I’ll Explain Later

Sky Pirates!, Dave Stone’s first New Adventure, is a novel in the comedic sci-fi style of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, albeit with a bit of a dark tinge. It’s not hugely popular. Lars Pearson calls it “a drug-induced work, perhaps best suited for trippy, skewed-view people.” Dave Owen is polite, but calls it “a bit of an ordeal.” Shannon Sullivan’s rankings have it languishing down at 47th pace, with a 60.9% rating. It’s worse than Iceberg. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s July of 1995. Robson and Jerome are still at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” A week later The Outhere Brothers take over with “Boom Boom Boom.”  U2, Foo Fighters, Jamiroquai, Bobby Brown, Shaggy, Seal, and Method Man also chart. I have a bad feeling that I accidentally ran the July chart for Original Sin, since this is flagrantly the same chart. I’ll want to fix that for the book version. In news, John Major retains leadership of the Conservative party. Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from House Arrest in either Burma or Myanmar, depending on your taste. And there’s quite a bit of to-do over Iraqi disarmament.

While in dead trees, Sky Pirates! The obvious thing to note about Sky Pirates! is that Dave Stone is no Terry Pratchett. But who in their right minds would expect it to be? One of them is among the most successful writers in the United Kingdom, the other is writing for the New Adventures, and, as we previously discussed, there’s a cap to the expectations one can reasonably have there.

This is, however, a problem for Sky Pirates! in a way that it isn’t for, say, Original Sin. Because as we discussed on Monday, the comedic narrator is first and foremost a matter of style and craft. And doing a Terry Pratchett-style comedy novel when you’re not a Terry Pratchett quality writer then the gulf is going to be more visible than if you’re writing a pulpy action thriller, which is a genre where the difference between a very good writer and a pretty good writer is narrower. Comedy is terribly, terribly unforgiving.

And so, yes, Stone’s novel has problems. Where the books he’s emulating – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Discworld – weave comedy around social and political observations, Stone too often delivers lengthy lectures on sexual politics with a few jokes in them. It’s a subtle difference, but a massive one. Stone is also prone to trying a bit too hard to create a distinctive narrative voice, falling back on gratuitous verbosity and the deeper recesses of the thesaurus in place of actual wit or content.

But that’s the obvious thing to note. We strive for better here. And while I think even a positive reading (and I don’t think the New Adventures require such extreme words as “redemption” for the most part) has to acknowledge the fact that the New Adventures simply aren’t drawing top drawer writers on a regular basis, and it would be utterly unreasonable to expect otherwise.…

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Original Sin, by Andy Lane, introduces Roz Forrester and Chris Cwej, the final two original companions of the Virgin line. It serves as a semi-sequel to Lucifer Rising, in that it fleshes out the time period and the nature of the Adjudicators (basically, at this point, cops), and has a surprise reveal of Tobias Vaughn as the villain behind it all. At the time Dave Owen, newly installed as Doctor Who Magazine reviewer, calls it “a truly auspicious debut for two new companions,” while Lars Pearson declares it “all the more impressive because it doesn’t try to impress you.” It’s quite popular, at sixth in the Sullivan rankings with an 83.1% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s June of 1995. Robson and Jerome remain at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” A week into the month, The Outhere Brothers unseat them with “Boom Boom Boom,” which rides out the month. U2, Foo Fighters, Jamiroquai, Michael and Janet Jackson, Clock, Shaggy, and Seal all also chart, more than one of them with songs from the Batman Forever soundtrack.

In news, what is apparently the busiest hurricane season in sixty-five years begins. So that’s ironic, as I post this from generator power. Jacques Chirac resumes nuclear tests in French Polynesia. US Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady is shot down over Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is rescued. A hijacking situation in Japan is defused after a knife-wielding man attempts to force the release of Shoko Asahara. And John Major pulls a stunt resignation as leader of the Conservative Party to allow a leadership election, which he wins.

In exciting sci-fi television tie-in novels, Original Sin. The needle that the New Adventures perpetually threaded between serious-minded, action-packed sci-fi drama and the sort of ludicrous camp that Doctor Who can do better than any other sci-fi show of note is, perhaps, captured more perfectly in this than in any other novel. On the one hand we have a grim and murder-filled future, a book where the Doctor acquires a pair of cops as his newest companions, and a major secondary character who’s a serial killer. On the other, one of the new companions spends most of the book with a body modification making him look like a giant teddy bear.

This may be a strange thing to focus on, but it still gives some intriguing insight into the way in which the books go about things. There is, after all, no inherent reason not to give the Doctor a giant teddy bear as a companion in the novels. Left to their own devices the comics gave us a shape-shifting penguin, after all. And so the decision to have Cwej be a giant teddy bear for large swaths of this story, but to make sure he gets reverted to human form at the end presents a strange ambivalence: a moment where the books seem to say “this far and no further” in terms of that sort of mad inventiveness.…

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Human Nature is possibly the New Adventure needing the least introduction: it’s the book from which Paul Cornell’s two-parter in Series Three is adapted. As one might expect, it’s somewhat acclaimed. At the time, Craig Hinton called it “the finest Doctor Who book to date.” Lars Pearson calls it “a must-not-be-missed bold experiment.” It’s at number one in Sullivan’s rankings with an eighty-eight percent rating. And, you know, it’s good enough that they made a TV story out of it. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s May of 1995. Oasis debut at number one with “Some Might Say.” They get knocked out a week later by Livin’ Joy, who also enter the charts at number one with “Dreamer,” a rerelease of their 1994 single. They’re unseated a week later by Robson and Jerome, making a debut at number one with “Unchained Melody/White Cliffs of Dover.” Unlike the previous two songs to enter at number one, they actually stay there for more than a week. Bjork, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, and the Manchester United 1995 Football Squad also chart.

In the news, Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. The Dalai Lama picks a fight by naming the eleventh Panchen Lama. Three days later the six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is detained by the Chinese authorities, and has not been seen in public since. A year later the People’s Republic of China names their own Panchen Lama. Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down in a horseriding accident. And Japanese police arrest Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, over the sarin gas attacks in March.

While in books, Human Nature. Ah. A big one. The book is better than the movie. Let’s get that out of the way, and then, perhaps more importantly, let’s leave it there. We’ll be back to this story eventually, and we can talk about comparison then. But since I know better than to think I can leave it entirely, the book is better than the movie. So let’s just talk about the book.

To start, it’s good. Better than good. Back with Warlock we played at the idea that the New Adventures could compete with serious literary science fiction, but the ruse was see-through. Andrew Cartmel doesn’t have the prose style for it, though he’s not dreadful by any stretch of the imagination. But go ahead. Put Human Nature up against The Diamond Age. It can hold its own and then some. Are there enough different ways to calmly explain that this novel is an absolute triumph? Perhaps not.

And yet what we have is, on the surface, uninspiring. The plot isn’t just ripped off from Death Takes a Holiday (clearly something in the air, as three years later the movie was remade execrably as Meet Joe Black), it’s unapologetic about it, even still including the Grim Reaper within it. It’s one of those terribly clever novels, and its plot seems to mostly be a canvas stretched out so that Paul Cornell can scrawl his usual enthused claims about the virtues of mundane everyday life, mixed freely, in this case, with stern lessons about the horrors of war that are using World War I, the single easiest war of the twentieth century to demonstrate the horrors of, to make their point.…

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We’ve skipped Infinite Requiem by Daniel Blythe. If one were to make a list of the most skippable novels in the New Adventures line, it would easily make the top ten.

Sanctuary, David McIntee’s third and final New Adventure (he wrote two Missing Adventures as well), is the New Adventures’ sole pure historical, and the first such story since Black Orchid. It deals with Christian heretics in medieval France, and culminates in the death of Benny’s romantic interest Guy de Carnac and much emotional trauma. I have an unsettling feeling that somewhere in this entry I instinctively typed Guy Debord, but frankly if I did I’m too amused by it to fix it. Like most of McIntee’s work, it exemplifies averageness: thirty-second on the Sullivan rankings, with a score of 69%. Craig Hinton declares that “even if you don’t like historicals” you should read it, as “you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.” But one page earlier he gave The Ribos Operation one star, so, you know. Trust him as you will. Lars Perason backs him up, though, calling it “one of the best stand-alone books” and proclaiming that “the ending will tear your entrails out,” though this seems intended to be read as a selling point. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s April of 1995. The Outhere Brothers are at number one with “Don’t Stop (Wiggle Wiggle),” which lasts a week before Take That are “Back For Good.” Which turns out to be untrue, though they do make it through the end of the month.  Wet Wet Wet, Celine Dion, REM, Bryan Adams, Boyzone, and a momentary supergroup of Cher, Chrissie Hynde, Nene Cherry, and Eric Clapton also chart. In news, the Oklahoma City bombing takes place in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The recently elected Republicans in the House of Representatives finish passing the bulk of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. While in countries we actually care about… actually, nothing so far as I can tell. This appears to either be a very dull month or a very spotty Wikipedia article on the year.

On to books, such as Sanctuary. There are two kinds of binary distinctions that we’ve drawn up on this blog: ones that have eventually been deconstructed, and ones that haven’t. The latter category is by far the smallest, consisting, at this point, of this binary distinction and the one between Spooner and Lucarotti-style historicals. That’s not to say the distinction is never deconstructed – had we done Doctor Who and the Pirates as a Time Can Be Rewritten entry we would have seen it done. But it is, as distinctions within Doctor Who go, one of the most puzzlingly steadfast, and thus a useful one to turn to as we stumble about

To recap, since the blog has gained a reader or two since the Hartnell days, some of whom might have not bought the Hartnell book, the pure historical episodes of the Hartnell era divide fairly easily into two types.…

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Kate Orman’s second New Adventure, Set Piece, is first and foremost notable for seeing Ace’s departure to become “Time’s Vigilante” and patrol a two hundred year period of Earth’s history via Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart’s mostly functional time machine. The book also finds room for ancient Egypt, Napoleonic France, and late 19th century France in the last days of the Paris Commune. Also a very evil spaceship staffed by robotic ants and a cafe that reiterates through space and time. It’s quite fun, and most people agree: Shannon Sullivan’s rankings put it at fourteenth overall with a 77.5% rating, part of that four-book cluster of Kate Orman books that I’ve mentioned previously. And yet the big two reviews are rather equivocal: Craig Hinton calls it “a masterpiece,” but grouses that Kate Omran is “rather self-indulgent on a number of occasions,” and Lars Pearson can only muster “Good, focused, and clear.” Fools. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s February of 1995. Celine Dion is at number one with “Think Twice.” And that’s February for the number one slot, at least. Madonna, Annie Lennox, Bon Jovi, and a bit of Riverdance also chart, as do things I’ve never heard of but that could well be important: Ini Kamoze, N-Trance, and MN8, for instance. In news, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers goes missing. Michael Foale becomes the first Brit to walk in space. Kevin Mitnick is arrested, and Barings Bank collapses after a securities broker loses $1.4 billion on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. And The Independent publishes the first Bridget Jones column.

While in books, Ace (some would say at long last) leaves the New Adventures in Set Piece, largely wrapping up the strange phenomenon of New Ace. And it is, on the whole, difficult to come up with many words other than “strange” to describe New Ace. She was largely the pet project of Peter Darvill-Evans, who is by this time long gone from editing the New Adventures (it’s not quite clear where the transition was. The Whoniverse guide is the only overt claim I can find, and it has Darvill-Evans’s last New Adventure as Theatre of War), replaced by Rebecca Levene. But even Darvill-Evans seemed to have no real idea what to do with her beyond the concept. Her debut novel was, as we saw, a mess. Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore got one good shot out of the concept, Paul Cornell got two more (one years after the New Adventures had wrapped), and Andrew Cartmel did well enough with the character, though mainly by ignoring all of the New parts of New Ace and just writing Ace, older.

So it’s not a surprise that Levene, fairly early in her time in charge, saw to it that New Ace was written out. And tapping Kate Orman, one of the best Virgin debutants around, for the job is the very definition of sensible. But it leaves Orman with what we usually call the “nightmare brief,” namely having to wrap up a character who never worked in the first place.…

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We have skipped St. Anthony’s Fire, Falls the Shadow, and Parasite, all of which are in the bottom third of New Adventures in Sullivan’s rankings.

Warlock is the second part of Andrew Cartmel’s War Trilogy, and abandons the Cyberpunk of the first volume in favor for a thriller about drug culture and animal experimentation. Which sounds like it should piss a lot of people off, but it actually comes in at a cheerily average twenty-ninth place in Sullivan’s rankings, and does extremely well with the critics. Craig Hinton sums it up as “Warlock is nasty, Warlock is unpleasant, Warlock is sick. And Warlock is a triumph for Andrew Cartmel.” Lars Pearson takes a similar tack, saying that “Warlock strikes your chest dead-center, warming you up and making you angry.” DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s January of 1995. East 17 are at number one with their holdover Christmas #1 “Stay Another Day.” It’s unseated a week later by “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex, who round out the month. Celine Dion, Oasis, Boyzone, Mariah Carey,  R Kelly, and Green Day all also chart, the latter with an actually-successful-this-time rerelease of last year’s single “Basket Case.” So clearly we’re in that part of the nineties. More cheerily, Portishead makes it to number three in the albums chart with Dummy.

In news, the World Trade Organization is established. Star Trek: Voyager premieres, to nobody’s particular joy. The Russians briefly panic and think Norway is trying to bomb them. And the first MORI poll of 1995 shows that the Conservative Party is only trailing Labour by about thirty points, a significant improvement of their previous forty points. They still don’t have to actually go get slaughtered at the polls for two more years, however.

And in books it’s Andrew Cartmel’s Warlock. It was easy, with Warhead, to miss what was going on with Andrew Cartmel. Doctor Who itself was straining hard in the face of unexpectedly becoming a series of novels. Whereas Cartmel was actually making his Doctor Who writing debut, having been the first regular script editor since Terrance Dicks not to self-commission, and the only one since Peter Bryant to have never actually written an episode of Doctor Who. So to try to figure out how Cartmel’s writing was evolving in Warhead is to peer through a glass darkly at what isn’t even close to the most interesting thing in view. But now we come to Warlock, the second part of his War trilogy, and it raises some interesting insights both about Cartmel as a writer and about the shifting role of Doctor Who in relation to the larger body of science fiction.

While it is not quite accurate to say that Cartmel is the last Doctor Who writer to decide that the point of Doctor Who is to do “serious” science fiction, with its premise meaning that it can jump around from idea to idea rapidly, it is accurate to say that at the time of Warlock this is something of a dying idea.…

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