I’ll Explain Later

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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I’ll Explain Later

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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I’ll Explain Later

We skipped the largely disliked Strange England by Simon Messingham. He gets better in the BBC Books line.

First Frontier, David McIntee’s second novel, mashes up American UFO myths with Doctor Who, and then, about halfway through, pulls off the return of the Master. The book is altogether lighter than White Darkness, although maintains McIntee’s fondness for lengthy action sequences, upon which its reputation largely hinges. Craig Hinton proclaims it to be “another winner from Mr. McIntee,” while Lars Pearson, who had been skeptical about McIntee’s first effort as well, says that the book “needed to shed about 100 pages and not end with a whimper.” On the whole this novel is apparently stunningly average – thirty-third out of sixty-one on Sullivan’s rankings, with a 68.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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It’s September of 1994. “Love is All Around,” improbably, is still at number one, having landed there way back in June. They stay there for the first two weeks of the month before Whigfield finally takes them down with “Saturday Night.” Boyz II Men, Blur, Kylie Minogue, R.E.M., and Bon Jovi also chart.

Since last we checked in, a fire wiped out the Norwich Central Library. Woodstock ’94 happened, because nothing commemorates the spirit of the 1960s like a massive corporate remake. And the Provisional Irish Republican Army announces a complete halt to all military options. While during the month this book comes out, Louise Jensen is raped and murdered by British soldiers in Cyprus, the US carries out a bloodless invasion of Haiti, and, in a desperate attempt to let me have three items in this sentence, Andrew Wiles proves Fermat’s Last Theorem again.

And in books, First Frontier. Since the “I’ll Explain Later” section robs me of any chance to bury the lead, we may as well start with the big deal, which is that this book features the return of the Master. Actually, this is still burying the lead slightly, as the real story is in many ways not that the Master is back but that the New Adventures have decided to regenerate him, with the Ainley version of the Master getting shot down by Ace in one of the novel’s innumerable action sequences. This is an unusual move. For a variety of reasons it is unrealistic to have the novels maintain the status quo of the television series – and indeed they haven’t, both introducing Benny and evolving Ace into New Ace.

Nevertheless, there are degrees of this sort of thing. None of the wilderness years lines ever made a sincere attempt at regenerating the Doctor. The only wilderness year regeneration was on television. And the reason for this is relatively obvious: it’s done so that if the series returns to television it can, in theory, pick up where it left off. Even the aging of Ace in Deceit only serves to advance her age by as many years had passed since Survival, effectively keeping Ace and Sophie Aldred’s ages in line.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else

Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks, is the other portion of the two book cycle that kicks off the Missing Adventures line, the other being the already-talked-about Goth Opera by Paul Cornell. It’s a sequel to State of Decay and practically every story ever on Gallifrey, with Al Capone thrown in to boot. At the time Craig Hinton wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but claimed his “overall impression was of an exciting, compelling book.” Lars Pearson says almost the exact same thing, but says that “Blood Harvest succeeds despite these flaws.” The overall consensus is average – twenty-eighth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s July of 1994. Wet Wet Wet remain at number one with “Love is All Around,” and remain there all month.  Both Reel 2 Real and All-4-One also chart, as do the BC-52s, and, less numerically, Take That and Erasure. Andres Escobar is shot and killed in Medellin, an incident widely believed to be revenge for his scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup, which Brazil wins later in the month. Fourteen firefighters die in a wildefire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Fragments of Shoemaker-Levy begin hitting Jupiter. Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty, and a bomb explodes outside the Israeli Embassy in London. And Tony Blair wins the leadership election for the Labour Party, so he gets to start being a character in these things I suppose.

While on bookshelves, Blood Harvest. I realized, as I thought about this post, that I am fairly sure this is the third-to-last time we’re actually going to cover a Terrance Dicks story. We’ve got The Eight Doctors, we’ll do one of his two New Series “Quickreads” books, but those are actually the last of the Terrance Dicks material we’re going to look at. And so it’s perhaps time to knuckle down and deal with one of those oft-punted topics that I’ve gestured at broadly, namely Terrane Dicks’s politics.

Let’s first set this up in terms of All-Consuming Fire, a book witch which Blood Harvest shares more than a passing resemblance. Both are Doctor Who stories in the classic “mash up some genres” mode, with Blood Harvest combining Doctor Who, vampires, and gangster noir. Both take their relatively mental premises and have a great deal of fun with them. All-Consuming Fire is in several ways better put together – the seams between the Chicago gangster bits with the Doctor and Ace and the E-Space vampire bits with Romana and Benny are weak, and the two settings barely manage to converge at the end. Still, the book is firmly in the range of “great fun,” and is yet another Doctor Who book that clearly has a sense of glee at the fact that it’s Doctor Who, and thus can casually do vampire gangster noir.

Dicks also does a better job than anyone gives him credit for in writing McCoy’s Doctor. This is still McCoy the chessmaster, with an elaborate plan he’s not telling anyone, and Dicks captures that while keeping it comfortably on the same spectrum as other versions of the Doctor.…

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I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped the quite-good Tragedy Day and Theatre of War, as well as the quite awful Legacy. They are, in order, a Gareth Roberts romp, a novel that establishes a ton of New Adventures-specific mythology that won’t really ever play in that heavily, and a Peladon story as bad as the last one.

All-Consuming Fire is a Doctor Who/Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft mashup by Andy Lane, though only the first two of these were particularly advertised. It’s written as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, with all but a few sections being narrated by Watson (Benny gets a few sections as well). The format puts the Doctor and company relatively in the background – Benny doesn’t appear at all until the halfway point, and Ace is limited to the final third or so, while the Doctor vanishes for lengthy chunks of time. Still, it’s well-liked. Craig Hinton at the time called it “a brilliant pastiche and a compulsive read,” while Lars Pearson goes with “a little long, but damn fine work.” The Sullivan rankings put it at eleventh place.

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It’s June of 1994. Wet Wet Wet are at number one with “Love is All Around,” having just knocked out Manchester United with “Come On You Reds.” They remain there all month. Prodigy, Guns ’n Roses, Ace of Base, and Mariah Carey also chart. In albums, you’ve got The Cranberries. Lower in the charts are Nine Inch Nails with “Closer,” but the truth is that that’s mostly interesting for the US, as Nine Inch Nails never did all that well in the UK despite the fact that virtually all of their musical influences were British.

In news, since No Future the US Supreme Court made a key ruling that parody is a valid example of fair use, a case that is also entertaining in that it requires us to imagine Antonin Scalia listening to 2 Live Crew. US troops withdrew from Somalia. Silvio Berlusconi made one of his periodic assents to power in Italy. The Rwandan Genocide began, Kurt Cobain killed himself, and Nelson Mandela became the president of South Africa. Also, John Smith, leader of the Labour Party, died of a massive heart attack, leading to Tony Blair becoming leader of the party in July (after the requisite political wrangling with Gordon Brown). While during this month South Africa rejoins the British Commonwealth, a one month ceasefire lasts only a few days in the Yugoslav War, and the early stages of that great 1990s obsession of the US, the OJ Simpson trial, begin. Also, Microsoft announces that it’s killing off MS-DOS, and Aum Shinrikyo a sarin gas attack in Japan killing seven. And Dennis Potter dies.

And then, in books, All-Consuming Fire. There is a revealing moment, a ways into All-Consuming Fire, in which Benny, explaining the history of India, refers to the 1857 uprising and talks about the ammunition cartridges that were said to be made with animal fat, specifically pork or beef fat. And the Benny comments that, “of course, the Hindus couldn’t touch pork and the Muslims couldn’t touch beef.”…

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I’ll Explain Later

No Future is the final book of the Alternate History cycle, and the third book in Paul Cornell’s loosely themed quartet. It features the resolution to the tensions among the TARDIS crew, as well as the return of the Vardans, the Meddling Monk, UNIT, and a Chronovore. Paul Cornell himself is on record as not being fond of the book, and nor was Craig Hinton at the time, saying that “we’ve seen it all before” and that “it doesn’t live up to expectations.” Thad said, he rather inexplicably describes Cornell’s writing style as “street-cred cyberpunk,” which really ought disqualify his viewpoints. (That he expresses disbelief that Ace would betray the Doctor over Jan when, in fact, that’s a complete red herring and the point is that Ace wouldn’t betray the Doctor over Jan makes this even more frustrating. I mean, I don’t usually thwap the reviewers here, but this one is a crappy review.) Lars Pearson is more praiseful, calling it “one of the strongest novels.” Fan consensus tends to side with him, putting it at sixteenth of the sixty-one New Adventures. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s February of 1994. D:Ream are still at number one with “Things Can Only Get Better.” Two weeks later it’s Mariah Carey with “Without You,” which closes out the month. This is uninspiring, as is the collection of other things to chart: Toni Braxton, Celine Dion, Reel 2 Real, and Ace of Base, the latter, inevitably, with “The Sign.” More fitting for the book we have on tap, Tori Amos’s Under the Pink debuts at number one, her lone number one album in the UK charts.

In news, Byron De La Beckwith is finally convicted for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, an American civil rights leader. He had previously twice avoided conviction when all-white juries deadlocked on his guilt. In one of these trials a former governor of Mississippi interrupted the trial to shake Beckwith’s hand. In Norway, “The Scream” is stolen in Oslo on the same day that the Winter Olympics open in Lillehammer. Police excavate the garden of Fred West, a serial killer, in Gloucester. And the Bosnian War drags brutally on.

While in literature, we have a Doctor Who book that tries to extend the UNIT era the few years further into the punk era, finally tackling the one great subculture that Doctor Who never fully embraced. In which Doctor Who finally makes direct reference to the Situationists and deals with anarchism as a social movement and philosophy instead of a vaguely defined tendency. One that smashes together huge swaths of continuity, revamping UNIT for the umpteenth time. And one that finally tackles and sorts out the tensions among the TARDIS crew. It is, in other words, a staggeringly ambitious, big novel. Clearly the only person who could be trusted to write it is Paul Cornell, at this point by far the established “marquee” writer for the Virgin line.

The book itself has a reputation for being a bit disjointed.…

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Steve Lyons’s Conundrum is the fourth and penultimate part of the Alternate History arc. It’s another sequel book, this time to The Mind Robber, so clearly I’m going to have some things to say below. As with much of this book arc, it’s also largely about ratcheting up the tensions within the TARDIS, and everyone is at everyone else’s throats for much of the book. It is quite acclaimed – indeed, the most popular of the five books, coming in tenth place on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings. Craig Hinton claimed it as an “absolute masterpiece,” while Lars Pearson calls it “Tremendous.” So obviously I’m going to have something terrible to say. Before that, however, the DWRG summary and Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s January of 1994. Mr. Blobby is still at number one. This comes to a swift end, as Chaka Demus and Pliers get to number one with “Twist and Shout” featuring Jack Radics and Taxi Gang, which seems like far too many people for “Twist and Shout.” Two weeks later it’s unseated by D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” which plays out the month, keeping “All For Love” by Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart, and Sting out of number one. That also seems like too many artists, really, for anything. Culture Beat, Eternal, Haddaway, Depeche Mode, Toni Braxton, and Tori Amos all make the top ten as well, the latter with “Cornflake Girl.”

In the news, NAFTA is properly established. Nancy Kerrigan is whacked in the leg, setting off one of the greatest sports melodramas ever. In one of the greatest purely symbolic acts of foreign relations ever, the US and Russia sign the Kremlin accords, agreeing not to actually point their nuclear weapons at each other but to aim them only if they intend to actually blow up the world. Two blank shots are fired at Prince Charles in Australia. This is, so far as I can tell, utterly unrelated to him retiring from competitive polo a few weeks earlier. Katharine, Dutchess of Kent, converts to Catholicism. And Shannon Faulkner breaks the gender barrier at The Citadel, a US military college, and quickly dropped out in the face of the torrent of sexist abuse she received.

While in dead trees, Conundrum. Steve Lyons is something of a bogey-writer for me. He’s terribly well-acclaimed. According to Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, he’s got top-ten novels in the Past Doctors Adventures and New Adventures, and places at fifteenth in the Eighth Doctor Adventures and sixteenth in the Missing Adventures. And yet I’ve done his work twice – The Witch Hunters in the Hartnell book and The Fires of Vulcan here – and came away unimpressed both times despite the acclaim. And here I am with his most acclaimed book and yet again I have trouble with him.

Admittedly explaining the Land of Fiction was never going to be a way to win my heart. If there’s a premise for a Doctor Who story I’m more likely to outright hate than that, It doesn’t spring to mind easily.…

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