The Crooked World

You know what crossover you never knew you needed? Doctor Who with Saturday morning cartoon land. Scooby Doo, Looney Toons, all those classics… a world where gravity is subjective (you only fall when you notice you’re off the ground), bombs and shotguns only beat you up temporarily, and television screens can be reached or climbed through. What happens when ordinary mortals like the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji show up? It turns out that it’s dangerous not only for these three (one of whom nearly dies from a shotgun blast in chapter 1), but it’s also dramatically impactful for the denizens of the Crooked World itself. For where they previously lived their carefree repetitive meaningless lives without question, they now discovered free will, the possibility of living differently, and (as the book progresses) actual mortality.

In some ways this is a horrifying story, a dramatic loss of innocence for a ridiculously violent-yet-harmless society, a coming-of-age tale in which actual cartoons come of age. In other ways it’s a very funny story, and a delightful romp through one of the zaniest “what if’s” Doctor Who lore has ever explored. And because pretty much every character in the book is an obvious copy of a famous cartoon character (or at least an obvious trope), the author is able to throw lots and lots of characters at us with ease. You don’t have to be introduced to the policeman Boss Dogg and his plucky sidekick nephew, or Streaky Bacon the pig who has a farm and a shotgun and is trying to shoot that watchamacallit running through his crops. If you’ve seen even just a couple clips of Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner through the desert, you know how the Crooked World works. It’s a cheap trick, in terms of writing, I suppose, but it’s a unique cheap trick, so the experience of reading this book is very enjoyable and clever and fun, and not, well, cheap.

In terms of the in-universe explanation for why the Crooked World is the way it is, this book gives a pretty rushed explanation at the end. Only one character in the world (eventually, at first) remembers what happened to make the Crooked World what it is, and Anji in particular spent a lot of time trying to figure it out on her own. But in the end we found out that the psychic impression came from a little girl in an escape pod. Thus this book is a sort of combination of The Space Age and Grimm Reality, the latter actually being referenced by Anji on more than one occasion for comparison.

Fitz remains protective of the Doctor, who still has one heart and is more mortal as a result, though is no longer reeling from the shock and loss. Anji is still thinking about going home, though she also thinks of the TARDIS as home, and I noticed she’s been taking refuge there more often in this and the previous book. Perhaps the series is beginning to wind up toward her departure? I know she leaves at some point, but I don’t know exactly when. Onward, I suppose!

The Book of the Still

Let’s be honest, this is one of the trippier stories in the 8th Doctor Adventures range of novels. The Book of the Still is the 56th novel in the series, and is the author’s (Paul Ebb’s) only contribution to the range. His primary Doctor Who work has been with BBV.

The titular book is a mysterious artifact in which stranded time travelers can write their name and location and be assured of rescue. It’s a neat idea, and certainly worth exploration, but the majority of the book deals with the story of people trying to steal it. The “deadly chase” mentioned in the description on the back cover, disappointingly, begins halfway through the book, making the action on Lebenswelt feel overly drawn out as the reader anticipates the flight into space.

We are treated to two intriguing characters – Carmodi, who’s addicted to artron energy and pays to have Fitz fall in love with her for a while so she can get high on him, and Rhian, a researcher in time travel who’s portrayed as (or at least viewed by Anji as) Velma from Scooby Doo. Thankfully, their motives and personalities are more interesting and complex than initially suggested, which makes up for the fact that Anji feels a bit sidelined at times and Fitz is not himself for most of the novel. But the star of the book’s attention is The Unnoticed, a truly grotesque alien race with inside-out stomachs and a paradox-ridden history. Their link to the Book of the Still was explained so briefly that I don’t remember what it was anymore, but the sheer alien-ness of their physique and their extreme commitment to being unnoticed by time-sensitives and the surprise twist reveal of their true origins makes for a worthy foe for the Doctor and friends.

If I’d had a chance to read more of this book in a shorter amount of time perhaps I’d have had an easier time following it, but I’m sorry to say this was one of the more confusing ones that’s difficult to follow unless you keep careful track of things. It’s trippy with its mind games and the pace of events can be quite fast in parts.

Trading Futures

Trading Futures was a far more interesting and engaging book than I expected. I’m not sure what the negativity was in my subconscious… the idea of the TARDIS team going to the relatively-near future (late 21st century) doesn’t appeal to me, as near-future stories always date themselves pretty quickly. Plus, I’d set this book aside in order to read the two Time Lord Victorious novels, so it was sitting on my bedside table for quite a while before I finally picked it up.

But when I did… I devoured this book.

Trading Futures is a spy/action science-fiction adventure in a similar vein as Spyfall and Endgame, two stories I also enjoyed quite a bit. The premise, hinted on the back of the book, is that someone is offering to sell a time machine to the highest bidder in a world that is on the brink of World War… Four, apparently, between the Euro Zone (EZ) and the USA. And, surprise or not, it’s not the Doctor who’s the mysterious time traveler, but some guy named Baskerville.

Just like a James Bond movie, this book opens with the Doctor on a cool spy mission, too: parachuting onto a stealth ship, pushing a soldier overboard, ejecting the pilot, and activating the self-destruct with a rubber ball, all to steal a briefcase from Cosgrove (a British spy chief). He later returns the briefcase, and quickly gets involved in the investigation of the time machine. And it turns out everyone is after this time machine: the Doctor & company, two Time Agents from the future who are working for Sabbath, the EZ, the US, and a race of bumbling rhino-like aliens who are basically an even-less-competent version of the Judoon called the Onihr (because that’s how you spell rhino backwards). Representing the EZ is Cosgrove (though he’s more about protecting what’s left of British interests), and representing the US is Malady Chang, and, for a nice call-back, the President of the USA is now Felix Mather, who was an agent back in Father Time. Through this core group of characters we experience a global-scale story of intrigue and desperation in the face of hostilities just waiting to boil over.

Fitz’s Plot

Of the TARDIS trio, Fitz is the one most sidelined and separated from everything else. He is sent to California to meet Cosgrove where the Doctor misdirected him. He is briefly beat up by the man, but escapes only to be captured by the Onihr. In a delightful twist of irony, they believe he is the Doctor and are complete inept at torturing humanoids, and so Fitz is able to playact the pain, impersonate the Doctor, and figure out how to be the hero who saves the Earth from the Onihr. In his first journey in the TARDIS, in Demontage, he attempts to do a Bond impersonation in a space casino; it’s a funny reversal that he misses out on all the spy intrigue of this story but does a Doctor impersonation instead. Aided by an extremely convenient computer pad, Fitz succeeds in destroying the alien ship, and he plays a critical role in defeating Baskerville at the end of the book.

Anji’s Plot

Anji is much greater danger throughout the book, and her precarious position keeps the reader on the edge of the seat. She and the Doctor go straight to Baskerville, impersonating the EZ delegation. When things get awkward, Anji “reveals” herself to be the American, Malady Chang, and the Doctor gets thrown out a high-rise window (presumably to his death) She then spends the rest of the book alive only because she’s an enigma to Baskerville and he values the information he thinks she has – especially once she figures out he’s not really from the future like he claims, and he figures out she’s not Malady Chang like she’d claimed. When Baskerville collects Cosgrove and President Felix Mather to talk business and sell his time machine blueprints to one of them, Anji is caught in the thick of it through to the end.

The Doctor’s Plot

After he’s thrown out a window in Athens, he is rescued by Malady Chang, who takes him prisoner. He narrowly saves his and her life, with a few civilians, from a “predicted” tidal wave that destroys Athens, and from there the two of them are running for their lives for a while from both Cosgrove’s troops and from a pair of real time travelers who (it is revealed) are working for Sabbath. Now, Sabbath is an 18th century astrologer-astronomer who developed time travel through esoteric means, mirroring the “priestly class” of Gallifreyans who eventually became the Sisterhood of Karn (a backstory from Zagreus) – we met Sabbath in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. His influence was also felt in the previous book, Anachrophobia, so it’s intriguing to see him at work once again. Indeed, this time we get more straightforward explanations of what he’s about, and the ramifications of the Time Lords being gone. Both the Sabbath’s agents and the Onihr are aware of the legendary “elementals”, of whom four remain, which we know from previous books are the Doctor, the Master, Iris, and (I assume) the one Time Lord who escaped Gallifrey’s destruction with Compassion. Anyway, the Doctor and Malady eventually use Sabbath’s Time Agents’ technology to prevent a nuclear detonation in Toronto (which would have precipitated a war immediately), and then track down Baskerville in the TARDIS.

Other character notes, and what’s next?

Fitz continues his on-and-off addiction to cigarettes. Anji tries to take advantage of time travel to edit history in order to save her boyfriend Dave from dying. And she still kind of wants (and expects) to go home eventually. The Doctor is healthy again, seemingly recovered from his heart surgery at Sabbath’s hands a while back.

It was really nice to have such rich call-backs to a few previous novels throughout this story. It helped what might have otherwise felt like a random story idea fit into the hint of a larger framework, both for Earth and for the Doctor & team. This novel series was in a slump for me, shortly after Anji joined up, but it has solidly picked up again and I continue to want to know what happens next. I have to resist looking up spoilers online… I want to be surprised by the next 15 or so books that I’ve never read before! I do know that eventually Anji does leave and another woman joins the TARDIS crew, but I’m trying not to find out ahead of time; reading these books are just too enjoyable to ‘spoil’.

So, eventually Anji will return home. And I assume Sabbath will continue to pop up from time to time and there will eventually be some sort of confrontation. It’s still not really clear to what extent he and the Doctor are supposed to be at odds. Sabbath saved the Doctor’s life in his introduction story, but he also clearly sees himself as the new Lord of Time – the Time Lords’ replacement. Is this going to be a “there can be only one!” thing, or will Sabbath just chill the heck out and stop acting like an 18th century ship’s captain? We’ll have to see, I guess.

Anachrophobia

Well… Anachrophobia was a harrowing book to read. Not because it’s a bad story, or poorly written, but because it’s so intense. This was one of the very first Doctor Who stories written by Jonathan Morris, who’d go on to be one of the more prolific writers for Big Finish, and it’s fascinating to look back at such a solid start to his Doctor Who career. Really, it’s a hefty piece of science fiction with strong scene-setting and characterization, with just a touch of larger arc-hinting thrown in for good measure. And that’s basically the recipe for an excellent Doctor Who story in my mind!

The setting is a cold and dying planet where a war has been raging for 400 years and both sides are developing time-manipulating technology. They can start time storms which slow down local time such that soldiers on the field are left frozen in stasis for centuries, or, speed up local time such that people age and decay in seconds. But they’ve also got a protective material that is Time Resistant, “chronomium”, which they use to shield vehicles and even body suits. Between these suits and the way time is explained with an experimental new time ship, the whole thing has a very “submarine” feel to it. The experimental time ship literally descends into a hole in the ground to be subjected to a time storm and it “dives” into the past. The war is being fought between the Defaulters and the Plutocrats, and the latter party hopes that this new time ship, if they can make it work, will enable them to win the war by nipping it in the bud at its beginning. Another time travel concept added to the mix is the idea that traveling backwards in time takes more energy because it’s going “uphill”, which makes sense conceptually since time as we normally experience it moves forwards – to speed it up is one thing but to slow and reverse course into the past is more disruptive to the ordinary course of reality!

Story Summary

So the 8th Doctor, Fitz, and Anji are found in a dangerous warzone and taken to a military installation, the Doctor posing as the expected “time expert.” He assists at a “dive” of their experimental ship and they all learn a little about this world and this war. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense – a war between the “Plutocratic Empire” and a colony of loan defaulters – but soon there are bigger things to worry about: anachrophobia. This is a debilitating condition that everyone whose gone on a time dive brings back. They feel sick, they lose memories, and kind of die inside. But it gets far worse as things go on: they literally turn into clock people. It makes no sense and it’s creepy as hell. One woman actually tries to kill herself as she’s succumbing to this condition, only to discover black bile (like a sort of lubricating oil) and clockwork cogs in her wrists. It’s not clear if this a disease, an alien invasion, or some freak accident. But whatever it is, it’s contagious, and the clock people are increasingly intent on making everyone become like them.

Even when the clock people aren’t in the room with you, their thematic partners are still everywhere: clocks. Every room has a ticking clock. It’s a security measure, really: by comparing clocks in different rooms and on your person, you can evaluate if local relative time is the same, and this is critically important in a conflict that utilizes Time Warfare.

So you have a base-under-siege story, with submarine-like imagery and body horror and a Doctor who just can’t figure out what’s going on here, all of which together gives you a harrowing tale to experience. It’s not as horrifying as Eater of Wasps, which was a bit more disgusting; this is bit more psychologically thrilling to balance out the horror. Fitz and Anji are carried along in this living nightmare, and recall several previous incidents nothing could be weirder than the Poodle planet, the Doctor has been noticeably weaker since his second heart was removed, Anji is still feeling shame over her lack of character judgment in the previous story.

Eventually the Doctor devises a brutal solution. The clock-people can wind time backwards about two minutes, so if they’re killed they can undo the event that destroyed them. So, the Doctor eventually figures out, a method of killing them that takes more time to work but isn’t detectable until it’s too late must be devised. And the solution is mustard gas. So Fitz and one of the surviving soldiers on the base run down to the basement to flood the installation with mustard gas, and everyone gets to watch (and we get to read) as the clock people all die horrible painful deaths, even pretending to revert to human form to beg for mercy in their dying throes, which Anji painfully (but successfully) ignores. It’s a brutally effective tactic. But the book isn’t over at that point: one of the anachrophobia patients had already been transferred out to the central colony city! He must be intercepted before he spreads the infection to the general populace!

So the last quarter (or fifth) of the story sees the Doctor, Anji, Fitz, one soldier, and an Auditor originally dispatched by the Center making the dangerous journey to try an prevent a catastrophe. And shockingly they fail. The city is full of clock people, and everything seems lost. Only then do they discover the truth about the war on this planet, the purpose of the time ship experiments, and the true identity of the auditor who’s been annoying them for over half the book.

Characters and Themes

The 8th Doctor has clearly lost some of his Time Lord-y super powers that were particularly showcased throughout the novel range. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Gallifrey was destroyed in The Ancestor Cell and he lost his memory of everything prior to that, the loss of his second heart in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street has left him further debilitated and vulnerable to ordinary sickness. The mustard gas, for example, nearly kills him in this book, and only a clever workaround of the clock creatures’ weakness and operation saves the day in the end. And, what’s worth, his “replacement”, Sabbath, is running around time and space doing his own thing, and now clearly quite capable of manipulating the Doctor and his companions. This is a major hit to the Doctor’s ego and self-assurance. It’s ironic really, the first 40-ish novels in this range slowly and gently un-write the movie’s assertion that the Doctor is half human, and then after that started making him more and more human. The universe has called the Doctor’s bluff. How this plays out for him in future novels is going to be interesting.

I mean, I was already committed to reading through this novel range anyway, but now I’m actually motivated to see what actually happens with this Doctor over the remaining 20ish books. How is he going to take this weakening of his once-great physiognomy?

Fitz and Anji, too, are shaken by the Doctor’s more vulnerable condition. Just before the end of the book they are actually prepared to accept the possibility that he really actually has died. Even Fitz, with his massive faith in the Doctor, begins to give up hope. It’s been pretty explicit in this arc with Anji around that Fitz is one of the Doctor’s most ardent believers of all time. He’s been protective of the Doctor in his amnesia, but this is another blow to the Doctor’s legendary status… I wonder how Fitz, too, will deal with this.

All this with themes of identity in light of one’s past. That’s a hard-hitting concept. That a man is the sum of his memories and decisions, the result of his past, is the Doctor’s credal insistence in this story, and the clock creatures overwrite their human hosts by enabling them to rewrite their own histories and thus paradox themselves out of existence, leaving their bodies free for the taking. The Doctor knows that even he is not immune to such a temptation! And yet (and thankfully) this book doesn’t go whole hog with that idea and tease him (and us) with the events of The Ancestor Cell in which he destroyed Gallifrey. That would be a bit too much, given Fitz’s frequent reminiscences to that event. Still, it’s in the readers’ minds, and it gives one pause for thought – how different a person is the Doctor without memory of his life before his amnesia?

Whateverso, this book is a worthy entry in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range, a solid contribution from a new-ish writer who’d go on to have a fantastic career with Doctor Who to this day, and a thought-provoking piece of science fiction action adventure that will keep your heart and mind both on the edges of their proverbial seats from start to finish. I highly recommend this one as an exemplary story of the range.

Hope

Ah, now here is a solid entry in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range. Hope is a novel steeped in the recent continuity of the novel range, yet also distinctly stand-alone in its readability. And, apart from a few quirks in the narrative voice, it is a very well-written story.

Let’s get those quirks out of the way first. There are periods – often at the start of chapters or smaller sections – of present tense narrative. It’s reminiscent of a movie or television scene where we watch the action through a specific person’s eyes briefly before cutting back to a more regular perspective. In writing it struck me as a bit awkward sometimes, though, having a present-tense narration introduce a block of regular preterite narrative.

The Scenario in General

The Doctor decides to “push” the TARDIS and see how far she can go. They end up in the very far distant future, where the universe is beginning to fade out and die. Technological advancement is achieved largely by looking backwards and discovering old buried relics, and even time travel is a memory of the old days. It’s very much like the situation in the 10th Doctor story Utopia. The 8th Doctor, Fitz, and Anji find themselves on a planet called Endpoint, covered in acid seas, enveloped in smog, and inhabited by small clusters of survivors hanging on for dear life. It’s a bleak world, but the human spirit hangs in there (as evidenced by the name of the city on stilts, Hope). But crime and death are blithely everyday realities, and the Doctor is unusually uninterested in hanging around. But they have to find someone with power and resources because the TARDIS has fallen through the thin ice into the acid sea. Their only hope in retrieving it is to earn the favor of Silver, the local cyborg casino owner who is the most powerful businessman on the planet and its de facto governor by economic domination.

The task that the Doctor is set to is to investigate a string of nasty murders that Silver hasn’t managed to solve or prevent. It’s right up the Doctor’s alley, so I was a bit surprised at how reluctant he was to accept this job. Regardless, this mission brings the Doctor eventually to a hidden bunker under the sea where some purebred (read: inbred) humans survive, conducting experiments on the evolved “mutant” half-breeds surviving on the surface. (Again, these are attitudes that we can see also from the likes of Lady Cassandra in series 1 & 2 of New Who, and the “New Earth” setting in general.)

Value judgments are made, promises are kept (and twisted), new futures are envisioned, and the entire planet of Endpoint is transformed in more ways than one.

Oh, and a very neat version of the Cyberman concept (and even the Cyberium from Ascension of the Cybermen) makes an appearance near the end of the book. It’s almost as if the author wanted to tell a Cybermen story but didn’t have the rights to use them.

Hope, thematically

The book’s title is “Hope,” and Hope is the name of the city where the majority of the book takes place. Life on Endpoint seems pretty hopeless, Silver’s economic hegemony is the people’s only real hope for stability. The discovery of the human bunker beneath the sea provides hope for the future of genetic humanity, the renewal of the environment of Endpoint, as well as the advancement of Silver’s ambitions to previously-impossible horizons.

The Doctor, too, is looking for hope in this story. He recently lost one of his hearts (and with it, much of his Gallifreyan physical advantage that we’ve come to know and love) and is now feeling much more vulnerable, human, and mortal. His lordliness has been taken down a notch, and so he takes out that insecurity on the TARDIS, pushing her as far into the future as she dares, to see how strong she is, in the midst of his newly-appointed weakness. Proving the TARDIS’ prowess at full strength, as well as challenging his own abilities in a difficult situation, proves I think a therapeutic experience for the Doctor.

Anji, however, is the main star of the subject of hope. So much so that Fitz is almost written out of the last quarter of the book with next to nothing to do! The novel begins and ends with Anji’s memories of Dave, her beloved boyfriend who died at the beginning of her arc. Her sense of survivor’s guilt has cropped up from time to time through most of the past several books, sometimes heavy and sometimes barely registering – just as real grief has its ups and downs on the psyche. Perhaps most notably is her wrestling with the fact that on one hand she honestly loved him for who he was, yet on the other hand she was on the verge of splitting up with him because she was not ready to pin it down to marriage.

Her survivor’s guilt comes back with a vengeance in this story as she learns that genetic copying and fast-growing clones is a technology that’s available here. She has Dave’s first gray hair from a while back, and decides she wants him cloned so a “Dave II” can live out a new life somewhere and not meet a pointless unfair early death like her Dave did. This plays out through the drama of the story as Silver delivers some of his more dastardly plans in the wake of this project. Anji betrays the Doctor’s trust by scanning the TARDIS so Silver can learn from it, and has her own hopes raised and manipulated and dashed. There have been instances of companions betraying the Doctor’s trust in the past, and this was one was pretty reasonable and well-handled both in setup and in resolution. Even in terms of character development, this made sense for Anji, who had been somewhat suspicious of the Doctor for quite a while.

Some Rushed Elements

My main disappointments with this novel are in the rushed handling of certain bits. The closing action in the last two or three chapters was extremely fast, Fitz had nothing to do at that point. One of the main characters, Miraso (Silver’s second-in-command) never got a final farewell indicating what she’s going to do in Silver’s absence. Not that a story needs to have an epilogue for everyone, but we spent so much time getting to know her that it’s a shame we don’t get a “now what” moment for her. Similarly, we had a whole chapter in the middle of the book where the reader (but nobody in the narrative) learns about Silver’s true origins, and how he came to be a cyborg, and why he left the year 3006. That was cool, especially getting to know his tenderness for his mother (which didn’t fall into the cliche of him accidentally killing her, or dumping her when he was no longer human enough to care), so it was a bummer that we never got any follow-up for that in Silver’s plans or goals or desires.

Conclusion

I really appreciate a good Doctor Who book that is well-rooted in the established continuity, at least of the range that it’s in, and yet use that continuity in a way that you don’t have to have read those other stories to understand what’s going on. Hope is one of those. It’s a quality self-contained story with solid science fiction elements and a well-painted setting. I feel as though much of the range since Escape Velocity has been barely average, either having interesting ideas or an interesting setting but rarely both. The previous two were good, but also pretty unique in style which would make them much less enjoyable if they weren’t rarities. Hope comes into the line of 8th Doctor novels that is an excellent representative for the calibre of the range which anyone can come in and understand and enjoy without needing to invest in half the range to understand. And after 50 books in the range, that’s saying something.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Sometimes I forget just how zany the early Paul Magrs stories can be. The 100th Doctor Who novel from BBC Books, or 52nd in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range, is entitled Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and after a serious and (literally for the Doctor) heart-wrenching story in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street this comes off as a massively contrasting style of comic relief.

First of all, it has poodles with hands.

Secondly it features the Smudglings (not the Inklings) with an idealistic man named Cleavis (not Clives Staples Lewis) who’s writing a children’s book about evacuees in the countryside who travel to strange magical realms in a double-decker bus (not a wardrobe), and a more serious man named Reginald Tyler (not J. R. R. Tolkein) writing a massive work of fantasy with an even larger appendix for the world about which he’s writing entitled The True History of Planets (not the Lord of the Rings). Someone is hijacking history, however, by changing the book so it’s about the political machinations of sentient poodles on Dogworld, and by ensuring that its movie version will be made in the early 21st century and broadcast by the BBC so that the poodles on Dogworld will intercept it and start a revolution against the Emperor when the True History of their Planet is revealed.

Yup.

Now, for context, this author’s previous entry in the EDA novel range seriously lampooned Star Trek, and at the time of this book’s release Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was part-way through and incredibly famous and popular. It was the perfect time to write a parody. And with parody, of course, comes the in-universe Queen of Parody herself, Iris Wildthyme, undercover as Brenda Soobie (not Shirley Bassey). Fitz recognizes her from their last meeting, and Iris is (understandably) a little heart-broken that the Doctor doesn’t remember her. Their interactions is very much like how River Song would come to interact with the Doctor – with that touch of sadness that she can’t fully express her love for the Doctor.

Just when I was all impressed with how another story managed a three-at-once plot in three different time zones for the 8th Doctor and his two companions, I came to read this book which also does that for a short time. The Doctor is investigating the interference in Reg Tyler’s history in 1942, Fitz is investigating Brenda Soobie’s musical involvement in the yet-to-be-made movie project in 1960, and Anji is investigating the special effects man for the movie in 1978. All three of them are accompanied by other characters who they pick up early in the story, one of whom goes on to travel with Iris at the end, and all three of them run into the same villain who has been flitting about through his own timeline making the whole Dogworld conspiracy possible.

For all its silliness, the story does make sense (with only one or two unexplained plot points) and does resolve into a more coherent drama than it initially presents itself to be. So it’s not zany for the sake of zaniness, it’s telling a story that just happens to have a lot of zany elements and isn’t afraid to own it.

That may not be your cup of tea, it honestly isn’t always mine, but I think this one works quite well in its context. Plus, with the previous book’s revelation that there are only four Time Lords left in the universe, it was especially touching to follow that up immediately with the Doctor meeting another survivor of his genocide. The Doctor, the Master, Iris, and one other… who might it be? Probably the technitian, Nivet, who ran off with Compassion at the end of The Ancestor Cell.

Anyway, if you like the 8th Doctor books, this is a good one to include in your perusal of the series. If you’re looking for a one-off sampling, though, I probably would not recommend it for that purpose.

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street

I guess I was one of those people who really liked Interference, and was sad to see that Lawrence Miles didn’t have much more of a presence in the Doctor Who canon thereafter. So I was looking forward to his only other book in the Eighth Doctor range thereafter, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, and I was not disappointed.

This book reads like a documentary or some other sort of non-fiction account of a mysterious set of events 200 years in the past. This is something I’ve enjoyed about the EDA range – every now and then you come across a book with a non-standard narrative style which really changes things up and gives a fresh take on familiar territory. It took me a short time to get the hang of this book’s style, but once I did, I really enjoyed it.

In line with an historical docu-drama (albeit in book form) there are elements of the “end” of the story that are given away early one, such as the funeral of Scarlette and the wedding of the Doctor. This doesn’t necessarily spoil the end of the book however. Rather, it gives the reader teases of what the end of the story will look like, but leaves enough questions unanswered that you just want all the more to keep reading to see how it all fits together.

A prominent feature of this book is its use of supernatural or pseudoscientific powers such as occult magic and (especially) tantra. The “science fiction” is not explained by any technobabble, but instead presented in terms hardly a step away from magic. This is in line with the past couple books in the range (voodoo in The City of the Dead, and a quantum singularity in Grimm Reality), so in a way those books warms up the reader for this one. Specifically, this book posits a relationship between intelligent awareness (or understanding) with time itself, such that a quasi-religious philosophy of reality can enable one to move through time at rates other than one second per second forwards. This might be seen as annoying by some, and against the spirit of Doctor Who as a franchise… perhaps it is in opposition to 1960’s Doctor Who, but the idea that there is a ‘spiritual’ approach to time travel has been explored elsewhere ever since the Sisterhood of Karn was introduced in The Brain of Morbius. The Sisterhood, extended lore has posited, is a remnant of a ‘priestly’ class that departed Gallifrey ages ago.

In tandem with this, the other major background piece to this story is the ramifications of the loss of Gallifrey. Without the Time Lords around to keep things in working order, all sorts of alternate realities and ‘shadow realms’ are at risk of colliding with our own universe. This sort of problem also gets explored in the 9th Doctor story Father’s Day, and the “Time Lord Victorious” is also a case of the Doctor taking matters into his own hands with regards to the definitive absence of his people.

But because the documentary “narrator” is an ordinary 20th century human, the Time Lords are never mentioned directly, nor is Gallifrey. The reader has to recognize those signs, hidden behind a “foreign” city and the terminology of “elementals”. Even the Master shows up, no longer interested in combating the Doctor now that only four Time Lords remain alive. Honestly, I’m a sucker for Time Lord lore, and I love Gallifrey, so even arcane clues about them made this book really intriguing to me.

What’s more, there is a rival named Sabbath who rises the ranks of occult knowledge such that he becomes a sort of prototype human Time Lord with his own space-time “ship”. In the end, spoiler alert, he even rips out the Doctor’s right-hand-side heart and apparently grafts it into his own body. Typically I prefer “hard science fiction”, and hope to see Sabbath in a future novel from that angle, but in this case the esoteric and mystical approach was intriguing and sufficient to keep my curiosity going.

This book came out nearly 19 years ago; it’d be easy to spoil the majority of the book range. Indeed, there were several plot points that occurred earlier in this range that I did “spoil” by reading Wikis before the books. But the 50’s and 60’s of the novel range are pretty blank to me, so I’m going to enjoy allowing myself to be surprised by what they have to offer, volume by volume.

Grimm Reality

The fiftieth novel in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range came out in October 2001, and was entitled Grimm Reality.  Like the book before it, there is a great deal of magic and (rather than voodoo) high fantasy wrapped up in its pages.  This time there was more attention to the science fiction explanation for the magical effects: a quantum white hole that spits things out from other universes into our own.  Although the “science” of it was not explored in any great depth, its thematic and in-story significance was a constant presence, and examined from two very different angles.

Story #1: explorers, salvagers, opportunists

One storyline, which often felt like the secondary plot, is that of an exploration vessel with three captains representing the three races serving on board.  They’ve staked out a white hole in the hopes of claiming valuable materials to sell.  The planet adjacent to it has some strange qualities, so the human captain leads an expedition to investigate the long-lost human colonists there, the insectoid vuim captain leads an expedition to take geological samples from an uninhabited portion of the planet, and the hippo-like abanak captain stays on board the ship to coordinate efforts.  The vuim find the planet physically resisting them, the humans find the fantasy world a difficult to cope with, and the abanak attempt to seize control of the whole mission so they don’t have to split the profits.

On the whole, this is a pretty simple plot, and forms a sort of backdrop for the planet-side happenings.

Story #2: the world of quests, magic, and wishes

Fitz, the 8th Doctor, and Anji are separated from the TARDIS as soon as they exit it – a magic forest has grown up around it.  In a nearby town they are, in turn, separated from one another and whisked away into their own respective fantasy stories, meeting up with other characters sometimes on their own quests or following other fantasy stories.  While nothing in this story is a direct rip-off any of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the amalgamations that result are obviously derived from several classic stories of the genre, including Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Hansel and Gretel, and several others I don’t recall.  I must admit I’ve seen more Disney movies than I’ve read Grimm tales, but I am at least aware that the traditional forms of most fairy tales are far more gruesome than the Disney versions.  And I can observe that the negative effects on many characters (and especially the fates of the villains) are more grisly than Disney would have us expect.

A key recurring theme among the different plot lines on the planet is that of wishes.  Anji has a wishing box that allows her to grant others’ wishes; Captain Christina is given three acorns to grant her wishes; the Doctor meets a princess who can grant certain wishes.  And this is where the white hole plot links to the planet-bound plot: the source of these magic wishes stems from certain artifacts that the white hole has spewed out.

Overall thoughts

I was not a fan of the “fantasy” style story, Wolfsbane, and a little more comfortable with the fantasy elements of The City of the Dead, but this time the fantasy elements finally did work for me.  It wasn’t just the setting, it was the story-telling style, the narrative voice, and even the consciously in-universe explanation of what was going on.  Because the authors went all-in, writing fantasy not just for the sake of writing fantasy, but integrated into the plot and the scenario, it comes out much more fun and believable and enjoyable.  I felt like there had been a sag in the interest factor with some of these novels, recently, which is a shame because Anji has been developing and hitting her stride, so I want to be able to settle in and enjoy getting to know her better.  Grimm Reality was a good improvement on all fronts.

The City of the Dead

The 49th novel in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range, released in September 2001, is The City of the Dead.  The author, pen-named Lloyd Rose, is a female American writer, who went on to write a couple other Doctor Who novels, a short story, and also one of the 8th Doctor audio plays for Big Finish; one of the few Americans and women to do so!  Perhaps appropriately, then, this book takes place in New Orleans (and a little bit in Vermont).

This novel is kind of like a Doctor Who version of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.  They’re both pretty heavy on voodoo or magic and never quite explain away the supernatural elements.  The Doctor has flashes of insight from his forgotten past, namely that it is his Artron Energy that makes him a being of great “energy”, in a magician’s terms, and one of the elemental creatures encountered is referred to as an Eternal, hinting at a kinship with other immortal beings encountered before in Doctor Who.  So we get hints of a science fiction explanation for magic, but not much more than hints.  That was enough for me; I’ve found in the past that I typically do not like it when Doctor Who just blatantly walks into the realm of fantasy fiction wholesale.

It begins with nightmares, where the Doctor normally doesn’t dream at all.  There is a nothingness, a void, encroaching upon him even in the TARDIS, and his screams alarm Fitz and Anji considerably.  Then there is an old bone charm he finds in the TARDIS and wants to have identified by magicians in New Orleans, and he also discovers the body of a recent murder victim.  A complex run-around is quickly set up, with several bizarre characters who are obsessed with the supernatural in some form or another (Teddy Acree, Dupre, Mr. Thales), and a homicide detective (Lt. Rust).  There is also a mystery concerning a house destroyed in 1980 as if by a tidal wave, a lost survivor from that episode, and a couple strained marriages (Teddy & Swan Acree, Vernon & Mrs. Flood).  It’s a lot to keep track of, but most of the characters do know and interact with one another, so it’s not quite too complicated.

This novel also has a large number of call-backs to the Doctor’s flashes of lost memory.  He has come to terms with the reality that sometimes images, words, and ideas from behind that barrier pop up unbidden, but if he tries to grab hold of them they disappear.  Let’s take a specific example: chapter 8 is mostly a dream sequence for the Doctor after some musings on his still-forgotten past.  He seems aware now that he is probably guilty of a terrible crime and is struggling to assert his newfound innocence in the shadow of that repressed memory.  In his dreams he is buried alive in a metal casket, and “escapes” to the edge of a garden where he sees the 7th Doctor sleeping – there’s even a reference to a brief scene in Endgame where he saw the 7th Doctor and Ace at a funfair – but then his former self wakes up and rebukes him: Leave now and never come back!  Smeagol has temporarily exorcised Gollum.  What a scene!

Fitz and Anji are very active players in this book, too.  Even though the Doctor is particularly secretive about his nightmare condition and the terrible things that mages like Dupre do to him throughout the story, they are very involved in the plot and the goings-on.  They’re sent to Vermont to investigate a missing child’s fate, and come up with some apparently helpful insights into what must have happened, and what threats still exist back in New Orleans.  Fitz doesn’t get to use his charm all that much in this story, in fact it’s Anji who goes on a couple dates and finds herself blushing and flirting a bit from time to time.  But their mutual respect is clearly growing, and Anji’s trust in the Doctor (which was tested and tentative at best for a few books) is now more solid too.  They are a TARDIS team now.

This book really immerses you in the world of magic.  Powders, energies, charms, runes and inscriptions, psychic projections, elementals and other strange creatures… it’s never outright explained, so to speak, but it’s all used and described consistently to give the reader a good sense of what’s going on even without understanding all of it.  This could have been a gorgeous (and gory) TV show, too.

That unapologetic dive into the world and setting of magic is both a strength and a weakness, though.  There are moments when it’s just a little too gratuitous and “out there.”  For example, near the end of the book the Doctor is left to be imprisoned by “bogles” in the swamps for a couple days, and they attack him with needle-like hands, pulling him under the water and shredding his clothes.  What are bogles?  Have they always been in the swamps of New Orleans?  Is there a whole bestiary of supernatural creatures I need to read?

Similarly, the ending chapters felt a bit rushed.  I enjoyed how the mysterious “Magician” hinted at throughout the book is not clearly identified until the last quarter – there are several cases of misdirection along the way that keep the reader guessing all the way through.  But once he is revealed, everything plays out so quickly and suddenly.  With all the other plots and character arcs already wrapped up (or dead) it’s all Doctor-and-foe all the time until it’s just suddenly over.

All that said, this was a cool book to read.  You get a lot of insight into the Doctor’s thoughts and internal functions and abilities – almost too much.  The setting is richly explored and described and explained, the characters are vivid, Anji and Fitz have a lot to put up with and a lot to take in.  The story-telling is committed and thoughtful, the pacing is (almost completely) perfect, and it has a thoughtful ending.

Dark Progeny

The 48th Eighth Doctor Adventures novel is Dark Progeny.  Like several of the books before it, the science-fiction theme rests upon biology.  It’s startling how long this streak is lasting (4 or 5 books in a row, plus the later-written book that slots into the chronology of this bunch), and I’m hoping more and more that we’ll get something more notably different next time.

Though I will say that this book did feel like a bit of pick-up in terms of writing quality and interest level.  It is better paced than The Year of Intelligent Tigers, it has elements of horror but not to the I’m-not-sure-I-want-to-touch-this-book-again level of Eater of Wasps, its world scenario is far better explained than in The Slow Empire, and its disclosure of mystery is nowhere near as maddening as in Vanishing Point.  It’s as it the author picked up several of the previous books, identified their chief flaws, and made sure to avoid repeating the mistake.

And yet this story doesn’t feel all that original.  It’s as if I just read an amalgamation of Frontier Worlds and Coldheart.  In both of those books you find a mysterious alien intelligence infecting the local humanoid populace, causing strange-to-terrible things to occur, including genetic mutation of the humanoids into something else akin to the mysterious alien presence.  So take the human colonist element from Frontier Worlds and pit them against a native planet-bound force as in Coldheart, and you get Dark Progeny.  If I may spoil the entire plot in one fell swoop, the entire planet of Ceres Alpha is a latent telepathic gaia life-form undergoing a regeneration after some sort of planetary disaster, and now that humans are attempting to terraform it, the planet manifests some hybrid creatures by genetically altering a bunch of human babies in utero to be powerful telepathic beings in tune with the planet.  Naturally, the corporate authorities are keeping these mutants under wraps, and sparks are beginning to fly.

One of the things that makes this otherwise-familiar scenario more compelling, though, is the backdrop of world-building.  Earth is out of space. All the natural environment has been over.  Okay, yeah, again, I feel like I’ve read or listened to several Doctor Who stories that use this as a piece of background information to explain aggressive colonizers and megacorporations looking for new homes for the human race to expand into.  But Dark Progeny does this really well.  A few characters take time to appreciate a natural sunrise, the sky, wish for real birdsong, express their hopes that their children will be the first generation in a century to experience a natural environment around their homes.  This brings a commonplace idea (practically a trope) to much more vivid life than I would have expected.

Another thing that keeps the pace moving in this story is the constant separation of the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji.  They very rarely cross paths throughout the entire novel, living very different experiences that gives the reader a fuller picture than most of them get until the end of the book.  We also get into the minds of a few other characters – Tyran the CEO of WorldCorps, Josef and grief-stricken Veta who lost their baby to the genetic mutation, Captain Foley a security officer who gradually comes to respect the Doctor, Colonel Perón the increasingly-bloodthirsty head of security, and Doctor Bains the archaeologist with a pained past and a difficult task of publishing archaeological findings on Ceres Alpha when the corporation wants to ignore it and terraform the place.  These characters all come to life enjoyably and clearly – even those who descend into madness have a logic to them that the reader can follow.

I would only quibble about the surprise father-son relationship discovered near the end of the book.  While it fits thematically with the whole children-of-the-planet thing going on, it doesn’t seem to add anything narratively to the story.  And this revelation is not shared with any other character, nor does it actually impact anything else that takes place.  So that, I think, was a case of the author grasping for one twist too many.  The man who lost his wife and the man who never knew his parents don’t  literally have to be the other half of each other’s story.

On the whole, Dark Progeny is a neat book, though.  I feel like it pulled me out of a slump in the EDA range, and I am looking forward to reading what adventures Anji and Fitz get dragged on to next.  Especially now that Anji has finally taken a break from questioning the Doctor’s motives at every turn; it’s good to see that seems to have healed up for the time being.