Salvation [Doctor Who, Diversion 5]

Salvation by Steve Lyons

4 January 1999

​I'm a little surprised that it took me two years to actually do a novel for this marathon. I'm not altogether sure if Big Finish audios have surpassed them in quantity these days or not, but there are still a whole heap of licensed books for Doctor Who, and yet I covered eight audios before I even managed one book! I've already passed the point of opportunity for a lot of First Doctor novels, most notably Empire of Glass which I had to axe after my long hiatus, but I expect them to be a more regular occurrence from this point onward. Still, this remains the only First Doctor novel in the queue, and as such is an outlier.

As I've mentioned before, this is a difficult era to write for, and new additions to the realm of Doctor Who prose (as also mentioned previously) seem to run the risk of trying too hard to be "mature". This is seen most plainly in this book during the appalling scene where Joseph tries to force himself on Dodo, but fortunately the book doesn't hit quite the same point of crassness again. Though that scene annoyed me for a while, I was back on board again once we reached the part where the Doctor and Dodo sit in Battery Park on the grass together, chatting and eating hot dogs. I thought that bit was a brilliant piece of character work which would have slotted right into the modern series. It's easy to see how a lot of the DNA of the novels published in the 1990s eventually made its way into the show proper when it was revived in 2005.

The book also deserves major props for trying to make an actual character of Dorothea Chaplet. As of this writing, I have already watched The Ark and I cannot say that I'm overly impressed with her so far. I could blame John Wiles for this, but something had to have gone wrong at multiple levels to turn out such a non-character as Dodo, especially given that foreknowledge tells me that she doesn't improve much before her departure. I'll try to form my own opinions, but first impressions seem not very promising. Despite that, Salvation actually managed to make me care. Lyons does a fine job of sketching a Dodo who's a naive but sympathetic young girl, desperate for escape after the death of her parents. Time is even given to explain her mysteriously changing accent, noting how she had to learn how to switch to RP after moving to the London area and being mocked by her peers. This is someone who could have actually lived in 1960s Britain, and it's nice to see her being portrayed with significantly more life to her character.

The central conceit of the novel is an eye-catching one, with latter-day gods walking the streets of 1960s New York. Just getting to see New York of this period in Doctor Who is a treat, as aside from the brief Empire State Building segment of The Chase, contemporary America is mostly ignored throughout the classic run of Who. The cultural differences noticed by the characters are quite fun, particularly the bit where Dodo is gobsmacked by seeing a color TV! The gods themselves (actually aliens, shocking millions of readers) are the most interesting concept put forward by Salvation. In a real sense, the story doesn't even really have an antagonist, and as the Doctor points out, the gods are victims just as much as the people they inadvertently kill. As a species, they have no thought or form of their own and instead react to the perceptions and expectations of others. When caught by army personnel after landing on Earth, one takes the form of a little gray alien. The rest begin to take the shape and powers of gods when reading the collective subconscious of a population desperately hoping for order and stability in a world torn apart by the social conflicts of the 1960s. The Patriarch even briefly becomes a bog-standard menacing Doctor Who villain when perceived as such by the Doctor! (I choose to be charitable by thinking this is intentional...) It's a wonderfully meta idea - a species of beings who only think, who only really exist when they are perceived.

The culmination of this is their own world, a place which the human followers sent there believe to be Heaven, an entire world of such beings where the dreams of humanity are made manifest. Joseph, who has been becoming steadily more and more human for the whole story unlike the others of his race who have been trying to match the human idea of gods, eventually starts to influence this world with his own thoughts and desires. Dodo, who has been having a frankly rather sad dream where her parents are alive and she is a princess, even starts to become affected by Joseph's perceptions, and almost marries him before he realizes this is wrong and puts a stop to it. He's even "excommunicated" by the Patriarch and becomes essentially a real human before the end of the story.

This is an interesting idea. A creature who essentially does not exist becomes so "real" because of the expectation of the humans around him that he not only becomes functionally human himself, but even starts to shape those humans in turn. There is a point to be made here in that fictional characters can be startlingly real depending on the perspective of the viewer, reader, or listener, and that just as these characters are shaped by an author, they can affect real people right back.

Conversely, it also puts into focus how, as soon as I stopped reading, Dodo as presented in this story ceased to exist, replaced by her vastly inferior counterpart from thirty-four years before. Although I'll keep this characterization of her in mind, I can't help but to feel that these post-mortem rewrites of her character are the best we'll ever get. It's a pity, but even though we've been rewriting the past for the last several reviews, this art has its limits. To mangle two quotes at once, I guess we're all stories in the end, companions of a Time Lord even more so.

That's all I have for tonight. We're set to explore many, many more stories written by Steve Lyons in the medium-to-distant future of this marathon. In fact, I was surprised by just how many, as I didn't know what he had written until I checked his bibliography earlier. I liked this book, on the whole, so I'm interested to see what else he's cooked up. For now, it's back to 1966, and The Ark is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 29 April 2020.)