I continue to make my way slowly through the Virgin Doctor Who 'New Adventures' books from the early-mid 1990s. I only read about a dozen of them back in the day - something of a random selection that I picked up or borrowed. I was probably the right age for them at the time too, being a late teenager when Virgin started publishing them. Some of them were great, but not enough (I felt at the time) and they didn't reflect the TV programme I'd grown to love, so I thought. When Seasons 25 & 26 had raised the bar considerably in terms of TV Who it's surprising now when I look back on it all to see how quickly in print form I fell out of love with the scheming 7th Doctor and particularly Ace. They still frustrate me at times now too, but I'm mature or patient enough to bear with them and see where the books are going. Conflict alone does not make good drama - particularly when it involves empowered adults who are able to make choices and decisions that could end that conflict. I think that's when I get most frustrated with Ace...
Anyway...
Recently I've completed the story arc from Jim Mortimore's Blood Heat to Paul Cornell's No Future. It's embodies considerable conflict but it's probably the most satisfactory of the arcs so far.
The Timewyrm books were, no doubt, slightly hampered by being the first of the range and needing to bring the readers in without being too far off the mark from the recent Target novelisations. So they're considerably shorter than later efforts. John Peel's Genesys is a competent piece without being challenging. Terrance Dicks' Exodus is wonderful - a great read and a great story. Nigel Robinson's Apocalypse, on the other hand, is simply dreadful, 200 pages of woefulness and a firm contender for the worst book of the range. The only thing that may save it is that it's so short. Paul Cornell's Revelation I despised at the time, and it put me off the range completely at a very early stage. I found it to be unrecognisable babble. I wasn't in to high concept science fiction so this was just total nonsense to me. Thank God for second opinions. This time around I adored it!
Because of my adverse reaction to Timewyrm: Revelation I didn't go anywhere near the Cat's Cradle trilogy. Looking back now I'm glad. I think Marc Platt's Time's Crucible, deconstructing the TARDIS in a similar way to how the Doctor had been deconstructed in Paul Cornell's book, would have been too much for me to cope with. It was a tough read now. But there's a clear message that these books aren't just telling stories, they're exploring concepts and relationships as well. Andrew Cartmel's Warhead I also struggled with. I didn't recognise his versions of the Doctor or Ace and I didn't get where the reader's sympathies are supposed to be. That said, I'd happily go back and read it again rather than just dismiss it out of hand. Online reviews had led me to believe that Andrew Hunt's Witch Mark was brilliant, the true start of the 'New Adventures'. Hmmm. Not so for this reader. I have issues with stories that take the Doctor Who world into faerie-type lands where there's 'magic' and other powers that don't relate to 'our' world. I didn't enjoy this or David McIntee's Autumn Mist in the BBC Eighth Doctor range. Paul Cornell's EDA Shadows of Avalon is another tricky one, and Torchwood did it on TV in Small Worlds in season one. But I'm aware that this is an issue of personal taste and comfort and I can't use it as a basis to criticise competent writers, so I won't. They're well-written and intelligent books, I just don't like the concepts.
Filled with hope from all the positivity surrounding Mark Gatiss' Nightshade this is another one that I bought at the time. This is also another one that really disappointed me at the time, but goodness only knows why because I couldn't put it down this time! A wonderful addition to the range. I think what I may have disliked first time around was the programme being meta-textual, with Nightshade clearly being Doctor Who itself. I think all that does is highlight inadequacies in myself from the time...
Paul Cornell's second outing is another one that I will have to go back and visit again in the future. Love and War never quite did it for me in the way that I expected it would. Nightshade ends on such a good note, almost a cliffhanger, that it's disappointing not to find Love and War continuing directly from there. I was, however, glad to see Ace leave at the end even if I wasn't entirely convinced why Bernice Summerfield would want to go off with the Doctor.
I can see what Ben Aaronovitch was trying to do with Transit, but I still didn't like it! It's an attempt to write a Doctor Who cyberpunk novel, in the style of William Gibson and the Neuromancer stories. My biggest frustration with it was that Benny has so little to do having only just joined the Doctor. Wham, she's out at the beginning and then back at the end. It's a book that assumes that it'll be read a few times, I believe, and that readers will get more out of it with subsequent readings as they know where it's going and understand what's going on. Maybe. Trouble is, it needs to make you want to re-read it and Transit doesn't. It also, I think, assumes that only Doctor Who fans are buying the NAs, not general sci-fi readers. This is probably true, but still a dangerous conceit in my view.
I seem to have read an awful lot of Gareth Roberts books of late. The Highest Science was his first and was also the first of his old ones that I picked up. It's refreshing to get to know Benny a bit more at last, and the slightly humorous, slightly rubbishy but still dangerous Chelonians. I feel that this novel is trying a bit too hard and consequently doesn't really impress as much as it should. One only has to pick up any of his 'Missing Adventures' to see Roberts in full, confident flow and they're much better for it.
The Pit. Oh dear. Online reviews had led me to expect little from this book and on this occasion they were right. I had to have a break from the NAs after this dreadful effort from Neil Penswick. Another strong contender for worst of the range. It had no spark, no energy, just dull prose - possibly inflated with its own sense of (misguided) self-importance.
Deceit finds range editor Peter Darvill-Evans publishing a belated manifesto for the NAs and laying down some ground rules. Presumably it had taken publication of a dozen or so titles for them to decide on this manifesto. It's a good, solid sci-fi read and shows that, at a basic level, the range is sturdy and reliable. Ace is back, with less of the annoying Professors and 'bog off bilge-breaths' of yester-tales, but still with issues - oh joy, oh rapture. Now she's a sexy killer and weapons expert in figure-hugging body armour. She still doesn't trust the Doctor and she clearly doesn't like Benny very much, but she decides to stay with them anyway. I don't think this can be truly reconciled from any of their perspectives - they all have to need each other somehow, and we need to know that - so we have to take it as a given. I just hope the range doesn't force too many of these on us.
I think 'sturdy' and 'solid' are the only way I can describe the next few books too. Lucifer Rising, White Darkness and Shadowmind were all enjoyable reads but with nothing outstanding in my view. This is good for the range, if not necessarily for the individual authors who need to find that something 'extra' to take their work above the reliable base level set so far.
Birthright was another book I picked up at the time, because I bought Iceberg (thanks to the lure of the Cybermen!) and I remember as I started reading Iceberg it became obvious I should read Birthright first, since they're connected. Unlike the others I revisited, I didn't enjoy Birthright as much this time - but I can't explain why. It's one that I've read several times over the years and always enjoyed before. Nigel Robinson has certainly made a better hash of it than he did with Timewyrm: Apocalypse, and it's very atmospheric in places if still a little short and spartan at times. This may have to go down as a Gambrell mystery...
And while Benny and Ace are off 'bonding' on a distant world the Doctor has gone off with another bit of the TARDIS to make a new friend and battle some frozen Cybermen left over from The Tenth Planet. David Banks was very much Mr Cyber at the time and Iceberg is a pretty decent read in my opinion, taking it above the level of its immediate predecessors. Based on this I'd like to know why Banks didn't write any further books for the range.
This brings me to the next 'story arc', which thankfully didn't have an umbrella title so it feels less formal. The resolution of this arc has been something of a long-standing mystery to me, since I picked up Blood Heat and The Dimension Riders cheap in a charity shop years ago, and was leant The Left-Handed Hummingbird but didn't get to grips with the others until recently!
Blood Heat: this is great. Sometimes I think it's just ticking boxes - like the inclusion of Jo Grant, but in the main it's a cracking read and it's a tribute to Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks that the Silurians and Sea Devils have been so successfully fleshed out in other fiction from the basic characters and civilisation they laid down in the early 1970s.
The Dimension Riders feels at times like Shada from an Oxford perspective but again it's a great book and the cover is particularly brilliant. This is another title I've enjoyed each time I've re-read it.
Kate Orman is one of those NA authors that posterity has already taught us we must love. The Left-Handed Hummingbird is still the only one of her NAs that I've read, although I've read all her (and Jon Blum's) EDAs. There's a kind of a theme here, but the first time I read this about 5 or 6 years ago I struggled with it and really couldn't see what the fuss was about. This time I adored it and zipped through it like nobody's business - not always pronouncing each syllable of the Aztec names to myself, I will admit! Again, I can't explain why I enjoyed it the second time around. Maybe it is purely a familiarity thing?
Steve Lyons was up next. Recent experiences with Steve's work had not been favourable: The Space Age was a weak addition to the EDAs (a short story at best, stretched to novel length) and his 6th Doctor & Grant MAs Time of Your Life and Killing Ground were pretty awful. Conundrum was his first Who novel and is thankfully much better. It's full of energy and life, and plays with the reader as an active character which is a refreshing change considering how introspective most of the NAs have been up to this point. But that's Lyons using the print medium as a key aspect of his story, not just as the means to tell his story. What the reader comes to question after a while, though, is - to whom is the 'author' writing this? Who is the story for? This is a textual intrigue that leads the reader into the final chapter of the arc...
Paul Cornell is back for a third stab at the NAs with No Future to close this arc, so expect emotion, depth, drama and conflict. That's pretty much what we do get. What we also get is an apparent total breakdown in the relationship between Ace and the Doctor and the return of the Meddling Monk - now given a proper name, Mortimus. This is another excellent book and the bar has clearly been raised from Iceberg onwards so the range authors will have to work hard to maintain this quality if excellent is to remain the base standard.
There were times during much of this story arc where I was questionning why Benny and Ace would stay with the Doctor if they both hated him (and each other) so much. The issue gets raised, but never concluded and the more it arises the less of an impact it has if nothing results from it. It's interesting that my allegiance all the time was with the Doctor - it's him I relate to and sympathise with, not the companions. Their emotional responses and issues were often difficult to rationalise with the lives they'd chosen to live. That's why simply having 'conflict' in these books doesn't always provide drama or make them challenging and powerful reads - the conflict has to go somewhere, even if it's away, and be resolved otherwise it becomes dull and predictable or just plain annoying as the bickering between the 6th Doctor and Peri did on TV in Season 22.
It was rewarding, then, to find that Cornell, even though writing a third-person narrative, had deliberately not allowed the reader access to all of Ace and the Doctor's thoughts or faithfully reported all the goings on and all that was said, so it is a pleasant surprise at the end when it all works out and everyone seems to be happy and friends again. Nice coup Mr Unreliable Narrator!
It's even more rewarding, and refreshing, to begin Gareth Roberts' Tragedy Day with the TARDIS crew still smiling and friends, as they should be if they're adventuring together. It comes like a breath of fresh air, as if a terrible weight has been lifted from the NAs. These changes are necessary to give the range life and keep it fresh - too much of the same month on month and it becomes banal and unbelieveable. Drama isn't built out of conflict, it's the mixture of light, darkness and shade. Gareth Roberts gives us a little bit of all of these in his second NA, but to be honest I think there's a little too much in the mix in this book. It's not a bad book - and better than The Highest Science - but it's not quite at the same level as the previous half dozen NAs. He writes for the regulars very well, but I was expecting an additional twist towards the end that never came and the mix of humour and drama never quite felt comfortable - unlike in his MAs and his new series scripts where it has worked very well.
And that's as far as I've got so far. Next up is Gary Russell's Legacy. Looks like I'm off back to Peladon for a bit then...
No comments:
Post a Comment