Doctor Who: Trading Futures by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: Trading Futures
by Lance Parkin

This book is kind of "Doctor Who does James Bond"—you can get that as soon as you look at the cover, which could come out of a Bond film title sequence.  But though it has its goofy moments, and definitely owes something to the Pierce Brosnan films in particular, it's not a parody. Rather, Parkin does that thing Doctor Who does so well: crash the Doctor into the conventions of a different genre and see what happens. Parkin explore the consequences with seriousness. Well, as serious as Doctor Who ever gets, anyway.

 

Published: 2001
Acquired: August 2022
Read: September 2022

What would a Bond villain look like in the Doctor Who world? Bond villains, when not Soviets themselves, were often trying to incite conflict between East and West for their own reasons. Parkin gives us a new Cold War in the twenty-first century, and then thinks of a Doctor Who way an arms dealer might trying to make money off this conflict: selling time travel. The result is a fast-paced action story, but one firmly in the Doctor Who realm. Especially early on, the way the Doctor gets out of James Bond-esque jams nonviolently is inspired, and a sequences where the Doctor stages a bank robbery to protect people from a tidal wave is delightful, a perfect extrapolation from the eighth Doctor in the tv movie. The Doctor's sort-of companion for the story, Malady Chang, feels exactly like a female ally character from a Pierce Brosnan film.

 

Parkin always does well by Eight, I reckon, and he also has a good handle on Anji, who here gets to plausibly bluff her way into the confidence of the villain. The subplot about Fitz pretending to be the Doctor probably could have gone further, but was enjoyable anyway. Some people praise Parkin for his Big Ideas about Doctor Who, and while he does indeed have them, he can also write solid Doctor Who books without them. A perfect example of the kind of fun you can have with a "regular" Doctor Who book.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Blue Box

Doctor Who: The City of the Dead by Lloyd Rose

Doctor Who: The City of the Dead
by Lloyd Rose

This is another Eighth Doctor Adventure from the era where he was traveling the universe with amnesia, accompanied by Fitz and Anji. Here he lands in near-future New Orleans and tangles with dark magic. I realized while reading it that this is the third book of this era I've read in a row... and all three of them have been written by women. Like Jacqueline Rayner and Kate Orman, one of Rose's high points is her characterization.

 

Published: 2001
Acquired: November 2009
Read: May 2022

I really like how the Doctor comes across here: recognizably Paul McGann, but a different McGann than we might get in the audios. He's got the Doctor's insight and enthusiasm; what he lacks is the Doctor's self-confidence and certainty. After all, he doesn't know who he is. There are lots of good lines here. Rose does okay by Fitz, too, and I particularly liked her Anji. Anji comes in for a lot of stick in online discourse around the EDAs, but I've found her to be a strongly delineated, enjoyable character in each of the three books I've read with her.

I will admit I didn't entirely follow the turns of the plot here, but this is the kind of book that 1) has enough good stuff going on that you don't care, and 2) is good enough otherwise that you kind of trust that it does all work out if you want to follow it. (Plus, I read it in fits and starts between Hugo finalists, and I'm sure it wasn't meant to be read across a couple months!) There's a lot of atmosphere, strong characterization, a neat sense of history, and a good sense of magic. The villain became a little obvious too quickly, but other than that, I enjoyed the journey a lot even when I didn't understand it. I remember really liking Lloyd Rose's other EDA, Camera Obscura; now I will have to track down her third and final Doctor Who novel, The Algebra of Ice.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: Trading Futures

Doctor Who: The Year of Intelligent Tigers by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Year of Intelligent Tigers
by Kate Orman
story by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Following on a few books from EarthWorld, this is another adventure for the amnesiac eighth Doctor with Fitz and Anji. Like Jacqueline Rayner, Kate Orman is a deft hand when it comes to characterization, especially Anji; I also really liked Orman's eighth Doctor, who you can imagine as being played by Paul McGann, but who also does the kind of things that are unique to this prose version of the Doctor, a man obsessed but who also doesn't know his own past. I liked him on the music-obsessed space colony, trying to figure out a piece of music he could remember; the visual of the Doctor literally curling up with tigers and adopting cat body language is something one can't imagine the tv show actually being willing to do, but fits beautifully.

Published: 2001
Acquired: November 2009
Read: November 2021

The story is a good one, with a human space colony discovering that native "tiger" life-forms they'd thought benign and nonsentient are actually intelligent and possess their own agenda; the Doctor and his friends must work to minimize loss of life and bring two sides together. Some good jokes, some beautiful prose, well written throughout. In general, I've picked and chosen from the post-Burning Eighth Doctor Adventures, but every one I have read shows off Doctor Who prose fiction at its best.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The City of the Dead

Review: Doctor Who: EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner

Originally published: 2001
Acquired: July 2021
Read: August 2021

Doctor Who: EarthWorld
by Jacqueline Rayner

 

This was a delight. EarthWorld is the first proper adventure for the new TARDIS team of the (amnesiac) Doctor, Fitz, and Anji following the trapped-on-Earth arc; Anji was introduced in the previous book, Escape Velocity (which I read back around the time it came out, in 2001), but this was her first trip in the TARDIS. I don't have much memory of Anji despite reading five novels featuring her back in the day, but she is great here. Rayner has an exceptional handle on her, much the same way she does Bernice Summerfield. She is real, funny, and inventive, and her internal monologue utterly convinces; much of the novel is told from her perspective, and the book works all the better for it. I liked the e-mails she writes her (dead) boyfriend sprinkled throughout the text; I liked her interactions with the three would-be rebels; I liked her solutions to the situations she ends up in. I have three more Eighth Doctor Adventures featuring Anji that I am slated to read in the coming year; I can only hope those writers measure up to Rayner.

At one point, I started to wonder if Fitz was a bit flanderized-- he seemed pretty pathetic. But I think Fitz actually kind of is pathetic, it's just that he's normally written by male authors who sympathize with his patheticness. And if he feels flanderized, well, that's because (as the novel delves into a bit) he was literally flanderized in the novel Interference. His existential crisis was well handled, and I liked his resolution at the novel's end.

The one weak point of characterization is the Doctor himself. I liked the slightly off-kilter Doctor we got in the Earth arc novels The Turing Test and Father Time, and here it seems that he knows a little too much about how he is "supposed" to act on an adventure considered it's his first one. But there is a neat moment at the end, where he does some stuff no other Doctor would do, and Rayner captures Paul McGann's performance as well.

All this, plus it's that rarest of things: a media tie-in with thematic depth! This is a story about memory, and the gap between what we remember and what actually was. The Doctor has lost him memories, Fitz is made up of memories, Anji struggles over her memories of Dave, the planet New Jupiter is in a war over to what extent their cultural memory of Earth should dominate them, the EarthWorld theme park is entirely made up of misremembered Earth history, the president of New Jupiter struggles with false memories he's invented. It all comes together quite nicely, without being ham-handed. Definitely one of the best EDAs, and a worthy choice for BBC Books's fiftieth anniversary reprint line.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Year of Intelligent Tigers

Review: Doctor Who: Father Time by Lance Parkin

Published: 2000
Acquired: January 2021
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: Father Time
by Lance Parkin

 

Reading this shortly after another "caught on Earth" arc novel, I could see that one of the real benefits of this storyline was how it let you see Doctor Who from the outside. This happens in three ways. One is that, since the Doctor is spending a century on Earth, and the stories are spaced decades apart, each can use a new, outsider viewpoint character. Some of my favorite Doctor Who stories are ones that introduce you to the Doctor from a new character's perspective: "An Unearthly Child," "Rose," The Harvest, "Smith and Jones," certainly others I am forgetting. The premise of this arc means that literally every story can take this approach! Here, we follow Debbie, a schoolteacher who takes refuge at the Doctor's house after a car accident, and becomes enraptured by him and his world. She's a well drawn character; Parkin makes her and her world feel very real, and we get the sense of an ordinary person seeking an escape that Russell T Davies would often use to excellent effect on screen.

It also is Doctor Who from the outside in that the Doctor himself doesn't know who he is. Now, amnesia has become a bit of an overused trope in Doctor Who tie-ins, especially for the eighth Doctor, but it's put to good effect here. He's Doctorish... but not exactly the Doctor. Here, he's a man who settles down with a daughter and does business consulting in the 1980s! But the kind of business consulting he does is pretty amazing.

Which leads me into the last way these stories really work. They are not traditional Doctor Who stories, but they still feel like Doctor Who stories. As a friend said, paraphrasing Elizabeth Sandifer, there are Doctor Who stories that "speak[ ] Doctor Who fluently, but with a charming accent you haven’t heard before." These "caught on Earth" stories are among them, and Father Time is particularly good at it. This has a lot of Doctor Who tropes you'll recognize, but in a new, unfamiliar context. How does the Doctor deal with evil aliens from the far future attacking the Earth to find another alien who's in hiding... when he lives on the Earth and lives with the alien? I've read four of the six caught on Earth books (five of the seven if we count the retroactively inserted Past Doctor Aventure Wolfsbane), and, except for the utterly mediocre finale by Colin Brake, they all do this successfully to varying degrees... but I think Father Time does it best of all. There's a particularly great bit where, when the Doctor realizes his daughter has been kidnapped into Earth orbit, he basically just shrugs and goes, "Well, I guess we're off to Cape Canaveral to steal a space shuttle." It's the kind of audaciousness you can imagine a Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat story having on screen... but the way the Doctor steals the shuttle is very different than what they might do because this is a Doctor without his usual technical resources.

The issue I have with the book, however, is that it's not long enough. It's divided into three sections: 1980, 1986, 1989. The first section runs about a hundred pages, and it is the best of them: strongly atmospheric and character driven. But the last two sections thus only get half the book between them and must be squeezed into fifty pages apiece; I felt the character work suffered as a result. Debbie, who really drives the first section, fades into the background. (Imagine if, having been the focus of "Rose," Rose spent the rest of series one just standing there and asking questions like a Chibnall companion. Why do all that set-up and do nothing with it?) And though there's a lot of focus on Miranda, the Doctor's daughter, the one thing I didn't quite see enough of was her relationship with the Doctor. They are usually separate in the actual novel; most of their time together happens off-page between the 1980 and 1986 sections. But if the 1986 and 1989 sections had got 100 pages apiece just like the first, I think this would have gone from a verging-on-great Doctor Who novel to surely one of the greatest of them all. The potential is all there in the first part, but the rocket doesn't achieve the heights it could.

Still, this is a blast. I always enjoy a Lance Parkin Doctor Who story. He knows how to blend cool concepts with over-the-top storytelling, and I wish we heard more of his voice these days.

Also, this is one of a few pre-2005 Doctor Who novels to get an official ebook release, for which I am immensely grateful. It seems to average $13-20 on the secondary market, but you can get it for $7 on Amazon.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: EarthWorld

Review: Doctor Who: The Turing Test by Paul Leonard

Published: 2000
Acquired: November 2009
Read: November 2020

Doctor Who: The Turing Test
by Paul Leonard

With this installment, my reading of the BBC's Eighth Doctor Adventures jumps ahead to the "trapped on Earth" story arc. This began with The Ancestor Cell and The Burning, which I read over fifteen years ago; an amnesiac Doctor is left on Earth in 1890 to make a rendezvous with his companion Fitz in 2001, giving him and the TARDIS over a century to recuperate. This story details what the Doctor was up to during World War II, as he becomes involved in the activities of a group of aliens trapped in Nazi Germany.

I remember finding what I read of the post-Burning novels a mixed bag: while the novels did have the freedom to be more inventive and weird in the new post-Time Lord universe, it wasn't really clear to me what purpose the Doctor's amnesia was meant to serve. He seemed to always know how to do things anyway, and always remembered what was necessary for the plot. The Turing Test, however, makes great use of this premise, possibly the greatest of any EDA I've read. This Doctor is among humans, but knows he is not of them-- yet does not know who he actually is. So while a "normal" Doctor might thwart some aliens, this Doctor genuinely does not know what his "side" is. This approach is amplified by having the story narrated from the outside in the first person; the narrators here know less of the Doctor than we do, so we can read between the lines, but in some ways, we know as little as they do of this new Doctor. When telling the story from, say, a companion role, I think it's impossible to really render the Doctor as unknowable, but Leonard does an excellent job here of using his narrators to create distance and danger. Overall, this is an effective and gripping story of WWII intrigue and violence. I don't think it's the best Doctor Who novel but it is in the top tier.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: Father Time

Review: Doctor Who: Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Mass market paperback, 283 pages
Published 1997
Acquired March 2011
Read March 2020

Doctor Who: Vampire Science
by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Having finished working my way through all the New Doctor Who Adventures I happen to own, I'm now going from the seventh Doctor to the eighth and tackling some of BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures from the late 1990s and early 2000s. That begins with Vampire Science, the second EDA but (so people say) the first one worth reading. The Doctor and his new companion, Sam, fight vampires in 1990s San Francisco. I enjoyed it: it's a good mash-up of the sensibilities of the NAs with those of the 1996 television movie. It gets a little violent at times in ways I don't see as very eighth-Doctory, but outside of that it captures his character very well: there's a big emphasis on the sleights of hand he did in the TVM, and how his whole way of operating might itself be a sleight of hand. What's trickier: having a complicated plan like the seventh Doctor, or not having a complicated plan like the seventh Doctor... but everything still working out in the end? This isn't quite the eighth Doctor that Paul McGann would end up playing in the audio dramas (which didn't start for another four years), but this is a legitimate extrapolation of how he played it in the movie. It gets a little bogged down in vampire stuff at times, but it usually has a good sense of humor about it. (I was surprised to realize it was published four months after Buffy began, because it feels like Buffy must have been an influence, and yet it could not have been.) I remember liking Sam in the later Orman/Blum EDAs I've already read (Unnatural History and Seeing I), and that was true here as well; they give her that Rose-esque sense of someone who wants to do something in the world that the Doctor enables, but often feels overwhelmed by the realities of the universe.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Infinity Doctors

Review: Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film by Gary Russell

Mass market paperback, 223 pages
Published 1996

Acquired September 2019
Read October 2019

Doctor Who by Gary Russell

I've finished reading the seventh Doctor New Adventures I own, but I have several eighth Doctor books I've never read, and those were the spiritual and literal successors to the NAs, so I'm going to do those next. Before I begin, though, I picked up a book I've always been curious about but have never read: the novelization of the 1996 tv movie starring Paul McGann. It's often called "Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film" (including on the spine), but the title page clearly gives the title as just "Doctor Who," a move that I'm sure has led to absolutely no confusion.

It's by Gary Russell, so it's as workmanlike as you'd expect. Russell fleshes out a lot of background bits. Some work (the prologue with the seventh Doctor is nice, and he almost makes the ending work), but some fall flat (there are bits of the film that are just there to look cool, but fall apart if you think about them, and I would argue that explaining them just makes it worse). I think its biggest problem is that the film succeeds in two areas: visual style and Paul McGann's performance. But those are largely uncaptured on the page; the cool moments don't come across, and the Doctor fades into the background without McGann's charisma.

But hey, if you want a 200-page diversion about the best Doctor, it will do nicely, and I suspect it works well as a transition between the NAs and the EDAs. I guess I'll find out when I read Vampire Science! (Of course, as soon as I track this down used, it's announced that they're re-releasing it as a Target novel with added material. Bah.)

Next Week: The tenth Doctor returns in Revolutions of Terror, as I begin to explore Titan's Doctor Who comics!

"But I like being sarcastic.": Liv Chenka, Companion from a Real World

I just got home from a car trip from Tampa to Cincinnati to Cleveland and back, and my wife and I spent much of the time listening to Big Finish's Doctor Who miniseries Doom Coalition. (Not as much as we should have, mind. Thirty-six hours in the car isn't enough to get through a sixteen-hour story if your wife keeps falling asleep.)

Anyway, this means I have spent thirteen hours in the company of and thinking about Liv Chenka. Liv is one of my favorite audio companions-- she's no Charley Pollard, but she's up there-- and I think she exemplifies a certain type of companion I like.

I reckon there are fundamentally two types of Doctor Who companions (you will shortly think of an exception to this, but let's go with it for now). The first is the companion whose life is empty and pointless until the Doctor comes along. The major archetype for this on screen is Rose; it's what "Rose" is all about. If she didn't meet the Doctor, literally nothing would ever happen to her. Other examples of this type include Donna, Bill, Jo Grant, Tegan, Ben and Polly, Izzy, and Helen. These companions need the Doctor, not just to give themselves something to do, but to define who they are as people. What kind of person would Rose even be without the Doctor? Not one who takes a stand. Would Jo have become a social crusader without his influence? Doubtful. They can live full lives after meeting the Doctor, but not before.

The other type is the companion who exists as a fully fledged person without him, having adventures on their own. For me, the archetype of this is Bernice Summerfield, from the novels and audios. I'm currently listening to the audiobook of Human Nature, and one thing that strikes me is how fully-formed Benny is. She had a life and purpose and voice before she met the Doctor; the Doctor just helps her access these things better. Other example of this include Sara Kingdom, Sarah Jane, Harry Sullivan, Romana, Klein, Captain Aristedes, and of course the original companions, Ian and Barbara. I say "adventures," but that should be broadly construed. Benny may have been doing space archaeology and Sara space policing, but Harry, Ian, and Barbara's "adventures" before the Doctor were much more mundane, doing medicine and marking. But the story doesn't position this pre-Doctor life as empty.

Ian and Barbara especially feel like real people who happened to meet the Doctor rather than people who only became real by meeting him.

Though many of my favorite companions come from the first list, I have a soft spot for solidly executed examples of the second type. They can add a level of deepness and complexity to their stories, in that they have more of an existence than to reflect and refract the ideas and desires of the Doctor.

Liv fits into this pattern quite well, partially thanks to the way she's introduced. When we first meet Liv in Robophobia, she's already an experienced medical technician on a long-haul space freighter. I don't think Liv's age is ever given, but Nicola Walker was about forty when the story was recorded. Liv doesn't join the Doctor in that story, and by the time we next hear from her in Dark Eyes: The Traitor, she's been trapped on a planet under Dalek occupation and ended up in the awkward position of being supported by the Daleks while doing medical relief work. She still doesn't join the Doctor at that point, but (as we learn in Dark Eyes: Time's Horizon), she evacuates from the planet in a cargo ship and her metabolism is fatally damaged by radiation. As a result, she enlists on a long-range deep-sleep exploration mission to the edge of the universe. And then she meets the Doctor again and finally begins traveling with him.

Of course, backstory isn't character, but all of this does inform Liv's characterization, most notably in Doom Coalition: Ship in a Bottle, where we see that Liv has been through so much shit and still come out okay that there's no way she'll ever give up hope ever again. The Doctor and Helen both lose hope in that adventure, but having lost hope once before and run away from the entire universe and still ended up okay, Liv's faith is now unshakeable.

Aside from all that backstory, though, Liv still feels real. She's a person trying to do her best in an uncaring universe that muddles through by using sarcasm to limit her engagement with earnest emotion. But deep beneath it all she really does care. That could be cliché, of course, but Nicola Walker elevates every bit of material she is given, with the amazing subtlety of her voice. You just don't feel Liv's desperation and sadness in (say) Doom Coalition: Absent Friends, you feel that Liv is desperately trying to stop you from feeling her desperation and sadness. Now that's acting. (On the CD extras to one of the Doom Coalition sets, I forget which, Walker says that Liv is like a duck: calm on the surface, but paddling furiously underneath.)

Liv also comes across as deeply competent in a way that few Doctor Who companions do, I think because she's often entrusted with her own life during her travels with the Doctor, even. Like I said, it's not until her third story that she really becomes a companion, but even then, she keeps getting dropped off on her own throughout the Dark Eyes saga. In the story after Time's Horizon, Eyes of the Master, the Doctor ends up leaving her on her own in the 1970s with Molly while he goes into space to pit the Daleks against the Eminence. She's there for a couple months, I think, during which she even has her own adventure without him (Short Trips: The Wood beyond the World).

Liv Chenka, trapped in nothingness.
art by Johannes VIII

When we next catch up to her in Dark Eyes: The Reviled, she's working on her own as a medic on a planet on the fringes of the Eminence War, laying the groundwork for the Doctor's ongoing efforts. She's clearly been there some time; then in the next story, Masterplan, her and the Doctor are separated, and then in Rule of the Eminence, the Master has been using her as a physician for months while he rules the Earth. So her early travel with the Doctor are in fact characterized by a lack of travelling, by the fact that she stays in the same place for long periods of time, and she gets things done. She keeps her head down and does her job. By the end of Dark Eyes, she's scarcely done the proper companion thing at all. (No wonder that Doom Coalition  established that she travelled with the Doctor for years between the two sagas, to give Liv time to actually become a "proper" companion.)

And that's the key to making a Doctor Who companion feel real. One of the keys, anyway, for companions of the second type. So many companions have reasons to travel with the Doctor, but Liv Chenka has a reason and purpose to not travel. She has a reality she comes from, and carries with her in all her stories.

Doctor Who at Christmas: The Sleep of Reason

Mass market paperback, 281 pages
Published 2004
Acquired and read December 2016

Doctor Who: The Sleep of Reason
by Martin Day

My tradition for the last six years has been to read a Doctor Who book set at Christmas around Christmastime... the last three years have seen me scraping the bottom of the barrel, with Nightshade and K9 and Company, two books set at Christmastime, but otherwise no real Christmassy content. The Sleep of Reason's connection to the season is even more tenuous, as there are just a few chapters set on 24 and 25 December 1903.

The book starts out great: it's set in a psychiatric hospital, with parallel narratives in 1903 and 2003, and there's a very compellingly and disturbingly written history of a teenage girl practicing self-harm. Not the kind of thing you'd see in a Doctor Who novel post-"Rose," and not the kind of thing I associate with Christmas, but it sets the stage. The Doctor is suitably mysterious in this one, with lots of good lines. Things are set up well, with mysterious goings on at the hospital in both time zones...

...and set up is basically all that ever happens. On page 203 out of 281, the Doctor finally figures out what's going on... and then we're told that he, "far from proposing any plan of action, stated that he was still at the information-gathering stage." C'mon, Martin Day, kick this plot into gear sometime! As you might guess, things wrap up a bit too easily, and plus it turns out that everything's the fault of that overused Doctor Who standby, aliens who feed on negative emotion. A promising beginning, and some good touches here and there, and a nice companion-of-the-month, but a disappointing novel on the whole.

Thankfully, Penguin released a book of Christmas-themed Doctor Who short stories this year, so next year's read-- probably the last-- will be one with a direct connection to the season.

Next Week: Less a volume 3 and more a volume 0... or maybe even a volume i, since it's all pretty tangential to the main event. Still, it's more The Transformers: All Hail Megatron!