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I’ll Explain Later

We skipped Iceberg, but I talked about it Friday, so Blood Heat. The first book of the “Alternate History Cycle,” a five book series in which the Doctor faces a (for the first four books) unknown enemy who is altering history and causing all sorts of troubles. Or, as the Doctor puts it, “meddling.” So that’s subtle about who it is. In this first book, the Doctor ends up in an alternate universe in which he died during The Silurians, leading the eponymous Silurians to win. The book ends with what is almost certainly the New Adventures’ highest death toll as the Doctor is forced to destroy the entire alternate universe. It’s quite well-regarded, although Craig Hinton is relatively restrained, accusing Mortimore of being “a little more heavy-handed than Johnny Byrne, and considerably more so than Hulke,” though still basically liking the book. Lars Pearson is more unequivocal, calling it “magnificent” and saying that “fans still stand up and cheer about it.” Shannon Sullivan’s rankings put it at 24th, with a rating of 72.2%, nestling it snugly between The Highest Science and Birthright. DWRG entry. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s October of 1993. DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince are at number one with “Boom! Shake The Room.” That lasts a week, and then Take That unseat them with “Relight my Fire.” That lasts two whole weeks, at which point Meat Loaf take over number one with “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).” Pet Shop Boys, Roxette, Iron Maiden, The Prodigy, and Phil Collins also chart, while top ten albums include Nirvana’s In Utero, Pet Shop Boys’s Very, Pearl Jam’s Vs, and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell II.

In news, since last entry Israel and the PLO signed a peace accord in Washington DC, with Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands afterwards. Giuseppe Puglisi was killed in Italy due to his strong stance against the Mafia. While during this month the US badly botches Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, leading to the events depicted in the film Black Hawk Down. China performs a nuclear test, unnerving everybody a bit. Benazir Bhutto becomes the first elected female leader of a Muslim state in Pakistan. John Major attempts to revive the blatantly sagging fortunes of the Conservative Party, launches the Back to Basics campaign, which mostly becomes emblematic of failed attempts to relaunch political parties. And members of the Ulster Defence Association attack a bar in Greysteel, Northern Ireland, killing eight.

While in books, we have Jim Mortimore’s Blood Heat, which provides something of an interesting test case for a broader aesthetic and critical issue that has at times lurked in the background of this blog, and that is, in many ways, in play again now. In any given era of Doctor Who there is a critical gravity towards the idea of figuring out the era’s default mode, if you will. In the Troughton era, for instance, the default was bases under siege.…

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I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Shadowmind, by Christopher Bulis, because this sentence says almost everything there is to say about it.

Nigel Robinson’s Birthright, along with the novel after it (which we’re skipping), Iceberg, form a vaguely-linked two book sequence in which the Doctor has one adventure in Iceberg and Ace and Benny have a completely separate one here. In Iceberg the Doctor fights some very dull Cybermen, while here Ace and Benny are stranded on different planets and at different times having a linked adventure with the Doctor’s fingerprints all over it. The book introduces Muldwych, a supporting character in the Virgin books strongly implied to be the Merlin version of the Doctor. It’s pretty well-liked, with Shannon Sullivan’s rankings putting it in twenty-fifth place with a 72% rating. At the time, Craig Hinton declared it “probably the best New Adventures novel published so far,” and Lars Pearson goes with “a crisp and good little story, if a bit unpolished in parts.”

On the occasions where I go to conventions, I favor panels on which there are writers, with my stated logic being that there’s a minimal level of “being able to say articulate and interesting things” that writers necessarily have, and there’s not always for actors. David Banks’s Iceberg pretty much exemplifies that.

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It’s August of 1993. Take That are at number one with “Pray.” The late Freddie Mercury unseats them a week later with “Living On My Own,” which lasts for two weeks and is followed by “Mr Vain” by Culture Beat. 4 Non Blondes, Billy Joel, Madonna, Mariah Carey, and the Urban Cookie Collective also chart, while UB40 dominate the album charts for the entire month with Promises and Lies.

In the news, since last we read a book, Vince Foster committed suicide, giving right-wing conspiracy theorists their favorite part of the Clinton administration. Clinton also announced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” While during this month Buckingham Palace is opened to the public for the first time, and Magic: The Gathering comes out. Thrilling, I know.

On to books then. We’ve been talking for a few entries about the problem that a lot of the New Adventures have, which is that they seem faintly embarrassed to be Doctor Who. There seem to be, once the New Adventures finally got off their mark with Timewyrm: Revelation, three sorts of writers. The first are the embarrassed fans. There’s no serious argument to be had that McIntee, Mortimore, and Lane aren’t huge fans of Doctor Who, but they all seem like writers who will be happier when they move to more “serious” science fiction. The second are the Cartmel-era writers now on the New Adventures. They aren’t embarrassed about Doctor Who, but they have an iconoclastic tendency to want to change what Doctor Who is.

And then there are writers like Paul Cornell and Gareth Roberts who actually seem happy as can be to be writing Doctor Who, but who are distinctly a new generation of fans-turned-writers with their own ideas for what Doctor Who can be.…

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I’ll Explain Later

David McIntee’s White Darkness, the fifteenth New Adventure, features the TARDIS crew in early 20th century Haiti during the events leading up to the American occupation. It also has them fighting Cthulhu and zombies. So it’s a bit ambitious. The Cthulhu stuff is what it’s best known for these days, since that becomes a bit of a theme for the New Adventures, but it’s just as notable for introducing McIntee, who went on to write scads more books, and his research-heavy historical style. Reputation-wise, it’s middle of the road – Sullivan’s rankings have it at fortieth place, with a 65% rating. At the time newly installed Doctor Who Magazine reviewer Craig Hinton displayed a flair for the lousy pull quote by describing it simply as “an enjoyable adventure story.” I, Who goes with more outright ambivalence, calling it “solid, albeit a bit passionless and unimpressive.” DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s June of 1993. Ace of Base are at number one with “All That She Wants,” unseated a week later by UB40 with “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You,” which lasts for two weeks before Gabrielle takes over with “Dreams,” making this the first actually volatile month on the charts I feel like we’ve had in a while. The Spin Doctors, Janet Jackson, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart, The Pet Shop Boys, and Haddaway also chart, the latter with “What Is Love,” AKA that song from the Saturday Night Live sketch.

While in the news, Andrew Wiles proes Fermat’s Last Theorem. Loreena Bobbitt does the thing that she’s famous for. Clinton orders some casual bombing of Iraq. Kim Campbell becomes the first female Prime Minster of Canada.

While in books, it’s White Darkness. And thus an intersection with my life again. June of 1993 is the summer before sixth grade for me. I was, by this point, a Doctor Who fan, and it’s in sixth grade that I discovered the New Adventures. It started with finding one or two in a book store – probably either the still-open Barnes and Noble in Danbury, Connecticut or the now-closed Borders in Farmington. I know the first two books I got were White Darkness and Lucifer Rising.

Memory deceives just a little bit here. I don’t remember exactly what month – it was certainly a bit later than June. I can’t quite place exactly when my relationship with Doctor Who snapped into the present such that there was such a thing as a new release. I started buying issues of Doctor Who Magazine when I saw them in the comic shop in this period, but my comic-buying days were nearing an end this year – I bailed out of them completely in the fall of 1994. So there was definitely a point around here where I became aware of the fact that new Doctor Who was coming out on a fairly set schedule, and that there was such a thing as a community responding to it.…

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Lucifer Rising provides the debut of both Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore, two of the more important of the novel writers. (We’ll see both again, and have, in fact, seen both before, though Andy Lane only in the Hartnell book.) It’s also the longest New Adventure to date, and one of the longest of the series. (I’m not certain, but I think only Warlock and Falls the Shadow are longer) While Deceit reintroduced Ace to the series, Lucifer Rising is the book that defines the character, with its plot hinging on Ace using the Doctor in order to investigate something on behalf of the International Mining Corporation and serving, for a stretch of the book, as one of the villains. It also serves as the end of Virgin’s Future History cycle, but as that’s the single most vaguely defined “arc” in Doctor Who it’s difficult to say much about that. It’s reasonably well-regarded, tucking in at twenty-seventh out of sixty-one on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, with a 71% rating. At the time of release Gary Russell, in his last column of Doctor Who reviews, calls it “an evocative science fiction novel” and refers warmly to its “overall splendor,” while more recently Lars Pearson says that it’s rightly praised as “a blood-pumping, brink-of-disaster feast,” though suggests the book has padding akin to that of an old-fashioned six-parter. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s May of 1993. George Michael, Queen, and Lisa Stansfield are at number one with the “Five Live” EP. They stay there for three weeks before Ace of Base unseats them with “All That She Wants,” staying at number one for the rest of the month. R.E.M., Janet Jackson, UB40, Bon Jovi, and Tina Turner also chart.

While in the news, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa is assassinated by a suicide bomber. Eritrea becomes a country. Pierre Bérégovoy, the former prime minister of France, commits suicide. Ireland wins the Eurovision song contest. And the Conservatives continue to be obviously doomed in the next election, as they will until the next election.

And in literature, it’s Lucifer Rising. One of the first things we should note about this book is its swagger. It unfolds on an impressive scale, not in the sense of being epic, but in the sense of having a wealth of ideas and set pieces that are both interesting and take advantage of the novel’s lack of budgetary restraints. Lars Pearson, as I mentioned, compared it to a six-parter, but I’d go a step further: this is very much in the spirit of the Pertwee-era, where six-part stories were, after all, the most common structure. It’s not just the inclusion of IMC from Colony in Space that flags this as a Pertwee-esque adventure either. The entire space opera texture of it screams Pertwee era, and the density of ideas implicit in things like the multi-dimensional Legion or the complex workings of the planet Lucifer itself almost scream Baker and Martin (particularly the Baker and Martin of, say, The Mutants).…

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We’ve skipped The Pit, labeled as the absolute worst New Adventure ever published. Despite its general awfulness, it’s relatively on target in concepts. It’s tough to call it influential, given how wretched it was, but it does start to move the New Adventures down the road of treating Ancient Gallifrey in part as a source of almost Lovecraftian horror.

Deceit, by Peter Darvill-Evans, is one of the big turning points in the New Adventures line, reintroducing Ace some six months after her departure. This version of Ace, popularly dubbed “New Ace,” has spent three years fighting the Dalek Wars and is a much angrier and harder-edged character than the one that left in Love and War. The novel also includes Abslom Daak, the comics character created by Steve Moore in Doctor Who Magazine. Gary Russell, in his final reviews column for Doctor Who Magazine, declared said that “it is coherent, entertaining, pleasantly easy to follow, and, above all it has a darned good story to tell,” but then, he also praised it for “stabilizing the Whoniverse,” so let’s just stop there. I, Who is more in line with most reactions, saying it’s “hardly worth reading.” Shannon Sullivan’s rankings have it as the fifth worst New Adventure, giving it a 53.7% rating. DWRG summary. Whonivese Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s April of 1993. The Bluebells are at number one with “Young at Heart,” a rerelease of a song they previously recorded in 1984, itself a cover of a Bananarama song. It remains at number one all week. Shaggy, Madonna, David Bowie, and New Order also chart. Albums doing well around now include David Bowie’s Black Tie, White Noise (which means I’ve finally passed Pushing Ahead of the Dame in history!), R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, which meanders off to number one again, and Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion.

While in the news, March actually proved fairly uneventful, with the highlights being a brutal blizzard in the eastern United States, the release of Intel’s Pentium processors (the “can’t do math” variety, specifically), and South Africa’s official abandonment of its nuclear program. April is somewhat more exciting: the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas ends disastrously, with a fire that kills virtually all of the people inside. While in London a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence is murdered by five teenagers in a racist attack that takes until 2012 to result in a conviction.

While in television tie-in novels we have Deceit. As I explained later, this is not one of the most beloved of New Adventures. Indeed, it’s largely hated, and not without some reason. I said on Friday that as of The Highest Science the line had never put out something that could be described as a “generic” New Adventure. That record arguably broke last novel with The Pit, but that novel at least had some cool new ideas. This, on the other hand, has very little that doesn’t just feel like a standard recitation of Virgin tropes.…

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The Highest Science, the eleventh New Adventure, is the debut novel of Gareth Roberts, bringing the number of Virgin writers who went on to write for the series to three. (It will peak at either five or six, depending on what you do with “Continuity Errors.”) As is normal for Roberts’s style, it’s largely a lighter, funnier book than its predecessors, although in keeping with the New Adventures style it has an exceedingly dark finish. It introduces the Chelonians, a popular New Adventures alien species that not only got a shout-out in The Pandorica Opens but also were originally set to appear in Planet of the Dead, which was once upon a time kinda sorta an adaptation of this story. They’re basically military-obsessed cyborg turtles. At the time Gary Russell praised it in Doctor Who Magazine as “nothing short of marvelous,” while I, Who went with “a brilliant book” and “one of the best stand-alone novels.” Despite this high praise and a largely (though not universally) positive set of reviews at the Doctor Who Ratings guide, the book is only ranked #23 in Shannon Sullivan’s novel rankings with a rating of 72.7%. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s February of 1993. Whitney Houston will always be at number one with “I Will Always Love You.” That is actually a total lie – she has held the position since November, and still holds it at the start of February, but is finally unseated by 2 Unlimited’s “No Limit.” Take That, Duran Duran, Annie Lennox, Lenny Kravitz, Whitney Houston (now with “I’m Every Woman”), and Depeche Mode also chart, the latter with the utterly fantastic “I Feel You,” which also has a sublimely good cover by Placebo if you happen to care.

In real news, since Transit came out Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, splitting into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Bill Clinton actually became President of the United States. And, to quote one of my favorite sentences in Wikipedia, “the Bombay Riots take place in the city now known as Mumbai.”

While this month a bunch of Italian politicians are forced to resign in the wake of a large scale corruption investigation. James Bulger is murdered by a pair of ten-year-old boys around Liverpool, which sets off exactly as big a moral panic and controversy as you’d expect. Brian Mulroney resigns as Prime Minister of Canada. And the World Trade Center bombing takes place, killing six, injuring a thousand, and prefiguring more markedly tragic events.

While on bookshelves we have The Highest Science. To say that the Sylvester McCoy era is not the era most conducive to Roberts’s style and approach is one of those bits of droll understatement I typically favor. Roberts is, by his own open admission, most at home in the Graham Williams era. It’s a mistake to pigeon-hole him as a light and funny writer – he’s good at comedy, but it’s the base he works from, not his exclusive focus. But there is an extent to which Roberts is vocally not a fan of what might be broadly described as “darker” approaches to Doctor Who.…

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Ben Aaronovitch’s Transit is the New Adventures’ great piece of Marmite, with reviews either being outright raves or vicious pans. A piece of outright cyberpunk about alien intelligences and vast transportation systems, the book features no shortage of sex and swearing. It also introduces Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, the Brigadier’s genetically engineered descendent, a recurring character in the New Adventures. It was absolutely savaged at the time, with Gary Russell saying outright that it “has nothing whatsoever to recommend it.” Shannon Sullivan’s rankings are only slightly nicer, putting it at fifty-third, with eight books below it, and giving it a 56.5% rating. I, Who is one of the few things to equivocate, saying that “parts of it seem damn clever – but only after back-breaking analysis.” DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s December of 1992. Whitney Houston has just moved into number one with “I Will Always Love You,” and settles in for a massively long run there. Madonna, Take That, The Prodigy, Michael Jackson, Gloria Estefan, and Rod Stewart are among those who fail to unseat her.

In news, since we last looked at the world Bill Cinton won the US Presidential Election, and women won the “can we become priests in the Church of England” election. A fire broke out in Windsor Castle, one of several things leading Queen Elizabeth II to declare that the year has just sucked. She then became subject to taxation. This month, the US begins military action in Somalia. Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially announce their separation. And riots break out over the destruction of a 16th century mosque in Ayodha, India, killing 1500 people.

While in books, as mentioned, it is the New Adventures’ very own piece of complete Marmite. I’m fairly easy to predict on Marmite stories. Generally speaking, they’re ones with a very clear-cut reason to love them, but one that is not like the reason to love a lot of other Doctor Who, and thus that fails to appeal to a substantial core of Doctor Who fans. In this case, though, I admit to being a bit puzzled by picking either love or hate for this book.

Let’s take care of the objections, and then see what we have left. We’ll start with the smaller ones. First, this book gets a lot of flack for its marginal use of Benny. This, at least, is preposterous. Yes, Benny spends the majority of the book possessed by the villain. The reason for this is straightforward enough – realistically, Aaronovitch wouldn’t have had the manuscript for Love and War for very long. Putting the new companion in the background is a venerable tradition stretching back at least to Steven getting a bunch of Barbara’s dialogue in Galaxy Four. Nobody faults Kinda for the fact that Bailey couldn’t make Nyssa work in the story and so wrote her out of it.

And in this situation the circumstances are actually even more complex. There’s an interview with Paul Cornell in which it’s suggested that several of the novels in this period were being considered as the book that would introduce a new companion, with Benny being in competition with Aaronovitch’s Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart and, of all things, Neil Penswick’s take on William Blake in The Pit.…

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