Bigger On The Outside: An Introduction
THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY (WHICH MAY NEVER HAPPEN, BUT THEN AGAIN MAY) ABOUT A MAN WHO CAME FROM THE SKY IN A BIG BLUE BOX AND DID ONLY GOOD.
IT TELLS OF HIS TWILIGHT, WHEN THE GREAT BATTLES WERE OVER AND THE GREAT MIRACLES LONG SINCE PERFORMED, OF HIS HIS ENEMIES CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM AND OF THAT FINAL WAR IN THE BLIND WASTES BENEATH THE MEDUSA CASCADE; OF THE WOMEN HE LOVED AND OF THE CHOICES HE MADE FOR THEM; OF HOW HE BROKE HIS MOST SACRED OATH, AND HOW FINALLY ALL THE THINGS HE HAD WERE TAKEN FROM HIM SAVE FOR ONE.
IN THE BIG CITY, PEOPLE STILL SOMETIMES GLANCE UP HOPEFULLY FROM THE SIDEWALKS, HEARING A DISTANT WHEEZING, GROANING SOUND…BUT NO: IT’S ONLY A SAW, ONLY A MACHINE. THE DOCTOR DIED TEN YEARS AGO.
THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY…AREN’T THEY ALL?
[FOOTNOTE: That piece of writing, a parody of Alan Moore's introduction to Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? , is something I found at the now-defunct URL http://blog.cartoonmoney.eu/post/149660318/this-is-an-imaginary-story-which-may-never . I've also quoted this in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, and wish I could properly credit its anonymous author.]
The memory cheats. We know this, because John Nathan-Turner said so, and he produced the most exciting, enthralling piece of television ever made, Attack Of The Cybermen.
As a six-year-old I was utterly enthralled by the return of the Cybermen, the fixing of the chameleon circuit, the return to Totter’s Lane, and all the other continuity references that were thrown in [FOOTNOTE: I really was. I was quite a strange child.]. So all those people, including thirty-three-year-old me, who say it was an appalling mess, and the story that single-handedly killed Doctor Who, must be misremembering. Obviously.
There’s a real point here. Doctor Who may well be the greatest TV show ever made, but that status has less than you might think to do with the actual TV show that was broadcast. Sometimes it does – I’d put, say, An Unearthly Child, The Aztecs, City Of Death, Logopolis, Ghostlight or Vengeance On Varos up against any other piece of television from their respective eras – but I couldn’t defend, on any grounds whatsoever, The Chase, The Dominators, Planet Of The Daleks, Warriors Of The Deep or Time And The Rani. Well, in every case there’s a lead actor who’s trying his best to make something of utterly awful material, but the general point remains.
But a lot of Doctor Who exists in a weird edge-space. When I watch The Five Doctors, for example, I’m watching two programmes simultaneously. On one level, I’m watching a lot of tired old hammy character actors wandering around Wales, stealing each other’s lines, screaming as they fall down a mild incline, and giving line readings that show they’ve not actually bothered to read the script. But on the other, I’m seeing a hero fractured through time, different aspects of his personality embodied and brought together to conquer the greatest, most fearsome enemies in existence, and to do this to stop his old mentor from giving himself the very power of the Gods themselves.
And both those aspects are definitely there in the programme – though only one of them may be easily visible to those who weren’t brought up on the series from before their critical faculties were able to form (I still have vivid sense-memories of watching The Five Doctors on its first broadcast, when I’d just turned five years old). The version of Doctor Who that many of us have in our heads is the real Doctor Who, the actual programme broadcast on BBC1 has only ever been an imperfect echo.
So is there any way of figuring out what that Doctor Who that’s in our heads is? Well, yes. Because between 1989 and 2005, the BBC didn’t make any new Doctor Who for TV [FOOTNOTE: Apart from Dimensions In Time , the TV Movie, Curse Of Fatal Death...] and that left a gap. And suddenly, rather than the BBC having a monopoly on Doctor Who, anyone could re-create the programme in their own image. Because Doctor Who fans wanted more, and were willing to pay.
So there were series of original Doctor Who novels and audio dramas. But there was more than that. Because if you couldn’t get the license for Doctor Who itself, why not get the license for one of its old monsters and bang out a direct-to- video film about Sontarans? And if you can’t get the license for the Cybermen, just knock the handles off and call them Cyberons. And while you’re at it, why not hire some of the actors who’d played the part of the Doctor, and get them to play characters called The Stranger or The Professor (nudge- nudge, wink-wink)?
Or if you lose your license to publish Doctor Who novels, why not just continue using all the supporting characters you’ve introduced? Or if you’ve created a particularly good villain for a novel you wrote, why not write more novels about them? The true Doctor Who devotee, who wanted everything, would end up following in either audio, video, books or all three, The Stranger, PROBE, Dalek Empire, Cyberman, Faction Paradox, Jago and Litefoot, Iris Wildthyme, Kaldor City, Gallifrey, The Minister Of Chance, and many more mutually-contradictory series of wildly varying levels of legitimacy and competence, and that’s without considering the actual Doctor Who material still being produced.
The return of the TV series in 2005 slowed this down, though it’s not stopped altogether; we now have an official idea of what Doctor Who is again. But the interesting thing about this material, good and bad, is that it’s not so much based on the programme as broadcast as on various people’s ideas of what the programme should have been. It’s a fan-memory of the programme made physical.
n fact there were roughly two schools of thought about how this material should be. One school was intensely conservative, and wanted something that made as many references to the TV show as possible, and generally to stick to a very specific version of the programme as it had been – a conflict-heavy, near-future military space opera, featuring famous monsters. A typical story of this type would be that the Doctor and his companion get stuck on a space freighter whose captain doesn’t trust them and so refuses to believe that the Ice Warriors are about to attack. Some good work was done in this vein, but it’s not, fundamentally, what I’m interested in.
The other school of thought is perhaps best summed up by Lawrence Miles [FOOTNOTE: Miles is a hugely controversial figure within Doctor Who fan circles, for reasons I won't go into here, partly because I'm not entirely sure of the history behind the controversies. Suffice to say, some of the people whose work I'm going to compare to his would not take kindly to the comparison, and he might well dislike it too.] :
Doctor Who‘s my native mythology, that’s all. If you read, say, the work of Salman Rushdie . . . forget about the blasphemy for a moment, it’s not important right now . . . there’s a lot of material in there that comes from traditional Indian culture, there are lots of links to Indian mythology. Which doesn’t mean he has to believe in gods with the heads of elephants, obviously. It’s just part of his background, those are the symbols he grew up with. That’s more or less the way I feel about Doctor Who. I’ve got a pretty low opinion of a lot of the original episodes, but it’s still my home territory. [FOOTNOTE: An interview available in multiple places online. I found it at http://www.authortrek.comlawrence-miles.html, but am unsure what the original location was. ]
The books, audio dramas and films I’m going to deal with in this book have little else in common – some are light comedies, some are hard science fiction, some are attempts at Proper Literature – and the creators of those works likewise have little in common. But one thing they are doing is taking Doctor Who the TV series as a starting point for further exploration, rather than an end point to be emulated as closely as possible. And so by looking at them, we might get a better idea of what it actually is that makes Doctor Who the idea so fascinating.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts
The Faction Paradox series of books has been one of the most consistently good and interesting series I’ve ever read – certainly the best multi-author series, but it’s had a relatively troubled history. Starting out with a series of novels published by Mad Norwegian (a small press in Iowa, devoted mostly to ‘cult TV’, but with a surprisingly high hit-rate of decent books), when Mad Norwegian stopped publishing new entries in the series, a small SF publisher in New Zealand, Random Static, took over.
However, Random Static have only published one novel in the series, the excellent Newtons Sleep. and their FAQ says “When’s the next book coming out? We can’t say yet, but expect an announcement early in 2009.”, so we’ve been waiting a while for anything new.
Luckily, another small press, Obverse Books, which specialises in short stories rather than novels, has stepped up, and the result is this, my favourite book so far this year.
For those who are unfamiliar with Faction Paradox, the series is originally the creation of Lawrence Miles (who, with Stuart Douglas, co-edits this volume) , although it’s had much input from other writers. The books don’t share a setting, characters or background, but all take place in the same shared universe, which provides a certain consistency of tone.
This universe is dominated by the Great Houses, a race of near-gods who can travel through space and time in their Timeships, but who prefer to simply exist on their Homeworld. In a very real sense, they *are* the universe – they embody its physical laws and history, and the universe mostly exists just because they have chosen to observe it in this form.
However recently the Great Houses have gone to war… to War, in fact, against an Enemy as powerful as them. Nothing is known about the Enemy, except what can be found by reading between the lines, except that they are the Enemy, and that for them to win might well mean not only the Great Houses ceasing to exist, but it might completely rewrite the whole universe – not even just its history, but its fundamental logic. The War covers all of space, all of time, and quite possibly those regions beyond either.
The War is in a kind of stalemate, but it has led to the involvement of several minor powers, including the Celestis (a race of malevolent conceptual entities), the various posthuman races, and Faction Paradox, a time-travelling voodoo cult who delight in playing both sides off against each other.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts is a collection of twelve stories set in this universe. While the twelve stories are very different, they share a few themes. Primarily, they’re about story and its power – fans of Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman might well enjoy this book (despite its co-editor’s well-known antipathy towards Gaiman’s work) – but here story is seen as a far darker, more malevolent force than their comparatively safe work.
Many of the stories also seem Lovecraftian – not by using words like Cthulhu or shoggoth and hoping people get the reference and feel geeky, but by evoking the same feeling he did at his best, of existing in a world fought over by blind, impassive forces that can crush you without even noticing. In fact, some of the stories remind me even more of Lord Dunsany, the great 19th century fantasist who inspired Lovecraft, than of Lovecraft himself. Certainly most of the writers here have a prose style far removed from Lovecraft’s ponderous overwriting.
The stories here are a mixed bag, of course, as in any multi-author collection, and many of the best stories have only a tangential relationship to the Faction Paradox back story – several of them could have been published with only minor changes in a non-FP collection – but they actually feel, to me, more evocative of the Faction Paradox spirit than the ones that concentrate more directly on the Faction and its doings.
Storyteller by Matt Kimpton is one of those. A pseudo-Viking saga about what happens when a storyteller goes looking for stories to be part of, this is one of those “I wish I’d thought of that” stories that feels like an old folk tale. Gramps by Jonathan Dennis can similarly be read with no previous Faction knowledge, though this creepy little short-short about a cat called Gramps with a missing leg is *definitely* a Faction Paradox story.
I won’t deal with every story in the book, but what I will say is that those I enjoyed less are just those I enjoyed less, rather than bad stories – the quality level is remarkably consistent. In fact, the stories I enjoyed least tend to be the ones that were the kind of thing I was expecting when I bought the book – the good ones were just *better* than that.
That said, I don’t have as much to say about every story, so I’ll just look at a handful to give a flavour of the book. Mightier Than The Sword by Jay Eales, about the prison where they put the writers and a very familiar-seeming comic artist, Now Or Thereabouts by Blair Bidmead, which starts as a satire of The Apprentice before turning somewhat stranger, and Print The Legend by Daniel O’Mahony, which manages to have Charles Dickens and John Ga(u)lt team up with a shoggoth without, astonishingly, turning into AWESOME!, are all standouts.
But best by far is the closer, A Hundred Words From A Civil War, the long-awaited sequel to Of The City Of The Saved by Philip Purser-Hallard.
A Hundred Words… is a ‘drabbleplex’ – a hundred separate one-hundred-word stories that work together to tell a much bigger story. In Of The City… Purser-Hallard established an incredible setting, a city between this universe and the next where all the dead humans live forever. Here death has come to that city, and so has civil war – though not The War; this only involves the death of four trillion people, and is nothing like as all-pervasive, though it’s clearly a small part of the overall War.
A couple of examples (I hope PPH doesn’t mind me sharing these bits – if he does I will of course take them down):
Remakes make lousy soldiers.
I tell you, you build a person based round a character from some media fiction, they’re gonna have some pretty odd ideas about reality.
They’re terrible strategists. They make big, symbolic gestures, then act surprised when that doesn’t win the war outright. They abandon vital operations just to rescue one person. Usually a kid.
Yeah, sometimes it’s a dog.
They sacrifice themselves heroically over and over, knowing someone’s gonna Remake them every goddam time.
Did you know the rebels run an entire POW camp just for John Rambos? There’s something like 500 of him there now.
When the most sophisticated of the posthuman civilisations are co-opted into the Civil War, it becomes a rarefied affair. Five Districts are carrying out hostilities entirely through the medium of music, exchanging shifting tonalities and rhythms which delightfully reprogram the senses with revised systems of aesthetics.
Representatives of two more rival cultures are vying in Flautencil’s Plaza, their societies’ respective destinies invested in a single combat which appears to the ordinary human spectator (of whom there are thousands assembled) to consist of sniffing orchids and exchanging significant glances.
The apparent flirtation is in its seventh month, and approaching no resolution.
Purser-Hallard’s story also contains short stories featuring many characters from other stories in the book, giving many of the stories a final extra twist. But even without that, this pushes so many of my buttons it might as well be called “ten thousand words to excite Andrew Hickey” – a piece of eschatological science fiction which references the ideas of Nick Bostrom and has Philip K Dick talking about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, along with the final deaths of all the dying-and-resurrected gods? That’s my kind of thing, as regular readers will no doubt realise.
And the ending of Purser-Hallard’s story, and of the book, is absolutely chilling and puts the whole book in another light. I won’t spoil it for you, but… just read it, OK?
Faction Paradox, A Romance In Twelve Parts, is available in hardback for £11.99 from Obverse Books.
The Doctor Who Multiple Choice Test
1) If presented with a race that are manipulating humanity for their own, possibly sinister, ends, do you:
a) Expose them to humanity, turning their powers against them so humanity can see them for what they really are and hopefully come to a peaceful settlement – but however they deal with them, humanity must come up with its own solution to being manipulated by aliens.
b) Turn their powers against them by turning the whole of humanity into a race of hypnotically programmed murderers?
2) If your friend is kidnapped and you don’t know where she is, do you
a) Trace the mysterious signals back to their source, or look in the TARDIS information bank, or make an amazing deductive leap, or stumble upon a clue.
b) Get one of your other friends to dress up as a Roman and blow up Cybermen’s spaceships til they tell you where she is, despite the Cybermen having no connection whatsoever to anything, while making macho action-movie quips?
3) If you’ve just spent 90 minutes hammering home the point that the shape-shifters controlled by others’ minds have a sentience of their own, and then discover that one that you thought was your friend is in fact a shape-shifter, and that your friend, unaware, has been kidnapped and is in another, pregnant, body, do you:
a) Find some way to restore your friend to her own body with minimum trauma to both her and the shape-shifter.
b) Zap the shape-shifter with a magic wand ‘sonic screwdriver’ so your friend suddenly finds herself in labour with no warning and the shape-shifter is now dead?
4) If you know your friend and her baby have been kidnapped by your enemies, do you
a) Come up with a clever plan involving sneaking in, maybe stunning a guard with a Venusian aikido blow, but otherwise trying not to hurt anyone very much, and save them, possibly leaving a dummy made out of pillows in their bed or something
b) Come up with a plan that involves sneaking in then dramatically revealing yourself, before bringing in an army of thousands, including lesbian Ninja Silurians, space-Spitfires, pirates and other cool-sounding things, as well as Sontarans, Judoons and anything else they don’t need to make a new costume for, and having them all have a massive fight in which all the NPCs die, but the baddie still escapes with the baby?
How did you score?
Mostly As You are the Doctor, you solve problems using your native intelligence, wit and knowledge, and try not to hurt people unnecessarily.
Mosty Bs Hello Mr Moffat!
I got an email today from my friend Bob Temuka, which I hope he won’t mind my quoting in part:
Bloody hell, there I am, watching the latest Doctor Who and really digging it, and then they have that bit where they point out that ‘Doctor’ now means warrior to many, and that he shouldn’t be getting away with the massive threats he lobs around based on his fearsome reputation, and all I can think is “Damn! Andrew Hickey was right all along!”
Moffat can be great at plotting (though in my opinion he *really* dropped the ball on the first two-parter this series) but where he falls down in my opinion is that he’s got no real moral or human centre to his writing. It’s all intricate clockwork, and wheels within wheels, but there’s no ghost in the machine. That means that it can very, very easily tip over into amorality.
Note I am *NOT* (unlike, say, Lawrence Miles) saying that Mr Moffat himself is amoral. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to think through the moral implications of his writing, or gives them far less consideration than the workings of his epic plotlines.
Last night’s episode was exciting, if clichéd – we knew from the very second that we saw the Headless Monks that one of them would be concealing the Doctor, who would reveal himself at a moment of maximum dramatic tension, but it did all those clichés very well, and there were some genuinely nice moments (the Doctor talking to the baby, the Sontaran nurse), but it still, ultimately, felt hollow. The characters were being jerked around in the service of the plot, rather than seeming to act from any consistent motivations.
Doctor Who at its best – the show I love, which I accept is only a small part of the programme as it was made – is a very small-scale thing, and mostly about the clash of ideas and worldviews rather than about epic space battles. From The Aztecs through to Ghost Light, all the best Doctor Who has been about a clash of characters, and could as easily have been performed as a stage play as on TV. The best of the Welsh series has been like that too, though I think that ‘best’ is a fairly small subset. That kind of thing necessitates developing a character with a strong moral centre – it might be one you disagree with (as when the Doctor destroys Skaro or kills off the Vervoids) but it’s as consistent a moral centre as a programme with multiple writers, script editors and lead actors could possibly have.
But these considerations seem alien to Moffat.
While last year’s series was definitely the best of the new series, this year’s hasn’t even been patchy so much as bad. We had a two-parter that was more plot hole than plot and which ended with the Doctor brainwashing the human race to become killers, a story about pirates that was pretty much the definition of average, a Neil Gaiman story by Neil Gaiman (by *far* the highlight of the year), a decent two-parter that was let down by an ending which contradicted all the moral arguments built up over the previous ninety minutes, and then a fun-but-empty 45 minutes of action-movie bombast. The series has been getting better since that appalingly bad two-parter at the start, but it’s still not reached even the average of last year.
One encouraging sign is that the budget is clearly now almost zero. They’re getting cleverer and cleverer at reusing sets, props and costumes, and this kind of limitation may yet be the making of the show.
I’m not (again unlike Miles) saying you’re wrong if you liked this series – there’s lots to like about it, which definitely wasn’t the case during the RTD era, and taking the last two series and the special as a whole, the trend has been mildly up overall, but this series is like a mix of Earthshock and Time Flight in roughly equal measure, when what I want is The Caves Of Androzani or Castrovalva.
Hugo Blogging 1: Chicks Dig Time Lords
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to start reading more science fiction (especially as I’ve been *writing* more SF, and it’s a field that demands keeping up with what’s current). Other than Charles Stross, Greg Egan and Neal Stephenson, I’ve read fairly little from the last thirty years or so (oddly, while I prefer SF to fantasy, I’ve read far more fantasy from my own lifetime than SF), though I have an exhaustive knowledge of the field before that.
So I decided to get the Hugo packet, to get an idea of the current state of the best in the field, and vote in the Hugos for the first time.
(I note incidentally, that the Hugos are awarded by AV *and* have a ‘none of the above’ option and so are more democratic than our Commons elections will be. Not that I’m bitter. (I am bitter.))
While I’ve got it, I thought I might as well blog my reactions to the various entries as I read them. First up, an entry in the “Best Related Work” category
Chicks Dig Time Lords is a book I *wanted* to like. It’s published by Mad Norwegian, who among other books have published almost all the Faction Paradox books and the wonderful About Time series of guidebooks, and who are a very small independent company. And it’s about the female experience of fandom, something that’s been neglected.
I certainly wouldn’t have any hesitation in recommending it to some people, but I am so far from the target audience for this that it’s not funny. While the promotion for the book has described it as being about female fandom, it’s actually, for the most part, about a very specific part of female fandom – namely people who will use the word ‘squee’ on a regular basis. We’re actually, here, looking at a snapshot of a sub-subculture – one that grew up around the website Outpost Gallifrey and communities on LiveJournal in the middle of the last decade, one mostly based around enjoying the Welsh series, and one that is extremely uncritical of the show itself.
Now, this is not an invalid perspective, and it is one that deserves to be shared, but this book seems written for people who already have that perspective. Words like ‘squee’ or ‘aca-fan’ are thrown around with an assumption that one has the cultural context to appreciate not just the literal meaning of the words but some kind of subtextual nuance for them. (I had to google aca-fan, having never come across the term before).
Far too much of the book is made up of short autobiographical sketches of very similar-sounding people. There must be at least four or five essays in here which could be summed up as “I remember watching Tom Baker on the PBS affiliate for my Midwestern US state with my annoying kid brother when I was a kid in the 80s. All the other kids at my school thought I was weird for liking this weird English English weird English thing with wobbly sets, so I grew out of it. But then Russel T Davies brought it back and I fell in love with all the characters, especially Jack Harkness, and SQUEE!”
Now, again, I am not criticising this as a perspective – as one of the essays (by Kate Orman, one of the better writers involved) is titled, “If I Can’t Squee, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution”, and enthusiasm is the reason why anyone becomes a fan of anything. And I would have a *LOT* of explaining to do to my wife when she gets back from visiting her Minnesotan parents tomorrow if I tried to say that the perspective of women who grew up in the midwestern US in the 1980s didn’t deserve to be shared.
But I am, fundamentally, an analytical person. Descriptions of how something makes you feel do very little for me, compared to descriptions of *why* something makes you feel that way (or attempts to make the reader feel the same way). I also find it far more revealing sometime to talk about something’s failures than its successes – I’d rather read About Time or The Discontinuity Guide than something that didn’t talk about Doctor Who’s flaws, for the same reasons I’d rather read Liberator than a Lib Dem party press release. And the analytical is pretty much absent from this book. Which is OK. That’s not what it’s for. It’s a celebration. I’m just not a very celebratory person.
Of these autobiographical sketch things, the best by far is “Mathematical Excellence: A Documentary” by Seanan McGuire, which moves away from the generic and had me genuinely laughing quite hard, as well as being moved by the rather poignant ending. Most of the rest of the pieces in this vein are descriptions of emotions, while McGuire’s piece inspires those emotions in the reader. Maybe more of the other pieces would, if I were part of the target audience.
More interesting from my point of view are the descriptions of fan creativity – people talking about creating costumes for their own imagined characters in the Doctor Who fictional universe, or writing fan fiction, or making fan videos. This is something that female fandom has been far more willing to do than male fandom generally (all exceptions duly noted – of course any female/male split is an artificial division, but this book *exists* because of that artificial distinction) – to take elements of others’ work and reimagine them as elements in their own creative projects.
Still, though, by the nature of the book, these essays are too short to properly go into the issues involved or the process of making these things, and I get the impression that a far more interesting book (from my point of view) could have been made just using examples of this fan-art (though I understand that it would be prohibitively difficult to do legally). At least one representative piece of this fan art has been included, a comic strip called Torchwood Babiez. Unfortunately, it didn’t display properly in my ebook reader.
And the book is rounded out by a few interviews with women who have been involved in Doctor Who, mostly actors who have performed for Big Finish, which might be interesting to those who’ve not read interviews with these people before.
It sounds like I’m being terribly critical of this book, and I’m really not. If you’ve taken part in online new-Who fandom, especially on LiveJournal or the old Outpost Gallifrey, this book will probably be precisely your thing, and I know some of my friends have been and are part of that world. The writers are obviously intelligent, talented people for the most part, and I can’t imagine a better book of this type. But it’s emphatically not for me. But that’s OK – not everything has to be. It’s an open-hearted, welcoming, *friendly* book, and that I’m a cold-hearted joyless curmudgeon is, essentially, my problem, not the book’s.
Toy Story The Doctor’s Wife
I’ve often half-seriously wondered if Steven Moffat has just decided to make this entire series of Doctor Who as an elaborate means of winding Lawrence Miles up. The riffs on Alien Bodies in the opening two-parter were blatant enough, but this might as well have been labeled as an adaptation of Miles’ short story Toy Story. Except of course it’s written by Miles’ least-favourite writer in the world, Neil Gaiman.
Truth be told, I doubt Gaiman’s read Miles’ story, but both have such similar ideas as their basis (the TARDIS takes on the form of a human woman, and amongst other things reveals that she had as much choice in who her pilot was as he had in his ship, and it’s also made clear that the interior of the TARDIS is more software than hardware) that Moffat at least must have noticed. People on the Faction Paradox forums have been pointing out other, more tenuous, similarities too, but I suspect these are more down to Gaiman and Miles having common influences than anything else. (I strongly suspect one of the reasons Miles loathes Gaiman so much is that he sees him as a warped mirror reflection of himself).
The result is easily the best Doctor Who TV story since Dalek, and feels more like Doctor Who than anything on TV since the McCoy era, but is a strange collision of at least four separate styles.
First, we have the standard Gaimanisms – the TARDIS is written as, to all intents and purposes, Delirium of the Endless. Auntie and Uncle could easily have stepped out of Neverwhere. And the whole cosmic junkyard thing felt very, very Gaiman. Even the production design felt this way – it looked all steampunk-goth – though the whole series since Moffat took over has had that feel.
On top of that, we had the Big Idea stuff – the stuff that felt like Miles, the living planet that eats TARDIS energy and creates puppet people to play with out of the parts of dead Time Lords, the possessed woman with the mind of a TARDIS, the space-time twisting inside the TARDIS itself, and so on. This is a side of Gaiman we don’t often see, but which seems to owe a lot to Alan Moore in horror mode.
Then we have a few bits which seem to be Gaiman deliberately trying to write like Russel Davies – the tearful goodbye to the embodiment of the TARDIS felt exactly like the kind of tearful goodbye-forever speech Davies wrote about four times a series (usually before bringing the same character back two episodes later).
And there are a few bits which seem to be either Moffat’s direct input or Gaiman trying to sound like Moffat (the “be afraid of me, I killed *all* the Time Lords” bit seemed very like Moffat’s usual macho action-hero posturing). I suspect the Ood was also just dumped in in order to have a visible ‘monster’, as it had little part to play in the proceedings.
But all this hangs together, thanks to Gaiman being a good enough writer to make it work. He even manages to take a joke about running down corridors (and having the corridors looking all the same to save on expense) and turn it into something quite scary and effective. Though it would have been more scary had they not killed Rory and brought him back to life AGAIN – the South Park jokes are getting more appropriate all the time.
I have serious problems with the episode – mostly that the TARDIS in human form is just Gaiman-mad-woman-by-numbers rather than the truly strange and awesome (in the literal sense of the word) character she should be. People have been comparing this to things like Edge Of Destruction, and the comparison really does it no favours – in Edge Of Destruction, it’s all about the characters, whereas here there really *were* no characters – a majority of the characters are really just puppets played with by an omnipotent disembodied entity.
But this had a plot that made sense, a few good lines, a couple of scary bits, and the Doctor didn’t commit any genocides (though he did cause the death of at least two intelligent entities, one accidentally and the other in self-defence). By the low standards of 21st-century Doctor Who, that’s as good as it gets.
NuNuWho Series 2 Episode 1: The One With The Things And Stuff
SPOILERS and stuff.
Well that was certainly a Steven Moffat story, wasn’t it?
Spacesuits, disembodied kid voices, the Doctor saying various things are cool, the Doctor saying something really annoying like “wobbly bobbly flippity floppity” or something, I don’t even remember what, alien monsters that are more a conceptual threat than a real thing, astronaut suits, hints as to River Song’s identity, a major character ‘dying’ in a way that will very obviously be reversed, characters knowing secrets about other characters’ futures, a bit ripped off from Alien Bodies (the bit where they have to destroy the Doctor’s body in order to stop it being prized by alien civilisations), Mary Sue River Song being able to do everything in the world… It really was like somebody’s got some kind of machine, the Moff-O-Matic, churning this stuff out by the yard.
Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you – one could make a similar list of ingredients for a Terrance Dicks, or Robert Holmes, or Christopher Bidmead, or Douglas Adams script. And of the writers on the Welsh series, Moffat is by far the most competent at actually telling a story. And Matt Smith is still turning in an astonishingly good performance. I have trouble seeing Smith’s character as the Doctor though – while some have described Colin Baker’s TV Doctor as ‘a stupid person’s idea of what a clever person is like’, Smith’s character seems to be a deeply dull person’s idea of what an interesting person is like. He’s not so much an eccentric as “I’m mad, me”. The performance manages to sell it, though – Smith is as good an actor as ever played the role (I didn’t warm to his performance at first until I read an interview where he talked about how he was influenced by Peter Sellers, and it became obvious then that Smith is playing the Doctor as Sellers would, were he given those scripts).
On a comparative scale, this ranks somewhere in the middle of last year’s episodes, which means it would still be by far the best thing in any of the four series prior to that. But compared to the old series? Earthshock or something from that era. It’s about up to the standard of a Series 19 mid-season filler, right down to a surplus of companions (two companions is OK. Two companions plus River Song plus Guest FBI Blokey is too many) and the desire for SHOCKING EVENTS! (The Doctor Died!!!!!).
It’s not a bad piece of TV by any means – I laughed at points, the monsters were quite spooky, the bloke playing Nixon looked slightly more like him than Ian MacNeice did Churchill last year, and everything more or less made sense. But it was just sort of… there. Forty-five minutes of extruded TV product.
Moffat *is* capable of better. When he’s good, he can actually be very good. I hope he starts trying later in the series…
Gallifrey Series IV
I come to Big Finish’s new Gallifrey series from a slightly different angle from most of its listeners. I listened to the first three series several years ago, and was unimpressed – I remember the first series as being moderately entertaining fluff, while the second and third series got so far up their own arsehole they actually succeeded at navel-gazing from the inside, (This may be an unfair judgement. I remember them as being the very definition of fanwank, but it may well be that the attempt to do a fifteen-part epic story was just too ambitious for my own attention span).
But series three of Gallifrey had ended on a cliffhanger – the start of The Time War, with ‘some metal gentlemen’ having infected all of Gallifrey with a virus. And if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s the Time War. Especially since reading Richard & Alex’s wonderful Fractal History Of The Time War, I’ve been treating the Time War in my head like a gigantic multidimensional puzzle.
The interesting thing about the Time War is that the further one gets from ‘canon’, the more interesting the stories become. The Faction Paradox books are among the best books I’ve ever read, as is Dead Romance (which is slightly more ‘canon’ than the books). The Faction Paradox audios (with officially licensed Doctor Who baddies) and the Eighth Doctor books are good – sometimes very good – but rarely great. And the actual 2005-2009 TV series that established a version of the war as ‘canon’ is, to my mind, pretty much uniformly awful. The Time War/The War/The War In Heaven is as much as anything a war between alternative versions of history, and a history written by the winners and imposed from above is usually far less interesting than the multiple perspectives of the oppressed – would you rather read Homage To Catalonia or a piece of Falangist propaganda?
That’s not to compare Russel Davies to Generalissimo Franco – though I can imagine certain of the more rabid message board denizens emulating the example of the Tilbury dockers – Davies has actually been remarkably good on the issue of ‘canon’, loudly and publicly refusing to use his position of authority (in the minds of the kind of fans who like authorities) to adjudicate on what does and doesn’t ‘count’. For all the faults I find with him, Davies’ view is an inclusive one.
Rather, it’s to argue that those who are looking for certainty and ‘canon’ are limiting themselves unnecessarily (an argument I have made before, of course, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!). The Daleks as one possible Enemy in the Time War is a decent, though rather obvious, seed for other stories. The Daleks as *the* Enemy, on the other hand, closes off the other possibilities (an incursion of Time Lords from another ‘bottle universe’, the Time Lords themselves in the future/past, a new idea that radically disrupts ossified ways of thinking, the writers of the books themselves, a non-existent threat created purely to give the illusion of conflict, humanity, the vampires/Mal’akh wanting their universe back, the new TV series itself… ).
It might be fun, in fact, to do a few posts here looking at different options as to who or what The Enemy is. I particularly like the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy as the war between the ‘classic’ (small-c conservative, big-L Liberal) and Welsh (New Labour – modern, glossy, “we can brook no criticism, because however bad it is, it’s better than the horrible wilderness years we had before, do you want Thatcher back/the show off the air again?”) series…
But anyway, if we pop out of this digression from a digression from a digression, the Gallifrey audios – like the Big Finish audios generally – are in an odd place when it comes to ‘canon’ for those who care about such things. They’re officially licensed, but have to be approved by the makers of the current show. But at the same time, they can’t make reference to anything in that show. So even though Gary Russell, who is in charge of the Gallifrey series, is also a script editor on the Welsh series, and he has clearly stated (including on the special features for these stories) that he intends the War that happened off-stage between series three and four to be the Time War featured in the TV show, this can’t be stated directly in the stories themselves. This leads to an interesting kind of forced ambiguity being imposed *against* authorial intent.
And whether intentionally or not, this has produced a story where the in-universe and out-of-universe epistemic statuses are mirrored. We have a multiple-universe story (always a very good thing), but one where all the alternate universes travelled to are just that – alternate universes. They exist not as the parallel worlds in, say, Lance Parkin’s Faction Paradox novel Warlords Of Utopia, do – as worlds whose divergences produce results both good (in Parkin’s case, a peace that has lasted millennia, and a flowering of culture and technology) and bad (dictatorship, paedophilia as social norm, slavery). Rather, they exist as wrong turns that could have been taken, lessons that this (or in this case, the main Doctor Who universe) is the best of all possible worlds, with each of these universes being defined as wrong, inferior timelines, and each one diverging in precisely one way, which leads to disaster.
So along with the ‘real’ Romana, Leela and K9, plus the characters Narvin and Braxiatel from earlier stories, we get alternative versions of Romana (both her first and second regenerations), Leela (an articulate, educated fascist torturer, whose distinctly different tones show once and for all that Leela’s rather stilted way of talking is a deliberate acting decision by Louise Jameson, rather than a poor performance), two Sixth Doctors, and more, all in some ways ‘worse’ than the ones we know.
(Sadly there is no alternate K9. John Leeson was the star of the earlier Gallifrey series, with his bitching between the two K9s. Here, there is only one, and he doesn’t get to shine the same way except during his brief promotion to Castellan).
Of the four stories here – which can only be bought as a bundle, though for a very reasonable £30 (£35 if you want the CDs rather than just downloads), by far the best is CD3 – Gallifrey: Annihilation. Oddly, given that Russell was a co-writer, and he’s known for being more obsessed with continuity and fan-wank than most, there are no alternative Doctors or Romanas or whoever (though Lord Prydon *may* be intended to be an alternate Master, given that he’s played by Geoffrey Beevers), and surprisingly/thankfully Katy Manning isn’t playing Jo Grant or Iris Wildthyme, but a female Borussa.
For those of us who like playing games with that sort of thing, in fact, this story could fit quite neatly in with Faction Paradox, as it’s set on a Gallifrey where Rassilon was turned into a vampire by the Great Vampire, and there’s a civil war between the Vampire Gallifreyans and the ‘True Lords’, who never developed time travel but *could* regenerate. This could easily be the timeline from which the Faction’s masks come, and it will be in my ‘personal canon’ from now on. (Also in my ‘personal canon’, these are four of the Nine Homeworlds. No-one said the Nine Homeworlds had to be in *this* timeline – or if they did I don’t remember, which is the same thing).
It’s quite a nice piece of space-opera-Gothic, Beevers makes an appropriately sepulchral vampire, and it’s an entertaining way to spend an hour, though hardly ground-breaking stuff.
The worst, unfortunately, is Justin Richards’ Gallifrey: Disassembled. I say unfortunately, partly because this has the best performances of the bunch (from Louise Jameson as two Leelas, and a great turn by Colin Baker as Lord Burner), and the first half-hour or so is genuinely good, but it soon degenerates into a load of nonsense, with illogical, made-up-on-the-fly rules about what does and doesn’t count as a paradox, hints at Braxiatel being the Doctor’s brother, explanations as to why the Doctor originally left Gallifrey…
When I say that the big turning point in this universe is that Zagreus took the place of The Other in its history, I think that will tell everyone all they need to know (if you don’t know what those words mean, be thankful…)
The other two stories, Gallifrey: Reborn and Gallifrey: Forever, bookend the series quite nicely, providing us with, respectively, the set-up for this four-story series, and a new status quo at the end with Romana and Leela trapped on a Gallifrey which hadn’t yet invented time travel but where Romana’s now president.
Overall, quality-wise this sits somewhere in the middle of Big Finish’s range. Nowhere near a genuine masterpiece like Peri And The Piscon Paradox or some of their other recent triumphs, this still feels like it was created because of someone’s desire to tell the story, and so it’s still above some of the landfill “let’s have the Doctor team up with two companions from different eras, and have them fight the Celestial Toymaker, who’s teamed up with the Zarbi” stuff they do when inspiration fails completely.
You already know if this is the kind of thing you like or not (in fact you probably either ordered it in advance or are never going to hear it), but for the kind of thing it is, it’s well done. And thankfully, either through diktat from above or through taste on the part of Gary Russell, it leaves as many questions about the Time War unanswered at the end as at the beginning.
Doctor Who: Smoking Mirror
(Sorry if this is drivel – I’m not very well and having a great deal of difficulty writing coherent sentences. Pretty much every sentence here started out as “it’s like that thing, oh you know, the one with the thing”).
Obligatory disclaimer-cum-explanation as to why I’ve bought this book. I’ve vaguely known Lawrence Burton as one of the more intelligent posters on the Doctor Who forum Outpost Gallifrey and on the Faction Paradox forum for a year or two. We’ve recently become Facebook/Twitter friends, and he wrote a very flattering review of my most recent book. So I may be biased here.
On the other hand, I don’t know him well enough that I think I’m biased – and if you read through that thread (Lawrence reviewing several hundred science fiction books) it’s obvious both that he can actually write, and also that he shares a number of my tastes – of the books we’ve both read, I’d say I agree with at least 80% of his reviews, and especially the stuff he’s most glowing about (Philip K Dick, Lawrence Miles, David Louis Edelman) and his tastes in individual works by writers (preferring The End Of Eternity and The Gods Themselves to Asimov’s Robot stuff).
So when I saw he’d self-published a couple of books himself, I bought this one without even reading the description.
It turns out to be an unofficial Doctor Who novel. I’d hesitate to call it fanfic, partly because it was intended for BBC Books (and quite why it was rejected I can’t understand) and partly because fanfic tends to suggest something of poor quality, and this is anything but. It’s a Doctor Who novel that happens not to have been licensed by the BBC, that’s all. (Lawrence is selling the book at cost price and not making a penny from it, I hasten to add).
Given that it’s self-published, there are surprisingly few criticisms I can make of it. The review thread linked above is called “Crappy 70s paperbacks with airbrushed spaceships on cover”, and the cover design is a perfect imitation of those, the typography on the back being spookily reminiscent of some of them (the closest comparison I can find is the Granada paperback copies of The End Of Eternity and The Zap Gun, but I know I’ve seen something even closer). However, the typography in the book itself is less wonderful, being in Times New Roman (or a facsimile thereof) and eight- or ten-point type. Having a legally-blind wife, I know from experience that ideally one should print things in at least twelve-point, and wherever possible use a sans-serif font, for readability.
Other than that, the only really jarring thing about the book is a moment of lampshade hanging, when the Doctor is on a collect-the-plot-tokens quest and thinks about how he hates this kind of thing when it happens in books. It’s not done quite well enough to overcome the problems.
One other problem I have – and one that’s my problem rather than the book’s – is that the book is set in pre-Columbian Mexico, and so the characters’ names are all phonetically unlike anything I’m accustomed to. This gave me some difficulty in keeping track of the characters, but that can hardly be helped, given the subject.
The plot is a pretty good one – why has the universe shrunk, so that it now consists of only a small area of Central America and a few centuries? Why are the Gods walking among the humans? – but the plot is less important than the writing. Lawrence obviously has a huge love for the Mexica culture and mythology, and this comes across in every word. Before I read this, all I knew of the Mexica culture was that some of their sculptures in the British Museum look like they’d been made by Jack Kirby, if Kirby had had an obsession with skulls (which is a good thing). But Lawrence manages both to make this seem like a sympathetic culture (putting even the human sacrifice into a context where it seems entirely reasonable) and to bring out the utter strangeness of the culture’s myths.
A lot of individual scenes will stay with me for a long time – the Doctor getting an inkling that problems are starting when Carl Sagan starts talking about how the Earth is a few thousand years old, the god at the centre of the TARDIS, the journey through Mictlan – this is a book as much about the journey as the destination, and Lawrence isn’t afraid of devoting time to his interests, whether that be retelling old myths or explaining Mexica social structure or making asides about old sitcoms.
In fact, after the obvious in-joke that the Third Doctor used to watch Dad’s Army (which starred Bill Pertwee) I started wondering about the other references – what does the confirmation of a Doctor-Who-universe Wilfred Brambell and Tony Hancock mean for the careers of the ‘Whoniverse’ Ron Grainer and Terry Nation? – but that’s just the 60s-TV fan in me coming out.
And there’s a very sitcom feel about parts of this book, but in a good way. It’s a funny book, but the humour all flows from the situations, whether it be the Doctor’s other console rooms (I want to see the McConsole Room ™ now) or the TARDIS translation circuit malfunction that renders speech more… idiomatically than before. The one funny bit that doesn’t quite fit in is the bit with three priests (trying not to spoil anything here). But that is so funny – and so incongruous – that it works, even though it could easily have fallen into the too-common trap of mistaking a reference for an actual joke.
The characterisation is spot-on as well. Lawrence catches Peri’s voice perfectly, and his Sixth Doctor is definitely Colin Baker (although the character here is closer to the TV series than to the more nuanced portrayal in the audio stories – understandably, as this was written in 2002, when the audios hadn’t been going that long). At times the Doctor seems almost *too* verbose, but then this is a Doctor whose defining writers were Pip & Jane Baker, and the fact that nobody else talks like that shows it as a stylistic choice rather than a tin ear.
It’s a first novel, with all that that entails, and Lawrence’s influences are clear (and he thanks Philip Purser-Hallard and Simon Bucher-Jones in the acknowledgements, if it hadn’t been obvious) – I’m sure the use of Mictlan here is at least in part a reference to its use in the Faction Paradox books – but while this doesn’t rise to the level of the very best Doctor Who books, it’s funny, clever, well-written and written by someone with an obvious love for his subjects – both Doctor Who and pre-Columbian Mexica culture – and is certainly better than a good 90% of the Doctor Who books I’ve read.
Now if only Air France hadn’t lost my bag with my DVD of The Aztecs in, I could do a compare/contrast here. Oh well…
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to a non-fan of Doctor Who, but it’s an excellent self-contained story which requires a minimum of continuity knowledge, so if you’re even a casual fan – especially if you’re a fan of the Sixth Doctor, who’s otherwise even worse-served in print than on TV – this is well worth a read. I’ll definitely be buying Lawrence’s book of short stories.
Smoking Mirror is published by Ce Acatl/Lulu and is available here.
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