I’ll Explain Later

The Burning is the start of the six-book Earthbound arc, in which the Doctor spends a century hanging around Earth waiting for the TARDIS to finish regrowing itself and to meet Fitz. Its plot is thoroughly straightforward and simple: the Doctor stops a fire elemental from killing people in Victorian England. Although in practice things are a bit more complex than that. It was at the time terribly well-regarded: Lars Pearson called it “a striking, contemplative story of Victorian terror,” while Doctor Who Magazine deigned to give the Eighth Doctor Adventures a cover feature for it and said that it “confirms the vast improvement in the Eighth Doctor novels of late.” Still, it only makes it to thirtieth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings.

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It’s August of 2000. Craig David is at number one with “7 Days.” Robbie Williams unseats him a week later with “Rock DJ,” then comes Melanie C with “I Turn To You,” and finally Spiller with “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love).” Ronan Keeting, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Eminem, and Storm also chart. In news, riots break out on a council estate in Portsmouth as over a hundred people attack the home of someone named as a pedophile by News of the World. Dora the Explorer debuts. The Confederate submerine H.L. Hunley is raised to the surface, and four days later the Russian submarine Kursk sinks to balance the scales. And Reggie Kray is released from prison due to his expected death from bladder cancer. (He’ll die in October, just over a month later.)

While in books, The Burning: the big relaunch of the Eighth Doctor Adventures’  fabled new direction after the excesses of Lawrence Miles. Written by newly installed editor Justin Richards, it was a huge deal as a novel simply because, well, in the previous book the Eighth Doctor Adventures blew up everything they had been doing so far and most of what defined Doctor Who, and everyone was understandably curious where they were going with all of this, if somewhat less than enthused.

Given all of this, what is striking about The Burning is its traditionalism. The novel goes out of its way to include the standard elements of Doctor Who, including a military whose failure to trust the Doctor exacerbates the situation. The story is self-consciously the most traditional Doctor Who story imaginable. In many ways the real giveaway is the Victorian setting. There aren’t actually a lot of Doctor Who stories set in the Victorian era, but because Doctor Who has so many roots in Victorian imagery and concepts it feels iconic and proper to put the Doctor in a Victorian setting. So we have a Victorian setting, a pool of secondary characters who are steadily killed off, a military whose effectiveness is damaged by their failure to trust the Doctor enough – it’s basically “put the Hinchcliffe era in a blender, then cook at medium heat until a thick reduction forms. Serve over 240 pages.”

Which begs the question of why anyone bothered.…

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We’ve skipped The Fall of Yquatine, Coldheart, The Space Age, and The Banquo Legacy. One’s got a giant worm, one’s rapey, one got credited with capturing the Eighth Doctor perfectly despite being adapted from a twenty-year-old TV script that didn’t even have him in it, and one’s West Side Story in space. The Ancestor Cell is the big one – the novel that wraps up all of the plot lines that have been running since Alien Bodies. In it Gallifrey is destroyed, the Doctor loses his memory, Romana turns very evil and dies, and Faction Paradox is thoroughly dealt with. As one might imagine given the adamance with which they hated this entire plot line, Doctor Who Magazine called it a “surprising success” and “essential.” Lars Pearson wrote the politest and most supportive review ever to compare a book to “surgery without any anesthetic.” And the fan consensus dumps it at fifty-fifth, with a 60.2% rating.

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It’s July of 2000. Kylie Minogue is “Spinning Around” at number one, which is replaced a week later by Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.” That goes a week later to Corrs’s “Breathless,” then Ronan Keating’s “Life is a Rollercoaster,” and finally Five and Queen with “We Will Rock You.” S Club 7, Coldplay, Oasis, Limp Bizkit, Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child, and Savage Garden also chart.

Since The Shadows of Avalon the Playstation 2 came out, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia, the whole Elián González thing wrapped up, the Tate Modern opened, India’s population reached one billion, and the Human Genome Project was finished. While during the month this book came out, France wins the European Championships in football. In shuffles of power, the delightfully oxymoronic Institutional Revolutionary Party sees seventy-one years of power in Mexico come to an end, Bashar al-Assad takes over Syria, and Alex Salmond resigns as the head of the Scottish National Party. Big Brother premieres, and the News of the World pushes Sarah’s Law, the UK version of Megan’s Law, which would continually disclose the residences of all convicted sex offenders.

And in books we have The Ancestor Cell, a book that is almost universally recognized as a bit of a bad move, in the “invading Russia in winter” or “watching Timelash with your new girlfriend” sort of senses of that phrase. This is all completely true. This is not a good book on any level. Its prose is turgid, its plotting is awkward at best, and its ideas are bone-headed. It consistently insults the reader’s intelligence while cheerily driving its plot forward as an outright idiot plot. (I particularly love the moment where the Time Lords forget that putting a Klein Bottle in the time vortex flattens it and lets the contents escape, which on the one hand misunderstands a Klein Bottle and on the other hand assumes that Time Lords are prone to forgetting basic facts about how four-dimensional objects work.) It is an absolutely awful book. But the particulars of why it’s bad are almost immaterial.…

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I’ll Explain Later

We went skip-happy again. No The Taking of Planet Five (12th best), Frontier Worlds (29th), or Parallel 59 (54th). The Shadows of Avalon is Paul Cornell’s one contribution to the Eighth Doctor Adventures. Mostly it’s a book about Celtic mythology, grief, and the Brigadier. A little bit it’s a book that does a huge plot twist in the novel line as Compassion turns out to be the first of the living TARDISes we met in Alien Bodies and Romana turns a bit evil. Unfortunately it’s a bit wonky. Lars Pearson mourns giving Paul Cornell his first bad review. Vanessa Bishop calls it “less self-indulgent than Paul’s later work for Virgin” but mostly finds time to keep bashing Interference. It’s only at 31st in the rankings, which is strikingly low for Paul Cornell.

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It’s February of 2000. Gabrielle is at number one with “Rise,” which lasts two weeks before Oasis debuts at number one with “Go Let It Out,” which is unseated a week later by All Saints with “Pure Shores.” R.E.M., Shania Twain, Christina Aguilera, Aqua, Britney Spears, and… OK, I just need to admit, we’re miles outside any part of British music I know a thing about. So I’m just picking band names that amuse me now. Scanty Sandwich, Lyte Funkie Ones, Sash!, Joey Negro, and Ian Brown also chart. Ian Brown’s name doesn’t amuse me, but the song title “Dolphins Were Monkeys” does, so it goes on the list too.

In news, since we left off, Pervez Musharraf successfully executed a coup d’etat in Pakistan, narrowly avoiding dying in a plane crash, which was actually the other alternative. The Catholic Church and Lutherans resolved their theological dispute over salvation. A horrific train crash took place at Ladbroke Grove, killing thirty-one people and prompting major reforms in rail safety in the UK. Gary Glitter was jailed for downloading child pornography, and both the Millennium Dome and the London Eye opened. Also, the odometer rolled over without the world ending, unless you happened to be a Pyrenean Ibex, in which case you went extinct when your last surviving member had a tree fall on her. While in the month this book came out Peanuts ends its run in newspapers.

And in books, The Shadows of Avalon. So there’s an elephant in the room with this book that I’ll spend most of the post on, but I want to set up some other bits first, mostly because everybody focuses on the ending of this book. And while I want to say my piece there, especially as it’s the bit that feeds into the larger narrative best, I want to give the book the repsect of its own terms as well.

This is, by Cornell’s own admission, a book he wrote because he was strapped for cash. It is, as a result, the weakest Paul Cornell novel by some margin. In some ways this is surprising: the continually passionate Eighth Doctor, who absolutely sings in Orman and Blum’s hands, seems similarly tailor-made for Cornell’s frockery.…

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I’ll Explain Later

The Blue Angel is Paul Magrs’s second Doctor Who novel, co-authored with Jeremy Hoad. It features Iris Wildthyme in a dense plot weaving its way through multiple levels of reality, a Star Trek parody, and a few other bits of postmodernism to boot. Lars Pearson calls it “passionate, whimsical and charming,” while Doctor Who Magazine likes it, but only when it can contextualize it against “the inherited story arc’s desire to crumble the Doctor.” Regardless, it fares rather worse than the other Magrs books in the rankings, stuck at forty-eighth out of seventy-three Eighth Doctor Adventures. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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It’s September of 1999. Lou Bega is at number one with “Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of…),” which is impressively only one of two songs in the top two with “Mambo” in the title, and one of four in the top ten with explicit Latin influences, which clearly constitutes a bit of a fad. Two weeks later Vengaboys take number one with “We’re Going To Ibiza!,” and a week after that Eiffel 65 takes over with “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” Tom Jones and the Cardigans, Enrique Inglesias, and Ricky Martin also chart. In news, an earthquake kills 143 in Greece, and another kills 2,400 in Taiwan. The President of Indonesia is successfully pressured to allow an international peacekeeping force into the country. And the Midland Bank renames itself HSBC, a name under which it will do lots of impressively bad things.

While in books we have The Blue Angel, the first of two times in which Paul Magrs immediately follows Lawrence Miles in the running order, helping establish a strange sort of dualism between Faction Paradox and Iris Wildthyme as the defining ideas of the era. More than any other book in either the BBC or Virgin line, The Blue Angel wants to stand alone as a novel. It’s a novel that luxuriates in its own structure and space. Its style is not ostentatious or over the top – this is not Sky Pirates!, nor even, for that matter, The Scarlet Empress. But the entire book gives a continual sense of being structured and deliberate. Its casual play with multiple realities and refusal to impose an overall structure on them makes the book actively difficult to reconcile with the rest of the line in any direct way. It doesn’t contradict anything, but so much of what it’s doing stems out of its own structure and feeds into its own concerns that it seems almost silly to spend too much time connecting it elsewhere. On top of that, it is a book that actively declines to offer explanations for itself. It’s not quite a difficult book, but it’s a strange one that doesn’t quite fit in. In this regard it’s a welcome break from the pace of the EDAs I’ve mostly set for myself – in many ways it’s the one EDA I’m looking at because it’s interesting on its own merits instead of because it fits cleanly into the larger narrative of the series.…

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