, in other words, is responsible for original sin.

And time and again in Morrison’s recent work, we see this – the two universes influencing each other, both for good and evil. Ne-Bul-Oh is evil, but only because of the DC Universe – but the people of the DC Universe enter our universe in order to prevent this. When the people of our universe look for inspiration, for heroes, we turn to Superman and Batman (Morrison has admitted that when he was writing JLA in the 1990s, at a time his life was collapsing around him, he was doing it at least partly as a magical working – crying out to Superman and Batman to save him). But when Zatanna is suffering, what happens?

She reaches out to us, the readers. Reaches out even though this story is the one where our universe is inside theirs, and is responsible for the attacks she’s fighting.

I think a close reading of Morrison’s DC Universe work, then, shows that he thinks the DC Universe could have either a good or a pernicious influence on this one – could be great or could be sociopathic – just as this universe could have a similar influence on the DC Universe. The two can either help pull each other up or drag each other down, and it’s up to us, the readers and writers and artists – the individuals – to decide which it’s going to be.

I agree with Sandifer that if we were to look at the output of DC Comics at the moment, or really at any time since about 2003, it would appear sociopathic. Where I disagree is that I think Morrison knows that, and that he’s working consciously to change that.

(I expand on these themes a *LOT* more in two books – Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! (about Doctor Who, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and the stupidity of ‘canon’, and An Incomprehensible Condition, a book on the themes in Seven Soldiers specifically. If you enjoyed this post, why not buy them from one of the links in the top right hand side of this page?)

Because Shearman’s play is very different to the usual run of Doctor Who Unbound. For the most part, the series follows a simple formula – what if the Valeyard (an evil version of the Doctor from the story Trial Of A Time Lord) had won? What if the Doctor had never left Gallifrey? What if we could get David Warner to play the Doctor?

But here, Shearman goes for something very different – what if Doctor Who had never been broadcast at all?

Derek Jacobi plays a hack writer, Martin Bannister, who started off as a promising playwright but is now best known for writing the least popular episodes of the 80s police drama Juliet Bravo, and whose career seems to have started to go downhill from the time he was asked to write stories for a planned TV show called Doctor Who, a show that was never actually made. Everything would have been all right if that show had been made. His marriage wouldn’t have ended, he would have a better relationship with his son, he’d be an acclaimed writer.

Shearman’s script is a poignantly humorous look at a life falling apart. Every one of Bannister’s relationships is built on multiple layers of lies – he praises his nurse’s bad attempts at writing in order to encourage what he sees as her sexual advances, but once he actually makes a move she backs off in revulsion even though she had clearly been interested while he was not attainable. He romanticises his relationship with his son during his son’s childhood years, but the son is so angry with his father that he lies to him, claiming his mother has died, just in order to try to get any reaction from a man he’s never felt close to.

And throughout this, Bannister is rewriting his life in his head, imagining himself as the Doctor, off on adventures in time and space. These adventures are badly-written versions of early First Doctor stories – An Unearthly Child and The Daleks in particular, but also the unmade story The Masters Of Luxor – which of course in Bannister’s mind has exactly as much or as little ‘canonicity’ as any of the other stories.

In the end, Bannister goes and locks himself in a wardrobe, refusing to come out, saying it’s bigger on the inside. He’s finally retreated totally into his fantasy world, and it’s strongly implied that he may have died there. But it’s also implied that this horrible, mean-spirited man who has wrecked the lives of everyone around him is coming out of a coccoon, that he contains within himself an urge to be better – to be The Doctor.

Shearman’s play also has a very interesting textual interrelationship with Marc Platt’s Auld Mortality, the first of the series of Unbound stories of which Deadline was the last. Both centre around writers who regret paths not taken in their past lives, and reunions with members of the family from which the writer has been cut off. In both, the central character takes refuge in fantasy worlds that are Doctor Who stories. But in Platt’s story, the writer is the First Doctor, who chose to stay on Gallifrey and write novels based on alternate realities that he creates while staying in his home, which he never leaves. In fact, the stories that Platt’s Doctor writes are also adventures that Bannister’s Doctor has – fictional stories from a ‘non-canonical’ universe’s fiction. If the stories are never written, then they all count equally.

This Doctor writes stories of ‘the Adventurer’ and his adventures through time and space with his casket-shaped TARDIS. But when he’s trapped in one of these stories (a story about Hannibal which bears some resemblance to Hartnell-era historical stories), he discovers the TARDIS is just an empty box – just as Bannister finds that his wardrobe is really a TARDIS, at least in his own mind.

Both stories were written in 2003, the fortieth anniversary of the TV show, a time when the show had been off the air for fourteen of those forty years, a time when the central fact about Doctor Who was that it was in the past and that it had been stopped, and the central question among fans was whether doing something different would have kept the show alive. Both are ultimately about escape from this question, from “an old cooking-pot of memories and ill-researched approximations” as the Doctor describes his writing in Auld Mortality. Auld Mortality in particular specifically argues for pluralism and freedom, and the point of both stories ultimately is that the only true death is to allow regrets from the past to limit our choices in the future.

We are limited, ultimately, only by what we can imagine, and to settle for less because we’re scared of failure is to invite that very failure. A writer who doesn’t write, or a traveller who stays at home, no matter what their reasons, are fundamentally the antithesis of the Doctor, which is why they can only appear in stories about the Doctor’s non-existence.

For those who are interested in ideas, The Book Of The War is quite probably the single best thing ever to have come out of Doctor Who.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the BBC had taken control of the ongoing series of Doctor Who books, and put out a series featuring the Eighth Doctor. Much of this series was regarded at the time as being a bit rubbish, not least because a lot of it was – The Eight Doctors and War Of The Daleks, in particular, are just bad fanfic, written to explain away or rewrite things their authors didn’t like (and the fact that one of those books is by Terrance Dicks, the single biggest contributor to Doctor Who ever, doesn’t stop it being bad fanfic. Picasso was once asked to separate a pile of paintings into real Picassos and forgeries. After putting one into the forgery pile, someone said to him “But Pablo, I was with you when you painted that one”, to which he replied “No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.”)

But some of them were extremely good. Those by Lance Parkin and Paul Magrs we’ll come back to later in this series of articles, but there was also a set of books, starting with Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which set up a fascinating plot thread – a war, at some time in the Doctor’s future, between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. There was also a third party in this war, a renegade faction of the Time Lords known as Faction Paradox, and several smaller parties.

Unfortunately, the editor of BBC Books at the time decided to wrap this storyline up in a rather spectacularly dull way, and to write almost all of the elements that had been introduced in this story out of ‘continuity’.

But if you’ve read this far, you’ll know what I think about ‘continuity’, and Miles and several of the other authors involved evidently had the same view. Seeing no reason to waste a good idea, a series of Faction Paradox books and audio adventures was started which continues to this day, and The Book Of The War was the first, and one of the best, result.

The Book Of The War is the work of ten different authors – some, like Miles himself, or Simon Bucher-Jones, or Daniel O’Mahony, having written excellent books in the Doctor Who ranges before, while others, like Philip Purser-Hallard, were doing great work on the fringes of Who fiction without ever writing a ‘proper’ Doctor Who story. The book is structured as some combination of encyclopaedia, role-playing sourcebook and hypertext, and purports to provide background information on a war in time between the ‘Great Houses’, an ancient semi-godlike race of time travellers who kept the structure of history together, and their unnamed Enemy.

I say ‘purports’ because what this book actually is is an assault on the dull, literalist way of reading that most Doctor Who fans had.

While Doctor Who itself has at its best always attacked the idea of simple binary choices, that way of perceiving things pervades everything in our culture. Conservative or Labour, Mac or Windows, gay or straight, male or female, if you don’t pick a side, you will be assigned one anyway. Everyone knew that the Lib Dems were ‘really’ just Labour-lite, until they entered coalition and they’re now ‘really’ Tories. Bisexuals are ‘really’ gay people in denial or straight people trying to look interesting. And so on.

And so for a lot of the readers of the Eighth Doctor War stories, the single most interesting question had been ‘who is the Enemy?’ [FOOTNOTE A question which may contain its own answer...or may not.] They saw a war, and read it as having two sides, despite it originally being described as having at least four – the Time Lords/Great Houses, the Enemy, the Celestis and Faction Paradox – with many other factions such as The Remote later being described. So obviously the only thing of interest was who the Enemy ‘really’ were.

We get a lot of hints as to who the Enemy are in The Book of The War, and they do seem to point to an answer (the answer here seems to be that the Enemy are actually the Great Houses themselves, or a group within them, grown so bored and decadent that they have to invent a war with themselves in order to have a reason for existence). But it’s made clear that who the Enemy really are simply isn’t important – and indeed, the various books seem to suggest that Lawrence Miles, who edited this book and is more or less in charge of the Faction Paradox book range, has had different ideas as to who the Enemy are at different times. Indeed, it is entirely possible that each author of this book had his or her own idea who the Enemy were.

But further, the whole book goes out of its way to throw doubt upon the stories it’s telling. Attentive readers will be able to tell, for example, that the whole War itself is merely a feint for some larger plan, involving House Lolita, a single individual who is (we know from one of Miles’ short stories) the Master’s TARDIS (and the Master of course may or may not be the same person as the War King who is now in charge of the Great Houses, and his Presidency during the War may or may not be tied into Lolita’s scheme). There are at least three characters in the book who may or may not be the Doctor, all of whom are on different sides in the War.

The very text of the book itself presents itself both as fallible and as existing within the War universe – the text itself is corrupt, both in the sense of having (deliberate) mistakes in it, and in the sense that it reads as propaganda for one of the sides in the War – which one is open to question.

This corruption of the text exists from even the indicia, where we have “First printing September 2002. Almost certainly printed in Illinois” and “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or biological”. It’s not often the copyright warnings in a book forbid you to even remember it – and of course this ties in with the material on biodata later on.

Parts of the book have been censored – every entry relating to the Enemy has been deleted, although the links to them remain. Other parts, parts giving crucial bits of information, are interrupted by a ‘conceptual entity’ called The Shift who lives in the relation between the book’s words and the reader’s mind. And then there are entries like this:

“YOU” DIVERSIONS [House Military: Culture] Of increasing interest and concern to the Houses is the concept of interactive propaganda: the interweaving of propaganda messages into the receptors of a target audience’s brain, or even directly into the audience’s local culture. This is a typical tactic of the conceptual entities, but since the enemy gained some understanding of the same technologies the “trick” has become more widespread and more aggressive. YOU, YES YOU – REALLY – YOU. YOU BOUGHT THIS, THEN? THEY’RE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT THIS CAN BE HISTORY. THIS POLITE FICTION YOU’RE READING INSISTS THAT THE WAR WILL BE SOON BE OVER, THAT IT HAS A SPECIFIC “FIRST FIFTY YEARS”. WELL, IT HASN’T. IT ISN’T OVER. IT’S NEVER OVER. ONE IN EVERY THOUSAND PIECES OF INFORMATION IN THIS TEXT HAS BEEN RE-ENGINEERED. THE MATERIAL BEYOND THIS POINT IS PROGRAMMING HYPERLANGUAGE ONLY YOUR LOCAL IDENTITY IS ENDING. PAY NO ATTENTION. YOU WANTED TO KNOW WHO’D FIGHT FOR THE REBEL HOUSES? WHO’D BEAR ARMS AGAINST THE ENGINEERS OF HISTORY? YOU WOULD, would be a typical opening gambit in such cases.

After its appearance, the recipients of such messages would be told to await activation instructions. Often the level of paranoia induced by this would be sufficient to disrupt normal activities, the same exploitation of House anxiety also reflected in the principles of xenoprediction and mentioned in the “Probability” Doctrine. In some cases the propaganda thrust would be augmented by a secondary double-bluff, suggesting that the text did in fact originate from legitimate sources, which would then be undercut. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCES WERE A LIE, AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS would be a typically smug signing-off for such a message. It would then be followed by some vague, largely meaningless command such as WAIT, ACTIVATION LOCK ACCOMPLISHED.

The fact that almost any action could be construed as having obeyed the allegedly treasonous command is almost always sufficient to ensure that the messages aren’t even reported to the higher ranks.

Much of the book works on multiple levels, sometimes obviously like this, sometimes more subtly. There’s a description of a plot of a bad late-90s blockbuster film, for example, which reads like (and is) a parody of both Mulan and The Phantom Menace. It’s also a good description of the plot of some of Miles’ later Faction Paradox audio dramas, and itself gives another conflicting clue as to what is ‘really’ going on.

This is a book that’s full of ideas. Almost all of its several hundred entries would make the basis of fine short stories in themselves (and several of them made the background for Philip Purser-Hallard’s marvellous novel Of The City Of The Saved). There are digs at Richard Dawkins’ lack of imagination, expansions on the ideas of Teillhard de Chardin, parodies of Ally McBeal and reality TV, conspiracy theories, a subplot inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach and much more.

Possibly the closest comparison to this book is Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, but where that comic series takes ITC adventure serials, with their relatively limited scope, as its point of departure, The Book Of The War builds an entire mythology – or multiple mythologies – out of asides from Robert Holmes scripts.[FOOTNOTE - The Book Of The War is a much, much more mature work, too, far less concerned with a rather sixth-form idea of cool.] And this is definitely the Robert Holmes vision of Doctor Who, rather than any other, but fleshed out, and with the world foregrounded, rather than the character of the Doctor.

But most importantly, it’s a book that you have to approach as a critical reader. It forces its own unreliability to the foreground, and resists all attempts to fit its narrative into a simple binary, goodies vs baddies, format.

Or, at least, that’s what I think…

Following not terribly protracted negotiations with Lawrence Miles, Obverse will be taking over the Faction Paradox prose license in its entirety from 2012, as a result of which we’ll be publishing this lot next year…

*Novels*

Against Nature – Lawrence Burton
“*Goralschai, a first wave veteran of the House Military, returns from the front bearing a death wish the size of creation. The spiral politic, he decides, cannot continue, and on Earth, in the Mexico of 1506, he finds a means to his twisted end; and so, egged on by the Celestis (who find this sort of thing amusing), he lays plans to turn one small corner of history into a weapon*.”

The Brakespeare Voyage – Simon Bucher-Jones and Jon Dennis
“*The Maw, a wound in the fabric of the universe, forms. House Lineacrux claims to have constructed it, but this may be a lie. To exploit it House Lineacrux creates two ships with the intention of harvesting Leviathan biodata from outside the totality of the Spiral politic. The first the San Grael is a scout the second, the Brakespeare…*”

*Novellas*

The Moontree Women – Kelly Hale
“*Some people have timelines in their palms instead of lifelines..*.”

Opus Majus – Jim Mortimore
*”In 1267 the Fransiscan monk Roger Bacon made such a fuss about the
innacuracies of the calendar that Pope Clement IV ordered he be sent on a quest to find the missing time. This ridiculous but hardly refusable mission is something of a problem for Bacon – but an even greater problem for Faction Paradox.*”

*Short Stories*

Faction Paradox 2: The As Yet Untitled Collection – editor, Jay Eales…

Available either as hardbacks individually or a subscription or something
else entirely…

And that’s on top of the previously-announced City Of The Saved short-story collection. I will, of course, be buying every one of these. Simon Bucher-Jones and Lawrence Burton are both friends of mine, but they’re also both extremely good writers, and the rest are all good too. This is very, very exciting. Obverse are an excellent publishing house anyway, putting out good-quality hardbacks and DRM-free epubs of their books.

(Proper update later – spent the last couple of days travelling, and am now staying with my in-laws).

Which is not to say that it’s a bad book, as such – it’s a very enjoyable book of its type, hardly high art, but better than one might expect if, as I did, one comes to the novel only remembering Bishop’s uninspiring work in Judge Dredd The Megazine in the 1990s.

Who Killed Kennedy is, however, a deeply flawed book. It is trying to be two different, mutually contradictory books, and the two parts don’t really gel. Reading through Bishop’s notes [FOOTNOTE Available, along with the book itself as an ebook, from the website of the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club at http://nzdwfc.tetrap.com/archive/wkk/] it seems that there were two different ideas in play. Bishop wanted to do a Doctor Who version of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross’ then-recent comic Marvels, a comic that told the story of the Marvel superhero ‘universe’ from the perspective of a journalist seeing it all from the normal person’s level, rather than from the godlike perspective of the superheroes themselves. With the early-’90s popularity of conspiracy theories, he combined this with an X-Files-esque idea to have a journalist investigating UNIT, the military organisation for which the Pertwee Doctor had worked in the 1970s.

However, Virgin Publishing wanted a novel featuring both Doctor Who and the Kennedy assassination (which was undergoing one of its occasional bursts of renewed interest thanks to the 30th anniversary and Oliver Stone’s film), and so in the last few chapters, Bishop’s novel takes a sudden turn into a completely different, unrelated plot about the Master travelling back in time and trying to disrupt the Kennedy assassination, with a little plot glue.

This makes the book seem unstructured, and also has one particularly unpleasant consequence. In order to get from the UNIT-investigation side of things to the Kennedy plot, the protagonist needs to be motivated. It’s therefore revealed that Dodo, a former companion of the Doctor who has been the protagonist’s girlfriend, had only been with him because she’d been brainwashed by the Master. This is only revealed after it’s revealed that she had been pregnant, but had been shot dead in order to get at the male protagonist.

This kind of misogyny was and is fairly common in comics, Bishop’s field at the time, but isn’t really the kind of thing Doctor Who does, and I must say that I think Doctor Who is better for it – we don’t need any more women in refrigerators [FOOTNOTE A comics term popularised by fan-turned-writer Gail Simone, for female supporting characters killed off, often in a sexualised manner, in order to provide motivation for male characters. See http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/].

The other major problem with the book is one that no-one seems to have pointed out, but which completely torpedoes any possible plausibility the story has. The basic plot of the first three-quarters of the book consists of our hero, a journalist, investigating two government secret organisations, UNIT and C19. He proves that one or other of these organisations has been involved in several major strange events which have resulted in serious loss of life, all of which have been covered up. As a result of his investigations, his house gets torched, he loses his job, he loses his wife, gets hospitalised multiple times, and his pregnant girlfriend gets shot.

He then stumbles into the latest strange event involving UNIT, and they give him a cup of tea and show him a dead alien, and this is suddenly enough for him to change his mind about them and decide they must be okay really.

Now, I’m not an expert on conspiracy theorists, but I do get the impression that most journalists in that situation, if they were shown absolute proof that the evil quasi-governmental organisation they’d been investigating was also covering up the existence of aliens, even a cup of tea might not be enough to convince them that they were in fact the good guys.

And this is a shame, because in the first part of the book Bishop nearly, and probably unwittingly, stumbles across a very interesting point. This is quite the most fannish book ever written – it’s meant to be what was going on in the background of all the Doctor’s adventures during the 60s and 70s, and often it will be ‘revealed’ that the person on the other end of a phone conversation, or a non-speaking extra, is really our protagonist. In one 1500-word segment, Bishop references the TV stories An Unearthly Child, The Chase, The Aztecs, Remembrance Of The Daleks, The War Machines, The Curse Of Fenric, Delta And The Bannermen, The Faceless Ones and The Web Of Fear.

Now, obviously, Bishop is doing this playfully. He’s engaging in a game with the reader, and this ludic-but-maximalist use of previously created stories (or, say, Lance Parkin’s attempt to provide a single coherent history of the Doctor Who universe, AHistory) has far more in common with Sherlock Holmes fans’ attempts to reconcile Watson’s two wives, or with Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, than with the stultifyingly restrictive arguments over what ‘counts’ as ‘canon’ that so many people engage in. However flawed Bishop’s novel is, he is using past continuity in precisely the correct way – as a springboard for the imagination, a basis from which to tell new stories, rather than as a tool to attack or constrain others, as it is so often used.[FOOTNOTE For much, much, much more on this use of continuity, see my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!]

But in the context of a conspiracy-theory novel, it hits on something that I don’t think Bishop intended. Because the nine stories listed above were made over a twenty-six year period, by different people, making what was to all intents and purposes a different programme. Remember, for example, that William Hartnell only played a Time Lord once – in 1973′s The Three Doctors. In all the stories made when he was the Doctor, the concept of the Time Lords had never been created. Nor did the Doctor travel with a single female companion, or regularly visit contemporary Earth, or any of hundreds of other things that were added to the show over ensuing decades.

So Bishop is trying to make connections between events which don’t have those connections, creating a story out of elements that don’t actually go together. And this is why the first part of the book works, because this is what both fans and conspiracy theorists do.

There’s a very fine line between the playful interpretation of a text and the paranoid seeing of hidden meanings where there are none. Conspiracy theory often shades into paranoia, as anyone familiar with the sad story of Kerry Thornley [FOOTNOTE: A counter-culture thinker, 'Zenarchist' and novelist, who became convinced, thanks to a series of bizarre coincidences relating to his having served with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines, that he had inadvertantly helped plan the Kennedy assassination with Howard Hunt.] will be all too aware. And on the other side, many serial killers or mass murderers (most notably Charles Manson) have found patterns in innocuous texts like the Beatles’ White Album and taken them as an incentive to kill.

Both of these come from the same place, ultimately. As humans, we are pattern-matchers by nature. Our brains are attuned to see patterns in everything, even where none exist. This is the root of most science and art, but when that pattern-matching goes into overdrive it can become extraordinarily dangerous.

And by having his protagonist be investigating a real conspiracy, and then having him accept that conspiracy at their own word, Bishop manages to duck this point, even though it could be used to go into places that Doctor Who had never gone before. For all the adolescent shock of Dodo’s murder, the book feels hollow, because it’s ultimately dealing with ideas that are weightier than it’s comfortable with, and so the sections on the death of Kennedy (a real man, remember, with a family and loved ones who were in large part still alive when the book was written) sit uncomfortably with the games Bishop plays with Doctor Who continuity rather than the two parts cohering.

This is a strange book, one that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s either a successful potboiler, enjoyable but not hugely impressive, or it’s a hugely ambitious failure at doing something totally different.

Whichever, though, it also serves as a warning, both to myself and the reader, as I proceed with this series of essays. Because even more than Bishop, I’ll be trying to find patterns in things that were never intended to be connected. Some of these patterns will be there nonetheless – but others will just be an application of that part of the brain that can’t see a colon next to a bracket as anything other than a smiling face. And I’ll be able to go a lot further, and have a lot more fun, if both author and reader are fully aware that that is the case.

In other news, my computer’s now working properly again, so over the next few days expect more Bigger On The Outside, more Doctor Watson, and the long-delayed continuation of How We Know What We Know, as well as *possibly* some more Cerebus. I’ll also be contributing to a Thought-Bubble wrap-up post on the Mindless site this weekend.

Well first, as we’ve established before, there is no Doctor Who canon in the sense that there is for, say, Star Wars. There is no sense in which some of these stories that someone made up are more real than some other stories someone else made up. The very idea is absurd.

But in Doctor Who the idea of what ‘counts’ can be a fraught one. What’s the ‘real’ version of the Second Doctor’s encounter with the Cybermen on the moon? Why, it’s The Moonbase, of course – that’s what was shown on TV. That’s how it ‘really’ happened. We’ve seen it.

Except of course ‘we’ haven’t seen it, because the BBC burned two of the four episodes, without ever repeating it, before I was born. But almost every Doctor Who fan over the age of thirty or so has read Doctor Who And The Cybermen, the novelisation by Gerry Davis, who co-wrote and script-edited the story. Despite not being a very good book, it’s one that sticks in the memory – it was the first book my friend Alex Wilcock ever read, for example, and it was recently reissued as one of the first few of the Target books to get reprinted.

And reading it, maybe twenty-five years after I last owned a copy, this is memorable. I’ve seen the surviving episodes of The Moonbase and watched reconstructions of the others, and other than giving a chance to see Patrick Troughton work wonders with his eyebrows and to marvel at the astonishing beauty of Anneke Wills, there’s really nothing at all to make it stick in the memory. An adequately average piece of 1960s teatime TV.

But the book… opening it, I immediately get incredibly strong sense-memories, of sitting in the poky little room that passed for a school library at Grange Primary School, Winsford, in the eighties, at breaktime, opening my copy (with the eighties cover with Cybermen that look nothing like any that ever appeared on TV, rather than the seventies cover used on the reprint, which rather unfortunately includes a drawing of a zipper on the Cyberman’s neck) and reading:

Centuries ago by our Earth time, a race of men on the far-distant planet of Telos sought immortality. They perfected the art of cybernetics – the reproduction of machine functions in human beings. As bodies became old and diseased, they were replaced limb by limb, with plastic and steel.

Finally, even the human circulation and nervous system were recreated, and brains replaced by computers. The first Cybermen were born.

Still gives me the willies reading that today.

So by now far, far more people have experienced The Moonbase as Doctor Who And The Cybermen than have any memory of it on TV, and those memories are far stronger. Since we can never know now what The Moonbase was really like, we can just count the book as the real thing.

Some of you will already have spotted the problem – the book says that the Cybermen came from Telos, yet The Tenth Planet, the first Cybermen story, says they came from Mondas.

Okay… but The Tenth Planet is incomplete as well. So we say that the books count more than the TV series when we no longer have the TV series to watch.

Except that in this story, Ben and Polly come from the 1970s. Yet in the novelisation of Evil Of The Daleks, another missing story, the adapter, John Peel, clearly states that they returned to the date in 1966 from whence they came. In doing so, he’s asserting in a missing-story novelisation that TV takes priority over missing-story novelisations.

So, OK, fine, Evil Of The Daleks is one of the last of the novelisations. Presumably they’d decided by then that the books counted less than the TV. Someone’s finally made a decision!

Except that John Peel, the same author, then went on to write War Of The Daleks, one of the worst books ever written, whose whole reason for existing was to state very firmly that the existing TV stories Destiny Of The Daleks, Resurrection Of The Daleks, Revelation Of The Daleks and Remembrance Of The Daleks ‘never happened’.

My brain hurts.

The only way to deal with this is to either say that Doctor Who isn’t meant to be read as a consistent narrative, despite having the appearance of one – that every story, or indeed every episode, is its own thing, devoid of any context except that which it explicitly references, or to embrace the contradictions and say that the story I wrote when I was six where the Cybermen and Daleks joined forces and created new Cyber-Daleks, and where the Doctor regenerated five times, ‘counts’ just as much as, say, City Of Death (the story that was watched by more people than any other on its first broadcast).

And in the same way, it’s impossible to put a simple label on what Doctor Who is ‘about’. At the time of The Moonbase, for example, the scripts were mostly unpleasantly reactionary right-wing nonsenses. While people, myself included, have often said that the ‘base under siege’ stories of this period were inspired by The Thing From Another World, they’re most clearly based on Zulu, a film about ‘heroic’ white invaders ‘bravely’ massacring hundreds of black South Africans who dared to fight back against them. Doctor Who And The Cybermen, indeed, makes this explicit, with its line “Cybermen, dozens of them!” (after “Zulus, thousands of them!” in the original) and the Doctor saying “Therefore this march towards the base is probably a show of strength, to scare us the way the Zulus used to intimidate their enemies with their famous slow march.”

Over and again we see the plot of Zulu repeated, but with monster-of-the-month taking the place of black people. Sometimes, for variety, we get a story like The Dominators, about how young people should be respectful of their elders and pacifism is dangerous nonsense.

And yet Troughton’s Doctor is an anarchic, anti-authoritarian figure. When put in a machine to tidy him up, he immediately jumps into a machine to rumple him again. This is the Doctor who said “bad laws are made to be broken.”

Meanwhile, in Jon Pertwee’s time, we have most of the key scripts being written by an anti-authoritarian cynic (Robert Holmes), a Buddhist supporter of the Liberal Party (Barry Letts) and a Communist (Malcolm Hulke). We get attacks on corporatism, materialism and colonialism, and an entire story (The Green Death) that is essentially about a hippie environmentalist inventing Quorn.

Yet Pertwee’s Doctor is a sexist patrician aristocrat, working for the military, who claims to be a friend of the genocidal dictator Mao Zedong, and who is horrifically insulting to anyone who doesn’t speak in an RP accent.

What we have here, in summary, is something that is a patchwork of so many influences, created by so many people, over so long a time period, that trying to pin down “What Doctor Who is” is a fool’s errand.

So I’m going to try, and I’m going to do it by getting rid of all the Doctor Who TV episodes, the things pretty much everyone is agreed ‘count’ as Doctor Who. If, after that, the residue that’s left still has something in common, a characteristic ‘Who-ness’, then that might be a sign that when we use the term Doctor Who we are, in fact, referring to something other than just “whatever we label as Doctor Who.”

So from here on in, we’ll ignore the TV show. The Doctor himself will be a relatively minor figure in our story. And yet, he’ll be there, somewhere, on every page.