The story so far: after the Timewyrm arc established the Virgin New Adventures and the Cat’s Cradle arc saw them leaning into their more experimental side, the run of novels from Nightshade to Deceit saw Ace leave the TARDIS, 26th Century archaeologist Bernice “Benny” Summerfield joining, and Ace coming back again after spending some time in the 26th Century becoming a catsuited warrior badass. The next tranche of novels would explore the “new normal”, in which in a departure from his televised appearances the Seventh Doctor would be accompanied by two companions at once. (OK, sure, there was Dragonfire which had Mel and Ace in it, but Ace doesn’t officially sign on as a companion there until Mel says “I’m interested in Glitz so I’m calling it quits.”) This would be an important test of the concept; stories like The Highest Science had shown that Bernice could work very well as a solo companion, but now the chemistry between the Doctor, Benny, and new-Ace must be tested. Let’s see how that goes…
Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
The first journey of the Doctor-Benny-Ace trifecta takes them to the gas giant Lucifer and its moons, Moloch and Belial. It’s the 2150s, and Earth Central has set up a research programme – Project Eden – with the goal of examining the mysteries of this system, such as the space elevator connecting the two moons (in a manner which makes a nonsense of everything physics tells us about how gravitational orbits work, the hollow world within Moloch full of vegetation, the weird artifacts concealed in Belial, and the utterly strange aliens, dubbed the Angels, that live in the atmosphere of the gas giant itself. The ultimate goal is to establish communication with the Angels in order to gain their co-operation in extracting rare materials from the core of the gas giant – materials which could be useful to Earth’s ever-growing requirements for energy.
In her own time, Benny knows this as an archaeological oddity; records showed that some fruitful research had happened here, only for the whole thing to shut down under mysterious circumstances. The Doctor’s fascinated too, and Ace seems to be taking an interest as well, despite her grumpier attitude and her deeper commitment to violence. Perhaps Ace’s skills will be of use – for within a few weeks of the TARDIS crew ingratiating their way into Project Eden, Paula Engado dies. Paula, daughter of Project Coordinator Miles Engado, ended up suffering a malfunction in her starsuit – an advanced spacesuit with significant self-propulsion capabilities – and fell into Lucifer’s atmosphere, the extreme pressure rupturing her starsuit and killing her. Adjudicator Bishop has arrived to investigate the case, and everyone is a suspect – including the Doctor.
Bishop is right to be suspicious. The ultimate value of Project Eden, from Earth’s perspective, are those sweet sweet anomalous materials in the gas giants, not the research – and that means powerful interests are paying attention to Project Eden. That includes IMC – the dodgy mining corporation from Colony In Space – who’ll stop at nothing to take control of things. With the Project staff on edge and off their game thanks to the shock of Paula’s death, the IMC’s spy could end up with a fairly free hand. It’s a good thing that the Doctor, Benny, and Ace are all carefully keeping an eye on things… or it would be, if there wasn’t a dangerous, manipulative chess game being played with time travel here. And this time, it’s not the Doctor who’s playing. For back in the 2500s, Ace made her own deal with IMC…
This is the first of a very few New Adventures credited to multiple authors – in this case, it’s the New Adventures debut of Jim Mortimore and Andy Lane, both of whom would go on to become regular solo contributors. It’s essentially a New Adventures take on Colony In Space – you have an idealistic group of people undertaking an offworld endeavour, you have IMC up to something dodgy, you have an Adjudicator involved, and you have local aliens who are overlooked a lot but hold the secrets to a very powerful technology which could inflict terrible consequences on the universe as a whole if it’s abused. The Master is not here, mind – though there’s a cameo from a Time Lord child who might be the Master in a dive-into-the-mindscape sequence at one point – but nonetheless in terms of the major moving parts, there’s a lot of commonalities.
It plays out very differently, of course, because whilst the two stories have a lot of broad niches in common, what Mortimore and Lane choose to fill those niches with makes all the difference in terms of how the story then pans out. There’s a touch of The Robots of Death in here too, what with the whodunnit aspects, and some of the ideas that Mortimore and Lane play with here would go on to show up in the revived series. For instance, crucial plot points hinge on the spacesuits having internal computer systems with a fair amount of autonomy, which is exploited to suit a shallow commercial purpose, concepts which form the fundamental basis of Oxygen. The fact that one concept from here can be extracted and used as the basis of an entire episode of the show indicates just how astonishingly stuffed with ideas Lucifer Rising is. Some of these ideas are trivial continuity-juggling, but others are weightier, bringing in anti-capitalism, heritage, conservation, the cultural baggage of Western science, time travel-enhanced industrial espionage, and yet more besides.
The continuity nods, at least, are handled reasonably well – none of them are absolutely essential for following the main story (even references to plot developments in Deceit are explained in-context), those which are just callbacks for callbacks’ sake are kept brief, whilst those which actually have more weight to them get a bit more air. As an example of a brief callback, there’s a deft bit of dialogue which quickly and naturally ties in the Adjudicators from Colony In Space with the Knights of the Grand Order of Oberon from Revelation of the Daleks, which is a fun link which his both amusing to those who catch it and helps sell Mortimore and Lane’s interpretation of the Adjudicators as a guild of justice-makers partway along the way from descending from cutting-edge legal philosophers to faded relics of a fallen tradition.
It’s actually quite clever the way Mortimore and Lane were able to weave the Adjudicators into this story, not least because originally they weren’t meant to be here at all; in its very, very early planning stages, this was going to be a Doctor Who/Judge Dredd crossover, since Virgin had the tie-in novel rights to both franchises, but that fell through and so Adjudicator Bishop was parachuted in to broadly the same context. Lesser writers would have ended up with a serial-numbers-filed-off version of Dredd, but Mortimore and Lane cunningly tap into the cultural trappings seen in Colony In Space, use the Grand Order of Oberon concept as inspiration for additional flavour, and come up with not just a character who despite being draconian in his own way is not really all that Dredd-like, but also makes sure the Adjudicators as a whole don’t really resemble the Justice Department of Mega-City One.
Perhaps the meatiest continuity tie-in to the classic show hails from the fact that this is set in the mid-22nd Century, and all through the novel increasingly alarming reports seep in suggesting an unidentified alien force creeping its way into human-occupied space; the reports are obviously harbingers of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and the Doctor treats them as historical records rather than something he needs to intervene in directly. (After all, he already did intervene.) He does throw in a long scheme over the course of this novel to, in essence, give the First Doctor a bit of an assist, but he isn’t trying to alert everyone to the fact that the Daleks are about to invade, any more than Benny or Ace are; it already happened for him, for Benny it’s ancient history, and even Ace has spent some years living in a context where the first Dalek invasion of human space is an established fact. None of them are fool enough to try and wreck their own timelines, which is exactly what would happen if the Dalek Invasion were cancelled.
That isn’t to say that none of them are up to anything misguided. Something that is notable about the story is that the Doctor, Ace, and Benny have already been hanging out at the base for some weeks when the tragedy of Paula’s death hits, giving them a touch more familiarity with the ground and skin in the game, though Lane and Mortimore wisely gloss over that to focus on the exciting bits of their stay. This also means that the Doctor, Bernice, and Ace have all had time to develop opinions and agendas they haven’t necessarily kept each other up to speed with, and some of them have noticed things others have. For instance, Bernice stumbled over the bisexual plot this time by stumbling in on the women in question having sex; Ace wasn’t aware of it, but has a functional enough gaydar to twig to what was going on.
(For slash fic writers keeping track, there’s a few moments where it seems like Ace might be attracted to Bernice but not feel brilliant about that – asking her to back off to avoid “confusing” her in a way which could be read several ways, for instance – but it’s very much under the radar, a possibility for future writers to develop or ignore as they see fit.)
Oh, and there’s also the factor that Ace betrays the Doctor and Benny in this book.
Specifically, it turns out that back in the future, Ace was recruited by IMC to find out what the deal was with the Lucifer system – for they were aware that something happened here which blocked off access to that sweet, resource-rich gas giant core, but not what, and they also knew that IMC undertook a hostile acquisition of Project Eden (complete with heavily-armed corporate mercenaries) in the process. Ace had been candid with them about the possibility she might go off travelling in time at some point in the future, so they gave her the credentials she needed to infiltrate the IMC mission in the 2150s with instructions to make contact, join up, ensure the mission goes smoothly, and if she gets away with useful intel find some way to communicate it to IMC in the future.
(Let’s remember that back when IMC were bullying the Colony In Space their plans involved stuff like that doofy robot, so for them to recruit Ace is a massive step up.)
It’s a hell of a bold move for two first-time authors to pull off, because it means that for crucial sections of the book Ace is on the side of the villains; her reasons for doing this are perhaps poorly enunciated, but it’s clear that they are meant to be poorly enunciated – that she’s all mixed up inside and has signed up to this plot largely for the sake of feeling like she’s in control of things. I can’t think of a single incident in the classic series where a companion betrays the Doctor as comprehensively as Ace does in this novel, even with the little acts of mercy she slips in here and there. Sarah Jane was working at cross-purposes to the Doctor in early parts of The Time Warrior, but this was the result of a completely understandable false conclusion (she assumed he was responsible for the kidnappings due to having the means to do it, having not accounted for the admittedly fantastic possibility that there might be two time travellers involved in the situation); Turlough was badgered by the Black Guardian to murder the Doctor back in Season 20, but he was rubbish at it, and never did anything particularly cruel to anyone in his desultory attempts to do the deed. Here, Ace goes about as far as she could go without making it implausible that she’s still a welcome member of the TARDIS crew at the end.
Sandifer has argued that the betrayal plot here does for New Ace what the plot of Love and War does for the Doctor in attempting to provide a high water mark for how edgy the respective characters can get and still perform the functions the series needs them for. In addition, for New Ace this story plays the crucial role of mapping out what that function is to begin with – specifically, she’s the wildcard, someone who’s not in it for the sense-of-wonder time tourism that Benny is here for (and many other conventional companions bought into), and who could conceivably come to very different conclusions about what needs to be done in a particular story from the Doctor and attempt to act on that independently.
In addition, I think a really important function is played by letting Ace do something super-dodgy and manipulative for once. It’s a much cleverer use of New Ace than Peter Darvill-Evans’ clumsy introduction of her in Deceit – it means that the interaction between her and the Doctor is much less of a one-way street as far as manipulation and long-term plans are concerned, that she finally gets a chance to turn the tables on him for a change, and that with them having both hurt each other like that, there’s a bilateral process of reconciliation to undertake.
The Doctor, meanwhile, is swinging back in a more heroic direction. Sure, he shoots someone dead – but the Doctor has used guns before, and the person he shoots is a seven-dimensional alien mercenary in charge of the IMC hostile takeover whose actions were literally endangering the entire universe. And moreover, it’s a moment when he acknowledges that great suffering has happened because of his own hesitation to inflict violence by his own hand in the past (citing his failure to retcon the Daleks out of existence in Genesis of the Daleks and failure to shoot Davros in Resurrection of the Daleks, but then again in that one he ends up infecting Davros with the Movellan cum virus so he’s hardly nonviolent). More than that, he outright states that he’s done wrong by Ace and others in this particular incarnation because as the Seventh he’s tried to manipulate others into doing the deed for him too often – he might have kept his hands clean, but he’s stained his soul.
In other words, it’s a acknowledgement that he has been at fault, and that this is down to a personality defect, and stating a commitment to do better. 1990s antiheroes generally don’t go for that level of positive, constructive self-criticism, or when they do they stop being antiheroes; generally, when they perform self-reflection, it’s usually to brood about how badass they are, and to double down on their trajectory and justify it to themselves.
Even with Ace’s late-novel face turn, it would still be tricky to sell the trio leaving together in the TARDIS without at least some reconciliation here, and that’s where the dive-into-the-mindscape stuff comes in. In this case, it’s a triad experience with the Doctor, Benny, and Ace all experiencing bits of each other’s psyche, and thus coming a way with a renewed understanding of each other’s perspectives. In a highly welcome move, in Ace’s portion of the mindscape she confronts Jan from Love and War and admits that she didn’t actually love him, she was just young and horny and he was there. This makes the abruptness of the romance in that novel all the more palatable; it was arguably always a viable reading of Cornell’s novel, but here Mortimore and Lane are making that explicit.
All this unfolds against a real page-turner of a plot which manages to on the one hand offer character interactions and scenarios you can almost imagine the classic show doing whilst on the other describing visuals which the classic show would have never been able to adequately attempt. Plus there’s illustrations in this, drawn by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. The one showing the Adjudicator seems to depict him looking a bit like Nicholas Briggs, as part of the spinoff-media wide Let’s Work In Guest Spots For Briggs campaign. They don’t add a whole lot, but they’re rather fun, and give the sense of Lucifer Rising marking something of a turning point for the series, with a little extra pizzaz. Alas, the experiment was not followed through on very cohesively, so far as I can tell.
Arguably, if this comes across as a new beginning then something has gone wrong – because this is meant to be a conclusion. In theory, the run of novels from Love and War to this was meant to be the “Future History” cycle, a swathe of books all set significantly later in the timeline than the present day. Of course, to coherently pull off such an arc you’d need to actually have a cohesive timeline to structure that history around, which Doctor Who doesn’t really have and rarely benefits from when people try to make such a thing happen. For me, though, Lucifer Rising is a breath of fresh air – a welcome return to form for the range after the decidedly shaky The Pit and Deceit, and a far better reintroduction of Ace than the latter managed. I’m stoked to see where things go next.
White Darkness by David A. McIntee
Where things go next turns out to be Haiti, 1915. As World War I rages elsewhere in the world, the Caribbean is left largely untouched – but many of the great powers of the era, especially the currently-neutral United States, have stakes in the region. President Sam, having been swept to power by a coup, is about to lose his life in another coup after his feared enforcer, General Etienne, carries out a massacre of political prisoners; the disorder that ensues will see the United States invade, beginning an occupation which will last the better part of two decades.
All told, this is not the most restful situation that the Doctor, Ace, and Benny could have arrived in for their Caribbean holiday. It’s a good thing they are here, though sinister forces are at work on the island. The regular practitioners of vodoun might be the subject of fear, loathing, and mistrust on the part of outsiders, but they really, truly aren’t the problem; far more serious is the secret base the Germans have established on the island with the intent of appropriating the traditional biochemical knowhow involved in the creation of zombis and weaponising it for chemical warfare purposes. The Germans have allied with a mysterious cult, considered anathema by right-thinking vodoun practitioners, who have repurposed the rituals and trappings of the local folk religion for their own ends; led my the mysterious Lemaitre, the cult is intent on manipulating the Germans’ project and distorting vodoun practices to accomplish their ultimate goal: the awakening of a Great Old One!
Yes, you read that right: after flirting with adjacent themes, this is the New Adventure which finally bit the bullet and just directly used the Cthulhu Mythos. The Necronomicon shows up, as do a swathe of other Mythos tomes, the backstory of the Old Ones is more or less as it is in Lovecraft (leaning towards the version from At the Mountains of Madness), Bernice mentions seeing ancient stones with similar writing to the Old One artifacts found here on a world orbiting Fomalhaut, a star given significance in some Mythos stories, there’s a character called Howard Phillips (though as a medical doctor who is one of the local white characters who never says a racial slur he is not like the real Howard Phillips Lovecraft at all) and so on and so forth. Later books would double down on this – the specific Old One involved in this novel is eventually identified as Cthulhu, for instance – but this is where the dam, already leaking, finally burst.
Wisely, first-time author McIntee doesn’t actually go for an appearance of the Old Ones themselves, with the Doctor talking up the fact that they may or may not even exist any more, but so long as cultists who believe in them act like they do there is still danger, and the thrust of the novel is about foiling Lemaitre’s cult and their big plan rather than confronting the Old One in question directly. I wouldn’t be shocked if McIntee had played lots and lots of Call of Cthulhu prior to writing this – given that Darvill-Evans was a Fighting Fantasy writer before he became the editor of the New Adventures, it’s particularly possible that he was able to recruit from RPG enthusiast circles, and “the cultists aren’t the actual practitioners of the local folk religion, they are weird aberrant folk who practice a corrupt version and the locals kind of despise them” is an angle used fairly frequently in the RPG, particularly in the widely-celebrated Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign.
Those of you know know a bit of French are probably looking at Lemaitre’s name, stroking your chin, and going “Hmmmm, I wonder what classic villain is making his delightfully devilish debut in the New Adventures with this novel?”, so it’s disappointment time: I am afraid Lemaitre is not the Master. He talks a lot like the Master – a lot of his dialogue would fit Roger Delgado himself quite nicely, and unless I overlooked something McIntee plays coy about his race until quite late so it’s possible to imagine him being played by Delgado or Anthony Ainley until it turns out he’s a short, chubby Black dude.
This is a crying shame. Between The Dæmons and The Time Monster in particular, the Master’s got past form in making misguided pacts with demonic or god-like entities, the story would work just as well with the Master, and hell with it, why shouldn’t the Master have a Black incarnation? Lemaitre’s backstory feels like a bit of a late-in-the-day patch job (he’s a former slave who was the sole survivor when the ship trafficking him across the Atlantic sank with all hands, which is presumably when the Old Ones tampered with him), and I do wonder whether McIntee initially wanted him to actually be the Master, but got overruled. In subsequent New Adventure, Missing Adventure, and BBC Books novels he’d play with the Master fairly regularly, and if he’s got as good a knack for Master-like dialogue there as he does here he’s an apt choice for the job. As it stands here, it’s a disappointment when Lemaitre turns out not to be the Master. Even the Doctor is disappointed when it becomes obvious that Lemaitre is not the Master; it’s like McIntee, via the Doctor, is shrugging at us and saying “Yeah, I know, it’s a bummer. Sorry.”
Another thing McIntee is apparently known for is doing his research when he writes historicals, especially those set in non-Western cultures. This is the first New Adventure to be set in Earth history since Nightshade visited the 1960s, and British sci-fi fans in the 1990s writing about Haiti in the 1910s is something which could easily have gone wrong. Laudably, McIntree cites his sources for his research on the period; lamentably, his major sources on cousin practice were decades old even when he was writing this, aside from The Serpent and the Rainbow, which would have been the most widely-recommended recent source on the subject at the time and whose central theory he takes as the basis of his story. It’s evident that he has also read broadly about the history and culture of Haiti in the period; I don’t really have much basis to assess how accurate McIntee’s research is – but it certainly feels deep enough to suggest a good faith attempt has been made.
Telling horror stories about Haitian zombis is something with a highly dodgy history, especially if you traipse over into presenting them like the mass-murdering George Romero zombies rather than the apparently quiet and sedate zombis of actual folklore, but McIntee finds a cunning way to play with both flavours in a way which doesn’t debase the culture he’s writing about but instead makes a comment about colonialism. Essentially, any folklore-style zombis encountered in the story are the product of actual Haitian practitioners, but the Fulci-tastic Zombie Flesh Eaters who show up are the result of the Germans’ attempts to weaponise the neurotoxins used by the practitioners and synthesise them on an industrial scale. The idea that horror movie zombies are the products of Western colonialism abusing Haitian folklore is perhaps on the nose in a novel which is still stepping into this area and making use of it, but it’s a far more intelligent engagement with the roots of zombi lore than you might have expected.
More broadly, the depiction of Haiti in the era makes sure to take in a range of characters from a range of tiers of society with a range of viewpoints. In particular, there’s the figure of Captain Petion – initially a military officer assigned to keep tabs on the TARDIS crew, he warms to them and they warm to him over the course of the novel, and once he breaks from General Etienne after the (historically real) prison massacre he becomes a sort of quasi-companion figure. This means that as well as the ordinary people and bystanders encountered in passing, there’s a Haitian character who’s present through more or less the entire novel who provides a local perspective and who is a sympathetic figure.
Petion’s interactions with Ace are particularly significant; at first thrown off by the fact that she acts like a soldier despite being a woman (remember, this is 1915), Petion eventually comes to admire her, but firmly rules out anything sexual between them because he’s too loyal to his wife, keeping their relationship on a firm basis of platonic friendship. This is not only a novelty for the New Adventures, but also sets up an incident towards the end where Richmann – a ruthless American mercenary working for the Germans – shoots Petion, and in the heat of the moment Ace pulls out her Browning and empties the entire clip into Richmann.
Petion survives (with injuries) thanks to Ace’s swift action, and Richmann has been well-established as a seriously nasty piece of work over the course of the novel, and it’s established that if Ace hadn’t acted quickly he’d have shot her, but despite all this justification Ace still ends the novel thinking very hard about the sort of person she has become, and could become if she keeps going down the path of violence, and being deeply unsure of that. The 1990s were rife with edgy antiheroes doing edgy violence but then having a Very Good Justification for it – goodness knows the New Adventures has done this (including elsewhere in this book!), and it’s still a thing which rears its head a lot to this day. I think it’s much braver, as a writer, to say “Yeah, sure, there were all of these narrative justifications why that cool, cathartic thing was also Okay, but fundamentally it was an act of deliberate lethal violence and that’s still corrosive to the person who commits it.”
This is a bit of a landmark novel – as well as coming back to Earth and a historical setting for the first time in a while, it sees the debut of the Doctor’s less dorky linen suit/no question mark pullover look which he’d go on to use for much of the remaining New Adventures (and on the cover of Shadow of the Scourge). But McIntee’s arrival feels like the bigger deal here. He’s showing a willingness to properly research his material and root them in cultural perspectives which are otherwise under-represented, and whilst this does mean wading into an area where cultural appropriation is a constant risk, he doesn’t seem entirely oblivious to the possible pitfalls. He is also writing in a way which respects the contributions of other writers in the line whilst being willing to go his own direction with the stories and not, say, overhype the Doctor’s tendency to play the long game or get too overexcited about the idea of Ace as a violent catsuited sex-haver.
Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis
I couldn’t be assed with this one.
The gimmick seems to be that it’s set on a forest planet where something unseen is tampering with the minds of human colonists – fairly standard stuff – and the TARDIS gang show up just as the Doctor is feeling sad and is trying to cheer himself up by taking the gang somewhere nice for Ace’s birthday. The main drag factor here is that Bulis’ prose is not so much bad as it’s utterly pedestrian; he has a rough sense for writing dialogue which sounds at least superficially like the Seventh Doctor and Ace, at least, but there’s no sparkle to it, and in scenes where, say, Ace and Benny are having a chat the dialogue tends to become a touch generic and interchangeable. It doesn’t help that “the Doctor is sad” and “the TARDIS crew are trying to go somewhere nice for once” are starting premises that the New Adventures have been leaning really hard on – or that this is yet another future space colony story after we only just got away from a long run of them.
This was Bulis’ first novel, and he’d go on to write a fair few novels during the Wilderness Years, though it was his last New Adventure; Virgin would instead use him as a regular on the Missing Adventures line. As it stands, what I read of Shadowmind seemed too conventionally classic-style to satisfy readers interested in the more experimental end of the New Adventures. A New Adventures-style novel which doesn’t go experimental can still be good, of course – Nightshade is lovely. But as Mark Gatiss showed with that story, the way you make a “trad”-style New Adventure work is that you make use of the novel format to attempt a deeper dive on the sort of classic themes and tropes you’re riffing on.
Bulis, indeed, may have been using Gatiss as a model – the Doctor’s glum mood here, as there, is tied to reminiscing about his First Doctor days and feeling sad about Susan. The execution is not on Gatiss’ level here, however – and there’s a major problem with having the Doctor feel sad about Susan too often, which is that he has a sodding TARDIS. Bro, just go visit your granddaughter, like you promised you would when you abandoned her to rebuild Earth, you big goof.
Birthright by Nigel Robinson
This is a somewhat more celebrated New Adventure, in which in the wake of the TARDIS apparently dying Benny and Ace end up stranded in different eras and places without the Doctor and are stuck having to sort out a psychic insect invasion by themselves. It’s a Doctor-light episode! We all love those, right?
Except there’s a big difference between going Doctor-light for 45 minutes and taking the same tack for an entire novel. I can see the utility – as Sandifer has pointed out – in giving Benny a lot of solo spotlight time in order to further flesh her out as a character; in that sense, you could see her chunk of the novel almost like a pilot episode for the Doctor-less stretch of the New Adventures where Benny is a main character. However, even Sandifer, who is more enthusiastic for this novel than I am, regards the Ace-centric section as a bit of a stumble, an action-centric combat sequence leaning into the least interesting aspects of new-Ace.
For my part, I didn’t reach it, largely because whilst I like Benny, the scenario Nigel Robinson sets up here for Benny didn’t grab me. Surely, if you want to enrich a character like Benny, you want to put her in a situation which can tease out those depths, rather than a shallow Jack the Ripper-inspired thing populated by stock penny dreadful characters?
In addition, Robinson cheats. Sure, the Seventh Doctor is largely absent from this novel, but there’s still arguably a Doctor in the house – a significant role is played by Muldwych, a figure strongly hinted to be a future regeneration of the Doctor who presents himself in a more mystical guise than usual and who over the course of the New Adventures line is hinted to be the regeneration that does the whole Merlin gimmick alluded to in Battlefield. (Risibly, the novel Happy Endings would depict Muldwych on its cover as looking like the Dungeon Master from the 1980s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.) Even if Muldwych isn’t the Doctor, he’s in a Doctor-ish enough niche to undermine the “Doctor-light” premise.
Birthright gets talked about a lot, but the main thing people talk about is how it’s the New Adventure where the Doctor is missing, not the specifics of what Robinson offers up within that context. I suppose Benny being able to carry the novel solo is impressive, but I was already sold on Benny as a character. I wasn’t sold on Robinson as an author after Timewyrm: Apocalypse, and here he doesn’t generate sufficient goodwill with me early on to overcome that.
Iceberg by David Banks
David Banks was, for a span of time, the Cyberman Guy. He has other claims to fame within Doctor Who; in particular, he was Jon Pertwee’s understudy during the late 1980s stage show The Ultimate Adventure, leading to him stepping into the role of the Doctor – a unique incarnation known as the Greenpeace Doctor for the Greenpeace shirt he prominently wore – when Pertwee fell ill. (Big Finish missed a trick when they made the audio adaptation of The Ultimate Adventure by not having him reprise that role.)
Ultimately, though, only two theatres’ worth of people saw the Greenpeace Doctor. To many more Whovians, Banks was more familiar as the lead Cyberman of the 1980s – playing Cyber-Leader roles in Earthshock, The Five Doctors, Attack of the Cybermen, and Silver Nemesis. In 1988 he wrote Doctor Who: Cybermen, which combined a non-fiction look at the Cybermen from conceptualisation to the production of their televised stories to their appearances in tie-in media on the one hand, and on the other hand devised an attempt at an in-universe history of the Cybermen, a bid to reconcile their continuity once and for all.
No prizes, then, for guessing who the baddies are in his debut – and sole – Doctor Who novel. It’s the Cybermen, up to something naughty under Antarctica, where the stranded Doctor has to fight them with the help of Ruby, a plucky tabloid reporter, and I just can’t get into this. Banks can lash together facts but he cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, put together exciting prose, and the exercises here in cramming as much Cyberman-related continuity into the tale as he possibly can right from the get-go just exposes what a one-trick pony he is.
Besides, you shouldn’t tease me with Tobias Vaughn from The Invasion unless you’re going to bring back Packer so Vaughn can say “Packerrrr” all the time. (Here, he just appears on an advertisement in a segment set in the 1970s because yeah, sure, let’s delve into UNIT dating, that’s always a good idea.)
No thanks.
Blood Heat by Jim Mortimore
So, after the crisis where the Timewyrm infiltrated the TARDIS systems, and the crisis where the TARDIS bumped into a prototype Gallifreyan time machine and needed repairs, and the crisis where the TARDIS was infected by some of the bootleg material the Doctor used for the repairs, and the crisis where the TARDIS split up and dumped the Doctor, Ace, and Benny in three different time zones, this novel kicks off with a crisis where the TARDIS breaks down and…
Oh, hell with it. I’m fed up. You see the problem? Jesus fucking Christ, Darvill-Evans, get another plot!!! Seriously, the number of times “something’s fucked up with the TARDIS” has been used in the New Adventures is absolutely risible. We get it. The Edge of Destruction was a fun story. But you really can’t keep doing Doctor Who arcs based on “the TARDIS is broken”, especially if you aren’t going to have the guts to properly break it like in the early Pertwee era. Fundamentally, Doctor Who as a concept requires the TARDIS to be functional more often than not, at least when it comes time to go from one story to the next. Threatening the TARDIS is the most hollow threat possible: companions can die, the Doctor can regenerate, but the TARDIS will never be destroyed, not unless someone wanted to provide the franchise with a definitive end point.
Anyway, apparently this time the gang end up in a parallel universe where the Doctor was killed beyond the point of regeneration during the action of The Silurians, with the result that the Silurians have taken over and the remnants of UNIT are taking a rear guard action. The TARDIS crew eventually abandon the wrecked old TARDIS in a tar pit, which is a thing thanks to the Silurians terraforming the planet to be more like they remember it, and take the parallel time stream’s TARDIS, which the Doctor will use until he gets the old one back in Happy Endings as part of the 50th book celebration.
I couldn’t get into this one either; Mortimore’s work on Lucifer Rising was decent enough, but here he’s clearly a beginning writer flying solo for the first time and working to a deadline. His knack for writing the key TARDIS crew is nowhere near as well-honed as it was in Lucifer Rising, where I suspect that Andy Lane helped tune that up a lot, and whilst the idea of doing a parallel universe story riffing on a Third Doctor story is interesting, it’s kind of been done already – remember Inferno?
Hey, that’s four books in a row I bounced off hard enough that I couldn’t be assed to do a full review. Maybe it’s time I took a bit of a break from all this. Fortunately, a golden opportunity is coming up – the new season of the TV show starts in early May, and fundamentally Wilderness Years stuff is what Whovians engage with when there isn’t fresh Doctor Who on the telly to enjoy. So with that in mind, I think I’m going to mash pause on my tie-in coverage at least until the first Ncuti Gatwa season is in the bag. Keep an eye out here for my review of that – and don’t forget that this blog has a Discord server, so if you want to discuss the season as it airs, there’s where it’ll be happening.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 