Doctor Doctor: Terrance Dicks' THE EIGHT DOCTORS

Terrance Dicks is perhaps THE name in Doctor Who fiction. Crafter of novelizations of uncounted (by me) television episodes from the classic series, former script editor for the show, gentleman, scholar. So who else would get to launch a series of further adventures for the poor isolated Eighth Doctor, wonderfully portrayed by Paul McGann, utterly wasted in a bad American TV movie and in danger of just being swept under the rug forever.

BBC Books and, later, Big Finish Audio to the rescue! The Eighth Doctor has become beloved after all due to some great prose and audio adventures, of which The Eight Doctors is the very first. Er, sort of.

Possibly out of concern that their British/Commonwealth readers were not prepared to accept the Eighth Doctor as part of Doctor Who continuity, the powers that were decreed that this first "novel" would basically be a very thinly constructed "plot" that forced the Eighth Doctor to hang out with each of his seven prior incarnations to accept a piece of the relay baton, and, er, reassemble it so he could get on with being the Doctor in other stories.

Yeah, it's pretty lame. But this is Terrance Dicks, so it's very professionally and well-informedly lame, so much so that at times, if you squint, it can look a bit less lame and maybe it's just walking through really thick mud or something. Except it's also maybe a little bit clever (though it could have been a bit more clever, about which more below), as each but one of the Past Doctor encounters serves as a sort of post-credits continuation of a famous TV episode. Thus we see the First Doctor towards the end of "An Unearthly Child" (after a silly frame sequence that just happens to take place in a certain junkyard in Coalville), the Second in "The War Games", the Third in "The Sea Devils", the Fourth in "State of Decay", the Fifth in/after "The Five Doctors", and the Sixth in "The Ultimate Foe" (aka the last serial in the infamous "Trial of a Time Lord" season). The Seventh is seen pretty much between "Survival" and his date with regeneration at the beginning of the TV movie, which is a bit of a gyp but o'well.

There's a lot going on here, chiefly in the form of Terrance Dicks doing the most Terrance Dicks thing he possibly could. As in long before there was the continuity-obsessed Stephen Moffat, there was the continuity-obsessed (at least for the writing of this novel; I dunno how much so he might have been during his time as script editor) Terrance Dicks, who must have had a checklist a mile long of stuff that had to be in here before it was the Doctor Who Novel That Made The Eighth Doctor Canon. And had obviously been tortured for years by little inconsistencies and plot holes and whatnot that this particular storytelling gimmick gave him a chance to fix and/or explain.

But so, this could have been a bit more fun for the kind of reader who likes this sort of thing. I would have enjoyed having had to do a bit more work to figure out at what point in each Doctor's timeline the Eighth was meeting them. The bit with the First Doctor at first seemed like it was just going to be the sort of nostalgic look at the show's origins with the Coalville stuff, and so I didn't notice that we'd plunged right into "An Unearthly Child" until I realized what was going on in the Second Doctor encounter. And then the Third encounter goes and blows it all by outright naming the episode on the very first page of that chapter. And the rest of them are so obvious that I don't feel at all bad about "spoiling" them by calling attention to this cute little device of Dick's. Pah.

I will say that, with Dicks being the practiced craftsman that he is, this all hangs together rather elegantly, especially once the Sixth encounter gets going. Dicks manages to broaden the issues at stake in the silly trial stuff and make it all more meaningful, which was very gratifying. BUT.

Ain't there always a but?

But, the framing device is ridiculous. It's not inherently silly to go back to Coalville, as Stephen Moffat et al have proven, but in The Eight Doctors we're going there solely to meet and pick up a new Companion for the Eighth Doctor, without really introducing said character, Samantha Jones, at all. We know she's a Coalville student, that she's principled and brave and... um. Because, you see, she only appears at the very beginning and the very end. She plays ZERO part in the Doctor's past self encounters. Boo. I'd much rather just meet her organically in a proper Doctor Who adventure, that's just telling one new story instead of retelling seven old ones. But hey.

Not much change to the Arbitrary and Mercurial lists. I was tempted to bump Dicks down a spot out of pique at the lame idea, but he did execute it well, so he stays at #3. The Eighth stays where he is. I almost nudged Romana II up a spot because (unlike the other companions appearing in this novel), she actually did some cool stuff in the "State of Decay" coda, but even so I still don't love her more than Ace.

As for new companion Samantha Jones? I've seen even less of her than I have of Bernice Summerfield, but what little I saw of Samantha was more interesting than Bernice, so in she goes above the professor.

As always, these'll change and change and change like a TARDIS with a functioning Chameleon Circuit.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Romana II
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa

Samantha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Peri
Ian

Doctor Doctor: Kate Orman's THE LEFT HANDED HUMMINGBIRD

A long time ago, in a TV universe far, far away (smirk), a character known as The Doctor, a doddering old codger having adventures through time and space with his granddaughter and two of her kidnapped teachers took a jaunt to the height of the Mexica Empire to spend some time among the Aztecs. The chief tension of that adventure lay in teacher Barbara's efforts to stop the Aztecs' slaughtering prisoners by the thousands to appease the blood-hunger of their war god (avatar, a hummingbird, because dude, have you ever watched hummingbird's at war over a backyard feeder?). She of course failed, because the First Doctor wasn't about messing with or influencing history. Oh no.

Fast forward hundreds and hundreds of years, both in our time and the personal timeline of The Doctor, and in The Left Handed Hummingbird he returns to his old haunt in his Seventh incarnation, accompanied by his friends Ace and Professor Bernice Summerfield (a fan favorite* who first appeared in a short story that appeared in Doctor Who magazine and then spread to other media). Except first stop, modern day (OK, circa 1994) Mexico City, where they quickly meet a sweet but panicky guy named Cristian, who says he met them back in 1968 in London and sent a message through bizarre channels begging for them to help him yet again. Of course none of the TARDIS crew has ever seen him before.

Their effort to help the poor guy -- a latent psychic and Aztec descendant -- sends them back to Aztec times and to London in 1968. And then to other times and places, but we'll get there. In both milieus, the TARDIS crew encounters a terrifying psychic force Cristian refers to as The Blue, that has insinuated itself into the spiritual life of the Aztecs and into the acid-droppin' hippie life of a houseful of hippies who mistake its distorting effects on their lives for enlightenment, man. But it's not. Oh, no.

In the process, The Doctor trips balls several times, Ace gets into a ton of fights, and Bernice, who is a Space Archaeologist from the Future (decades before River Song was that), does a lot of research, and everybody runs afoul of another non-TV character, one Hamlet MacBeth ("my parents hated me"), a former member of UNIT who founded its short-lived Paranormal Division (which, see Milkweed from Ian Tregillis' triptych), who interferes as only a UNIT guy can.

It's a pretty good, tight but convoluted plot, which alone makes this an enjoyable read (especially since it explores Meso-America, which not enough speculative fiction does. There's Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian & Blood trilogy and then there's... what? If anybody knows of more, please tell me. I love me that setting), but author Kate Orman is also a lovely prose stylist, with some passages manifesting as downright lyrical, as when she describes the TARDIS' famous groaning noise as "the arrogant music of equations shoving aside the particles of the air."

Really, the book's only flaw is its awkwardly shoehorned and totally unnecessary side trip into the life of John Lennon*, for reasons I don't really get except maybe because he was a peace guy, and his influence was, like, so important that it thwarted the Blue? 'Scuse me while I puke and die. Ha ha ha ha.

But so anyway, Kate Orman zooms up near the top of my author list, which is a good thing because she's written a LOT of Doctor Who novels. If they're all as good as this one (which even made me like The Gnome a bit more), I'm in for happiness!

So, speaking of those author rankings, after this one and Palace of the Red Sun, here are all the rankings, which, yes, have changed slightly. As I always warn, they are both Arbitrary and Mercurial.

Authors

Alastair Reynolds

Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks

Gary Bulis
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

And the Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh

Fifth
First
Tenth

And a reader has demanded that I take a stab at formally ranking companions. So, solely including what I've had in the novels thus far:

Ace

Romana II

Jamie

Ben and Polly

Tegan

Jo

Barbara

Nyssa

Bernice

Vicki

Adric

Peri

Ian

So next up is the Eighth Doctor, of whom I'm terribly fond because HELLO PAUL MCGANN. The TV movie was terrible but he's just wonderful in the Big Finish audio dramas he's made. So I'm excited. But instead of just picking what strikes my fancy to read first, since the Eighth Doctor Adventures really are, I think, meant to constitute his lost seasons, continuity might matter (as, actually, it does a bit with the New Doctor Who Adventures, as there was some stuff in The Left Handed Hummingbird that was carrying over from previous Seventh Doctor novels. O'well), so I'm going to read those in order as I go. Which means, yep, The Eight Doctors is next, even though it's by Terrance Dicks, one of whose novels I've already read in this first tour de Doctor novels.

Anyway, see you then!

*Which, funny about this, the few times when it really looked like the bits regarding the Beatles were looking to hijack my cool Aztec/Mexico story, I got super mad and started composing a rant in my head about how I'd always felt like Doctor Who was a sort of special present that the Silent Generation made for Generation X and why did the Baby Boomers have to go shoving their culture into everything, with an excursis into just how tired I really am of the damned Beatles, but then I looked up author Kate Orman and she's only two years older than Your Humble Blogger. So she was 12 years old when Lennon was assassinated and so that event probably meant more to her than it ever did to me and my ranty pants went back onto their hanger in my complainy closet.

China Mieville's THIS CENSUS TAKER

As I've observed once or twice on this here blog, China Mieville is one of those writers whose work I buy just as soon as I hear about it, without knowing at all what it's going to be about, what genre he's messing with this time, or anything except NEW CHINA MIEVILLE. Were I a video game character, that would be the cheat code to make me drop my money on the spot.

(Except for Kraken, yo.)

This Census Taker gave me pause at first, though. It just seemed so unpromising once I read the description (after buying it, of course). A boy witnesses something traumatic and grows up with a deranged parent. That's too much like real life for a lot of people in this world. It's hot and yucky out and I'm living with chronic pain and no relief. Why would I want to read this thing?

Because China Mieville, I told myself. It's China. China has only let you down once. And everything else he has done has blown you away with awesome.

OK, self.

Quickly once I'd started reading This.Census Taker, I found myself imagining scenes from The Bed Sitting Room again (I found a few in-your-ribs references to that nutty masterpiece in Railsea) and realized I was pretty much just straight setting this book in that very messed-up world in my head. People are always asking the narrator's father to make keys for them, often keys to "open" impossibly abstract things. Then the boy watches dad go to work making them with various weird-sounding tools, polishing them with strange powders (of which he seems to have inexhaustible supplies) and then presenting them to his customers, who are never seen again. Do these keys actually work? Are they actually keys like we think of keys?*

Have I just seen one too many Yorgos Lathimos films?

Speaking of Lathimos and his artistic ilk, we have am unreliable narrator here, of a kind and quality that would do Gene Wolfe proud. This narrator, who warns us early on that he is writing a triple account of the story he's telling: one merely enumerating, in cipher, one "performing" for public consumption in collaboration with others of his kind, and a third meant to be kept absolutely secret. I have not, as of this reading, found the key (wink) to determine what passages are from what books, but perhaps the shift in narrative person has clues. Sometimes, you see, we get a pseudo-objective third person account of the Boy's childhood; sometimes he switches to first person. Sometimes this switch happens within a paragraph, which should be annoying, but isn't.

And this boy, who of course grows up to be This Census Taker, is a poor eyewitness with poor recall (like all humans, really), so we're never even sure if he is trusting himself, let alone expecting us to. Yowza.

Unfortunately, though, reliably or notThis Boy Who Becomes This Census Taker doesn't have a lot to say, and isn't interested in clarifying anything admit what he does say. There are hints that this is a post-apocalyptic setting, and that there are still some kind of lingering ethnic tensions going on (indeed, these census takers" job is specifically to count and collect narratives on everybody from the country that is the census takers' own point of origin. This is tantalizingly sinister, especially we face the possibility of a U.S. President who insists on creating a registry of Muslims, and not so he can market a halal version of his steak to them iykwim). Our boy has no knowledge of or interest in any of that, though, just wants to keep telling us about this thing that maybe didn't even happen. The effect is kind of like watching a really sophisticated and fascinating film but with a guy sitting in the seat in front of youth constantly getting up to shove his high school yearbook in his face, or something.

Ah, there, I've almost talked myself into hating this book, but I'm still kind of in the admirers' camp. But only kind of. I like the narrative experiment a whole lot; ditto the way this could fit into either a satirical or serious post-apocalyptic framework. But Mieville is capable of so much more, damn it.

Let's see what his next book brings.

*Especially since, pages later, the narrator refers to "keys" in the sense of typewriter or computer keys, as are arranged on a keyboard...

Tim Powers' MEDUSA'S WEB

My love for Tim Powers knows no bounds, as my readers probably know very well. From my very first reading of his basically perfect The Anubis Gates when I was a teenager to my most recent umpteenth re-read of his definitely perfect Last Call, I'm pretty close to saying the man can write no wrong.*

With his latest novel-length work, Medusa's Web, I'm even closer to saying that. Because holy crap, this is his best work since Last Call, and I really, really, really love Last Call, y'all.

There are enough superficial similarities between this work and LC that a reader might at first start suspecting that the wells to which Powers likes best to go are finally starting to run dry -- the hero's name is even Scott, you guys (but the reader discovers midway that it's Scott for a very punny-but-plot-relevant reason) -- but quickly it becomes apparent that said similarities are superficial indeed. Powers is not done coming up with weird new ways to mix science and magic and human creativity, and this is one of his weirdest yet.

Medusa's Web, which also in its setting and cast of closely related characters has even more of the flavor of a gothic novel than Powers' stuff usually does, begins with an uncomfortable reunion of cousins, gathered back to the sprawling Holywood estate where they were all raised by a legendary actress/model/bodice-ripping novelist named Amity. Who recently died. By committing suicide. By going to the roof of her monstrous house and blowing herself up with a grenade. And oh, by the way, because her monstrous house and its grounds are sort-of-haunted in a very timey-wimey way, that particular explosion keeps repeating itself at odd intervals throughout the subsequent story as her son and three of his cousins try to sort out what to do now that the old girl is gone.

And that's not all. Because this is Tim Powers. So, no, there is no Time Machine whisking people to and fro, nor is the repetition of Amity's spectacular suicide just a ghost story. There is a really weird sort of magic at work here, magic triggered by very simple but weirdly potent line drawings that suck observers right out of their bodies, into an identity-less, sort-of-dimensionless space and then dump them into vignettes from the lives of other people who have looked at those drawings. And there are lots of those, generally, because this trip is pretty addictive. But that's not all, either.

Let's just say you're not just a passive observer of the vignettes you might witness. And that there's maybe some reciprocity. Which makes a kind of time travel possible. Kind of.

And there's yet more. Because this book takes place in Hollywood. Yes, the bulk of it in 2015, and yes, in kind of a romantic ruin of the past, but also in Old Hollywood. As in the silent movie era. And the great Rudolph Valentino is a character (kind of the way Bugsy Siegel was in LC, but he gets to do more). And there's a whole thread woven in about a classic silent pic, Salome**, which I'd not heard of before but now totally want to see.

And but so, GLAMOUR.

I think this is going to warrant a repeat read very soon, because, too, in some ways this reminded me a bit of a Gene Wolfe novel. Once you know its secrets, the meaning of some baffling early bits might just turn from baffling to brilliant.

Don't forget your bullseye specs, kids!

*I say "pretty close" only because I am not a huge fan of his sequel-that-tied-two-previously-unrelated-books-together-to-make-an-after-the-fact-trilogy, Earthquake Weather. It's not terrible, but it's not up to his usual mark, either, and reeks of something cooked up by his agent or publisher. Meh. But otherwise, yeah, he can write no wrong.

**Which is a silent adaptation of the great Oscar Wilde's famous play about Salome and John the Baptist and Herod. Yeah, that Salome. But it's also, because Powers is a genius, warped into being a key to the mystery of these weirdo spider drawings. Because Powers is a genius.