Doctor Who: Royal Blood by Una McCormack

Doctor Who: The Glamour Chronicles: Royal Blood
by Una McCormack

I've been reading my way through the VNAs* and EDAs,† plus related novels, which have mostly been ones featuring Bernice Summerfield. That brought me to the NSA‡ Big Bang Generation because it guest-starred Benny. It dawned on me while reading it that Big Bang Generation was the second installment in the Glamour Chronicles trilogy, and that I'd quite like to read the first one as well because it was by Una McCormack, so I added Royal Blood to my list. Properly I ought to have read it before Big Bang Generation (I think, anyway), but too late now.

Published: 2015
Acquired and read: April 2023

Royal Blood feels more like a novella than a novel. Not so much in terms of length (it is probably on the short end for an NSA but not overly so) but in terms of structure. It just doesn't have the kind of complicated structure one might expect from a novel. Instead, the Doctor and Clara kind of turn up, observe what's happening, slightly get involved, and then things come to an end. There are not significant turns in the plot. That's not a criticism per se, it just requires you to calibrate your expectations: this would probably work a bit better in a volume of short fiction than as a $10 book. It's an elegaic story about the end of civilizations and the clash of colonizer and colonized and holding true to one's values.

McCormack is generally quite good at exploring this kind of thing, but though I enjoyed the book, I didn't think this was one of her stronger ones. Specifically, the guest characters mostly felt like types rather than people. I wanted to like them, but there just wasn't enough to them, unfortunately. Did we not spend enough time in their heads? Did the short length of the book mean they just didn't have enough to do? I am not sure, but I found them less successful than similar characters in some other McCormack books. I wonder if cutting this down even further would have the answer, make it into a punchy novella in terms of length, and then the level of characterization would feel slightly more appropriate.

What the Glamour is and how it works doesn't really seem to have anything to do with how it was in Big Bang Generation, but this is much more interesting, so I am willing to make that a knock against Gary Russell, not Una McCormack. There is some neat stuff here, the story is of course well told, and it reads quickly. A good NSA, but it's by Una, so I know it could have been a great one.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Bernice Summerfield: True Stories

* Virgin New Adventures
† Eighth Doctor Adventures
‡ New Series Adventures