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

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

Doctor Who: Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell

Doctor Who: Big Gang Generation
by Gary Russell

My journey through Doctor Who novels featuring the seventh and eighth Doctors and Bernice Summerfield brings me to this one, which has Benny meeting up with the twelfth Doctor. For the Doctor, it's part of a set of loosely-linked novels called The Glamour Chronicles, where the Doctor keeps bumping into an Ancient technology called the Glamour. For Benny, it takes place following on from the Big Finish box sets set on Legion, seemingly after Missing Persons, and it features her main cast from those stories alongside her: Ruth, Jack, and her son Peter.

 

Published: 2015
Acquired: January 2023
Read: February 2023

This was sort of a reread for me: I actually already listened to it on audio as part of my journey through Bernice stories on audio. When I heard it, I thought it was terrible. Aimless, confusing, overlong, unfunny, belabored. Not even Lisa Bowerman as reader could save it.

As a book, it was better, mostly I suspect because instead of having to suffer through every single word of Gary Russell's excruciating dull prose, I could speed read my way through it. So even though the fact that there are repeated, inexplicable digressions about the twelfth Doctor's relationship with the obscure New Adventures character Keri Pakhar, of all people, I could just jump over them.

 

Keri is not the only annoying use of continuity. It also has the Doctor claiming to Benny that every time he goes to France, he thinks of Guy de Carnac. Seriously? Gary Russell wants me to believe that when David Tennant was snogging Madame de Pompadour, he was thinking, "oh i'm so sad about a one-off character from a mediocre david mcintee NA who died centuries and centuries of years ago in my personal timeline." Go ahead, pull the other one. On top of that, there's a cheeky reference to the NA version of Human Nature, where the Doctor claims he went to "extraordinary lengths" to understand Benny's sorrow over the death of Guy. This is a fundamental misunderstanding and misreading of the events of Human Nature. Benny raises this as a theory on p. 116 of Human Nature, but on p. 202, the Doctor gives his actual reason, which has nothing to do with freaking Guy de Carnac, c'mon.

On top of this, there's an excruciatingly out of character moment where the Doctor and Benny console each other that bad things happen because of fate so oh well, which I think is contradictory to the entire ethos of the programme and of the characters.

The plot doesn't make a lot of sense. It was never clear to me why the Doctor, Benny, and company pretend to be a gang of con artists in order to fool an actual gang of con artists; I don't know what anyone would have done different had they actually been aboveboard about their intentions. Seriously, what was the point of all that?

Even by Doctor Who standards, Gary Russell has little grasp on science. We're told that the planet Legion doesn't orbit a sun... which would surely make it too cold to live on. However, we're also told it has a light side and a dark side; the light side faces the rest of the galaxy. Gary Russell has apparently never looked at the sky and realized the light of distant stars is actually not that light. But we're also told it spins very slowly. Well, if it does rotate, even if slowly, how can you do something like build a city in the middle of the light side?

Continuity-wise, it seems to follow on from the box set Missing Persons. I say "seem to" because given Gary Russell wrote this novel and produced those box sets, the details don't really line up. Specifically, Jack and Ruth are engaged to be married here... whereas there was a not a single hint of any kind of attraction at all in any of the preceding box sets. Like, where did this even come from? Why do this? Bizarre. Only Gary Russell could write a book that has detailed references to novels from over two decades prior but messed up continuity with something he wrote himself five years ago. Similarly weirdly, there's a bit where the Doctor thinks of his past companions, and it's only ones from tv and audio. Like, Gary, I know you know the books "count" because freaking Keri Pakhar is in this book! Are you telling me that Samson and Gemma really loom larger in the Doctor's mind than Fitz?

 

I was vaguely amused by how the story contorts to avoid mentioning Irving Braxiatel, who was a member of Benny's Legion-era supporting cast, but who could wreck the entire premise of post-2005 Doctor Who if he turned up. The Doctor's not quite the "last of the Time Lords" anymore by the Peter Capaldi era, but the Doctor still certainly shouldn't be bumping into random Time Lords. Braxiatel is only referred to as the owner of the White Rabbit; at one point Benny is probably about to say "your brother" to the Doctor but gets cut off. (Incidentally, the book also makes it difficult to date volume one The New Adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield; Benny says that its events were the last time she saw the Doctor, placing the story sometime between her appearance in The Company of Friends and here.)

So anyway, pretty bad but you can read the whole thing in about a day, because basically nothing that happens matters.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: The Glamour Chronicles: Royal Blood

Dr Who and the King's Dragon

Doctor Who: The King's Dragon
by Una McCormack

Hardcover, 245 pages. Published 2010.  Acquired November 2010.  Read November 2011.

I followed the ninth Doctor adventures pretty faithfully (easy to do with six books), but lost interest in the novels based on the new series three books into the tenth Doctor's adventures.  (Easy to do with crap like The Stone Rose and The Resurrection Casket.)  Since then, I've picked them up only occasionally, and The King's Dragon is the first eleventh Doctor adventure I've had cause to read.

I rather liked it.  The Doctor, Amy, and Rory land on a medieval alien planet, which is supposed to be friendly and democratic, but turns out to be rude and monarchical.  So, investigations begin and trouble ensues.  Where The King's Dragon particularly shines is its characterization; all three characters sound perfectly like their television counterparts.  Indeed, I wish the characters had been written this well on television.  The novel takes place during Series 5, between "The Vampires of Venice" and "The Hungry Earth," and it fits perfectly, especially in its depiction of Amy and Rory's relationship, which is still kinda uncertain as Rory tries to figure out how he relates to Amy with this Doctor fellow around.

Plus, Una McCormack's writing sparkles as it always does, the power of the enamour is suitably creepy, it has a nice emphasis on the storytelling act, and there are lots of good jokes and witty lines.  The good sort of standalone Doctor Who adventure, and thus the best sort in general.