Doctor Doctor: George Mann's DOCTOR WHO: ENGINES OF WAR

While I'm never now, thanks to Justin Robinson, going to be able to look at the War Doctor without thinking of the kind of old man who has definitely bought alcohol for a teenager at some point in his life (it's the fauxhawk), I loves me some War Doctor. His appearances have been slight -- one and a 100th of a TV episode, some great Big Finish audio stories, and now this novel -- but he's distinctively awesome, and not just because he's portrayed by the great John Hurt.

So I went into Engines of War with a bit of trepidation, because I just wasn't going to be able to bear it if it wasn't awesome.*

I needn't have worried.

A War Doctor story that's not just going to be another Doctor Who story that happens to feature this incarnation is a tall order, if it's going to be done at all decently. Where the 50th anniversary TV special that is still the only thing most people have encountered the War Doctor in went horribly wrong was in portraying the Time War as a shooting conflict seemingly taking place on just one planet. But this is supposed to be war on an unbelievably massive scale, in which "all of time and space are burning." How the hell do you portray that?

George Mann did a better job of it than the TV writers did, at least.**

The novel opens with a terrific battle scene, in which a giant fleet of "battle TARDISes" (think of a TARDIS with guns, basically) dukes it out with a Dalek stealth fleet that has been quietly waiting to ambush anything that passes through its part of the Vortex, and actually, to a certain degree, uses those battle TARDISes as TARDISes! Meaning time travel is a bit of a factor in the skirmish. Cool.

The War Doctor is the field commander for this conflict, more or less, but in the process he takes a hit and crashes onto a planet that is... Kind of special. Modox is one of a dozen or so human-colonized worlds in a system dominated by a strange-but-beautiful space-time anomaly referred to as the Eye of Tantalus, and the Daleks wanted it very badly.

Soon our man is exploring its secrets with the help of a don't-you-dare-call-her-plucky young Dalek hunter named Cinder (who is the most badass teenage girl in the history of ever, and a more than suitable companion for him, and even tougher than he has become) and what he finds is terrifying, gross and has huge implications for the Time War.

Which means, alas, we end up spending a good chunk of the novel on Gallifrey, which you know I find a tiresome proposition at best, but there you go. Borusa, a former teacher of the Doctor's who later made an ill-advised power play and got trapped for eternity as an embellishment on the tomb of Time Lord founder Rassilon, makes his third appearance in my personal novel-reading time line (he was also in Divided Loyalties and The Eight Doctors), but at least this time he's interesting. Ish.

Look, I find the Time Lords kind of one-dimensional and tedious, and think it's a mistake to base too much of a story on their society, politics or deliberations, but I get why we had to do it, here; it's nice to actually see them through the War Doctor's eyes and see that they more than live up to the hindsight glimpses we've had of them in wartime via the Doctor's later incarnations. As this novel's tag line says, war changes everything, even the Doctor. But, well, the Time Lords don't seem all that different to me, except in that they are now talking about deploying some truly heinous weapons and wreaking destruction on a truly heinous scale. Because Delenda est Carthago the Daleks must be stopped or the whole universe yada yada.

But still no Nightmare Child, etc. Which is both smart, in that they could never live up to the build-up those things get when the Tenth Doctor rants about them on TV, but also a tiny bit disappointing.***

What does get deployed, though, is fully timey-wimey, as is the way the Doctor deals with it, which is very, very satisfying.

And so, ultimately, is this book, Gallifrey scenes aside. And even those Gallifrey scenes? Way better than those in The Day of the Doctor.

As for my Arbitrary and Mercurial rankings, they're maybe not living up to that second adjective so much, for little changes.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
James Goss

George Mann
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

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

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie

Cinder
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Clara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Next time: another First Doctor novel! Can Ian possibly redeem himself enough to at least move ahead of Peri in my companion rankings? Where will Susan land on this list? And what about the First Doctor, whom I always want to like but who always annoys me and lets me down? Stay tuned.

*And because author George Mann has written more Torchwood fiction than anything else. Torchwood! I mean come on, except for Children of Earth, that's just foolishness!

**I know, I know, he's got the unfair advantage that all novelists have over makers of  film and TV, an unlimited special effects budget. But still.

***Though it lets me hang on to my pet theory that that creepy and tantalizing phrase, The Nightmare Child, might actually be a reference to the Doctor in this incarnation. I thought maybe it would be a new appellation for him bestowed by the Daleks, for instance. But the one used by them in this novel is fine.

Doctor, Doctor: James Goss' THE BLOOD CELL

And so now my first cycle through the extant Doctors as of this writing is complete with this, The Blood Cell, a novel featuring the Twelfth Doctor (hooray!) and Clara (eh). Do please pardon me while I have some feelings.

OK.

The Blood Cell, part of an early spate of novels featuring this duo -- officially published in September 2014, it appears to have hit NetGalley before most of us had even seen a full episode with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. And yet author James Goss had figured out exactly what the Twelfth Doctor was going to be like, and did so long before the TV writers seem to have done! And this is not to say that Goss just binged on episodes of In the Loop and projected Malcolm Effing Tucker onto the character of the Doctor; he got a lot more right, too, as I'll discuss in a moment.

Nor is this the only thing to admire about The Blood Cell, which also features two other things that I just love when they are done well: a locked room mystery, and an unreliable narrator. I mean, who's been peeking at my Christmas list, right?

The Blood Cell opens in an extremely high security prison, wherein a prison official is interrogating the newest inmate. There is some nice ambiguity in the first page or so as to which of them might be the Doctor, and I'm going to try really hard not to spoil that for you, but...

One of the things that really makes the Twelfth Doctor shine is his perfect self-assurance, which is so perfect that the man genuinely has nothing left to prove. He so absolutely does not care what anyone else thinks of him that he is perfectly free to disappear into the roles he assumes, with utter conviction, even if they are the lowliest of figures (yes, I'm thinking of "The Caretaker" here). He doesn't mind being completely misunderstood, even reviled, and that aspect of his character, which I tend to think is unique to this iteration of the Doctor (but am willing to discuss*) really shines in this novel. Everybody but Clara (and this is a fairly Clara-lite story, though the bits that do have her are way less annoying than I'd ever have suspected they would be) is working under the misapprehension that the Doctor is a truly reprehensible figure, with a past not so much checkered as nearly completely black. And he just rolls with it.

Meanwhile, of course, mysterious stuff is happening. Dead and broken bodies start turning up while the prison -- which is on an asteroid at the edge of a star system -- and its cobbled-together-by-the-lowest-bidders operating systems start going on the fritz in ways big and small. What's behind it? Who's hiding secrets? Who's to blame for all the chaos? Is it the same person or persons to blame for the bodies?

Some of the answers are telegraphed from the very beginning, but there are still some nifty surprises, and the final act is genuinely horrifying, making The Blood Cell yet another great page-turner of a Doctor Who novel.

And so the Aribtrary & Mercurials do shift a bit, with, for instance, Clara debuting on the companion list at a much higher spot than she might have otherwise. When she's good, she's very very good, and she's at her best -- challenging, a bit mysterious, no-nonsense, executing her tasks perfectly -- here.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss

James Goss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Twelfth

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

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie

Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Clara

Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Next, I'm reading one of the "extras" -- in this case, the War Doctor novel I mentioned last time. Will he hold on to his place just above the universally beloved Fourth Doctor in my A&M rankings? Tune in soon....

*But really, can you see the First Doctor, say, cleaning up vomit with that pink sawdust stuff? The Tenth? The Seventh? Any of them? No.

Doctor Doctor: Una McCormack's THE KING'S DRAGON

I'm just going to say this up front: the only way this book could have been any better would have been if it contained Brian Williams, father of Rory Williams (present), gonna-be father-in-law* of Amy Pond (also present), and gonna-be-grandfather-in-law** of The Doctor (duh). But pretty much every Doctor Who story, maybe ever, would be at least slightly improved by the presence of the elder Williams, and I just have to live with that fact, while still resenting that he's never gotten closure on-screen and probably never will. Ahem.

But that's neither here nor there. Here and there is The King's Dragon, which has shot right up there next to Harvest of Time on my list of best Doctor Who novels, largely because Una McCormack, unlike Amy's creators, actually gets what Amy Pond is all about and stays true to her from page one. But also because it's a good, complete and interesting story, told with elegant economy.

I'd like to visit the parallel universe where Ms. McCormack, and not Mr. Moffat, was the showrunner who took over when Matt Smith and Karen Gillan did. I can't promise that I'd come back, mind.

But so, The King's Dragon. The Eleventh Doctor (one of my favorites, recall), Amy and Rory have come to visit one of the universe's greatest civilizations, the city-state of Greath, a realm that has enjoyed over twelve thousand (12,000) years of peace, harmony, vigorous democracy, and restrained good taste. What a delightful locale to spend part of Rory's infinite stag night!

Of course, decades of Doctor Who watching/reading/listening has taught us all that no high and lovely culture visited by the TARDIS crew is ever going to be encountered at its height. No, no. If the Doctor & co. are going to land there, something is going to have gone horribly off-course. If it's not the TARDIS itself, its the place/time at which it stops. Duh.

So in place of a tastefully decorated and refined civic space of classical elegance, the TARDIS crew finds itself in a gaudy, blinged-out Las Vegas nightmare of a city. And instead of a thriving democracy steeped in humane tradition, the TARDIS crew finds a newly-minted monarchy-cum-cult of personality, centered on an impossibly charismatic and handsome king, Beol*** and his partner The Teller, and the impossibly gorgeous golden dragon idol they've brought into the city.

Plus an intangible but pervasive aura of impending dread, of course.

The best Doctor Who stories are mysteries of this kind. What's gone wrong with history? Why are people X behaving so unlike themselves and why don't they realize it? Something Is Interfering And It's Probably Aliens. Only the Doctor can set things right.

Except, mostly, it's not the Doctor who does so. It's Amy. And, to a degree, Rory. And a few key citizens of the visited world, notably the former democratically elected leader of Geath, a slightly cranky and unimpressed older woman (who I absolutely could not help picturing as played by Diana Rigg in her Queen of Thorns get-up), Hilthe, who seems to be the only person who remembers Geath as it was just months ago. The Doctor is just there to advise, really.

Don't get me wrong; this isn't a "Doctor-Lite" story. He's there in all of his lanky, absurd, slightly cranky know-it-all glory, on pretty much every page. But the plot is driven by his Companions and by the locals.

And especially by Amy. Amy Pond is at her nosy, stubborn, willful, smart, wise and capable best, as we've really not seen her since, say, The Beast Below.*** Even when she is under the influence of this story's Alien Menace (because of course there is one. This one is really, really interesting and original, by the way. Bling!), she's her own person, and that person learned long ago, when a certain Raggedy Man failed to come back for her, that she's really the only person she can count on (though Rory is going to be Rory and thus pretty damned reliable, but he's not yet the "wait until he gets here and I'll just wait and watch while he does all the heavy lifting of punishing you for making me cross" substitute for her agency that Moffat is going to make him), but that that's okay, even if she is pretty much lost in time and space and probably In Over Her Head. Amy can swim.

And again, like all the best Doctor Who stories, while there is plenty of ak-shun and things blowing up and existential peril and whatnot, it's ultimately about getting two opposing sides to understand each other, or at least try to empathize with each other, once those two opposing sides are finally discovered by the TARDIS crew and friends' careful sleuthing and thinking and deducing.

I read this in a single sitting, in a single night. Yes, it is a short work, but McCormack has packed a lot into it (again, like the best DW stories, like the best science fiction, Here There Be Allegories, but they are deftly and subtly handled) and hasn't wasted words. Its length might suggest that it's a lightweight, perhaps even juvenile, read, but don't be fooled.

And now for the Arbitrary and Mercurial rankings. I don't think they're going to surprise you much. The Eleventh Doctor moves up a spot because I just love his silly enthusiasm for things (combined with his old man crankiness and ridiculous physicality) and how he wisely gets out of the way and lets his friends handle things once in a while.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds

Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth

Eleventh
Third
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace

Amy

Romana II

Rory
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Now onward to a Twelfth Doctor novel, then holy cow, I just found a War Doctor novel, and then I'll start the cycle anew with another First Doctor novel. I'm going to keep going in this fashion for as long as there are enough novels for each Doctor, but alas, I'll run out of Classic Doctors much sooner than Seventh and Eighth Doctors, and then my enthusiasm might wane. We shall see.

*This story takes place before their wedding.

**No screaming about spoilers. It says so right at the top of my blog, right there in the header, "ware spoilers."

***I.E. since Moffat remembered that she is a woman and needed to be put in her place.

Doctor, Doctor: Mark Morris' FOREVER AUTUMN

Sweet Jeebus, there's a lot to like about Forever Autumn. A lot! Like, it would be a great seasonal read, a fun horror novel, all on its own, without its being a Doctor Who novel. But, sigh, it's not only a Doctor Who novel, it's a Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who novel.

Forever Autumn -- and see, I even love the title! -- blunders right into Lovecraft territory (albeit modern day Lovecraft territory, a smallish* New England town with a history of weird stuff, a mysterious black tree, etc.) and acts like it owns the place. Kids have the wild hair to dig at the roots of the mysterious black tree, which is so ancient there are Native American legends about how it got there, and dig up a mysterious, creepy, kind of "fleshy" book full of strange names and lettering. It emits a weird green glow, and soon the town is enveloped in creepy green mist. Then tall, thin, tree-like skellingtons are walking around town at night throwing the whammy on unsuspecting citizens. I mean, hell yes!

But then the Tenth Doctor, and his beautiful but boring-as-paint-drying companion, Martha Jones, show up, and start mugging for our attention. And here's the flaw. Novels and Big Finish have rehabilitated Doctors that I've not been too fond of for me, so I had at least some expectation that maybe this, my first Tenth Doctor novel, would maybe do the same. But no.

This book managed to make the Tenth Doctor worse! As portrayed by David Tennant -- who has been marvelous in everything else I've seen -- the Doctor is frenetic, twitchy, disconnected (if the Ninth Doctor is the PTSD Doctor, the Tenth is the ADHD Doctor. Unmedicated) and shouty. He's a distraction rather than a star or a protagonist.

As written, he's all of these things, but turned up to eleven (heh). Author Mark Morris must have been under special orders to emphasize all of these qualities, because in these pages the Doctor can't stand or sit still for even 30 seconds. Maybe because, without an actual actor with biology and whatnot to accommodate, there really are no limits to how spastic he can be? When he doesn't even have to take a breath?

I dunno.

What saved this book for me -- remember, to date I've only ever DNF'd one Doctor Who novel -- was the setting, and the incidental characters. The kids are kind of stock characters, but have personality enough to be enjoyable; the early victim of the novel's main monsters is compassionately portrayed (bonus that one of the kids knows better than to take him lightly as a figure of fun), and the novel's temporary companion, an elderly woman whose family has always had something a bit witchy about them, is a delight. Like I said, this would have been a fine, possibly Bradbury-ish read without the Doctor Who elements.

The climax is fun if kind of telegraphed from a long way off (*cough* Chekov's Evil Clown Costume *cough*), the monster-aliens, a delightfully weird riff on the Pumpkinhead, are cool and genuinely creepy and the book quite a good read. I would have absolutely adored it with pretty much any other Doctor/Companion team; as it is, I merely liked it a lot.

As for my Arbitrary & Mercurial rankings, they don't change a lot. I just get to add a few elements.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis

Mark Morris
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

Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric

Rose
Peri
Ian
*Most of you would probably drop the "ish" but I'm from a town with a population under 1600 souls, and spend a lot of time in even smaller burgs, so this town, which is apparently populated enough to allow a year-round dedicated costume shop to not only survive but flourish, it's small-ish. In a true small town, you make your own costumes, or you buy them at the nearest big box store (well over 100 miles away) or luck into them at a second-hand joint if your town's business community manages to support such a thing.

Doctor Doctor: Justin Richards' THE CLOCKWISE MAN

Happy sigh. As anyone who's been paying attention to my Arbitrary & Mercurial rankings knows, the Ninth Doctor is my favorite Doctor. This is partly because Christopher Eccleston, but also because this Doctor has an angry edge we haven't really seen since the Sixth Doctor (another one that's high in my lists) but is still hilarious with how he handles it (bananas are good), and he's basically the PTSD Doctor, which I can relate.

Indeed his only flaw is his taste in Companions. I wish he'd met Mickey first. Or Jackie. But nothing's perfect, not even the Ninth Doctor.

But I'd love, love, love to read a an adventure of his without Rose Tyler along. I don't know if I'll ever get one unless I write it myself (call me, BBC Books!), but meanwhile, there are a these New Series Adventures that have Nine and Rose, and of these The Clockwise Man was the very first.

The place-time this time is London in 1924 and right away as we meet a domestic servant getting the crap beaten out of him for mysterious reasons and then follow the Doctor and Rose in escorting the servant back to his employer's house, there are definite vibes. Upstairs, Downstairs, tail end of the Forsyte Saga vibes. Oooh lovely!

But those vibes dissipate rather quickly, because in the master's house are... White Russians. No, not as in Lebowski's favorite cocktail. I'm talking exiled Russian aristocrats who, even though the Tsar and his family are long dead, are still plotting to overthrow the Communists and restore the old regime. And they've got a little boy on their hands whom they claim is the heir to the Romanov dynasty. Which little boy immediately decides that Rose is just the greatest, probably because she's the only person he's ever met who doesn't treat him like he's made of glass and actually encourages him to do stuff, like go see the Imperial Exhibition (the ostensible reason for the TARDIS Twosome's visit).

Meanwhile, domestic servants keep getting assaulted, sometimes even killed, and a mysterious masked woman is making the rounds accompanied by a man who speaks rather mechanically and ticks and tocks audibly when he moves about. They Are Sinister. And the TARDIS disappears. Think these all might be connected somehow?

And what's up with all the identical black cats? Is there a glitch in the Matrix?

But so anyway, Late Steampunk. And another "aliens messing about with Earth history" story. I'm longing for a straight-up adventure out there in space. The Daleks menacing some gleepglorks. A human colony has gotten addicted to the secretions of a giant space lizard. Something. But here we go.

Which is to say that I found The Clockwise Man a bit dull for stretches, though things picked up quite nicely at the end, which in a bit on-the-nose fashion takes place behind the scenes in the Tower of Big Ben. The final confrontation in there is a neat bit of intricate plotting, though it would have been even better if the characters enacting it were more developed. There are too many of these, and they've spent most of the novel feeling dully interchangeable until suddenly they aren't! Oh my! But I didn't really care to make the effort of keeping them straight at that point.

I will give the novel bonus points for using the Sonic Screwdriver in ways that actually matter. But otherwise, hmm, yawn. It didn't suck, but it's pretty forgettable, even just ten minutes or so after I finished reading it.

Nonetheless, onto... a Tenth Doctor novel. Oh, I'm not a Tenth Doctor fan, not at all. But maybe, just maybe, without the mugging and the shouting and did I mention the mugging, he won't annoy me quite so much. We'll see.

As for the Aribitrary & Mercurial, nothing much has changed, really. The Ninth Doctor is still my favorite (and he did get some good moments in this novel). I still don't like Rose very much. And Justin Richards gets a meh for now.

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
Rose
Peri
Ian