Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s April of 2002. Gareth Gates is at number one with “Unchained Melody,” which lasts almost the whole month before Oasis unseat them with “The Hindu Times.” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Nickelback, Marilyn Manson, Britney Spears, and Shakira also chart. Christ, so much for historicization. In news, a military coup to unseat Hugo Chávez fails, and the Queen Mother’s funeral takes place.

Audios, then. It’s more than a little jarring to go from Seasons of Fear to Embrace the Darkness. The Eighth Doctor audios hadn’t done something so self-consciously sci-fi since The Sword of Orion, and that was a deliberately nostalgic throwback. Here there’s less of a clear sense of that. Embrace the Dark is old-fashioned, yes, but it doesn’t trade on an explicit image of the past in the same way that The Sword of Orion does, or even, for that matter, in the same way that Seasons of Fear did. And yet it still feels out of place. Why?

The first thing to realize is that it’s a story at odds with its medium. And, more to the point, that its medium is actually relatively new.  Two-CD sets featuring self-contained four episode audio adventures aren’t something that really has a lot of precedent. Sure, radio drama does, and books on tape do, but this isn’t either of those. Unlike radio drama, it’s not serialized or transmitted live. Unlike books on tape, it’s not an adaptation of something else. So the shape and structure of it are up in the air. On top of that, the audios are fundamentally tied to the structure and logic of classic Doctor Who, which is to say, everything must be a four-parter of approximately half-hour parts.

The result of this, or at least a result of this is that the basic structure of the audios is at times wonky. For instance, there’s a pretty good Doctor Who structure in which each of the four episodes represent a different phase of the story, with cliffhangers that reveal new information that change the stakes. For television, at least, it’s a good structure, albeit with some flaws. But those flaws are largely intrinsic to any episodically serialized story – mainly that the half-hour format is a straitjacket. But there’s always a structure, and you learn to write to your structure.

The problem, however, is that the structure exists to solve the problems of serialization. The “change the premise slightly every episode” approach ultimately developed as a response to the failings of structure and pacing in much of the Hartnell era, where stories would often expand or contract arbitrarily to fill the space allotted to them, with little thought about how to structure them on an episode-by-episode level. And it’s a reaction against the slow pace of serialization. Terror of the Zygons – to pick a story that really embraces the “change the tone weekly” approach well – does it in part so that after four weeks of Zygons the audience is still fresh.

Embrace the Darkness is perfectly structured along these lines.…

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It’s March of 2002. Westlife are at number one with “World of Our Own,” which goes a week before Will Young takes over with “Anything is Possible/Evergreen.” This lasts almost to the end of the month, but Gareth Gates’s “Unchained Melody” ends up playing us out. Kylie Minogue, R Kelly, Shakira, Nickelback, Ali G and Shaggy, Celine Dion, Marilyn Manson, and Natalie Imbruglia also chart. In news, the US war in Afghanistan goes on, though really, it’s not like I’m going to write that for every entry for the remainder of the blog. Milly Dowler goes missing, which will turn out to have impressive effects on the British newspaper industry. And the Queen Mother dies, it being another bad year for the monarchy.

And in specialty shops, Seasons of Fear. There is a problem that plagues writers. It manifests in one of the most depressing comments imaginable from readers: I liked your old stuff better. Nobody likes being told this. And understandably so, given that its distinct implication is that you’re washed up and past your prime. It applies to all forms of art, really. But there’s a real problem underlying the complaint: people early on in their careers have a hunger and an ambition that often fades with critical and financial success. Even a very good writer like Neil Gaiman suffers from it: once he hit mainstream American success with American Gods he entered a decade-long fallow period in which he did virtually nothing that wasn’t predictable and catered to his existing fanbase, and it was only when he was put in the position of writing for an audience that hadn’t heard of him, and with an editor who was as accomplished a writer as he was that he turned out The Doctor’s Wife. (And notably, this, along with marriage, seems to have given him a late career spring in his step.

But there’s another and somewhat bleaker reason this happens, which is that some artists fuel their best work with anger or depression and, as they mature, grow to be altogether stabler and happier people. And in terms of his Doctor Who work, Paul Cornell largely has that problem. His first four New Adventures are all brilliant, but they’re animated in a large part by Cornell’s tangible anger in the period. When, later in the New Adventures, he settled down and wrote his comedy books like Happy Endings and Oh No It Isn’t!, both of which are terribly fun, but neither of which have anything like the impactful heft of Love and War, little yet Human Nature.

Cornell has said that he wrote The Shadow of the Scourge and The Shadows of Avalon from a very dark place, and it shows. Both are flawed works, but they very much rekindle the crackling passion of his early New Adventures. But by Seasons of Fear Cornell had gotten his head screwed back on, was working with his girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancee Caroline Symcox, and was largely back to the more comedy-adventure mode of his latter New Adventures.…

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It’s February of 2002. Enrique is at number one with “Hero,” which lasts the entire month. Britney Spears, George Harrison, Pink, Ja Rule, No Doubt, Alien Ant Farm, Brandy, S Club 7, and Victoria Beckham also chart. In news, the Golden Jubilee proper happens, as do the Mitt Romney Winter Olympics. Slobodan Miloševi?’s trial begins at the Hague. And Princess Margaret dies of a stroke.

While on audio CDs, we have one of the highlights of the McGann era: Rob Shearman’s The Chimes of Midnight. If Invaders from Mars was frustrating for its lack of places to hook critical analysis onto, The Chimes of Midnight is at least a story where we’re spoiled for choice. Rob Shearman is a critic’s writer; his stories are dense with themes and references, bristling with self-awareness and commentary. They almost compel a critical response. In a way it poses its own problem. Invaders from Mars prompts little at all, existing in such a way as to defy speech. The Chimes of Midnight is almost more dangerous: it is a work that is capable of dictating its own critical response. It’s terribly easy to write an entry that is exactly what you’d expect a critical look at The Chimes of Midnight of being.

Critics hate this sort of thing. I was talking with my co-author on the They Might Be Giants book the other day about the way in which art rock is lacking in academic respect in a large part because it self-analyzes, and in doing so defies critique. The cynical explanation for this is that we hate being made obsolete. The more worked through explanation is that there’s a value to critique being independent of the work, and the self-awareness of art rock and other such self-critiquing forms is a barrier to that.

But these objections omit the possibility that there’s a reason for self-awareness beyond controlling the critique. The Chimes of Midnight is a prime example. Yes, it’s terribly self-aware, but this is part of Shearman’s basic theme for Doctor Who. All of his stories focus on confined worlds. The Chimes of Midnight is a prime example, taking place across just over two hours in the servants’ quarters of one house, although those two hours happen several times. But more than its limited space and time, The Chimes of Midnight, again like much of Shearman’s work, is focused on the constraints of our internal worlds. As the story unfolds it becomes increasingly clear that we are not so much in the basement of a house as in the internal psychic world of one of its inhabitants.

This works very, very well on audio, especially modern audio. The survival and, to a real extent, proliferation of audio as a narrative medium in recent years stems from one simple fact: it’s terribly good for a commute or an exercise routine. The Big Finish audios are overwhelmingly listened to in cars or through headphones. This makes audio an unusually claustrophobic medium these days. Unlike the screen-contained video, audio surrounds us in a tight bubble of diegesis.…

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It’s January of 2002. Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman are at number one with “Something Stupid.” Daniel Bedingfield unseats them a week later with “Gotta Get Through This,” then Aaliyah’s posthumous “More Than A Woman,” which was in turn unseated by the posthumous rerelease of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Clearly a month for nostalgia and digging things up after their time for sentimental reasons. I wonder who’s writing the story this month. In any case, S Club 7, Kate Winslet, Puretone, Pink, Dr. Dre, and the Chemical Brothers also chart. In news, the Euro enters circulation. Daniel Pearl, an American reporter, is kidnapped in Pakistan and eventually murdered. And it’s the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, if you’re into that sort of thing.

While on CDs you can buy in specialty shops, Paul McGann kicks off his second “season” as the Eighth Doctor with Mark Gatiss’s Invaders From Mars. I’ve already largely tipped my hand on this: I am decidedly not a fan of most of Mark Gatiss’s output. Invaders from Mars, however, presents an unusual sort of problem. Unlike Gatiss’s worst moments, it is at least not blatantly offensive. It avoids, for instance, accidentally backing the British National Party. Its storytelling is, by many reasonable arguments, deeply flawed, but there’s a reasonable case to be made that those flaws are more accurately described as a difference of aesthetics.

More than almost any other writer in the wilderness years, and certainly more than any other writer of the new series, Mark Gatiss has an aesthetic of nostalgia. Under many circumstances this would be outright unbearable. Gatiss was prone to a self-conscious embrace of the “trad” aesthetic, most notably in things like Last of the Gaderene, in which he does an almost note-perfect imitation of the Pertwee era. There are few writers who can be said to pull this off well. But whatever objections I might have to Gatiss’s work at large, it’s difficult to argue seriously that he wasn’t good at it. He wrote rarely, but his were among the most beloved of “trad” novels.

Part of this is that, although he is ruthlessly nostalgic, he has considerable range in his nostalgia. There’s a bit of a classical sensibility to his nostalgia; it reaches back to stuff that was already fairly old when Gatiss was a child. Gatiss is at home being nostalgic for Victorian fiction, 1950s sci-fi television, and World War II movies. It doesn’t make him any less prone to uncritical recitations of the things he’s nostalgic for, but it adds a pleasant sort of variety to proceedings. Invaders from Mars largely trades on this. It is, first and foremost, a piece of nostalgia for 1930s American radio. The result is that for all its traditionalism, it’s unlike anything else the McGann audios do. It’s terribly old-fashioned, but it’s so old-fashioned as to end up being reasonably creative.

It’s also, as with the best nostalgia, a meditation on tone rather than content. As a result, there’s a bit of a hodgepodge to it.…

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We should begin with context. The Adventuress of Henrietta street was released in November of 2001. Songs to reach number one in the charts that month included Afroman’s “Because I Got High,” Westlife’s “Queen of My Heart,” and Blue’s “If You Come Back,” while other artists to chart included Kylie Minogue, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Lopez, Cher, the Dandy Warhols, Destiny Child.

News stories over the few months before the book came out included the execution of Timothy McVeigh in the US, the sentencing of Jeffrey Archer, the launch of Windows XP, 9/11, and the introduction of the iPod. The month the book came out, on the other hand, the Police Service of Northern Ireland replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and, actually, that’s about it – not a terribly exciting month.

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a uniquely problematic novel, and a proper understanding of it is only possible through consultation with the various drafts of it that exist. These drafts are at times obscure and difficult to find, but taken together present a considerably more complete portrait of the work. Some things, for instance, can be ruled out decisively. The rumors, for instance, that there exists a fully narrative draft that discards the novel’s conceit of being written as a historical study of surviving documents is wholly false. Although Miles did, as is popularly reported, fail to mention this detail to Justin Richards when pitching the book, it is clearly a part of his basic concept. Simply put, the occult goals of the book would not be possible without such a conceit.

Ah yes. The occult goals. This is, after all, a novel in which the Doctor literally finds a whore to be his Scarlet Woman, and uses her in a grand alchemical wedding to root himself in the Earth. To accomplish this without the ambiguities and gaps introduced by the pseudo-historical would be a challenge, whereas the structural conceit allows Miles considerable leeway to work his spell by giving him considerable ability to leave things unsaid and to create moments of potent ambiguity. The false history, as a format, allows for fundamental manipulation of the nature of things.

Within the magical context of 2001, of course, to conduct such dramatics without at least some consultation with the dominant magical figures of the age would be foolish in the extreme. The earliest surviving manuscript of The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, in fact, survives in Alan Moore’s papers. Moore, who was in the final stages of producing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when the manuscript crossed his desk, was none too pleased with aspects of the book, and wrote Miles a detailed account of his objections.

Moore’s letter to Miles, at a mere twenty-nine pages, is uncharacteristically perfunctory, betraying a deeper sense of frustration than his public comments, or lack thereof, would indicate. It is evident that Moore took Miles’s manuscript extremely personally, and that his reservations were substantial. A representative passage:

As you of all people must know, when someone writes about an incident after it’s happened, that is history.

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I’ll Explain Later

EarthWorld is the first book after the stuck-on-earth cycle, and features a futuristic earth colony, a museum, and some evil princesses. It’s the second book featuring Anji Kapoor, the latest companion in the BBC Books range, the first being Colin Brake’s Escape Velocity, where her boyfriend died horribly and she inadvertently got abducted by the Doctor. EarthWorld’s reputation is middling: Lars Pearson calls it “a drastic misstep for the eighth Doctor line,” while Doctor Who Magazine calls it “an accomplished and enjoyable debut.” It’s forty-sixth on the Sullivan rankings, in any case.

It’s March of 2001 again. These things happen.

So it’s EarthWorld today – one of the myriad of books that takes as one of its major themes trying to square away the amnesia plot. This is a problem, as the amnesia plot is more or less impossible to actually square away. The biggest problem is one Lance Parkin pointed out: amnesia isn’t a concept that motivates someone. Or, rather, the only motivation it provides is memory. That’s a pretty solid problem, and one with a meaningful general case: a lack needs to be filled. This is the central logic of a mystery. Or really, of a lot of things. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever seen on the subject of puzzle-writing is “leave blanks for the solver to fill.” There is a deep-seated desire to fill in a blank. And while the Doctor’s memory isn’t a mystery for the audience, keep in mind that the structure of the genre had long been stretched by things like Cracker where we know who did the crime and just wait for Fitz to solve it too. Which is to say that even though we know the contents of the Doctor’s lost memories, we expect that he’ll pursue them because they are, within the story, a mystery. If nothing else, the idea of the Doctor blandly ignoring a great big mystery jars.

So the problem is less that the amnesia doesn’t help create any stories as that the story it helps create is the one story that Justin Richards has decided they shall not tell: the story of the Doctor trying to find his memories. Which means that every single book starts from a position of frustrated desire for the reader. Everything the reader knows about how stories work tells them to expect to see the Doctor trying to get his memories back. And every single book is saying “no, we’re not doing that.” And that’s not a death sentence for the books, but it’s a problem. It means every single book is starting at a slight but significant disadvantage with readers.

And on top of that, there’s the basic fact that the amnesia was never going to stick. I mean, BBC Books were putting out twenty-two Doctor Who books a year. Eleven of them were set in the Eighth Doctor’s memory. Big Finish was doing another twelve, all with a memory-having Doctor. And the assumption is still that Doctor Who is going to run forever.…

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It’s April of 2001. Hear’Say are at number one with “Pure and Simple.” Emma Bunton unseats them a week later with “What Took You So Long,” which lasts two weeks before Destiny’s Child take it with “Survivor.” Lil Bow Wow, Janet Jackson, Gorrillaz, Robbie Williams, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, Madonna, and O-Town also chart. In news, a Chinese fighter jet crashes into an American one, resulting in an international incident, which leads to George W. Bush’s first major foreign policy crisis. He manages not to completely whiff this one. Give him time. Also, Slobodon Miloševi? surrenders to the police, and the Netherlands become the first country to legalize same sex marriage. All of this happens on the same day, April 1, at which point the month gets tired and overworked and decides not do anything else.

Oh, yes, and Big Finish releases Minuet in Hell. Let’s start with the bit that if I ignore I’ll be rightly scolded in comments, and that if I pay attention to everyone will say that I’m being tiresome and imposing my personal issues and values on the story. The story is frightening in its internalizing of misogyny. Charley is kidnapped off the streets and turned into a “pretty little satin bottom,” where she’ll cater to the whims of the customers of a “gentleman’s club” and submit to their physical punishments whenever they want to administer them. This is treated as little more than another obstacle for a plucky adventurer to overcome. As is usually the case with things like this, the problem comes when the fantasy horror is far too close to a real one. Human trafficking and sexual slavery happen to real people. Treating a thinly sanitized forced prostitution as generic adventure filler is grotesque. And it sets a nasty tone for the whole piece.

That admitted, let’s move to the other thing that jumps out about this: its portrayal of the United States is ludicrous. I’m actually not quite as bothered by this as the consensus is. Yes, the accents are awful, but I avoided skewering Nicola Bryant or the entirety of The Gunfighters on those grounds, so starting now seems silly. The premise rather painfully strains credulity – I’m at a loss for why the subplot of forming a fifty-first state called Malebolgia is included, as it is at once ludicrous and pointless. But under the surface is an idea with some teeth, particularly coming four months after the inauguration of George W. Bush. This was surely on Gary Russell’s mind as he revised Alan Lear’s Audio-Visuals script during the 2000 campaign.

The Bush administration, barely four years in the ground, is a difficult thing to historicize, not least because it was, in fact, so disastrously bad. Its failures were in many ways worse than even the most pessimistic predictions in 2000. And thus in many ways the horror of what was has erased the sense of horror at Bush’s election in the first place. On top of that, the election itself was overshadowed by the fact that its results fell within the margin of error of voting itself.…

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