Bloodheat

The TARDIS is attacked by an unknown force and Benny is ejected from the craft into the vortex. The Doctor and Ace lose the TARDIS in a tar pit, finding themselves on a parallel Earth where the last remnants of humanity have survived a deadly plague and are pitted in a desperate battle for survival against the resurrected Silurian race. It's an alternative reality, and not only has the war against the reptilian race turned Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart into a hard and ruthless man, but it has claimed the Doctor as a casualty years ago.

Bloodheat begins a 5-novel cycle of alternate reality, and it starts it off with the extreme of actually going to a parallel Earth (which until the time it was published had only been done in Inferno but has since popped up as a theme in the 2006 season of the new series) and seeing the contrasts between what we consider as is and what could have been. Things all go wrong for humanity when the third Doctor is unable to escape the Silurian base and work on an antidote to their bacterial weapon, and in the days of the war that follows the Doctor is killed as a prisoner. UNIT is unable to stop the Silurians and Sea Devils as they emerge from hibernation and the Earth is overrun. When the seventh Doctor eventually crosses paths with the Brigadier and Liz Shaw, they are suspicious of him, never entirely trusting him to be who he says he is. And it's not just the Doctor who has to deal with the rejection of people he knows as friends; in this reality, Ace's friend Manisha has not been the victim of a racist attack on her home (as described in the novelization of Remembrance of the Daleks and more vividly in her soliloqy in Ghost Light) but the circumstances of their friendship are not the same this time.

Benny has the more interesting perspective when it comes to dealing with the Silurians, and when she is captured by them and used as an experimental subject they too notice it: she has no race fear of them. When pot-holing scientists from the Wenley Moor underground project first encountered the reptile species they were driven mad with fear and reduced to gibbering maniacs scribbling pictures on walls, but by Benny's day, the Silurians were an integrated species that shared the planet with humanity and contributed to its defence against the Daleks during one of their many wars. It doesn't exactly make her a sympathizer, but she does go out of her way to stop a nuke aimed at the Silurians' capital city in Africa.

And the Silurians despite everything that has happened are not portrayed as total monsters without an ethical code; they're doing what any of us would do if our homes were overrun by pests and exterminating the lot of them to make it liveable again. Granted, humans do rank a bit higher than cockroaches - or so one might hope - but the principle is the same. And there are those in the Silurian hierarchy who would once have seen humanity die out who tire of the war as well and realize that maybe there could have been another way.

Style-wise it's a good solid tale, it starts the alternate universe cycle off quite well. The Silurians had not been seen or heard from since Warriors of the Deep when this was published, and it was good to see them treated with a bit more respect. I don't have the time to go back and look at all of the stories of the alternate universe cycle, but if anyone reading wants to check them out they were, in this order: The Dimension Riders, The Left Handed Hummingbird, Conundrum and No Future.

But I am going to look at how the cycle ends, because it's kind of brilliant.

NEXT EPISODE : NO FUTURE

Iceberg

The Doctor takes a side-trip away from the TARDIS on board a life-boat within the time machine; it outwardly resembles a Chinese version of the London Polive Box the rest of the ship is modelled on. Leaving Ace and Bernice, the Doctor arrives on Earth in 2006 just as a team called FLIPback is working at averting a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field in Antarctica. Nearby is the pleasure cruise ship SS Elysium. And even closer, under the ice, are the Cybermen.

Loved it. LOVED it.

It's a different kind of take on the Cybermen this time, and despite the action taking palce in Antarctica and the family tradition of military service in the Cutler family, this one actually owes more to The Invasion than it does to The Tenth Planet. Chronologically, Invasion would have been the first real Cyberman attack on Earth as it was contemporary to when it was broadcast - the late 60's - whereas Planet was placed in the future (at the time) in 1986. But hold up - wouldn't the Cybermen on Mondas have been recognized? And how would Cybermen have made it to Earth ahead of the planet? And the vast differences in technology (despite the passage of time on television) are a bit jarring as well.

David Banks explains it all. At least, in his words. There's never been a deep look into the Cybermen and their origins in the classic series; they came from Mondas, Mondas went boom, they took over Telos, they started to die out, and then the Doctor wiped out what was left with the Nemesis statue. David Banks, however, having played a Cyberleader on television in every one of their appearances from 1982 to 1988, wanted to get into the heads of the Cybermen more than he already did, and he began to draft his own history of the Cybermen in a book called, simply, Cybermen. Iceberg, his only contribution to the New Adventures range (and the one with the most gratuitious use of the word "fuck"), takes his theories on Cyber-evolution and Cyber-proliferation and winds them into the threads left dangling from the two 60s invasion stories, with brief revisits to each of them from the points of view of simple citizens at the time. And then he takes a Cyberman survival unit that escaped Zoe's deadly rocket strike, drops them under the Antarctic ice, and then brings in the Doctor without companions to deal with them.

Yes, Iceberg was actually written to run parallel with another novel, Birthright, where Ace and Benny are stranded with a dead TARDIS and have to reconclie some of their own differences plus Ace's lingering distrust of the Doctor. But that's about all that I can say about that one; the actual story escapes me. The Doctor always needs someone along for the ride, though, so enter one Ruby Duvall, journalist, along on board the cruise ship to report on the work of the FLIPback team. Ruby's not a bad one to have along; she's plucky, she's smart, she knows how to pull her t shirt down to cover her bum (so the book says) and she's the first companion in any continuity to visit the loo.

And speaking of innovation - the concept of the Jade Pagoda as a sort of half-TARDIS for the Doctor to leave in when he pleases is an interesting one. It must be a character quirk of his, though, as nothing on Gallifrey resembles anything vaguely Japanese. It only comes up again one more time in this series before the idea is forgotten in the mists.

I never really found any flaw with Iceberg. It was enjoyable right through to the end. It drew a lot of fire for the swearing, most of it from fanboys (yes, the term includes girls too) who actually thought it made the series too adult. This from an audience largely in their 20s and early 30s by this time. I was 22 myself when it was published and I found it refreshing to be treated like an adult. But, hey, I was never one to sit around at fanclub executive meetings and giggle when someone said something naughty - I think one time when I did show up someone took exception to my Madonna Blond Ambition World Tour t shirt because she was cleverly naked on it.

But what do I know. I just liked Iceberg.

NEXT EPISODE : BLOODHEAT

Deceit / Lucifer Rising

Ace is back, and she's not happy. After serving a few years with Spacefleet and being part of the Dalek war that was brewing in the pages of Love and War, she's a battle-hardened war vet, and her unit is being shipped off to the planet Arcadia to sniff out more Daleks. The Doctor and Bernice are also headed to Arcadia for reasons of their own, and to everyone's surprise there are no Daleks to be found there, but there is one Abslom Daak, a mercenary also simply known as "Dalek Killer"...

That's a brief gloss-over of the high points. I don't remember a lot of details, as usual. I'm really just including the review of Deceit as a continuity point, with Ace finally making her anticipated comeback. In relative terms she was away from the Doctor and Benny for almost 5 years, so the story would tell us, but her absence from the printed page was something less than one year given Virgin's publishing schedule at the time. But the Ace that returns to the TARDIS this time is not the same one everyone voted as fan favourite; she's meaner, she's got little respect for the Doctor after what went down on Heaven that made her leave in the first place, and she isn't too keen on Benny either. Her choice to rejoin the TARDIS is questionable at best.

The other character worth mentioning is Abslom Daak, a creation of the comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly back in the 70's. He's a total wild card, uncontrollable, all he wants to do is kill Daleks. His exact motivation is probably out of revenge or something; exactly what his motives are remain unclear at best because author Peter Davrill-Evans simply can't write for him. or for Ace. Or for Doctor Who, effectively.

Now I can see why something as mediocre as The Pit made it to print. Actually I have two theories: the first is Darvill-Evans was too wrapped up in his own book to care about the quality of the one coming just before it. The second theory is he was very aware that his book was substandard and he deliberately put one in front that was worse so blunt the impact. Either way... Deceit is far from a glowing example of what can be done.


Lucifer Rising, however, is much better. Or at least I remember it to be so. The bonds between the TARDIS crew start to come together again, slowly, as they join a group of workers from IMC (think back to 1971's Colony in Space) on the planet Lucifer to first solve the mystery of who or what killed Paula Engado, and then confront the bigger issues beind IMC's interest in the planet.

Again, memory shorts out at fine details, but much better characters, much tighter pacing, much more credible motivation. The first joint effort of Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore is indeed a good one, and puts some quality back into the line that (to be fair) wasn't entirely missing from the last two novels, but was certainly decreased.

So rather than waste time with half-assed reviews starting with "I don't remember," (which is sounding more and more like Tom Baker commenting on the VHS compilation of The Tom Baker Years) I'm going to leap ahead a bit here and just pick up the high points where the series breaks new ground or goes back to revisit some old events... or just stories I remember better...

NEXT EPISODE : ICEBERG

The Highest Science / The Pit

The TARDIS is drawn to the planet Sakkrat by a large temporal fluctuation, and the Doctor and Bernice discover that it has hijacked a group of invading Chelonians, a group of drug addicted teenage music fans and an entire commuter train. While investigating, the truth of the planet comes out, that its original inhabitants were destroyed by their own creation: the Highest Science.

That's about all I remember of the basic plot. I read it just as long ago as I read Transit and it didn't leave as much of a mark in my mind. I remember that the story follows some pretty traditional patterns, with the Doctor being caught up with the baddies (in this case the xenophobic giant-turtle-people, the Chelonians)and Bernice stuck with the drugged up kids, who even get her to partake of their poison of pleasure : Bubbleshake. And the poor commuters on the train, they just want to go home. Bubbleshake is one of those drug drinks that triggers memory loss in the user, so for her second adventure with the Doctor, Bernice is once more not exactly herself.

Author Gareth Roberts has a distinct writing style all his own, and one I did not immediately enjoy. I can't remember exactly why, maybe because the contrast with Transit was so harsh; we go from gritty and nasty "cyberpunk" to a more comedic way to telling a story. Robert's style would not be lost during the days of Douglas Adams as script editor in the Tom Baker era, and in fact three of his later efforts would be missing adventures that take place in exactly that timeline (I didn't review them, no). Roberts later went on to write episodes of Coronation Street and co-write the pilot episode of spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures with Russell T. Davies.

As for The Pit... there's not a lot to say aside from it's terrible. It's awful. The plot is so vague and thin on the ground that I can hardly remember any of it aside from what was written on the back of the book. But I remember thinking that I was not enjoying it at all, from the presence of a supposedly menacing Time Lord from ancient Gallirey right to some weak reference to UNIT. Not inspirational stuff by any means, and author Neil Penswick gets the dubious award of First Crap Novel of the New Adventures Range.

Everything had been going so well until this one came along. Series editor Peter Darvill-Evans had been doing such a good job, and then this. What was he thinking?

Oh right, he was too busy writing his own novel for the series. It's next.

NEXT EPISODES : DECEIT and LUCIFER RISING

Transit

Just as they get their new friendship going, the Doctor and Benny are separated from each other and from the TARDIS in a freak accident in the King's Cross station of the Sol Transit System, somewhere in Earth's future. Benny is blown down the stunnel to a far distant stop across the solar system leaving the Doctor to search for her amid an Earth culture reeling from a recent war against the Ice Warriors. But the true nature of the accident is not random; something is chewing its way through the system, destroying everything in its path; something that has possessed Benny and recognizes the Doctor for the threat he poses to its plans.

This is a brilliant novel. BRILLIANT. Author Ben Aaronovitch previously brought us the cracking script for Remembrance of the Daleks and has summonned even more creative energy to describe an Earth of the future down to such detail that you can smell it on the page. And I am not just talking the people he has populated the story with - even the mysterious Kadiatu Lehtbridge-Stewart - but the whole culture of Earth and the effects technology have had upon human society. I'll put it this way: when the novel actually comes with a glossary you know you're dealing with something different, and when the terms within are not just a collection of glib phrases but an actual lexicon of a future society ... fantastic.

The first time I read Transit I was... well, I was younger and really was aching for escape. The future vision created in the book is not the stuff of utopia - far from it - but it's alive, it's energetic, it's so different and still so the same. Is this a groundbreaking novel? For the series, I would say yes. The term "cyberpunk" got bandied around quite a bit when the book was being reviewed back then (1992 ... "back then"... oh hell...) and it met with the usual kind of decrying of fan snobs who said it was nothing like cyberpunk - but there's always going to be the elitists in any movement who want to be more radical than anyone around them. Is Transit radical? It's certainly different, with its unabashed commentary on sexuality in the future (the joyboys, and the small child prostitute with condoms tied into her dreadlocks by her mother), its insane level of violence (with one character even named Verhoeven after the director of the ultra-violent, and perhaps somewhat inspirational in this sense, movie Total Recall) and for the first use of the word fuck in a Doctor Who novel.

Yes. The f-word! OH MY GOD THE F-WORD. If the DWIN executive ninnies of the time weren't already all squirrelly about the vanilla sexuality in Timewyrm : Genesys you can imagine what this did to them. There was still that element of fandom that refused to grow up, and refused to let the series grow up in case it forced them to, but there it is, right there on page 41: Maybe time travels fucks with your mind, thought Benny. Of course this just opened the floodgates and the dreaded f-word would just fly out of every mouth in the series, until it got to a point a few years later where the word was dumbed down to the less harmful "cruk". Yeah, gee, I wonder what THAT means? Give me strength.

Transit set into motion a new movement of future history in Doctor Who where the new authors would go to play from time to time - most notably Kate Orman and Craig Hinton. Yes, there would still be alien places, and there would be adevntures back in history, but the future would look a bit different now. And so would Doctor Who.

NEXT EPISODES : THE HIGHEST SCIENCE and THE PIT (a double bill because I promised Jay we'd be ready for the 8th Doctor by autumn...)

Love and War

It's the 51st century and the Doctor and Ace come to the planet Heaven. They are there just to relax while the Doctor looks for a book, but soon it becomes evident that the Doctor has some other agenda and Ace is once more a pawn in his plans. While she becomes involved with a Traveller named Jan, then Doctor crosses paths with one Professor Bernice Summerfield who is on Heaven for an archaeology dig, until she and her group are threatened by the monstrous Hoothi, and eventually by the plans of the Doctor himself.

Paul Cornell is back with one of the most intricate looks into the future that the series has had so far. Heaven is a massive cultural melting pot of different species, most notably though it is a refuge where Humans and Draconians exist together in peace sometime after a Dalek war, but the threat of attracting the attention of the Sontarans remains. And the Silurians have come out of hiding and also live alongside Humans, having taken on the new name of Earth Reptiles. And the Hoothi have plans for all of them.

Odd name, yes, but it's not actually Cornell's own. The species name is borrowed from one line from The Brain of Morbius way back in the Tom Baker era, when Maren says "Even the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi I felt in my bones while still a million miles distant,". Cornell, being a fan himself, has taken that one line and fashioned his whole story around it. Just who are the Hoothi? The best way to sum them up is intergalactic fungus that spreads through spores, and they're ready to invade, with Heaven being their first stop to conquest.

In dealing with them, the Doctor pushes Ace too far, and she finally leaves him in a rage, her life having been subject to his whims and under his control for too long. Ace has grown far beyond the 16 year-old girl she was when she met him in Dragonfire, and she can see what he has done to her and to others he has met along the way.

Assuming the role of new companion is Bernice Summerfield, a professor of archaeology from Heidelberg Unversity on Earth who prefers to go by "Benny". The first companion of many who does not appear on televised episode, Benny is older than Ace (late 30s is the best guess) and more mature, but still with parental issues of her own (mother killed in the Dalek war, father missing, presumed dead)and a bit of wariness around the Doctor after seeing what being with him has done to Ace.

At the time of the book's printing, Ace had been the sole companion for 6 years, and her departure was felt through fandom the same as any others who had been with the Doctor for a long time. There was a lot of complaining, and there was also the usual amount of "Thank god she's gone," from fans with nothing better to do than criticize everything about Doctor Who and not enjoy any of it (the Fat-Assed Anti-Fans as they are known). Myself I was annoyed that she was leaving, as the whole Doctor-Ace team had been one of the most successful in the series, right along with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, and the fifth Doctor and Tegan, and with the show off the air for 5 years at this point letting Ace go seemed like another admission that there would never been any more episodes made. But change is good; and although Virgin Publishing were not allowed to regenerate the Doctor, they changed the companions and made good choices doing it. I would eventually grow to really enjoy Benny's wry comments in the TARDIS, and she would become a fan favourite in her own right and earn not only her own spin-off series of novels and audios (the latter with Big Finish) but eventually the character would be cast to appear in some of Big Finish's Doctor Who range as well, alongside Sylvester McCoy and Sophia Aldred in their roles.

But before we get there, we have some more ground to cover.

NEXT EPISODE : TRANSIT

Nightshade

I've been trying for weeks to get something to say about this one, because Mark Gattiss is a fantastic writer, and really knows his Dotor Who. But do I remember this book? Vaguely, at best.

What I do remember is English countryside in the 60's, and a retired TV star from a show called Professor Nightshade, and an alien invasion. A deep space monitoring station not unlike Jodrell Bank. The Doctor acting all defeatist and gloomy - the first time we see him really start to dip into his own inner pool of misery.

And then there's Ace. Falls in love, sort of, and then chooses to leave. But the Doctor won't let her go; he still needs her. And the rift between them starts to form, and it's not going to take much more before Ace has enough...

Ah well. Maybe reviewing all of these is a mistake if I do not remember everything. Just hit the high notes, maybe?

NEXT EPISODE : LOVE AND WAR