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.

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading

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.…

Continue Reading