Blue Box [Doctor Who, Diversion 35]

 Blue Box by Kate Orman
3 March 2003

​

I can't remember a world without computers. By the time I was born in 1994, the World Wide Web had already existed for four years, and by the time that I was old enough to operate our old HP machine (the first personal computer in our household, running Windows 98 at the time), more than half of the world's two-way telecommunications were happening online. The number today is well over 97%.

I got my start exploring Google Images (and later Wikipedia, once that was a thing) and spent many of my formative years on web forums for my various interests. I was a precocious lass who learned to read quite early, so by the time that I had my first typing class in fifth grade (around 2005), I had long since mastered the QWERTY keyboard and was desperately bored because I had little use for the lessons.

My dear dad does remember the time before widespread home computing, of course, and was just about the right age to jump on the bandwagon, turning 14 around the time this book is set. So I sent him a text to ask him what the transition was like, and get his own perspective on the subject and events of Blue Box.

His first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Model III, a machine with only 4Ks of RAM without buying additional expansions. This was more than enough for regular use in the early 80s, and dad made frequent use of it indeed, teaching himself BASIC and Hex to go "data mining" in the various programs his family bought. (Presumably on cassette, as he was only able to install a floppy drive a few years later after saving up extra for it.)

Around 1985, the old TRS-80 was donated away when dad went off to college, and was replaced with the formidable Commodore 64. This was the machine he used to connect with the early Internet for the first time, with the help of a dial-up service called Quantum Link (or Q-Link) which he remembered being rather pricey. Supposedly grandpa once gave him a talking-to for racking up the phone bill using this rig. For shame...

Interestingly enough (but not surprisingly perhaps, as I've previously related his history with the fandom), it seems that one of his formative online experiences in this period involved posting in bulletin board groups about Doctor Who. He says he contributed to an online episode guide for American fans, specifically rounding out the last missing episodes on the list with some information on the Sylvester McCoy Doctor. I couldn't find any trace of it today (albeit with only a cursory look), but I'm reliably told it had some godawful dot matrix art of a Dalek on the front page.

All things considered, his experiences were mostly only different from mine in the particulars of the technology. I guess the more things change, the more they really do stay the same. Having heard all about it from someone who was there, I'm assured of the authenticity of the computing landscape illustrated by Blue Box, and I'm inclined to think that Kate Orman had first-hand experience with these machines and networks herself.

Blue Box vaguely resembles Who Killed Kennedy in its narration style, told as an in-universe book published by Australian journalist Charles "Chick" Peters. This time, the narrator is firmly embroiled in the Doctor's adventure, so this is far more Doctor-centric than the aforementioned novel. The chapter titles, given as numbers in various types of computer syntax, help to set the tone.

Cyber crime is a major subject in Blue Box, which depicts a time when ordinary people and law enforcement alike were still somewhat innocent to the idea of cybersecurity risks. The first computer fraud actually happened all the way back in 1970, but it was only the emergence of the early Internet which allowed hacking and cyber fraud to really blossom, a time period which is portrayed in this book.

The harbinger here of this all-digital future is chief antagonist Sarah Swan, a ruthless, "fuck you, got mine", Reagan-era yuppie entrepreneur, who enjoys controlling the lives of others by means of their digital footprint. She finds her match in the Doctor, whose people probably see human technology like a child's toy. He still gets really into the hacker persona and seems to have a great deal of fun modifying his Apple II and playing cat-and-mouse with Swan.

It is a little funny seeing the Sixth Doctor in a Kate Orman book; she's most famous for writing for the Seventh and Eighth Doctors, who couldn't be more different from Six. She still captures Six's personality beautifully, while making him a little more likable than his Season 22 counterpart. I enjoyed him quoting a poem extolling the virtues of the domestic cat (‘For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command,’ non-explained the Doctor), and reading a collection of B. Kliban's cat comics.

The reactions of other characters to him amused me. For example: Chick Peters remarking, "I bet in school you were the kid who always ate the Playdough", or suggesting the Doctor might be an art thief (truer than he knows). He also gets a much-needed costume change, albeit in a medium where we can't see him: a black Bond suit with a neon technicolor cat-print necktie.

Peri also gets to wear jeans and a sweatshirt, bless her. There isn't much botany to be done in this book, but she still gets plenty to do and feels more well-rounded than she ever did on TV. She's in her native America for once, and seems at ease with navigating the pizza parlor and local hotels toward the start of the story, as well as galloping around with the Doctor and company later on when on the run from Swan and the law.

The book makes an able attempt at sketching out the relationship between Six and Peri. Their banter is a bit more good-natured than it was on TV, but we still learn that Peri is considering leaving the Doctor now that she's in a setting resembling her own time and space. In the end, she chooses not to. She explains their bond to Chick as one formed through a common traumatic situation (presumably The Caves of Androzani), which is interesting.

This whole thread is even more interesting in light of the book's primary alien antagonist (more of a MacGuffin), the Eridani creation the Doctor calls the "Idiot Savant". The Savant is biologically engineered to learn computer languages in the same way a child acquires natural languages, allowing it to rewrite and hack into any computer system, no matter how complex. This ultimately includes the "biological computer" of the human mind as well, which it seems to control via pheromones. It passively rewrites the minds of those who spend the most time around it in order to make them feel attached to it and interested in keeping it safe, even at the cost of their own lives.

Although the Doctor obviously isn't doing that same sort of thing to Peri, the book does still draw a bit of a parallel in suggesting their relationship to be somewhat toxic and codependent in nature, something which is definitely a lot more interesting than whatever we got on screen.

The theme of privacy and personal information is even extended to gender identity, as we learn, late in the book, about something that Chick has been hiding from the reader and the others: that he's intersex and a transgender man. This totally took me off-guard, even though it was hinted at earlier in the book in retrospect, since I didn't expect much in the way of gender diversity from a twenty year-old Doctor Who tie-in. As a trans person myself, I was absolutely delighted; Chick is a pretty cool character in general, is written sensitively, and is not stereotyped.

Curiously, Chick isn't the only character that's brought up in the context of gender identity; when the Doctor is exploring a MUD environment (that brought me way back), the narration remarks about his in-game avatar, "The Doctor didn’t bother with details like appearance or even gender," and Peri says something rather interesting after Chick comes out to her:

‘Oh... I guess I see. You know, it’s funny. I’m sort of surrounded. The Doctor also –’ she stopped short, colour jumping into her cheeks. ‘Uh, never mind.’

This seems to be drawing a comparison between transitioning one's gender and Time Lord regeneration, something which I'll definitely talk about more than once over the course of this marathon.

The emergence of the Internet, and the widespread prevalence of computing technology in general, are historically very recent phenomena, and it doesn't seem like they're going to stop evolving anytime soon. My lived experience of becoming acquainted with the World Wide Web is already a thing of the past. Now toddlers go about with iPads in hand, and may never make more than incidental use of PCs in their lives.

The average formative online experience is probably now something more like 6 hours a day of Frozen or Spider-Man asset flip videos, at least until kids are old enough to make use of social media mobile apps. After asking around, I learned that the schools in my area no longer offer typing classes like they did when I was a kid; children now learn to type even earlier than I did, albeit making use of non-tactile touch screen keyboards instead of the physical type.

Already the web forums and blogs of my younger years are considered somewhat obsolete (present company excluded, naturally), replaced by more centralized services controlled by corporate monopolies. Many old sites and online resources I made use of in my youth have already disappeared forever into the digital aether, and the Web is full of abandoned sites and accounts - ghosts in the machine.

2003 is just as distant now as 1982 was when this book was published. Hacker Bob Salmon's dialogue about an all-digital future where "people [talk] in sentences that they’ve actually thought about first" was funny in 2003, and is absolutely hilarious now. The capabilities of the Web have expanded, but so have its dangers. The first real cybersecurity laws came into force in the States in the later Eighties, but I was alarmed to discover in the course of my research that, even today, there are still some glaring holes in cyber crime legislation.

As technology has become more and more centralized and corporatized, the general population now seem to be actively discouraged from repairing their own devices or learning how the various applications we rely upon actually work. Companies like Apple have created our very own generation of "idiot savants" who can use all their apps and products with ease, but are generally forbidden from trying to pick them apart like my dad used to do.

This decline in computer literacy is especially concerning when you consider how cyber crime has grown more sophisticated in the last twenty years. I find myself worrying over the idea of the situation somehow getting even worse as more of the population gets online, while less and less of them know how to keep themselves safe while doing so.

Maybe I just despair over this because I'm growing older. Or because I work in the tech support field. Time will tell if I'm wrong; it always does.

Preview illustration of Blue Box by Roger Langridge, from DWM 330. (Retrieved from here)

We aren't departing from the virtual world just yet. Join me next time for an exciting adventure with Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 16 May 2024.)

Grave Matter [Doctor Who, Diversion 34]

 Grave Matter by Justin Richards
1 May 2000

Good grief, has it really been almost three years? The last novel I reviewed for the marathon was The Well-Mannered War in October 2021. Time commitment issues, you see. I'm hoping to rectify this, and have added three more Sixth Doctor novels after this one to make up the difference.

I felt a bit like I had stepped back in time with this one. No, not to 2000, but rather to the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era. Between the foggy, out-of-the-way English setting, Victorian trappings, gothic horror, and more zombie movie references than I could shake a stick at, this feels at first like a story that Tom and Louise should be wandering through rather than Six and Peri. But initial appearances can be deceiving.

The Doctor and Peri spend much of the first act of the book noticing and investigating small anachronisms on the island of Dorsill, leading the reader to perhaps suspect temporal interference at first. This culminates in a moment where the Doctor sees the tell-tale lights of a helicopter landing on an adjacent island and shouts for everyone not to panic, only for the bemused residents to remark that he acts like he's never seen a helicopter before. Brilliant!

As it turns out, they only assumed they'd arrived in the past because the island they've landed on has chosen to maintain a pre-industrial society. This turns the whole premise on its head, and makes the decision to use Six and Peri settle into a kind of sense. It now becomes obvious that this story was made for them.

In typical Who fashion, the source of all the trouble ends up being an alien, a non-sentient microbe (the eponymous matter) which is capable of regenerating the bodies of its hosts from even the most grievous of injuries. The effects of this are sometimes grisly, especially in the case of hosts whose bodies are damaged to the point of death. As the microbe evolves and takes over human minds, it begins to take drastic measures to preserve and spread itself.

The creepiest thing about it is that its hosts are fully aware of everything that's going on, even when their body is being puppeted around. This reminded me very strongly of the (slightly earlier) science fiction series Animorphs, where the chief antagonists are a species of slug-like aliens who can do the same thing. This realization, which comes later in the novel after Peri is taken over, retroactively makes scenes where we see infested barmaid Liz Trefoil stare blankly at the zombie-like shape that used to be her lover, Dr. Madsen, come alive again with a fresh sense of horror.

All this body horror is well-rendered, and needless to say, both easier to stomach and to get away with than the televised material it's fitting into. The prose medium puts us at a little bit of a remove and takes a bit of the edge off of the worst of it.

The character writing is the strongest aspect of this book, in my opinion. The author not only captures Six and Peri, but introduces a large and memorable cast of side characters, making their dropping off one-by-one all the more riveting. If I had any one complaint about Grave Matter, it would simply be that the solution to the problem feels a little bit too easy, and that I find it hard to believe that the Doctor didn't consider the risk of flying hosts when he departs and leaves the story on an ambiguous note.

It wasn't enough to detract from my enjoyment very much, however; I thought this was both a very solid book and a nice addition to the Sixth Doctor's career. I'm hoping that my other literary diversions later on are just as interesting.

The Mark of the Rani is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 12 May 2024.)

The Well-Mannered War [Doctor Who, Diversion 29]

The Well-Mannered War

17 April 1997

​

My expectations have been toyed with thoroughly! I thought that I had a firm idea of what this story was going for by the end of the first chapter, only to be taken through several twists in succession that completely upended my sense of what was going on. It was thoroughly enjoyable being so very wrong.

The initial impression of the "war" on Barclow makes it clear that the conflict is going to go hot in some way or another, but my assumptions about how it would went out the window pretty quickly. I was charmed by the Chelonians (but had a sense that I had obviously missed a couple of previous appearances that would have made me appreciate them more), and amused by the political satire inherent in the description of Metralubit's government, as well as Fritchoff's over-the-top Marxist jargon.

I didn't expect to be so floored by the concept behind the Darkness, a thoroughly chilling alien monster, and I expected the Black Guardian's role reveal even less. It's not really left field per se, since the details all match when you look back. I had to nod in admiration at how clever this particular twist was. I found this a nice callback to the conflict between the Fourth Doctor and the Guardian that we saw in Season Sixteen. (And which I know will be continued in some manner in a couple of seasons, but we're not thinking that far ahead yet.)

I greatly appreciated the "K9 for president" plotline, and the Femdroids (and their plan) were fascinating to me. But I have to say that by far the most interesting part of this story, despite its brevity, is its ending. The implicit meaning of this ending is kind of obvious on the face of it, because this story is both set in the gap between the Graham Williams and JNT eras, and was itself the last of the Virgin Missing Adventures before BBC Books took over. The delightfully ambiguous way that the story ends (complete with a cheeky fourth wall acknowledging remark from Romana that they'd be nothing more than fictional characters, if they ended up in the Land of Fiction as the Doctor predicts) leaves a strong impression.

All in all, a strong book, and a fitting coda to this particular era of the show. I'll rejoin you all for the Seventies roundup shortly.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 6 October 2021.)

Verdigris [Doctor Who, Diversion 23]

Verdigris by Paul Magrs

3 April 2000

‘I am Verdigris,’ the figure said, and didn’t elaborate.​

Verdigris: "green of Greece", or in less obscure terms, the greenness on copper caused by oxidation. There's certainly no rust on this book, however, which at 21 years old still feels quite new and exciting. I've heard a lot about Iris Wildthyme, everyone's favorite auntie and original creation of author Paul Magrs, but I'd never read any of the books or listened to the audios until now. Predictably, this book is quite entertainingly mad, and it seems to have some interesting things to say about the Pertwee era as well.

From the off, it's hilarious how Iris (apparently in her Beryl Reid guise at this point) is just about this Doctor's opposite. She's a hard-partying lush with reluctant companions and far fewer moral scruples. And she's so much fun. The Doctor is stuck between caring for her and wishing she'd buzz off and let him solve this adventure by himself. I was also deeply amused by her apparent antipathy to Jo, given that they'd eventually share an actress. Her companion, Tom, is a nice side character and plays off of her well. His dilemma between liking Iris and distrusting her, to say nothing of his reaction to the other characters, is played very well, and leads to some fun places.

This book doesn't so much lean on the fourth wall as chisel a hole in it and peek on out. There's a sequence where Jo wanders into an abandoned UNIT HQ which is presented to us as a series of Tele-Snaps that are apparently in black and white and with garbled audio. We encounter a nameless man in the woods; the narrator can't decide if he is a poacher or a tramp, then shrugs and calls him both, before killing him. Poor Mike Yates is turned into a two-dimensional cardboard cutout and stuffed in Jo's handbag. The narrative more than once comes only just short of pointing out through text or dialog that they're all in a post-modernist novel. Verdigris takes refuge in absurdity, and I love it. It's poking fun at the tropes of the period, but in a way that I sense to be more fond than anything. I was also amused, and provoked into thought, when Iris pleads with the Doctor, telling him he got off easy being exiled, whereas she'd probably be executed by the Time Lords because he's a "posh" Gallifreyan and she's not.

All told, it's a bit of a mind-fuck, but undoubtedly a very fun one. The prose is hilarious, and the little references to both the continuity and to fan culture, gay culture, and literature were all much appreciated by me. I'm pleased that these two latest diversions have been some of the best I've yet done for this marathon, but not to be outdone, the program itself has some spectacle to offer. The Three Doctors is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 5 April 2021.)

The Face of the Enemy [Doctor Who, Diversion 21]

The Face of the Enemy by David A. McIntee

5 January 1998​

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Brig and the boys find themselves in a predicament. With the Doctor and Jo off on Peladon, a plot from a parallel timeline unfolds back on Earth, and UNIT is forced to do the unthinkable - asking the Master for help.

So, it's brilliant. At the same time that we get a Doctor story without UNIT, we get a UNIT story without the Doctor. This seems fitting, because it appears we are at the point in time where those two entities start their gradual divorce, as the series becomes more comfortable once again with its original time traveling remit. McIntee clearly likes writing for the Master, because here he is again, filling a part of the void left by the Doctor, but doing it in his own unmistakably Master-y way.

As great as it is when Delgado and Pertwee are on-screen together, with the Master acting as the Moriarty to the Doctor's Holmes, the Master is a fascinating character on his own, as this book proves. People make fun of Big Finish for the volume of spin-offs it puts out, but after reading this I think some of those Master spin-offs they've done are going to deserve some special attention from me.

Also helping to fill this gap, Barbara and Ian! (Should I call them Barbarian?) What a lovely surprise. Although the style of this story couldn't be more different from the episodes they once appeared in, they are still perfectly recognizable as the characters they were, if a bit older and more jaded. The only complaint I'd really have is that we're teased a reunion with the Doctor at the end of the book, but it never comes. Still, it's a small quibble. Just having them back at all is such a wonderful treat. They both seem very bemused by what the UNIT guys take for granted, and they both have such marvelous interactions with the Master. Ian's really got that guy's number, correctly guessing about a lot of the Master's neuroses, even if the Master tries to play it off; and the Master's surprise when Barbara asks why he hates the Doctor is quite nice.

Oh, and lest we forget, this story is also a sequel to Inferno. Rather than an alien force, the Earth's government is being infiltrated by human beings from the parallel Earth we saw in that story. It's an interesting twist on the usual invasion motif, because the threat isn't the other, instead it's us. The ease with which the fascists from the Inferno world infiltrate the systems of government using alternate-universe doubles is quite chilling, and I notice that the end of the book does very little to tell us exactly whether they were all taken care of at the end. Much like the primary antagonist, Marianne Kyle, there's a possible sense here that this was intended as a thread for a potential sequel which never came about.

Kyle herself is an effective enough foe for UNIT and the Master, her ruthless, blind ambition acting as both her greatest strength and her greatest flaw. Ultimately, she makes the mistake of believing that the Master wants power for the same reasons she does, and makes one last foolish attempt to take him into her confidence. This ends with a magnificent series of paragraphs on the submarine Redoubt, where the Master, Kyle, and another Conclave member Yu, all hold guns on each other. The lines where they each try to decide who to shoot first are quite brilliantly done, especially in light of how much more the two humans are sweating than the Master is. In fact, he seems to have a blast with it.

I also liked the DI, George Boucher, quite a lot. I found his desire to avenge his nephew's death highly compelling, so I was rather disappointed when he's killed off long before the end of the book. I might have liked to have seen that play out further.

This book is nothing earthshattering for the continuity or anything, but it does a marvelous job filling this particular spot in the marathon. The Sea Devils will be next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 2 April 2021.)

Who Killed Kennedy [Doctor Who, Diversion 20]

Who Killed Kennedy by David Bishop

18 April 1996​

Here is a book which is somewhat infamous in Who fan circles. While certainly tonally consistent with the other books under the Virgin imprint, it's in the curious position of having no relation to any of their existing ranges, and functions as a "Doctor-lite" sort of story wherein our title character barely features. Instead we follow the ambitious journalist James Stevens (cheekily credited as an author on the cover) who becomes wrapped up in circumstances surrounding the UNIT stories, ending with Day of the Daleks. Rather than the standard narrative style, Who Killed Kennedy is presented to us as a diegetic text, an exposé written in the manner of any number of schlocky conspiracy texts. The resulting effect is quite strange, but if there was ever an era to set this story in, it's this one.

The predominant theme of the work seems to be that of lost innocence, and of a world gone wrong in a moment of senseless terror. It's a bit on-the-nose how the story mentions that James spent his 18th birthday working as a junior journalist because it coincided with the JFK assassination, and never got to celebrate becoming an adult. By the timeframe of the story proper, he's become a cynic buried so deep in his work that he doesn't notice his marriage falling apart. The story actually does very little to endear the man to the reader for the longest time, but his inevitable breakdown leads him eventually in a more likable direction, even if he is ultimately a tragic character. It's his cynicism and willingness to assume the worst about the world that lands him in his predicament; if he wasn't so convinced that UNIT was up to no good, and so interested in his own self-promotion, most of the terrible things that happen to him probably wouldn't have happened. It's telling that he's chastened when he realizes toward the end that UNIT and the Doctor have been saving the world all this time.

The trauma of the JFK assassination on a certain generation is also something that was touched upon in Wonderland, though not in as much depth as we see here. Although James was not present at the event (as a teen, anyway...) as Summer was in that book, it's clear that the passing of Camelot left him with a huge chip on his shoulder and a lifelong fascination with the death of Kennedy. It's fitting that his adult life both begins and ends with this historical event, given that the book makes the rather insane decision of having an older James be the one who pulled the trigger. I don't mean "insane" in a derogatory sense, of course; it's a clever idea, but audacious in the extreme considering the subject. No longer content with merely toying with the mythology of Doctor Who, here the licensed books move on to toying with the icons of Western civilization at large with the same carefree ease.

Of course, here the mythology of the series and the real mythology being played with are one and the same. Doctor Who's debut was infamously overshadowed by the JFK assassination, and ever since, its iconography has haunted the series - from The Deadly Assassin, to this book, to Rose. It just can't get away! It's like some sort of original sin which just cannot be excised. So why is this original sin juxtaposed so directly to the earthbound stories of early Doctor Who? It's impossible to miss this other strand within the novel, one that seems to shine a spotlight on a great big blind spot of the program, namely the common failure to account for the consequences of the Doctor's adventures.

The big example here is obviously Dodo. Her characterization through the novel is mostly quite charming, but nobody remembers that. This book is most infamous for her attempted sexual assault, her pregnancy, and her death. Needless to say, these are all very shocking. Quite honestly, I could have done without any or all of these. Poor Dodo had a bad enough time on televised Who without needing to be put through the wringer here too! But it draws attention to the carelessness of the way she was written out of the show. Although the Doctor tells us in this book that he still feels responsible for her, it's hard to see how when she seems to have been left to fend for herself for all those years and dies an ignominious death. Then later on, there's a shocking moment where the Third Doctor encourages James to take revenge for Dodo's death! Since when urging people to take vengeance a part of the Doctor's M.O.?

As wrong as it all is, there's a kernel of truth behind the implicit criticism here, that when the smoke clears, the Doctor's responsibility seems to be at an end. It's an inevitable consequence of the adventure serial that the program still sort of is at this point, but it's still alarming when it's highlighted. Stray poachers, hapless UNIT soldiers, and ooh-arring homeless people seem to get casually offed with a regularity that's more startling now than it was in the Troughton years, by virtue of the fact that we're now in a context we understand. When a bunch of people get fried by Cybermen on a space station in the future, it's sad, but there's no size to it. When someone recognizably from our epoch of history meets the same fate, it has a different resonance.

I won't call this a moral failing or anything; it's perfectly understandable that the show doesn't want to dwell on the corpses when the adventure is over. So it mostly falls to diversions like this one to highlight the blind spots and make us think of the era differently. As more of a positive, it also highlights what's good about it, namely the densely connected world that is quickly building up around the Doctor during his stay on Earth, and the generally more mature tone of stories. That's a lot to celebrate, no matter what its shortcomings may be.

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death." - John Fitzgerald Kennedy​

Well, that was a harrowing series of philosophical utterings that I just typed. How about something more fun? Like The Curse of Peladon?

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 1 April 2021.)

The Scales of Injustice [Doctor Who, Diversion 18]

The Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell

18 July 1996​

Once again, we land on one of the Virgin Missing Adventures, and the title of the range is, in this instance, quite apt. This feels a bit like a season finale for Season Seven which we never got, most prominently for the reason that it features Liz Shaw's actual departure from UNIT. This is much needed, because the impression that we got of Liz in the TV series, of a scientifically curious woman ill at ease with military hierarchy, all but demands that we get something out of her eventual exit. There's just too much potential here to leave squandered.

As far as the "Liz leaves" plot goes, The Scales of Injustice handles it expertly. The character is handled with obvious love, and written with plenty of wit. Her own bemusement with herself over her fondness for her pet guinea pig is really funny, as is the moment where she thinks to herself that she has the Brig "trained" about sexism in the workplace. She's also just as clever and resourceful as she was on the TV show, if not more so. She certainly doesn't leave it to the Doctor to decide what she should be doing during this story, since she strikes off on her own to investigate the mystery surrounding the return of the Silurians.

Oh yeah, those things are back. This story makes one important retcon to Doctor Who and the Silurians, namely clarifying that, oopsie, Lethbridge-Stewart did not do a war crime, and in fact the Silurian bunker under Wenley Moor is just sealed off, not destroyed. This is a little jarring, but probably necessary for the viability of the UNIT formula at large. I made much of the fact that the ending of Doctor Who and the Silurians was a sort of wound to the Doctor's ability to work with UNIT that was never adequately addressed on the screen. Now, it seems, it's mended. If I sound less than convinced, it's maybe because I'd prefer to see the Doctor-UNIT relationship be strengthened onscreen. Perhaps there's something that will help with that in the upcoming seasons?

Anyway, as welcome as it is to get another dose of the Silurians and Sea Devils - and we do get several fascinating hints of their wider culture - they are simply not the focus of the book so much as scene dressing. The book spends far more time navigating the twists and turns of a labyrinthine plot involving a "conspiracy reaching deep into the heart of the British government". It turns out that someone has been naughty and has been hoarding alien technology from all the previous alien invasions of Earth. Amusingly, in their Vault there are (even more) pieces of WOTAN about, as well as a Dalek casing from Remembrance of the Daleks, though the Third Doctor is understandably mystified when he sees it. Detailing the bad behavior of this rogue group takes up most of this story, and to be honest, I didn't enjoy it best. Like with Wonderland, this feels like an unwelcome intrusion of the X-Files milieu into Doctor Who, and despite doing my best to read carefully, I mostly just come away confused about how the Vault, the Glasshouse, C19, UNIT, and the British government are all connected.

That isn't to say the conspiracy plot is a complete failure, though. It's at the very least extremely exciting, with loads of action. As is typical for this period, the action is rather nasty and crude, but such is the Virgin house style. I was also delighted to finally twig onto who the Pale Man's boss actually was. Albeit not spelled outright, the hints were enough to tip me off.

It's a heartfelt moment when the Doctor reflects on the fact that he doesn't really know Liz all that well, and his admission to her later that he'd really like to get to know her properly, that really gets to me. A word must also go to the revelatory treatment of the Brigadier in this story, as his failing marriage due to the secrecy of his all-consuming job is sketched out in heartbreaking detail. There is a very strong emotional core to this story, despite its flaws. For fans of the era, I'd recommend it wholeheartedly.

The Terror of the Autons will start us off on Season Eight next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 25 March 2021)

The Wheel of Ice [Doctor Who, Diversion 14]

The Wheel of Ice by Stephen Baxter

16 August 2012​

This book was published only a few weeks before the release of my last diversion, The Rosemariners, in the late summer of 2012. This is a peculiar time to find a Second Doctor novel. In fact, it was the first featuring that Doctor to be published in 7 years. Come to think of it, there hasn't been one in the 9 years since, either. (Mr. Men does not count.) For all that the Classic Doctors are well-loved by Big Finish, and all manner of audio plays come out every year, Doctor Who's literary world seems to have lost the vibrancy it had during the Wilderness years, though the revival of the Target range has given me a bit of hope.

Despite that, it feels as if BBC Books made a serious effort here to hire one of the most heavy-duty authors they could, and it pays off. I was a little curious how an author with these kinds of hard sci-fi chops would handle the regular cast, since he had not written for the series before, but honestly the Doctor and his companions are handled by this book with aplomb. The Second Doctor feels like himself rather than having out-of-place tinges of the Seventh like I read in Foreign Devils, and has a lot of wonderful and quite Doctor-ish moments. To highlight a few, I enjoyed his retort to Zoe when she asks if too many T-Mat trips as a kid made Boostrap boss Florian so harsh ("Now that, Zoe, is unscientific, unkind, and rather funny."), what seems to be the first use chronologically of the "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry", and his grief and sympathy for Arkive's plight ("‘So alone. So alone!’ And he lowered his hands from his face. He had been weeping, she saw, those deep blue eyes brimming with tears. ‘The emptiness – to be alone for nearly half the age of the universe…’")

The book also handles Jamie and Zoe deftly, as instead of the sort of generic companion stand-ins that companions are often reduced to in the books, they are both given parts of the situation to relate to that bring out parts of their background. The Wheel of Ice itself is pretty similar to Zoe's own space station, and there are plenty of Scots onboard, which makes Jamie feel at home. They both also end up doing quite a lot, which is refreshing.

The elements inherited from the TV show aren't the only good things here, of course. The original setting and characters all come off pretty well. Baxter does a marvelous job of explicating the genuine wonder and majesty of the Saturn system, of its rings and moons, and his description of the massive storms on the gas giant itself is simply to die for. All the descriptive prose is very good, which helps this place to come alive. It's funny that a real place in our own solar system comes across as being a little more interesting than most of the alien planets we've seen so far!

The Wheel of Ice itself is lovingly rendered, and the idea of a space station stitched together out of derelict rockets and other junk is a charming one. I can almost feel the chill of the ice tunnels of Mnemosyne as they're described. "Mnemosyne" is a clever name for this moon, of course, being the name of a Greek goddess of memory and loss. It suits the Arkive, the ancient AI which is the last remnant of a long-dead civilization.

The side cast is very good. The whole Laws family are a lovely bunch in varying ways. Luis Reyes is a very sweet fellow, as is poor Dr. Omar. For my money, my favorite is the gruff but lovable Glaswegian robot MMAC, while Florian Hart, our main antagonist, is probably the most ho-hum of the bunch. The last confrontation between her and the Doctor is maybe the most drab part of the book, which is quite unfortunate, since usually the Doctor's chinwags with his opponents are the highlights of stories like these.

There are some pretty awesome interludes in this book too, where the perspective moves away from the regular characters. These include a rather deep and tragic look through the eyes of the Arkive, a shocking account of the Blue Dolls becoming conscious, the path of the allohistorical lure through the lives of the Laws family over the decades, and one spectacularly unlucky Iguanodon that gets beaned in the brain by the lure's fall to earth.

This was a challenging read in many ways, being the longest book I've read for this marathon so far, and with some of the densest plotting, to boot. But it was a rewarding one to finish, and certainly a very strong addition to the Who literary universe. If my review hasn't spoiled too much for you, I'd recommend giving it a shot.

The Space Pirates is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 17 March 2021.)

Foreign Devils [Doctor Who, Diversion 12]

Foreign Devils by Andrew Cartmel

23 November 2002​

Before picking up on Season Six proper, I'd scheduled this curious little novella for this spot. It's hard to tell exactly where during this season this story is meant to go, but as Zoe still seems fairly new, this spot seemed appropriate.

Foreign Devils is interesting, for... a number of reasons, really. I don't think that a late-Victorian murder mystery with a dragon and a woman transforming into a plant can actually fail to be interesting on some level. The Telos line are all a bit odd, if only in format. This is about half the length of The Dark Path, which I just read, so it was gone in a flash. I thought the pacing was pretty good, at least, with the central murder mystery lasting just about long enough.

It's a bit unfortunate that the central mystery is only slightly mysterious. It's more of a "howdunnit" than "whodunnit", because it's far too easy to guess from the start that the Astrologer encountered by Roderick Upcott is responsible. It's only the means by which the murders are being carried out that remains in question. The scenes where they're puzzling this out, and the general atmosphere of the house during the investigation, are quite good, and Thomas Carnacki is a welcome addition, although I wasn't familiar with him prior to this.

It's impossible to ignore the orientalism in this story. The "white man goes to the East, gets cursed" angle is more or less played straight, and for all that the book's framing and imagery are inspired by Chinese culture, there aren't actually any named Chinese characters in the book. The Upcotts almost certainly deserve it. I don't think we ever hear one way or the other what Aunt Arabelle was like when she was alive, but the rest that we see have done nothing to acquit themselves after the lifetime of sin led by their ancestor. The theme of repayment for Britain's imperial past is thus grasped for, but because of the issues of presentation here it just doesn't really work out.

As well as the good bits and the bad bits, there's the just plain bizarre. Like the "Spirit of the Poppy" (as in the plant) being the ultimate culprit behind the killings, and possessing Carnacki's lover, Celandine. And Celandine graphically transforming into a plant-person for a few pages because she's been possessed by the spirit of a flower. The way it's described is grotesque, and I do mean that in both senses of the word. A little bit of a misjudged writing choice, all told, but certainly memorable.

So my overall impression of this book is a mixed one. Do give it a try, it's plenty entertaining, but your mileage may vary on how "good" it exactly is.

The Dominators is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 12 March 2021.)

The Dark Path [Doctor Who, Diversion 11]

The Dark Path by David A. McIntee

20 March 1997​

I have to say, this seems like a story that is set at precisely the right point in time. We're now only a few seasons away from our first proper introduction to the diabolical Master, and just one more televised story away from saying goodbye to Victoria. The funny thing is, as always, that it's a post-facto rewrite of the show's history, so no matter how apropos its canonical positioning might be, it's still out of place. And the book was written at such a curious time, too. This was the penultimate Missing Adventure before Virgin lost the Doctor Who license. Did that affect the tone of this novel? It's possible, I guess. The foreword is certainly wistful enough.

If I had to make one serious complaint about this story, it would actually be about Ailla. As a character she's fine, but I don't think that the twist of having her be a Time Lord (a term which, I note, is fastidiously avoided throughout the novel) was the right way to go. Her tragic demise at the Darkheart would almost certainly have been impetus enough to set Koschei down his spiral, and her revival and regeneration rob that demise of any of its impact. I was also a little puzzled that she didn't seem to take Koschei's rejection of her after her regeneration very hard at all. Quite a stiff upper lip on that one...

The setting is an intriguing one. Darkheart (as well as being a fitting name for the last bastion of what's basically the Imperial Remnant from Star Wars) is home to some interesting astronomical phenomenon, and the society existing there is well rendered. I admit, I had my suspicions from the start of the novel that the colony had been transported forward in time, but I was a little bit off, as it turns out that the colonists had been using the eponymous Darkheart to keep themselves alive as pseudo-immortals. Oh well, I was close.

This is kind of a darker version of The Time Meddler in many ways. The Imperials governing Darkheart are clearly a fascist dictatorship, a far cry from Vikings, and I certainly didn't see Peter Butterworth snapping anyone's necks. The book does display a lot of the grit and violence inherent to books of this range, but it's never to a grotesque degree, and there's a good amount of genuinely moving psychological horror here. This is seen most especially in the sequence where the alien members of the Piri Reis' crew are temporally rewritten to become humans. I wonder what became of them after the end of this story? With the Darkheart destroyed, there certainly wouldn't be any way for them to return to normal.

The book holds the Doctor meeting Koschei back somewhat, so accordingly they don't run into each other until the halfway point of the story, and even after that they are separated most of the time. I didn't really notice it too much, and I do feel like Koschei's long slide into losing his grip on empathy is a convincing one, but in hindsight it is a bit of a pity that the Doctor didn't get more segments alongside him. Giving him a "human" companion is a clever play on the usual dynamic, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Also, I most certainly caught the fact that he was goofing off playing Doom on one of the Imperials' computers while waiting for the Darkheart to boot up. I don't think I've ever pictured Roger Delgado doing that before!

The author really leaned on Jamie's Scots identity, which was fun. I mean, the show hardly shies away from it, but it definitely seemed like the opportunity was being taken to show off a grasp of Scots language and cultural mores of the Jacobite era (whether it's research or firsthand; I do see the author's surname). I found it quite fun, personally, but the star of the show here is really Victoria. It's nice being in a prose format, because it's easy to get into the thought processes of the characters, which in this period usually do not come across well on screen. I came to understand Victoria's impending departure pretty well from this. It seems kind of obvious in hindsight. She really only came along to start with because she needed a surrogate family of sorts after her father was murdered. Now that she's grown in the course of the last season, it's clear why she'd want to put all the danger and excitement behind her.

Overall, the prose ranges from amusing ("Oh my, yes, Jamie, it is a big one.") to rather dark ("Surely it was the infinity of death that was most frightening, but equally the infinity of immortal life would be just as fearsome.") Generally, I'd rate it quite highly; the descriptions of locations are especially sumptuous, and the dialog is good.

In the greater scope of the program, it's interesting to think of this as an alternate origin of the Master, whom we won't be meeting properly for a little while yet. Interestingly, the foreword to the book quotes the TV movie: "I’ve wasted all my lives because of you, Doctor..." I thought it an interesting choice, because on reflection, it is really all that the Master does throughout his life, at least in the Classic run of the show. Although he visibly has his own adventures from time to time, no matter what he does, he invariably ends up drawn into the Doctor's orbit as an antagonistic force, like the Darkheart to the Doctor's neutron star. It's the same force that draws him down his Dark Path to villainy at the end of the story, when he eschews his name from the Academy and takes up a title, just like his old friend did. It's kind of like he was fated to become the Master at the close of this book all along. It's a funny old thing, time travel.

Fury from the Deep is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 10 March 2021.)

Wonderland [Doctor Who, Diversion 9]

Wonderland by Mark Chadbourn
24 April 2003 

It's hard for me to find a more apt descriptor for this story than "absolutely bonkers". This is 1960s Doctor Who recast as a cross between an acid trip and a Lone Gunmen style paranoid fantasy. Wonderland is a paean for the death of the Summer of Love and the loss of American innocence, complete with a rather gratuitous flashback to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Accordingly, it's a little out of place in the Who canon, as it doesn't feel very British at all. This is reinforced by the abrupt shift to a conspiracy thriller in the latter parts of the book, when it's discovered that at the center of the strange happenings in Haight-Ashbury is an alien creature that can only be seen when you're tripping, which is being experimented on by deep-state agents.

Yeah, it's that sort of book.

Discovering in the latter part of the book that the "Combine" is a real thing, and that it controls the US government, is kind of startling. It's even more startling when the story (and even the Doctor himself) confirm it to be true and play it completely straight. It really doesn't belong in Doctor Who, and feels more like it dropped straight out of The X-Files, which I suppose is appropriate given the country this is set in and its date of publication. But it's the one tonal problem with this book that rattled me out of total immersion, much more so than the proliferation of "mature" subject matter. We're also kept at a remove from the Doctor, Ben and Polly, as the point-of-view character is not one of the regular cast, but a young woman named Summer (or Jessica) who has grown into a cynical old ex-hippy by the time that she's narrating the story from. It is an interesting juxtaposition putting the very 1960s Ben and Polly alongside their American contemporaries, but the resulting contrast exhibits how out of their depth the two of them are in a more gritty and realistic portrayal of the era.

A lot of the negative feedback I see about this book centers on the portrayal of the Doctor, namely his distant nature and lack of engagement with Summer's concerns. He does have a tendency to brush her off whenever she tries to tip him off to something going on, but having watched The Power of the Daleks (and now The Highlanders, as of the time of this writing), I don't think this characterization is necessarily as off the mark as some of the reviews I read suggest. This new Doctor, so far, very rarely tips his hand, even to his best friends, preferring to distract friend and foe alike with a strange and almost clownish performance. It certainly doesn't suit some of his later appearances to be written this way, but unless Jamie's tucked away somewhere in the TARDIS for a very long nap during Wonderland, then it must be set between these two TV serials, when this sort of behavior for the Doctor is to be expected. This isn't to mean that he doesn't care, far from it. In a quiet moment in the story, the Doctor finally breaks character to turn and speak quietly to Summer, who is despairing over the situation they find themselves in.

The Doctor took my hand gently and secretly so the others couldn’t

see. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my travels, it’s that, for all its

horrors, the universe tends towards good. In the middle of a moment, it’s

easy to see darkness, and to give in to the blackest despair. But across

the scope of centuries, the view reveals a path that always encounters

valleys but continues ever higher, that never stops rising.’​

It's a lovely little moment, and you can tell he means it, because when he meets Summer again two regenerations later at the end of the novella, he remembers it and reaffirms his belief, inviting her away from the bleak future she thinks she's destined for, to come on an adventure instead. I think that's the central message of this story; the world can be cruel, and innocence never lasts, but adventure and imagination, such as that offered by the Doctor here, can still offer escape, perhaps even a more lasting and meaningful one than that offered by the psychedelic drugs so central to this story.

That isn't to say that the two are treated as entirely incompatible here. One of the best set pieces in the book is the one where the Doctor casually browses in a shop and points out an interesting bong to Ben and Polly. Later he blends in magnificently at a rather wild and drug-filled party where even Ben and Polly seem to have trouble doing the same. As the foreword remarks, the Doctor is a trip in and of himself, and despite the very staid, BBC sensibility and production of the TV program, there is a very clear throughline to be drawn between this contemporary wave of psychedelia and a magic, mind-expanding adventure across the cosmos.

Wonderland was a gripping read with high quality prose, and I was hooked despite (or because of?) the general insanity of it all. I'm torn between loving it for its mad brilliance and hating it for its tonal dissonance, but whichever way I may lean, I'll certainly never forget it.

The Highlanders is next.

(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 15 May 2020.)

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.)