Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale

There is a sort of idea in Doctor Who discourse, of "guns vs. frocks." This idea was apparently coined by Gareth Roberts, but is pretty well explained by Kate Orman in this interview with fan and scholar Alan McKee:

I think it’s [Doctor Who novelist] Gareth Roberts who said that Doctor Who needs less guns and more frocks. And it became a very quick shorthand for two rough schools of writing in the Doctor Who novels: one of which was militaristic space opera books that were very serious, and took themselves very seriously; and then at completely the other end of the spectrum, very camp ones that did not take themselves seriously. (10)

(Also discussed here by another writer.) Like a lot of systems that break things down into exactly two categories, you're meant to favor one—I used to read Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex, and a go-to move for him and his readership was, "There are exactly two ways of thinking, and I belong to the superior one." Guns vs. frocks doesn't hide this; it's right there in the original conception of it that Kate Orman paraphrases. As Elizabeth Sandifer points out, "this is a spectacularly loaded framing of a debate" when your main character abhors guns!

On the whole, I agree: I am much more likely to have a good time with "Flatline" than with "Time Heist." However, I can enjoy a good "gun" story: I am an unabashed fan of Resurrection of the Daleks, for example, and Earthshock and The Caves of Androzani are also in this space. (Well, I remember being a big fan of Resurrection, anyway; it's been a long time since I've seen it.)

One might argue, though, that the whole guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy isn't really applicable to Doctor Who as a whole so much as a very narrow slice of it, which is what Jacqueline Klieper says on this Tumblr post: "I’m generally kind of dubious about treating the gun/frock distinction as particularly meaningful outside of the fairly narrow parameters of the Virgin novels that the terms originated because of." It's not so much a term designed to describe Doctor Who in general as a way of describing two particular ways of making the New Doctor Who Adventures more "adult." You could take the Paul Cornell "frock" approach and embrace the weird camp elements of Doctor Who—sentient churches on the moon—or you could take the "gun" approach of macho space military people blowing things up—for me embodied by the particularly boring and tedious novel Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis. I tend to agree with Kliper; I struggle to map the guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy onto the 2005-22 revival, for example. (I very much struggled to come up an example before finally thinking of "Time Heist," to be honest. Klieper comes up with a couple of examples from the revival, but I'm not sure I really agree with them... though I may be falling victim to a common problem in genre distinctions: "any example I enjoy from a genre I generally don't enjoy must not count as a 'true' example of that genre.")

Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Daleks
by Trevor Baxendale

Published: 2009
Acquired: January 2010
Read: January 2026

But that doesn't mean it can't occasionally happen. Trevor Baxendale never wrote an NA, but Prisoner of the Daleks reads like his attempt at one. The Doctor lands in the era of the Dalek Wars, and the book is all about that without reprieve: soldiers and squads and massacres and secret plots and plans and it's all Very Serious Stuff. Nicholas Briggs could have written this in his sleep, of course, but with Nick there's a thematic depth, an attempt to make the Daleks mean something that's completely absent from this book where they're just the Horrible Monsters You Know from TV. The one clever thing this novel does is to make you think there's going to be a sympathetic female character of the week who functions as a pseudocompanion... and then kill her off pretty quickly. I didn't expect this, so well done, and it firmly established the book's "gun" bona fides: no one is safe! Unfortunately, having done this, the book is left with no interesting or sympathetic guest characters to speak of. I think "gun" Doctor Who is probably a particularly poor fit for David Tennant's Doctor, even on the page.

All of this is to say, I think this book perfectly achieves what it sets out to do. But what it sets out to do completely fails to be of interest to me. If you know about the guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy, then what you think about that way of conceptualizing Doctor Who will probably tell you pretty clearly what you will think about this book before you even read it. (I picked this up because it's one of the more widely praised "New Series Adventures"... but I guess I should have paid more attention to who was doing the praising!)

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion