Doctor Who: Short Trips #20: Destination Prague |
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Published: 2007 Acquired: May 2009 Read: July 2025 |
Obviously, Savile decided to go with Prague in the end. I thought the book opened a bit oddly, with a story about an inhabitant-less Prague being taken out of time, hardly the kind of thing that makes the reader experience Prague and thus see the upside to setting a bunch of stories there. The next story takes place in Prague's future, and so does the next, and so does the next. I found this a bit of an odd choice, too—I felt like if the selling point of this book was Prague's rich history, then maybe we ought to lead off with a story set in that rich history.
Halfway through, though, I realized we still hadn't had a historical, and so that must be intentional in the sense that I was wrong about the book's premise. It wasn't chronicling past and future history, but only future history. I feel like this is an okay idea, though in that case, I think it probably would make more sense to go with a city readers are more familiar with, like London. But I also think that if you are going to tell just future history, it would be better to do it in chronological order. If the book had a mix of historical and future-set stories, then jumping around would definitely be the right choice for the sake of variety. But if the decision is to only tell the future story of the city, then jumping around makes that future story hard to discern. It would be neat to get a series of snapshots of Prague's future, chronicling its various ascents and descents moving ever further into the future... but what we get instead is dispersed and fragmented and hard to glom onto.
On top of that, I think the choice of just telling future-Prague stories doesn't play to the authors' strengths. I suspect a bunch of authors largely unfamiliar with a city could do some research to find interesting historical incidents to build stories around, and I think a bunch of authors familiar with a city might have found something to say about its future. But telling stories about the future of a city you don't know much about is a tricky business, and mostly what we get are pretty generic sci-fi stories and/or repetitive transpositions of classic Prague things into the future, like (if I counted correctly) three different Golem stories and three different Kafka's "Metamorphosis" riffs.
Like the last Short Trips volume I read, The Quality of Leadership, this one has a second, implicit USP: the editor is not part of the usual cohort of mid-2000s Doctor Who tie-in writers, and thus they have a different Rolodex of authors to call on, most of whom had never written a Doctor Who story (or maybe just one) and many of whom never would again. Some of them are people who have had (or would go on to have) pretty decent writing careers outside of Doctor Who in fact: names I knew from other contexts included Mike W. Barr (a number of DC comics from the 1980s, including Batman: Year Two and Star Trek: The Mirror Universe Saga), Keith R.A. DeCandido (innumerable Star Trek stories, including editing the S.C.E. series), Kevin Killiany (S.C.E.: Orphans), Mary Robinette Kowal (the Lady Astronaut series), Paul Kupperberg (JSA: Ragnarok), Todd McCaffrey (Pern, though I've never actually read any of his contributions), and Sean Williams (The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic).
Bringing in outside writers to an existing tie-in franchise can be hit-or-miss in my experience. Sometimes those outsiders have an expanded way of seeing it, and they come at it from atypical, interesting angles. But conversely, sometimes they have a more limited understanding of it, because their understanding is mostly shaped by what's on screen; because they haven't been living and breathing tie-ins for a decade, they don't see the dynamism that the premise really allows for. Doctor Who can do really interesting stuff in the medium of prose short fiction... but I don't think you'd know it by reading this book, where it seemed to me that most writers were trying to tell fairly "typical" Doctor Who adventures with aliens invading or time-travel shenanigans or rogue Time Lords, stuff that might work very well on screen with a canvas of ninety minutes, but comes across as superficial on the printed page. In particular, the book suffers from the sheer quantity of stories; some Short Trips anthologies have as few as seven or eight, if I recall correctly, but this one crams in over twenty, meaning many of them are by necessity quite short. You just can't do the "typical" Doctor Who story in fifteen-ish pages in a satisfactory way.
Thus, I found this one a bit of a struggle. Indeed, I think it's indicative that of the three stories I did think were very good, two of them were by authors who have written multiple other Doctor Who stories. The first story that really clicked for me was Mary Robinette Kowal's "Suspension and Disbelief"; it's weird and short (the Doctor has to help a woman whose husband is going to be executed for chopping down a tree so she can make a puppet; the resolution involves a giant puppet) but inventive and well told.
The second was James Swallow's "Lady of the Snows," which was a beautiful story about an artist falling in love with an amnesiac Charley Pollard, using her as his muse, with some great imagery and interesting thematic resonance between what the artist is doing to Charley, and what has happened to Prague in the far future. (To be fair to Swallow, who has gone on to write a lot of Doctor Who stories, I think this was just his fourth one or so.)
The last one was also the very last in the book, Stel Pavlou's "Omegamorphosis." (And to be fair to Pavlou, though he has written other Doctor Who stories, it's literally just two of them. But all three are bangers!) This is the book's third and final Kafka riff... but it's the only one of them that actually feels Kafkaesque, surreal and disconcerting.
So, I think there are better Short Trips volumes out there, and I unfortunately suspect this one was fundamentally misconceived from the beginning.
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Short Trips: How The Doctor Changed My Life
