For The Sake Of An Angel (Love and War)

I’ll Explain Later

We have skipped both Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark and Nightshade. The former wraps up the Cat’s Cradle trilogy by having the Doctor acquire some needed “organic material” from a story that is otherwise about getting fairies and unicorns into Doctor Who. The latter is Mark Gatiss’s debut novel, and is quite well-regarded, but the consensus was that I could skip it and so I did. For those keeping track at home, we are now at two writers who made writing debuts in the New Adventures range and who then went on to write for the television series. Next Friday Gareth Roberts will make it three.

Love and War is the ninth New Adventure, and the first by a returning author, namely Paul Cornell. It features the temporary departure of Ace, as she storms out of the TARDIS, enraged at the Doctor for deliberately sacrificing the life of her lover to stop the bad guys (the Hoothi, a race of manipulative fungus). It also features the debut of Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, the New Adventures’ signature companion. It is phenomenally well-regarded, coming in as the ninth-best New Adventure on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, with a rating of 79.4%. I, Who calls it “a paradigm shift” that is “another triumph for author Paul Cornell.” Reviews at the time were similarly enthusiastic, with Garry Russell proclaiming  it “probably the most mature and intelligent o the run so far.” It is sufficiently beloved that Big Finish are adapting it into an audio play in October, the first time that a novel has been adapted to audio without also being changed to remove the Doctor. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s October of 1992. The Shamen are at number one with “Ebeneezer Goode,” lasting two weeks before Tasmin Archer unseats them with “Sleeping Satellite.” Two weeks later Boyz II Men take number one with “End of the Road.” Lionel Richie, Prince, and Bob Marley and the Wailers also chart, along with Madonna's “Erotica.” In albums, R.E.M. do quite well for themselves with Automatic for the People, and rightly so. A fun fact - the two highest-charting R.E.M. singles in the UK are the utterly uninteresting “The Great Beyond” and the brilliant but unheralded “E-Bow the Letter,” both from well after their commercial peak in the US.

Since Warhead, Lindy Chamberlain is finally acquitted for murder on the grounds that dingoes did, in fact, eat her baby. This is actually mildly relevant to Doctor Who, as four years earlier a film of this case, Evil Angels, was produced by Verity Lambert’s film company Cinema Verity. Yitzhak Rabin became Prime Minister of Israel. Hurricane Andrew thrashed Florida, and Black Wednesday took place as the UK was forced to withdraw the pound sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which is about it for the Tory government, which had the fortune of having just won an election and thus getting to hang on for five years despite nobody liking them anymore.

While in October… erm… you’ve got the Sinéad O’Connor pope photo ripping thing. The Pope also admits that the whole Galileo thing had gone poorly.  Oh, and Yoshihiro Hattori getting shot and killed for knocking on the wrong door in Louisana, which is the sort of thing that happens there.   His killer is acquitted after claiming he thought Hattori, who was dressed in a tuxedo and rang the doorbell, was trying to rob the house, which is also the sort of thing that happens there.

On to literature, and Paul Cornell’s Love and War. As I’ve already noted, this book is widely beloved, and rightly so. It’s an outright triumph. I Who makes much of its supposed paradigm shift, but I want to resist that at least partially. First of all, it’s largely less radical than Timewyrm: Revelation. It does a lot, and is a better book, but it’s not the massive alteration to the conception of the Doctor and to how Doctor Who works that Cornell’s first book was.

Rather, Love and War serves to take a certain approach to Doctor Who to its limit. And in some ways it’s impressive how early in the books this happens. The New Adventures are famed for their use of an ultra-manipulative Doctor, but if we’re being honest, this is it. This is as far as the “the Doctor is a manipulative bastard” concept can go. No matter what you do, you’re never going to substantively top the Doctor consciously and deliberately sacrificing Ace’s lover. There’s never going to be a moment in terms of the Doctor’s manipulations as crushing and horrifying as the Doctor gently touching Ace’s cheek and reassuring her that she won’t have to choose between Jan and him, knowing full well that she’ll misunderstand his promise. That’s as extreme as that approach can go. That’s not to say that the manipulative Doctor well dries up here - it doesn’t. But this marks the moment where we see how deep that rabbit hole extends.

Indeed, for all that Love and War is seen as a definitive moment in Virgin’s developing of the series, it is in many more ways a careful policing of the boundaries. Its point is very often to say “this is as far as Doctor Who can go while remaining Doctor Who.” It’s difficult to overstate how important this was to the line - indeed, it’s every bit as important as the radical opening up of the series offered by Timewyrm: Revelation. Unbound by the pressures of a broad and general audience and the restrictions of television, it would be possible and indeed easy for the New Adventures to spiral off into something that’s not really recognizable as Doctor Who anymore. Indeed, this is in many ways exactly what happens to the BBC’s Eighth Doctor Adventures line. Too far down the manipulative Doctor road and you start to lose what makes the Doctor the Doctor - a point Cornell already raised in the implicit relationship between the Fifth and Seventh Doctors in Timewyrm: Revelation.

The most basic tool Love and War uses to accomplish this is to be unapologetically inspired by Sandman. Much of the New Adventures’ approach and aesthetic is borrowed from Sandman, but this is in many ways the most blatant. It’s not just the continuing anthropomorphizing of Death and Time, though those are fairly obvious references. It’s things like Cornell’s use of “Puterspace,” which is on the one hand another instance of the cyberpunk influence on Doctor Who. But its actual mechanics are miles from cyberpunk. Puterspace is nothing so much as a version of Gaiman’s Dreaming, where one wanders about and meets gods. It’s a purely religious concept, connected to science fiction through the standard trappings of neck ports, but unquestionably and undoubtedly working according to a logic of modern fantasy.

This allows Love and War to frame itself in a Gaimanesque way, taking place within the iconography of the series, but in a way that treats it as iconography, not as a material history. The villains, the Hoothi, come from an off-hand line in The Brain of Morbius. (“No ship can approach Karn without detection. Even the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi are felt in our bones while still a million miles distant.”) This is revealing. It’s important, for a book such as this, to have a villain that comes from the series’ past, but this is not a villain that gestures at a network of facts and plot points. Prior to Love and War all the Hoothi consisted of was a three-word phrase, “silent gas dirigibles,” that is on the one hand evocative and on the other hand just another Robert Holmes fart joke. It’s just a bit of textual driftwood from the series' past.

More substantively referenced is Terrance Dicks’s old and hoary maxim that the Doctor is “never cruel or cowardly,” originally, so far as I can tell, from the 1972 Making of Doctor Who book, but more broadly one of the general and standard descriptions of the Doctor. After everything has happened, the Doctor finds a note to himself on the TARDIS console, using the exact phrase, which prompts a conversation with Benny about it and his nature (including a bit that is a fairly straightforward antecedent of the “I had to give them a choice” bit of The Poison Sky in which the Doctor says that he had to confront the Hoothi personally before he destroyed them). Obviously we have a metafictional moment here, as the phrase comes not from within Doctor Who but from its paratext. But more crucially, it frames the story as doing exactly the Sandman thing. It’s already an effective story structurally - the Doctor betrays Ace to save billions of lives. That’s already a damn good hook. But Cornell takes it further, making it a story about how the Doctor who does that does or doesn’t fit in with the existing rules of the story. It’s not just a story about the Doctor betraying Ace, it’s a story about whether the Doctor can do that and still remain the Doctor and within the realm of what constitutes a Doctor Who story.

The larger brilliance of the book comes from its handling of Ace. On the one hand, the book’s premise requires that Ace be “mature,” by which I really just mean she has sex. Cornell wisely decides against writing an “Ace loses her virginity” story, establishing that she had some meaningless flings back on Iceworld, and keeping the book from having an unpleasant anti-sex undertone. But it also gets at a fundamental complexity of Ace’s character. On the one hand, she is designed to be an urban teenager. On the other, she’s always been a children’s television character as opposed to a socially realist portrayal of working class youth in late-80s Britain. This was never a flaw in the series, and it’s not a flaw here, but there is a tension that has to be worked with. By backdating Ace’s sexuality to Dragonfire Cornell buys himself something important - the ability to make Ace sexually active without abandoning her children’s television nature.

After all, nobody who has met a sixteen-year-old girl is going to seriously believe that if you randomly swept her across the universe and deposited her on an alien world populated by various lowlifes and con artists that she is not going to have sex with some of them. Whether one wants to make that explicit or not is one thing, and for obvious reasons the TV series didn’t touch it with a ten foot pole. But let’s be clear - the series never asked the question of whether Ace was sexually active. It certainly didn’t ever say she wasn’t. And Cornell is wise to realize that opening the door to that in Ace’s present really ought to come with a consideration of her past.

But this also means that Ace has been sexually active even in the various stories we’ve seen her as a children’s television heroine in. And this allows Cornell the clever trick of having Ace continue to act and think like a child even as she’s sexually active. Cornell continues to be deft about portraying Ace’s interiority, and makes it clear that she’s immature and foolish in her relationship with Jan. To quote one conversation between Ace and Benny, “‘Typical,’ Ace nodded. ‘But me and Jan are gonna be okay. We’re different.’ ‘That’s what they all say.’ Ace shook her head. She didn’t want to hear that.” She consistently reads as a children’s television character in over her head, being flooded with emotions and circumstances she’s simply not made to handle.

This sets up another brilliant trick for Cornell: he takes the immaturity of Ace’s relationship with Jan and applies it equally to her relationship with the Doctor. She’s no more mature in how she considers him than she is in how she considers Jan, treating their relationship as a big, mythic thing that works not according to any interpersonal logic but according to narrative logic. At one point, she declares that “if he’s fighting something he can’t handle, if he’s surrounded by enemies, then I have to be there. Always. That’s the deal.” What Cornell is doing, broadly speaking, is pushing this logic to its breaking point. Ace and the Doctor have a fairy tale relationship, and Cornell is putting that relationship in a situation seemingly too dark and too fraught for it to function.

Which would all be painfully deconstructive and nihilistic, except that Cornell finds an escape hatch. He pushes the fairy tale logic of the Doctor and Ace to its absolute limit, but not past it. In the end, the story does reaffirm the essential goodness of the Doctor. It sides with the Doctor. But it does so from a position other than straightforward, childlike adoration. The key comes in what is probably the novel’s most enduring contribution to Doctor Who’s larger mythos, and a spectacular execution of the Gaimanesque “tell-don’t-show” trick, the Doctor’s boast that he’s “what monsters have nightmares about!”

Let’s pause and look at this line for a moment, as it’s central to what Cornell is doing. On the one hand, it is obviously a triumphant line. But on the other, there is something unnerving about it. It frames the Doctor as something terrifying, albeit a terror in the sense of the sublime. On the one hand the Doctor is a force that protects children and saves the day. But equally, he does it by being even scarier than the monsters. This is also what the revelation of the Third Doctor’s agonizing death in the TARDIS of radiation sickness is about. Much like Ace’s sexuality, it makes sense in the context of the story, but is largely glossed over and unexplored, a terrifying detail hidden beneath our childhood memories.

All of the fairy tale love of the hero is preserved in this conception, but it’s accompanied by something else - a realization that the fairy-tale hero is absolutely terrifying. Similarly, consider the novel’s claim that the Doctor needs a companion for the same reason that Puff the Magic Dragon needs Little Jackie Paper to be brave. All well and good, but elided in this is the fact that the Doctor is a fucking dragon.

And this is the limit of the approach. You can push Doctor Who as far as you want so long as that essential connection to its fairy-tale nature remains. At the end of the day, the resonance of its first image still defines it - the TARDIS is a magic box and a portal out of the mundane world and into a fantastic one. This has always been scary; fear has always made companions of us all. And that tension between the terror and the splendor of what the Doctor represents is the thread that keeps the series functional as the Doctor is pushed to more and more extreme positions.

And so in that regard, unlike Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War is really a novel about showing where the approach breaks down. It pushes Doctor Who far enough that a single thread still grounds it to what it is, and then uses that thread to climb down from its own extremity. This is not the end of the idea of the manipulative Doctor who pushes ethical limits. It’s a sketch of the border, and there’s still much room to fill in. The book also makes one more key move that allows this sketching in to take place and have weight: it overthrows the status quo. Eighteen months into the New Adventures, Virgin has finally moved to where its stories are no longer dealing with the same TARDIS crew as Survival.

Even if the departure of Ace was announced as temporary at the time, the fact that she does leave and a new companion enters is a major statement of intent for Virgin. They’ve claimed something they didn’t really have before: the right to permanently change Doctor Who. They’ve built to it, most obviously in the revelations of Time’s Crucible, but this is the first time they’ve gone ahead and openly advanced Doctor Who into a new era. This is a big deal. Especially because it wasn’t necessary yet. We’re only nine books into the series. Shaking up the TARDIS crew is still brave, not a desperate attempt to freshen things up. It’s a dramatic claim that the New Adventures are Doctor Who now, not just an imitation of what was last going on when it was on television.

In short, Love and War represents a significant trade-off within the New Adventures. Cornell gives up the ability to push Doctor Who indefinitely in a conceptual sense in favor of being able to have genuine consequences for any and all of the characters. And in doing so the scope of the New Adventures becomes clear. This era has its concept installed, and can now begin the work of just being an era of Doctor Who. After eight books of trying to figure out what it means to continue Doctor Who in a series of novels, we’re now off to the races.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 37 (Sandman)

It is in some ways difficult to quite articulate why Neil Gaiman is good. Clearly he is. Even if I wasn’t fond of his writing, and I am, I’m not the sort of critic who is going to try to reject the volume of acclaim that Gaiman’s work has gathered. (Heck, I’ve contributed to it.) But despite all of this it’s maddeningly difficult to figure out what it is about him that makes him so substantial and important.

He is not so much the first of the British Invasion comics writers as he is the middle of them. The forefather, Alan Moore, had made the jump to DC some years before. His arrival coincided with Jamie Delano’s and Grant Morrison's, with a later wave still to come consisting of Peter Milligan, Garth Ennis, and, finally, Warren Ellis and Mark Millar whose British careers didn’t even start until after Gaiman had broken out in the US. In this regard he is, by and large, typical of the style. He’s probably the most successful of them, although Millar’s savvy in making creator-owned comics with the intention of having them turned into films needs some acknowledgment, and Grant Morrison seems perpetually on the brink of some film breakout or another. But much of this comes down to his skill at the business of writing - Gaiman is adept at working different media and at catering to a loyal fanbase. (Indeed, I’d argue that very little of what he’s written since American Gods has been as good as the highlights of his pre-American Gods career, largely because after the success of American Gods he started writing primarily for his built-in audience and not pushing himself)

Much of what constitutes Gaiman’s style is borrowed from Alan Moore, and the comparison does Gaiman few favors. Moore’s work is more complex and enlivening, and almost any time they’ve shared the same genre and approach I’d argue that Gaiman comes off as the poor imitation, turning out a slightly more populist version of the same techniques. But even here the line of argument contorts oddly. Yes, Gaiman comes off as the Alan Moore protege that he, as a matter of empirical fact, is. But on the other hand, some of Gaiman’s early work, most particularly his first collaboration with Dave McKean, Violent Cases, prefigures Moore’s work in the 90s just as much as Swamp Thing prefigures Sandman.

A cynical approach would suggest that Gaiman’s major innovation was his realization that goths and geeks had a significant overlap that nobody was marketing adequately too. Indeed, even a less cynical approach might acknowledge this - it’s something that Doctor Who was sniffing the edges of in the latter days of the Cartmel era - as a significant move. Indeed, there’s a book to be written about the transformation of geek culture in the early 1990s, and though the episodes themselves had too small an audience to be a major part of that, the Cartmel era was certainly in step with it. The move to turn “geek culture” from a designated set of signifiers (D20s, Spock Ears, computers) into a broader part of culture such that we are all geeks now, and geekiness is more a way of interacting with narrative than a genre as such. Gaiman, by pitching fantasy straight at the goth crowd, was moving forward decisively with the idea that Doctor Who was working with in stories like The Happiness Patrol or Survival, where the series seemed to muse that subcultures are at least partially interchangeable.

There is, however, more to Gaiman than just the realization that portraying Death as a goth manic pixie dream girl was a surefire success. He, more than anyone before him, figured out how to do metafiction that isn’t smug. He’s certainly not the first genre writer to do metafictional stuff, and he’s not even the first one to do it well, but he is the first to make a career out of telling stories about storytelling. And if you’re going to pick a singular thing that is why Gaiman is so acclaimed, this is it.

Sandman, in this regard, is blatant in a way that nobody could get away with anymore. Its basic conceit, that there are some transcendent beings called the Endless, is paper thin. That they only embody concepts beginning with D makes it all the more ridiculous, creating a wholly arbitrary list of seven concepts (Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Destruction, Delerium-Who-Used-To-Be-Delight). The main character being Dream, and thus a literal embodiment of, well, dreams and stories is such an uncomplicated bid to get away with telling metafictional stories that nobody could get away with anything remotely like it anymore. Even comics coming out today that unambiguously owe a massive debt to Sandman - Kieron Gillen’s Journey into Mystery, Mike Carey’s The Unwritten, or Bill Willingham’s Fables, for instance - come nowhere close to a premise that’s just “so there’s this guy, and he’s the literal embodiment of dreams.”

This, then, speaks to the extent of Gaiman’s influence. The fact that he could slip a premise that is, in hindsight, such an untroubled attempt to say “I’m going to do some Neil Gaimany stuff” past a discerning editor shows just how fresh Gaiman’s approach was. But if the premise is too thin to possibly get approved today, it’s also not entirely clear from it what the appeal is. The literal embodiment of dreams who looks like Peter Murphy. So what, honestly?

Well, here we get to the clever bit. Most metafictional stuff works from a narrative out to metafiction. So you start with characters who are in a “normal” type of story, then have them express metafictional awareness. (c.f. Moonlighting, to pick an example out of the air) Sandman, on the other hand, works exactly backwards. It starts from a big metafictional premise and then, given a set of characters who are explicitly and self-awarely archetypal, proceeds to tell perfectly ordinary stories about them. Sandman’s premise may be hugely metafictional, but its overall plot is as straightforward an Aristotelean tragedy as can be executed.

The effect of this is a reckless and almost giddy escalation of the increasing “epic” stakes that have been plaguing genre fiction, including Doctor Who, for decades now. Gaiman doesn’t bring the obsession with the epic to an end by any measure, but he certainly brings the concept of escalating stakes in terms of epics. You can even pinpoint the exact story he does it in: Seasons of Mist. Because the premise “Lucifer decides to close Hell down and give the key of it to the Lord of Dreams, who then gets visited by several pantheons of gods bidding for control of it” is pretty much it in terms of increasingly epic storytelling. You’re done. You’re not going to get a more preposterously ambitious plot than that.

Of course, what Seasons of Mist is really about is a man realizing that he was very, very mean to an ex-girlfriend, trying to apologize, and finding out that atoning for his past is more complex than he gave it credit for. And that’s Gaiman’s real cleverness. He sets up a premise that gives massive mythic weight to absolutely every detail of the world, and then proceeds to tell small stories about family betrayals and jealous exes. One of his biggest tricks in doing this is the use of the metafiction as a constraint for his characters. Dream may be a terrifyingly powerful embodiment of a primal concept of the universe, but he’s never just unleashed and shown to be powerful. Instead he’s constantly depicted as being bound by various rules, laws, and duties. The lesser characters are similarly constrained, their archetypal natures explicitly shaping what they can do. His characters constantly bump against the limits of their natures, but very few - only Lucifer and Destruction, really - ever rebel against them, and in both cases that rebellion is itself a part of their nature.

The result is a comic that consists of small stories taking place amidst the detritus of older epics. This is certainly similar to the reinventions of existing texts that, say Alan Moore or Ben Aaronovitch have been at for years. But Gaiman takes it further. He doesn’t just reinvent old texts and tell different sorts of stories in the rubble of their deconstructed signifiers. He tells stories that are about the very existence of signifiers and old stories. His stories are about storytelling, and by extension about their own power. In this regard, then, the observation that he’s a major influence on Paul Cornell seems almost too obvious to be worth pointing out.

It’s worth looking at an example. Since any comics writer worth their salt can hit single issue stories out of the park without blinking, let’s take one of his singles from around the period we’re talking about in Doctor Who - Sandman #38’s “The Hunt,” cover dated June of 1992, and thus, in practice, out the same month as Cat’s Cradle: Warhead. Like a lot of Gaiman’s Sandman stories, the issue employs a frame story so that there is a literal act of storytelling within it. (Gaiman eventually takes this to dizzying ends in his World’s End storyline, in which, counting the comic itself, there are momentarily seven distinct and nested acts of storytelling going on at once. It’s in issue #55, if you want to go looking.) As a result, two stories are going on in parallel. In one, a Russian grandfather tells his granddaughter a story of the old country. The other is a fairly traditional Russian fairy tale, ordered in proper Proppian fashion, in which Dream makes a brief appearance.

Crucially, the stories are intermeshed. Neither the folk tale nor the interaction of the grandfather and granddaughter are particularly lively on their own, but the interplay of the two stories is full of meaning and significance. Within the fairy tale is a moment of interesting elision. At one point the protagonist of the fairy tale has the opportunity to meet a beautiful noblewoman he’s been dreaming of all story, but upon seeing her in her bed decides simply to return the locket of hers he’s treasured and leave without further interaction. The grandfather tells this, and then focuses on the reaction of Dream and another regular Sandman character, Lucien, to that turn of events, saying that “when Lucien asked Vassily about the Duke’s daughter he shook his head and said nothing. But the Lord of Dreams knew that wishes are sometimes best left ungranted; and he did not need to ask.” But two pages later it is revealed that Vassily, the protagonist of the story, is in fact the grandfather himself. His story elided what it was that he saw and felt when he saw the Duke’s daughter, even as the grandfather points out that this is what the story was really about.

This is a very typical Sandman theme, where how a story is told and what is and isn’t included in it is the overt focus of the narrative. (Another story, in issue #40, takes this theme of secrets and mysteries even further, leading to one of Gaiman’s most quoted maxims, “it’s the mystery that endures, not the explanation.”) On a broad level “The Hunt” is a story about why we tell stories and what their roles are (the grandfather/granddaughter story is, broadly speaking, a debate about the fairy tale’s relevance), but it’s made up of smaller, more normal stories.

A more virtuoso approach to this comes in the arc A Game of You, a six-issue storyline in which Dream appears on just twenty pages out of a hundred-and-forty-four. In this regard A Game of You prefigures some of the New Adventures’ marginalizings of the Doctor, telling a story about the space around a main character instead of about the main character as such. But more significant is the way in which A Game of You takes its central ideas - a young woman’s old childhood dreams - and turns them into a dark and heartbreaking story. Again, the overall tone is in part about stories, and endings, and the question of when a story is past being useful. It’s a story about the death of the childhood dreamworld itself, but again, all the events make up a straightforward enough story in their own right. It’s not a story whose central “theme” is a metaphor for growing up and losing your childhood fantasies. It’s a story that is actually, straightforwardly about childhood fantasies. The material components of the narrative are what the narrative is about.

The final thing we should note about Gaiman’s style is his propensity for throwing the “show don’t tell” maxim out the window at strategically opportune moments. This is a trick he inherits from Alan Moore’s deft narration, but Gaiman hones the technique into a particularly effective trick that became, for better or for worse, one of his most enduring influences. It’s now standard practice for genre stories to just blithely declare big thematic concepts without attempts at subtlety - the outright declaration, for instance, that “the Doctor is worth the monsters” in The Girl in the Fireplace, for instance.

Again, it’s worth looking at how Gaiman himself uses this technique. Let’s use the first chapter of Seasons of Mist, There’s a three-page section of the issue in which each of the Endless (save for Destruction) gets a few paragraphs of prose description. Some bits of these descriptions are suitably show-don’t-tell, revealing details of characters through nice, proper objective correlatives. Of Despair, Gaiman writes: “Many years ago, a sect in what is now Afghanistan declared her a goddess, and proclaimed all empty rooms her sacred places. The sect, whose members called themselves The Unforgiven, persisted for two years, until its last adherent finally killed himself, having survived the other members by almost seven months.” This would raise no eyebrows with a creative writing teacher save perhaps concern about melodrama. Much is revealed about Despair, but obliquely.

Compare to Desire: “Desire is of medium height. It is unlikely that any portrait will ever do Desire justice, since to see her (or him) is to love him (or her), - passionately, painfully, to the exclusion of all else… Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.” You’ll not be getting away with that one in a creative writing seminar.

And yet these passages are among the most quoted bits of Sandman. Clearly they work. Why? The first thing to note is that even though he’s just expositing, Gaiman is working with a poetic lilt. Up until the word “passionately” the line parses in almost perfect iambs, with an extra beat at the ends of sentences (which is common in poetry). The use of alliteration and assonance together for “passionately, painfully” is similarly deft, as is the switch to a dactylic/trochaic rhythm for those words, creating a point of emphasis at that turn. Note also that “never a possession, always the possessor” splits into two phrases with identical cadence. Then we’re back to iambs for “with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes,” before a quick insertion of a trochee for “tawny,” creating a point of emphasis again right around the word sharp, so that the content and rhythm feed off of each other. This is very sharp, controlled writing, with a rhetorical structure that’s elevating itself so that the declarative content carries extra weight.

And, of course, there’s the mildly archaic tone - the slight overqualification of “it is unlikely that any portrait,” or the use of “tawny.” You can get away with telling if you break out a more poetic register to do it with. (And this is something both Moffat and Davies are meticulous in when they use this trick.) The result is an added power to the narrative - the ability to have its themes and implications hit har and directly, instead of being oblique.

The result is a compelling sort of story. It’s at once populist and literary - dense and full of implications, but wearing all of them on its sleeve. It provides a new way of playing with existing tropes, using them as a jumping off point to tell new stories that are in a large part about the impact of the old ones. And obviously I don’t want to go too far down the road of talking about how this approach can apply to Doctor Who because, well, in 2011 it was applied to Doctor Who and we’ll get there. And, heck, we’ll get to Neverwhere soon enough.

More important, for now, is the basic fact that Gaiman was a massive influence on anyone writing sci-fi or fantasy in the 90s. It’s blatantly obvious that most of the New Adventures writers had read him, with Paul Cornell being both the most blatant and the most skillful at adopting his style and techniques. The aggressive and explicit reconceptualizing of the Doctor, the focus on stories that are overtly about who the Doctor is and what the implications of his actions are, the defaulting to giving him big, mythic forces to fight, and even, in the end, the New Adventures’ basic assumption that to tell real and challenging stories requires being for “mature audiences” all owe a debt to Sandman, whose run coincided almost exactly with the New Adventures, starting in the final year of the classic series and ending the same year as the TV Movie. As much as the Hammer Horror films were to the Hinchcliffe era and Quatermass and Doomwatch were to the Letts era, Sandman is the overt and clear model for this era of Doctor Who.

All Grey And Misty (Cat's Cradle: Warhead)

I’ll Explain Later

Andrew Cartmel’s Cat’s Cradle: Warhead is the second part of the loose Cat’s Cradle trilogy, and the first part of the tighter but non-consecutive trilogy by Andrew Cartmel, which continues in Warlock and Warchild. Cartmel’s contributions are straight-up near future thrillers, typically referred to as cyberpunk, but in practice somewhat more diffuse than that. This one is about an evil corporation and massive pollution that threatens to destroy the world, and introduces the two characters who link the three books together, Vincent and Justine. Vincent has psychic powers and can channel strong emotion into physical forces, whereas Justine is impulsive and pissed off. Gary Russell was at the time in awe of the story, but only as “a one-off journey through the ultimate dark-side of Doctor Who,” a viewpoint that stands in stark contrast to I, Who’s adoration of it as “brilliant, but only as the first part of a trilogy encompassing Warlock and Warchild.” (Pearson views it as “a drawn-out, snarled mess” that is difficult to follow.) Sullivan’s novel rankings have it as the best of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy at 42nd out of 61, with a 62.7% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s April of 1992. Shakespear’s Sister are still at the top of the charts, but are unseated after two weeks by Right Said Fred’s “Deeply Dippy,” because they’re not a one-hit wonder in the UK. They remain at number one for the rest of the month. Eric Clapton, Annie Lennox, Erasure, Def Leppard, Vanessa Williams, Iron Maiden, and ZZ Top also chart. Clearly we are firmly lost in the 90s now.

In real news, since Time’s Crucible we’ve had the Bosnian War get worse as Bosnia and Herzegovina declares independence from Yugoslavia, leading to lots of people shooting each other. Euro Disney, now called Disneyland Paris, opens in, shockingly enough, Paris. Manuel Noriega, former head of state of Panama, is found guilty of drug crimes in Florida. And the Los Angeles riots break out. But the big news for the UK is another general election, in which Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party puts a solid dent into the Tory majority, but is still defeated by John Major. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun claims credit for the victory, because he’s charming like that - an event that will lead to Tony Blair repeatedly selling what fragments of his soul actually still exist to win the paper’s endorsement in 1997. But more about that next year - for now, books, and specifically Andrew Cartmel’s Cat’s Cradle: Warhead.

If Time’s Crucible explores the idea of sidelining the Doctor from the action a la The Christmas Invasion or Turn Left, Warhead seems like the first real antecedent of stories like Love and Monsters or Blink, in which a Doctor Who story plays out with the camera primarily focused on someone other than the Doctor. There’s an accusation against the New Adventures in general, and often Cartmel in particular that they are prone to leaving the Doctor out of too much of the story. We’ll see how much water that claim holds when we get to the point where there’s a pre-existing thing you can talk about as the Virgin style that the novels are living up to, (we’re almost there - I’d put the transition at somewhere around Love and War or Transit) but in terms of this novel it’s rubbish. This novel doesn’t suffer from a lack of the Doctor - it revels in it.

It’s ironic, given that Platt’s novel set up large swaths of the so-called Cartmel Masterplan, that Cartmel should pen the middle novel of the Cat’s Cradle trilogy and have essentially nothing whatsoever take place that ties in with the larger trilogy. We discussed last time how the Cartmel Masterplan is a flagrant misnomer, but it’s not really until you see Cartmel’s novels for the line that supposedly built out his Masterplan that you get a sense of just how disconnected from that idea and approach he is. It’s not only not what he’s interested in, it’s an almost complete 180 from what he does. The so-called Masterplan as embodied by Platt in Time’s Crucible is a clanking epic about the dawn of time and ancient space empires. Warhead is about people living in a dystopic near-future. It’s as stark as the difference between The Daleks’ Masterplan and The Massacre.

But, of course, both of those stories shared an underlying similarity of approach. They were both stories that advanced John Wiles’s larger theme of suspicion about the Doctor’s heroism. Yes, one was a soaring twelve-part epic about Daleks and the other a small-scale historical piece about Steven in a time he doesn’t understand, but looking at them, they’re clearly coming out of the same basic vision of what the show is. And that applies here as well - Time’s Crucible may do all the things that Cartmel wouldn’t let Platt do on the series, and Warhead may turn its nose on the entire notion of a cosmic epic, but there’s an underlying similarity of approach. This isn’t a surprise, of course - Cartmel commissioned Platt, and was seemingly set to do so again in Season Twenty-Seven. Obviously they have some common interests and approaches.

But in a lot of ways these two books, with Timewyrm: Revelation before them, play out as a sort of reverse dialectic. After Cornell demonstrates how to do a truly, properly alchemical epic the New Adventures proceed to show us the two components in isolation: the sweeping ambition of Time’s Crucible and the human scale of Warhead. Reading them back to back is an odd experience, but this entire four-book stretch before Cornell comes back on the scene with Love and War is a bit odd. Cornell has already changed Doctor Who completely, but there’s a lag before the books quite catch up. Once we pass Love and War we get a string of novels by writers more associated with the New Adventures than the classic series: Gareth Roberts, Andy Lane, Jim Mortimore, David McIntee, and Peter Darvill-Evans all make their debut in the second set of ten books, with Kate Orman writing the twenty-first book. But thus far we’ve had books by John Peel, Terrance Dicks, Nigel Robinson, Marc Platt, and Andrew Cartmel, with Ben Aaronovitch appearing within the first ten novels as well.

That list is somewhat deceptive - Cartmel, Aaronovitch, and to a lesser extent Platt all end up being very NA-style writers, with another five-and-a-half books among them. But it underlines the way in which this period of the New Adventures features them running to catch up a bit. Still, if Time’s Crucible and Warhead are treated as the two component parts of the Cornell approach then it’s pretty clear which one of them is the more important. Because while Time’s Crucible felt on the whole a bit pointless, this book absolutely sings.

This shouldn’t be surprising. The human element of Doctor Who is baked much deeper into the series’ DNA than the space opera epic. The show was originally about two ordinary people who fell out of the world into a set of adventures that they were actively not the right protagonists for. Its only successful period of discarding or minimizing the human element of its cast came under Graham Williams, who made up for it with unusually solid characterization in the guest characters. Whereas grand epics were actively prevented by the original conception of the show, in which the Doctor’s origins were wholly obscure and the TARDIS couldn’t ever return somewhere to provide a sense of continuity. About all you had prior to The War Games was “Daleks! Again!” Whereas a story about two ordinary schoolteachers being put through absolute hell? Take your pick of the first season.

But Cartmel still has a big innovation in Warhead that moves beyond the “focus the story on a human” approach - something that Time’s Crucible does, after all, if less successfully. Although there certainly are lengthy stretches of the book in which Ace takes center stage, there are also multiple chapters that are structured around telling us about an ordinary person in the world Cartmel sets out, giving details from their perspective, and then having the Doctor cross their path. Over and over again we get vignettes about what it’s like to meet the Doctor, and for large swaths of the book the Doctor’s scheme plays out in the background. It’s not that the book isn’t about the Doctor - it absolutely is. But it’s about how a world responds to him, not about what he does and what his plans are.

Let’s look at a specific instance. The third chapter of the book tells the story of Maria Chavez, a night-shift janitor at the villainous Butler Institute who is suffering from terminal cancer. A third of the chapter goes by before she even meets the Doctor - instead we get her life history, her love of dancing, the ways in which her life hasn’t worked out, and of her deceased lover. Then, finally, she stumbles upon the Doctor doing some light computer hacking. All told, the Doctor is only around for half of the chapter, and for much of his appearance we see Maria trying to figure out what she should do about him and whether she should alert security.

Eventually she decides to cover for the Doctor, and we get a brutal glimpse of human cruelty, as she pulls up a fake e-mail to an ex-lover in which she talks about missing him at night, in response to which the security guards belittle her, telling her that a “woman your age should be ashamed.” It’s ugly and mean, and one of the most compelling moments in the chapter. The drama isn’t whether the Doctor will be caught (really, who cares if he will be - it’s a Doctor Who story, and a series of captures and escapes for him are standard issue), but about Maria’s humiliation and shame, and her willingness to help a man she’s just met.

This makes the chapter’s resolution, in which Maria asks the Doctor to take her with him and is turned down, all the more brutally compelling. The Doctor flatly refuses, because of something that’s been going on on the fifty-first floor that she knows about, saying “you’ve known for years, and you’ve let it happen” before walking off and abandoning her. The chapter ends a page or two later with Maria dying in what sounds like a seizure, still narrated from her perspective. The result is a chilling and uncertain view on affairs in which it’s difficult to tell who, if anyone, are the good guys.

An even more chilling moment comes at the end of the next chapter, where the Doctor, after getting information from a child killer, leaves him to be murdered by gang members without any seeming remorse or issue. It’s a dark and cynical moment - and not the only one in the book. The Doctor later declares that “Ordinary people don’t have the ability to alter the course of events. Only the big corporations and the very rich have the power to do that.” This latter comment is a fascinating moment. On the one hand, it’s easy to bristle at, even if there are reasonably compelling arguments for its practical truth. On the other, and perhaps more interestingly, it jars with a novel that has, up until that point, been meticulously focused on ordinary people and their world. The result is that the Doctor gets put in the same category as corporations and the very rich - as one of the forces that changes the world. He’s one of the good guys, certainly, but looked at from this angle he becomes as uncanny and monstrous as the things he fights.

And this is clearly the angle on the Doctor Cartmel is interested in. There’s a fabulous scene around the two-thirds mark of the book in which Justine shakes Ace’s worldview by pointing out that the Doctor could just as easily be a sorcerer as an alien, and that nothing would change about her life except for the language she uses to describe it. This gets at a fundamental aspect of Cartmel’s approach to Doctor Who here. He’s not interested in the particular mechanics of the Doctor. He’s interested in the question of what happens when a good monster - a figure who is at once utterly Other and yet fundamentally on our side - is unleashed into a world. The explanation for the character is, by and large, just window dressing that dodges around the issue of his nature.

Quietly and meticulously, Doctor Who is changing out from under us. And though the next two books do little to advance things (a mediocre book that tries to do outright fantasy in Doctor Who, with a resolution to the damaged TARDIS plot bookending it, and a upstanding but ultimately very staid number by Mark Gatiss), the ninth New Adventure would prove to be another massive turning point for the series.

Relics From The Old Time (Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible)

I’ll Explain Later

Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible is the fifth New Adventure, and the kickoff to the Cat’s Cradle trilogy. Unlike the Timewyrm series, the Cat’s Cradle trilogy is somewhat more loosely connected. Basically, in this book, the TARDIS gets Time Rammed by an ancient Gallifreyan timecraft after being attacked by a largely unexplained alien. This results in it exploding into a city, lots of what we now call timey-wimey stuff about juxtaposed timelines within the city, and a missing and then amnesiac Doctor, leaving Ace to do most of the actual heroing in this story. The book lets Marc Platt indulge in his pet theories of ancient Gallifrey. The big ones are the idea that the Time Lords are sterile and reproduce asexually via what are called “looms”; that there was an ancient conflict between magic, championed by a woman called the Pythia, and reason, championed by Rassilon, on Gallifrey, and that reason won; and that in addition to Rassilon and Omega there was a more mysterious third figure known as the Other involved in the early days of the Time Lords (a concept borrowed from the novelization of Remembrance of the Daleks). The TARDIS is incompletely repaired at the end of the book, and a silver cat that serves as the avatar of the TARDIS’s repair circuits persists through the next two books, with the TARDIS being repaired at the end of the third one. I, Who describes Time’s Crucible as “a complete and bloody train wreck,” and Shannon Sullivan’s rankings puts it at 50th of sixty-one with a 58.7% rating. Gary Russell was kinder at the time in Doctor Who Magazine, politely noting that it was not "the best thing Marc has written, nor is it the best of The New Adventures," and expressing "a growing sense of alarm" at the marginalizing of the Doctor and the similarities with Timewyrm: Revelation. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s February of 1992. Wet Wet Wet are at number one with “Goodnight Girl,” remaining there for three weeks before being bounced by Shakespear’s Sister with “Stay,”which does just that for the rest of the month. Prodigy, Kiss, Genesis, Kylie Minogue, and Michael Jackson also chart.

Meanwhile, since last we checked in, George Bush has vomited in the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister. Absolutely nobody has ever claimed that this was one of the causes for Japan’s apology to South Korea five days later for forcing women into sexual slavery during the Second World War.  Boris Yeltsin and George Bush reach a largely symbolic (but potently so) agreement to stop having nuclear missiles pre-targeted at one another. And John Major calls a general election for April, more about which next entry.

While during the month this book came out, the Winter Olympics happen in Albertville, France. The UN approves the deployment of a peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia. And 613 civilians are massacred in Khojaly in Azerbaijan.  And the Maastricht Treaty, which establishes the European Union and begins the process of establishing the Euro, is signed.

While on bookshelves, it’s Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible. There is an alternate universe in which this book is well-regarded. It’s only a few doors down from ours, so to speak. The difference is simple - in that universe, this came out before Timewyrm: Revelation and is widely recognized as an incremental step towards that novel. Whereas in this universe, it came out one book later and is a visible let-down.

Time’s Crucible, to be sure, has problems. None of its secondary characters are well-developed enough to hang a plot line on, and so the lengthy stretch of the book in which Ace is wandering around the City looking for the Doctor drags painfully. The City itself, with its three time zones endlessly intermingling, is one of the most visually impressive ideas that Doctor Who has pitched to date. Sadly, this is a novel, and Platt never finds a good way to signpost where or when we are at any given moment. With the Doctor partially sidelined for almost the entire book this becomes a real problem, as there’s nobody to explain the plot. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense - it does, by the end. The problem is that the explanation is held back too long, and while it’s absent it’s difficult to invest in anything the book is doing.

On the other hand, the book features the TARDIS turning itself inside out to become a city, with separate time zones demarcated by river’s of mercury and a silvery ghost of the Doctor hovering over proceedings as a war for the (past) future of Gallifrey plays out in the background. It’s difficult not to award some grudging respect here for the sheer ambition of things. This is Christopher Bidmead’s Doctor Who without budget constraints. Again, this is a mixed blessing - Bidmead’s Doctor Who worked in a large part because of the visual component of Bidmead’s ideas. Lacking that visual component, Time’s Crucible flounders. But on the other hand, if the visual components were what made Bidmead’s Doctor Who work, they weren’t what made it valuable. There’s pleasure to be had in the ideas themselves here.

But Time’s Crucible does not require such a narrow defense. There’s more going on to the book than that. Like Timewyrm: Revelation before it, this is a book that tries to reconceptualize what the Doctor is. In this case it’s perhaps most useful to ground it in the future: this is out of the same basic playbook as The Christmas Invasion - the Doctor makes only sporadic appearances as Ace steps up to the major role. This feels routine now, both through its execution in the new series and through the fact that partially sidelining the Doctor eventually becomes a standard trick of the New Adventures, but Platt deserves real credit for being the first to try this. Yes, sidelining the Doctor happened periodically in the classic series, both through the occasional episodes in the 1960s where the actor playing the Doctor got a week off and through occasional short-term tricks like The Leisure Hive (where the Doctor is sidelined for a few episodes) or The Horns of Nimon (where Romana takes over the plot so Tom Baker can lark around). But the only story that provides a precedent for this level of a thorough marginalizing of the Doctor is Castrovalva, which, to be fair, is a clear inspiration for this story in more ways than one.

As I said, the problem with this approach is that this story really needs someone who can explain the plot in time for anybody to care about it, and that’s not something Ace can really do. But it allows Platt to get into the Doctor. It really is the same trick Davies eventually uses for The Christmas Invasion: define the Doctor by making a Doctor-shaped hole in the story, and then finally filling it. So we first get Ace having to figure out a world without the Doctor, then we get the Doctor without his memories, improvising desperately and speaking about how he’s a potential Doctor in an act of becoming.

But all of this was done better by Paul Cornell just two months ago. Attempting to define the Doctor by his absence alone just doesn’t hold a candle to the mad, sprawling redefinition offered by Timewyrm: Revelation. Once we’ve seen the Doctor’s interiority laid bare it’s just not that interesting a question to ask what would happen if he lost his memories. Once we’ve seen Ace chased by her schoolyard tormenter through the Doctor’s mind it’s difficult to get that excited about her being chased by a giant worm through a city that is the TARDIS. Similarly, when you hit a passage like “The Doctor had always found children very agreeable people. Their uncomplicated nature was refreshing and often disarming. They seemed to find a natural affinity with him and he with them,” you really just find yourself wishing you were in a Paul Cornell book and were getting this insight into the Doctor through something other than a third person narration tell-don’t-show commentary.

But all of this is terribly unfair to Time’s Crucible, which was, after all too soon after Timewyrm: Revelation to be influenced by it. And more to the point, we know the pre-Revelation approach of Marc Platt was a major influence on Paul Cornell, who obviously  draws heavily on the portrayal of Ace from Ghost Light, and, more broadly, on that kind of aggressively symbolic story in the first place. Time’s Crucible is a story of this sort - one that enabled Cornell to do what he did. It’s just that it came out after it, and so nobody reads it as an antecedent.

The other big aspect of the book is, of course, the laying of the foundation for the New Adventures version of Gallifrey, which proves to be something of a big deal. The usual term for this is the Cartmel Masterplan, a term I’ve bristled at previously, and continue to do so. In practice it’s the Platt Masterplan. And crucially, it’s something that never would have flown on television: neither Cartmel nor Nathan-Turner would ever have signed off on a script as heavy on revelations about ancient Gallifrey as this. None of this is the secret intention of the people who were writing the tail end of the classic series - it’s the theories of a fan-turned-writer who pitched them to the television series and, let’s be clear here, had them rejected.

I do not mean this as a criticism of Platt’s Gallifrey. It’s just that we should be clear about what it is: a fan theory that broke out into legitimacy. This isn’t actually the first time this has happened - Timewyrm: Revelation is an adaptation of a piece of Paul Cornell’s fanzine-published fan fiction. So on one basic level, the fact that this has happened twice in two months suggests that something very fundamental has shifted in the way things are done.

It’s worth comparing something like Platt’s Gallifrey to fanwank as practiced previously. Compare it to Attack of the Cybermen, or even to Timewyrm: Genesys. Both of those stories use referentiality as their fannish engagement. In many ways what’s most astonishing about Attack of the Cybermen is that despite having Totter’s Lane, the Mondas encounter, and a return to Telos in it, it manages to not add a single new thing to Doctor Who’s mythology besides the Cryons, who are the one bit everyone agrees Eric Saward added. There’s nothing there but references to stories. But Platt and Cornell are doing a different sort of fannish engagement - something more akin to Remembrance of the Daleks, where the past is mined in order to rewrite it. But even there Platt, and arguably Cornell, are less referential than Remembrance. For all that Platt is proposing a huge new fan theory of Doctor Who, there’s not actually that many references to the past of the series here. You’ve got a throwaway reference whereby we get an explanation for the origins of the Sisterhood of Karn, and some very low-key stuff like the inclusion of mercury in the TARDIS or a mention of time rams, but this just isn’t that invested in playing spot-the-reference.

Instead this is engaged in a sort of “what if” game - enacting a mad idea for the series that is interesting less for its clarifying effect on the past and more for its implications for the future. This is less like Attack of the Cybermen and more like The War Games - a story that simply adds a ton of detail to the premise of the series. In this regard it’s part of a more respectable tradition than the referential style of fanwank. And more than just that, Platt deserves some basic credit for having cool ideas here. The looms are a neat concept. His vision of Gallifrey’s past, along with the idea that the Time Lords are just narrowly something other than magical, are solid. Bringing some mystery into the origin of the Time Lords via the introduction of the Other is neat, and although there’s eventually going to be an uncomfortable reckoning when the “is it or isn’t it the Doctor” tease gets settled, that’s a matter for another day. And perhaps most substantively, the idea that the past of the Time Lords is forbidden territory - that it is “the one rule [the Doctor] had never broken” - is a thematically astonishing principle.

But on the other hand, there has been, since 1969, a nagging sense that something was lost when the Time Lords entered the occasion. We’ve been improvising madly at every turn to try to find some way to preserve the mad and mercurial potential of things that existed prior to The War Games, and it’s become harder with each passing Gallifrey story. Their de facto elimination after Trial of a Time Lord was, for the most part, a good thing. All of which is to say that the impact of a big dump of revelations about the nature of the Doctor is not entirely positive. Done as part of a sweeping epic like The War Games or The Three Doctors, or as part of an insane experiment like The Deadly Assassin the price may be worth it. But it’s a heavy price, and there’s a reason that in practice Cartmel was reluctant to pay it. And at the end of the day, even if you don’t compare it to Timewyrm: Revelation, Time’s Crucible just isn’t good enough to be  worth the price of its revelations. Even if they are good ideas - and they are - and if later writers do get good results out of them - and they do - it’s difficult to justify them in the context of this book.

But on the other hand, the sort of twilight legitimacy of the New Adventures saves things somewhat. The looms and the Pythia are intriguing concepts, but they are limited, by and large, to the Virgin line. There is a sense that the Virgin novels know that they are never going to be universally considered “canon” or “real Doctor Who,” and that they recognize that, accordingly, they can throw out the rulebook and not worry about hurting the series at large. For all that this book doesn’t quite work, there’s an increasing sense of the New Adventures forging their own distinct identity and vision.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 36 (Snow Crash)

There are two main ways into cyberpunk, and which one you pick is terribly important to how the genre looks to you. The first option is to go via Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 novel. This is not the first cyberpunk work - the term had been coined a year earlier by Bruce Bethke, and had been around unnamed for a few years previous, including in other works by William Gibson. But it is in many ways the definitive one, where it broke out into the mainstream. A year later we had Max Headroom, which we’ve already talked about.

The other way people approach the genre is Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. This is an altogether more interesting way, since Stephenson’s next novel, 1995’s The Diamond Age, was self-consciously framed as a post-Cyberpunk novel. The first character it introduces, Bud, is a blatant parody of cyberpunk heroes (the first sentence says it all: “The bells of St. Mark’s were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.”) and, more to the point, gets spectacularly and ignobly killed forty-three pages into the book. And while Snow Crash itself is not so prone to aggressively deconstructing cyberpunk, there is a somewhat odd sense of things that comes from having one of the iconic novels of cyberpunk be a book by an author whose later career consists almost entirely of actively moving beyond the genre.

Obviously, given the stated topic of this post, I’m taking the latter, although in my defense I did talk about Max Headroom at the time, which is almost like talking about Neuromancer. Though for the most part this is just a matter of accurately tracking influences. The cyberpunk influences on 1980s Doctor Who are few and far between. Warriors of the Deep, somewhere in its bowels, has a cyberpunk story trying desperately to get out from under the Myrka. Vengeance on Varos has some cyberpunk attitudes, but they’re largely incidental - any attempt to do a sci-fi Play for Today in 1985 would have been about as cyberpunk as Vengeance on Varos. Actually, the most cyberpunk story of the 1980s is probably The Caves of Androzani, which is just kind of too perfect if you want to think about it.

The New Adventures, on the other hand, are mad for cyberpunk. The primary embodiment of this is actually Andrew Cartmel, who has a cyberpunk trilogy spread out over the course of the line, the first book of which we'll deal with on Monday. But scads of the books are heavily cyberpunk inflected. So we should probably, you know, actually look at what that genre was before we go too much further. 

On a basic, factual level cyberpunk can be described as a sci-fi genre focusing on computers and digital technology (broadly construed), and with a gritty, street-level, punk aesthetic. Typically it’s set in a post-industrial and at least mildly dystopian future, and stars anti-hero hackers as its protagonists. And perhaps the first thing to ask is why these go together. Why is a dystopia-punk aesthetic and an interest in computers equivalent?

The answer, I would suggest, comes from the role that computers have in science fiction, or, more accurately, the role they don’t. An often-observed fact about the golden age of science fiction, when large swaths of our basic sci-fi iconography - rockets, ray guns, robots, et cetera - were laid down - is that they completely missed the Internet. It’s something that’s blatantly obvious to anyone watching 1960s science fiction, Doctor Who included. Everyone assumed that we’d have a substantial presence in outer space by the mid-21st century (depending on whether you want to believe About Time or AHistory, any of The Wheel in Space, Power of the Daleks, or The Seeds of Death are only twenty to thirty years in the future), but the idea of Facebook, or, heck, blogging is unimaginable. 

It’s important to stress just how striking this is. It’s not just that most of the default sci-fi iconography of the 21st century proved to be an illusion, but that a completely different piece of massively socially transformative technology happened. There are two errors there, and the result is that computers are, in many ways, a spectre haunting science fiction - the future it failed to imagine. 

As a historical accident the point where it started to be clear to people that computers and the Internet were the future was, chronologically, close to the point where the golden age of science fiction’s more generalized utopianism ran aground. We’ve tracked this thoroughly across the blog - the grand projects of a scientific utopianism that animated the 1950s and 1960s came into question in the 1970s before being largely rejected in favor of a more pessimistic view of the future in the 1980s. 

So within science fiction - and really only within science fiction - there was a ready-made image for this. The golden age had called utopia wrong, and it had called computers wrong. And so within science fiction the one served usefully as a metaphor for the other, and cyberpunk became obvious. But crucially, this link is a very figurative. It’s a powerful figure, and cyberpunk’s success is hardly a surprise. But it’s still figurative. The figure of the computer hacker and the punk anti-hero are not, in fact, linked for anything having to do with the material reality of evolving digital culture. 

And this split characterizes the split between Gibson and Stephenson in terms of approaching cyberpunk. Gibson freely admits that he knew nothing whatsoever about computers when writing Neuromancer, whereas Stephenson, although he makes some spectacularly wrong guesses in the course of Snow Crash, is a computer guy. Gibson, in other words, is first and foremost a punk interested in the utopia/dystopia debate, while Stephenson is interested in the question of how computers really might change culture.

That’s not to say that the novels aren’t similar. Stephenson is firmly in the general cyberpunk aesthetic, which can roughly be described as “badasses are cool.” The two canonical examples here are the opening of the novel - the single most epic description of a pizza delivery ever written - and the memorable and oft-quoted section, “Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied really hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way too, but then he ran into Raven.” The book is suffused with a love of the cool, and it’s unequivocally a debt to cyberpunk that applies to Stephenson’s work even when he’s writing about 17th and 18th century mathematics and the history of currency. (And I’ll admit, the Baroque Cycle is my favorite of Stephenson’s works.)

In terms of the New Adventures it’s probably the Gibson tradition that carries the most weight. Coming off of the Cartmel era’s embrace of alternative culture the Virgin stable largely felt like they were embracing cyberpunk because it was punk sci-fi, and the computer stuff was largely incidental. This is, in practice, a bit unfortunate, especially coming as they did while cyberpunk was, within science fiction, starting to give way to other approaches (largely because the punk part could be just as easily affixed to other prefixes, while the computer stuff could be done with more nuance by people who know what they’re talking about). This left them in a kind of unfortunate position - right as the World Wide Web was launching and Doctor Who fandom was increasingly starting to organize around the Internet (via, initially, the rec.arts.doctorwho Usenet group, about which more in late September), the New Adventures were mucking around in a deeply non-materialist conception of digital technology that was useful only as a metaphor for other things.

And Snow Crash, in many ways, is interesting as the road not taken - the other sort of cyberpunk that the New Adventures, and really, to a big extent, Doctor Who as a whole failed to take. Because, as I said, Snow Crash is a novel that attempts to build a grand metaphor out of the materialism of technology. Even in the cases where Stephenson badly misses his future predictions about how computers will develop - and he does, frequently - there is, throughout Snow Crash, a sense that he has actually thought about the technology that underpins his fictional world as technology. It feels like real technology.

On top of this, Stephenson has a very solid trick up his sleeve as writer tricks go. His standard technique is to provide a stunningly detailed map of how a given technological innovation might impact human experience. Which is to say, he’s very good at taking his bits of quasi-plausible technology and then coming up with a user experience for that technology. He then parlays that into the usual sci-fi society-building games, but the fact that he stops off in user experience on the way to society stands out. Especially because he’s very good at tying the technology to big ideas. 

In the case of Snow Crash, these big ideas draw from Sumerian mythology (clearly there was something in the air in the early 1990s - a legacy of the Gulf War, perhaps?), and the relationship between language and reality implied by various aspects of that mythology. Which is interesting - these ideas are ones that are usually more readily associated with the Alan Moore/Steven Moffat/Neil Gaiman end of the genre pool - an end characterized by a looser, more fantasy-inspired take on things than on the material focus on technology that Stephenson is coming from. And this gets at the real oddity of Stephenson - in a lot of ways, Snow Crash feels closer to what Doctor Who can do than the cyberpunk that actually proved an influence on Doctor Who in the 1990s.

But, of course, Doctor Who was never well-suited to the Snow Crash approach. It’s never been fond of hard science fiction. And even though Stephenson ends at a point that’s really Doctor Who-compatible - broad novels of ideas in which the material keeps intersecting in odd ways with the imaginative and the metaphoric - his approach is so far from what Doctor Who is historically good at that it makes for something of an odd bedfellow. But equally, it makes the cyberpunk that was influential on the New Adventures a strange bedfellow as well. 

The problem is that Snow Crash really was, in a lot of ways, the end of that approach. Once you had really good cyberpunk that actually felt like it was written with an eye towards computers the purely metaphoric link that animated early cyberpunk started to evaporate. And you got the split where one end of the portmanteau went off and started mating with words like “steam,” “bio,” and “diesel” while the other realized that it was a bit silly to begin with and calmly retired itself to be replaced by what we might call the broader category of “computer literate science fiction.”

But with the perspective offered by twenty years of history since Snow Crash came out, it’s altogether obvious how to take the New Adventures. Because while they’re clearly influenced by cyberpunk, they’re also clearly on the end of that split that started attaching the “punk” moniker to other concepts. And though they feature cyberspace and digital technology type stuff left, right, and center, they are for the most part not all that invested in the material reality of computers or technology. But once you’ve got a history that lets you attach “punk” to other prefixes you can easily navigate a way out for the New Adventures. They’re not cyberpunk. They’re Gallifreypunk. And in that regard, it’s not the Cartmel novel we’re covering on Monday that’s the first real piece of Cyberpunk Doctor Who, it’s the Platt one we’re doing Friday. 

But before we get there, we should nod at Snow Crash, an odd cousin to Doctor Who’s approach that is, in many ways, more like what Doctor Who eventually ends up being than anything in the Virgin era, and in many other ways something Doctor Who never came anywhere close to attempting - an influence that, strangely, never managed to influence the series.

Guest Post: Odin and the Doctor

Fairly early in the process of writing this blog I realized that it was useful to have some prior context for a given story before writing an entry on it. And so I bought the About Time books, which are fabulous and were my anchor for several stories in the classic series about which I'd have had little interesting to say on my own. But I was also, early on, aware that I was eventually going to hit the new series and there would be no About Time to help me.

The solution, I realized, was to get a friend hooked on Doctor Who so they would blog about it and I could just take off on their posts. Unfortunately for me, the friend I chose was Anna Wiggins. The problem with Anna, you see, is that she is vastly more clever and intelligent than I can ever hope to be, and so when my blog hits Series Six, about which she has blogged extensively, I am going to abruptly be found out as the pathetic fool I am and all of my readers are going to, quite correctly, go follow Anna instead. Oops.

In order to ease the transition to all of you abandoning me in favor of my smarter and far cooler friend, I thought I should get a guest post from Anna about the relationship between the Doctor and Odin. And so I did.

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In the fourth and fifth centuries, several Germanic tribes migrated to England. And they brought their gods with them. The British isles would be settled, resettled, and invaded by many peoples over the next several hundred years. The bones of Britain contain traces of dozens of cultures, and many of those cultures were Heathen.

To be clear, I’m using ‘Heathen’ in a fairly specific and uncommon sense. Prior to the encroachment of Christianity, a similar worldview and set of religious beliefs was practiced widely across Northern Europe and Scandinavia. The Romans termed these people ‘heathen’. So, I am using the term ‘Heathen’ to refer to this basic religious system, which largely included the same gods, myths, and folk legends. The more commonly known term for this religious system and worldview is ‘Norse’, as in ‘Norse Mythology’. But that is a misnomer - in practice, the same basic set of beliefs and practices held sway throughout northern Europe, and included, at various times, various parts of the British Isles. (I will also mention ‘modern Heathenry’ in the course of this entry - which is a reference to the reconstructionist religion that revives the worship of the Heathen gods)

And so, in the late 1980s, Doctor Who began to draw on these Heathen bones of British culture. The Seventh Doctor was cast as an explicitly Odinic figure, and this vision of the Doctor operating in a Heathen mode would have a lasting influence on the show.

Odin is widely known as the ‘chief god’ of the Heathen pantheon, and as a ‘god of war’ and, if you have a particularly verbose summary on hand, maybe a ‘god of secrets’ or a ‘god of wisdom’. And this strikes at a common misconception about polytheism: that the gods are archetypal representations of natural phenomena and abstract concepts. That a particular deity can be succinctly defined as “the god of” war or fertility or the ocean or anything else. But the reality is that gods are bigger than that. They are complicated and contradictory and bigger on the inside. In other words, they are people.

So let’s look at who Odin is, as a person. Odin is a leader, yes - but he is frequently an absent leader. He wanders the worlds searching for knowledge, often disguised. In fact, ‘wanderer’ is probably the best single word to describe Odin; before he is anything else, he is a wanderer and a seeker after knowledge. He also manipulates events to suit himself, and frequently deceives people to get what he needs or wants - often, this involves tricking people into giving him knowledge.

The Doctor, of course, is also primarily defined as a wanderer, and the Seventh Doctor in particular also manipulates people for his own ends. This is remarked on often enough, with the best example I’ve found being from the New Adventures novel Conundrum:

“But that’s the whole point, though, isn’t it?” said Ace. “To the Doctor, it did mean nothing. J0ust another of his games, another upset in the universe to be dealt with and then chucked.”

This sort of manipulation for the greater good (for some value of ‘good’) also defines Odin. There is a pervasive sense in the Heathen lore that there is some greater purpose to Odin’s actions, but this purpose is never revealed. The Seventh Doctor gives the same impression, especially in the New Adventures. So the Doctor manipulates people and events Odin. To argue that this is an explicit characterization, though, we turn to the iconography of the Seventh Doctor.

In terms of iconography, the connections between the Seventh Doctor and Odin are pretty straightforward. In The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the Doctor is represented as the Hanged Man, and fights the Gods of Ragnarök, who communicate with our world via an eye at the bottom of a well. The Curse of Fenric speaks well enough for itself, with Fenric being one potentially anglicization of the monstrous wolf more commonly known as Fenrir. “Let the chains of Fenric shatter,” of course, is a reference to the events that occur during Ragnarök:

festr mun slitna, en freki renna bond shall rent, and the greedy wolf run

And, of course, is case the connection wasn’t explicit enough, Paul Cornell cinches it. In Timewyrm: Revelation, we find the Fifth Doctor hanging from an ash tree in the Doctor’s unconscious mind, complete with a wound in his side. This is the most iconic image of Odin on offer.

Veit ek, at ek hekk vindga meiði á I know that I hung on a windy tree
nætr allar níu Nine full nights,
geiri undaðr ok gefinn Óðni spear-pierced and sacrificed to Odin
sjalfr sjölfum mér myself to myself
á þeim meiði es manngi veit on that tree which no man knows
hvers hánn af rótum renn. from where its roots run.

Of course, the fact that this is the Fifth Doctor is somewhat odd, since it is the Seventh Doctor who is so obviously an Odinic figure. The obvious answer is that to some extent, Doctor Who has always been indebted to the Heathen legacy in British culture. Surely if the Seventh Doctor is Odin, then the Fifth Doctor, who encountered the Vanir after all, is also Odin.

The scene with the Doctor on the tree also evokes Niðhöggr (in the form of the Timewyrm) and the runes: “Above the man, the three runes that Ace had recognized as the Doctor's signature were carved on the tree, brought together as one sign.” It is notable that the entire reason Odin hung on the tree was to discover the runes:

Nýsta ek niðr, Downward I peered,
nam ek upp rúnar - öpandi nam - I took up the runes - screaming I took them -
fell ek aptr þaðan. Then I fell back from there.

So, in light of that, let’s discuss the Doctor’s runes in more detail: “Ahead of her a final door was glowing, etched with three runes: a square spiral, a bent "S" and a horizontal bowl.” If we take some minor liberties with the ‘square spiral’, these could easily be Ing, Sowilo, and PerÞo. Which would be a bit unpronounceable as an actual word (ngsp), but is interesting nonetheless. The runes have literal meanings in addition to basic pronunciations, which are enumerated in a series of Rune Poems. These meanings form the basis of a magical system that dates back to at least the Viking Age (which is to say, the Icelandic sagas reference rune magic).

Taking up the Doctor’s runes, then. Ing has associations with the sort of active energy that evokes change. To frame it in terms of this blog, it is Mercury. Sowilo is straightforwardly the sun, light shining into the darkness. To quote Paul Cornell, “the storm in the heart of the sun”. And Perþo, well... the meaning of Perþo isn’t precisely known, because the word does not occur anywhere outside of the rune poem. Based on the poem, however, it seems to have connections with games and, more broadly, with fate. So, it is a nameless agent of fate that manipulates reality like a chess board. Really, it was nice of the classical Heathens to provide us with a perfect metaphor for the Doctor like that.

There are some differences, of course, between the Seventh Doctor and Odin. These aren’t necessarily a problem - legends get corrupted over time. But some of them are worth noting. The Doctor on the Tree isn’t hanging there to discover the secrets of the universe, he is there because having a conscience was inconvenient. Odin doesn’t bind Fenrir, Týr does (although to be fair, ‘he pulled bones from the desert sand and carved them into chess pieces’ is exactly Odin). Also, and most noteworthy, when Fenrir’s bonds break, Fenrir defeats Odin, and Ragnarök comes. Which didn’t happen with Fenric and the Doctor.

Except, of course, that it did. After only one more story, Doctor Who went off the air. The Curse of Fenric heralded Ragnarök after all. Sure, the series would survive as a line of novels for the dedicated fans, but Doctor Who, in the cultural fabric of Britain, was dead, a thing of the past.

Except, of course, that it didn’t. The Doctor survived, escaped from the belly of the wolf, hid from his fate in the form of a series of novels, and comes back on the air in 2005. And here is where our story ends, because he’s no longer the seventh Doctor, and thus no longer an Odinic figure.

Well, not quite. Because even though some of the more overtly Odinic elements are gone, the Doctor still draws parallels to Heathen lore throughout the new series. So, let’s skip ahead and talk about the new series, the world after Ragnarök. Because Ragnarök, in the Heathen tradition, is not the end of all things. The world does not end, although many people die and many things change. The world endures, but at a steep price.

A common line of thought in modern Heathenry is that Ragnarök is a cyclic event, a destruction and renewal. Ragnarök, in other words, is indistinguishable from a Whittakerian narrative collapse. Or from the Doctor’s regeneration. In this sense, there has been a Heathen thread in the narrative of Doctor Who sense the very first narrative collapse story, which is brought to light by the more explicitly Heathen stories of the Seventh Doctor.

So here the history of Doctor Who becomes, itself, a narrative collapse, a Ragnarök. The series is cancelled, but it survives, returning to the air 16 years later. On the mythological front, at least three of the sons of Odin survive Ragnarök: Baldr, Váli, and Viðarr. And all three of these figures seem to inform the new series. Viðarr slays Fenrir at the end of Ragnarök, avenging the death of Odin and saving the world from being completely devoured. He then survives Ragnarök. This, then, is the Ninth Doctor, the Doctor of the Time War who heralds the return of the show. Váli is born when Baldr is killed, and his sole purpose is to avenge this death. While there is no direct parallel in Doctor Who, the half-human Doctor created by Donna Noble echoes this figure strongly. After all, “He was born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge.”

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Baldr. Taking the show as a whole, Baldr is altogether a better figure to compare the Doctor to than Odin. He is a champion of truth, the “shining God”. And he is killed by a friend, who is in turn being manipulated by someone else. Except his death is not permanent - he returns to the land of the living. This is the Eleventh Doctor, and in particular Series Six can be read as a fairly straightforward retelling of the death of Baldr. The central myth of Baldr, in fact, is his death. He is killed by Loki, although the actual killing is done by his brother Höðr, who is tricked into the act.

But the Eleventh Doctor also has a lot of Odinic tendencies. He manipulates, and lies, and always seems to be searching for knowledge that will be useful to him (and specifically knowledge of his own death). But then, Baldr is Odin’s son. There are bound to be some similarities.

And more broadly, even with the evidence of Series Six there isn’t any impression that the new series is written with an explicitly Heathen iconography the way that the Seventh Doctor stories were. And yet Heathen themes persist, because the new series is built most visibly from the groundwork laid down in the Seventh Doctor’s era. And that era invoked the Heathen myths in the bones of British culture. Of course those bones didn’t just settle back down; they have been carved into chess pieces, and the Doctor can’t resist a game of chess.

If You Were That Old, And That Kind (Timewyrm: Apocalypse and Timewyrm: Revelation)

I’ll Explain Later

Timewyrm: Apocalypse is the third New Adventure and third part of the Timewyrm series, and is written by Nigel Robinson. Robinson was the editor of the Target novelizations until 1989, when Peter Darvill-Evans, who created the New Adventures line, took over. He thus continues the pattern across the first three New Adventures of using experienced writers from the Target novelizations. Timewyrm: Apocalypse involves societal revolution on an alien world, and is typically considered unambitous and tedious. I, Who goes with “sadly dull, especially in the middle,” and Sullivan’s rankings have it as the second-worst of the New Adventures with a 45.8% rating. Its reputation at the time of release was perhaps rosier, with Doctor Who Magazine praising it as "just excellent" and "well worth running out to buy." DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

Timewyrm: Revelation is the debut novel of Paul Cornell, and wraps up the Timewyrm series while starting the (very) loosely connected quartet of Paul Cornell novels that ends in Human Nature. Unlike any previous Doctor Who story, it’s an intensely psychological book in which the bulk of the action takes place inside the Doctor’s own mind where his previous incarnations live eternally. It’s tremendously ground-breaking, and does more to define the New Adventures style than any other book. At the time, Doctor Who Magazine bent over backwards to try to avoid actually calling it the best New Adventure to date, but cautioned against following in its footsteps with future novels. I, Who calls it “One of the blackest, most invasive Doctor Who novels - and one of the best,” while the Sullivan rankings give it a slightly above average ranking of twenty-first out of sixty-one, with a 74.9% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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Its October of 1991. Bryan Adams is still at the top of the charts with “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” and it’s not until the last week of the month that U2 finally dislodge him with “Fly.” Genesis, Moby, Salt-N-Pepa, and Erasure also chart, as, oddly, do Monty Python with “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” released some twelve years after Life of Brian.

It’s also December of 1991, where George Michael and Elton John are trying to keep the sun from going down. They are unseated after two weeks by a rerelease of “Bohemian Rhapsody” following the death of Freddy Mercury, which remains at number one through the end of the month and takes the coveted Christmas number one. These facts obscure a tremendously weird set of songs in the lower positions, as The KLF make it to number two, Right Said Fred have another hit that makes it to number three, and both Michael Jackson and Nirvana fail to hit number one with “Black or White” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” respectively. But most importantly, Hammer, formerly MC Hammer, hits #4 with a rap redo of the Addams Family theme.

In real news, Clarence Thomas is appointed to the US Supreme Court, while Bill Clinton announces he’ll run for President. Jean Bertrand-Aristide is ousted in a coup for the first time. Magic Johnson announces that he has HIV, and the KGB officially folds. And the Soviet Union formally dissolves.

While on bookshelves, as mentioned above, it’s Timewyrm: Apocalypse and Timewyrm: Revelation. I’ll confess that I decided to cover the former of these mostly for the sake  of completism, feeling like I should do the entire Timewyrm series. It is an unheralded and unloved book. It’s true that I’d be hard-pressed to get two thousand words out of the book, but equally, there’s some stuff to say. Its biggest sin by far is a slow middle, but it’s also one of the shortest of the New Adventures, which makes slowness less of a sin than it might be.

It also introduces some tropes that become standard issue for the New Adventures. It’s got your standard “two alien faction” set-up, though in this case they’re not at war. It’s got more aggressively non-human aliens than the television series ever went for - unsurprising, given the books’ lack of budget restrictions. And it’s got the first of three cases where the Doctor flagrantly sabotages a budding love interest for Ace, which is part of a larger move towards the idea that Ace mistrusts the Doctor, one of the big New Adventure themes. All of this makes it a considerably more influential book than it gets credit for.

It also, after two books with a somewhat dubious relationship to maturity, has the most interesting and mature moment of the New Adventures to date. The Doctor, in fairly traditional fashion, helps to foment a revolution. But in something Doctor Who had never done before, the revolution goes poorly as the people rising up are effectively starved by the ruling class, and it eventually collapses. It’s a small thing, but it’s a take on the complexity of social upheaval that’s not quite like anything Doctor Who had tried.

Unfortunately, that’s about the book’s only moment of real creativity. Otherwise the plot is a fairly straightforward mash-up of The Krotons and Full Circle - a traditional Doctor Who by numbers piece with nothing that stands out as particularly interesting or clever. And while I’m tempted to stamp my feet a bit and claim that the book is due for a reevaluation, the fact is that the argument is that it should be moved off the bottom of the pile and to a position of middling “it made some progress but was mostly pretty boring.” It is wrongly hated, if not wrongly unloved.

It is more interesting by far to talk about Timewyrm: Revelation. I have previously endorsed a relatively progress-centric view of artistic production in which I’ve argued that, in a sort of absolute sense, Doctor Who, and indeed narrative media in general, improves over time. There are individual exceptions, of course, and periods in which the speed of improvement waxes or wanes, but for the most part over time we get better at doing art.

This has less of an effect on the formation of canon (a term I use in the “classic literature” sense here) than one might think, because for a number of very sound reasons we tend to read works in the context of their time. And so what we’re interested in in terms of identifying classics tend to be works that are unusually good for their time and context, a phenomenon unrelated to the general improvement. Both are sensible ways to evaluate quality, and only in one does the notion of continual progress apply. If you want to rank stories in terms of their original context it’s very easy to come up with arguments that something quite groundbreaking like The Rescue is superior to the better-done but more run-of-the-mill for its time Pyramids of Mars. But equally, I’d argue that even a mediocre-for-its-time piece like Dragonfire is, by simple virtue of having a more expanded set of tricks and more time to figure out what techniques work and don’t, better than a classic-of-its-era piece like The Invasion from twenty years earlier.

I say this because it means that, over fifty years, there are various points at which Doctor Who has put out the best Doctor Who story up to that date. Some are trickier to pin down than others. I’ll readily agree, for instance, that the firsts eason of the Hinchcliffe era clearly have at least one story that was, at the time of transmission, the best Doctor Who story ever. But I’m in no way confident enough to casually declare whether it’s The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, or both. There are, however, four points in the course of what we’ve covered where I am willing to say, flat out, that Doctor Who hit a new high with that story: The Power of the Daleks, Carnival of Monsters, Remembrance of the Daleks, and Timewyrm: Revelation.

Timewyrm: Revelation is nothing short of a complete paradigm shift for Doctor Who - a story that is as flat-out revolutionary as anything the series has ever done. And it is ruthlessly, cuttingly brilliant. Its central innovation is that it is aggressively and thoroughly based on the idea of the Doctor’s interiority. It’s not the first bit of Doctor Who to go inside the Doctor’s head, but it’s the first to use that as its premise. (Yes, you’re very clever for that comment you want to leave about The Invisible Enemy right now.) The entire book is about the Doctor’s internal guilt and mental anguish.

This is not, in and of itself, a recipe for being a good book. In fact, from the pen of most writers it would probably make a pretty crap one. But this is by Paul Cornell. And he structures the book masterfully. His first trick is an old standard, but a crucial one - he grounds the book in the mundane. In the prologue he introduces, in amidst some fantastic concepts, perfectly ordinary people, who Cornell takes unusual care to describe with care and reverence, while not pushing the idea that they are anything other than ordinary, everyday people. The prologue also spends a lot of time focusing on mundane evil, with a slow wind through the mind of a particularly nasty bully.

Even when the book proper begins, its opening image is Ace’s interior monologue and self-description, spending more time describing her worldview than anyone had ever done before - and remember, one of the things that’s most notable about Ace as a companion is that she’s the first one since Barbara to have a significant sense of interiority and psychology. And yet nobody prior to Cornell had spent anywhere near the amount of time he does in the first chapter just calmly setting up and describing what Ace’s life on the TARDIS is like and how her mind works.

Perhaps more tellingly, the Doctor gets similar treatment, with Cornell introducing the suggestion - now more or less standard in Doctor Who - that the Doctor spends the time between documented adventures doing odd and strange things. In the case of McCoy’s Doctor, of course, these are manipulative, planned things. But even here Cornell is meticulous about grounding the idea of a chessmaster playing a long and elaborate game across time and space in the small scale, clarifying that “these little touches, the night moves in the Time Lord’s game, were not apparently dangerous. They consisted of such things as moving items of furniture, research on when things happened, and making sure certain couples never met. Bit mean, that last one.”

This is, of course, the playbook of the Holmesian epic, which the Cartmel era so delighted in through its shifts between the material and the grandiose. Cornell picks this up and takes it to the places the Cartmel era was constrained from going. There’s a glorious moment early on in which a possessed innkeeper casually kills his wife by reducing her to a pile of dust, then comments that “It’s a fitting end… for someone as concerned with dusting.” And it’s a wonderful moment - mundane and epic at the same time, and utterly, terrifyingly sick and twisted without a single bit of crass resorting to breast-grabbing or Nazis. It’s a tiny moment, but one that hammers the potential of this approach home, showing the way in which the Holmesian epic, when freed from the moralistic constraints of children’s television and fear of Mary Whitehouse, can just unleash itself.

But Cornell also demonstrates awareness of the implications of this linking of the small and the epic. A recurring theme in Timewyrm: Revelation is the old Ribos Operation concept of the same conflicts recurring at different levels of a system. The Timewyrm is linked explicitly to this concept, with her structure and nature being described as a fractal. And so Chad Boyle, the bully who tormented Ace at school, gets appraised by the Doctor and told, “you didn’t do anything big, not in cosmic terms, but to some of your victims, you were the most important thing int he world,” before being judged in the exact same words the Doctor used on Davros in Remembrance of the Daleks: “I have pity for you.”

These equivalences across levels of the system are also used to chilling effect. Again, the highlight focuses on Chad Boyle. Boyle tells the Timewyrm that he wants to do “really horrible things” to Ace, like filling her mouth with worms. In response, the Timewyrm shows him the true horrors of the world - war, torture, genocide, and the like. To which Chad responds, “those things too. But first I want to find some worms.” And in one shot, Chad Boyle storms to the head of the pack in the “all time great Doctor Who villains” list, as, really, the schoolyard bully was always meant to.

This focus on the equivalencies between the smallest and pettiest tortures of the world and its largest atrocities is also reflected in what is, for the purposes of this blog, one of the single most satisfying moments in Doctor Who, as the Doctor finally comes out and says, “as above, so below.” And on top of that, the Doctor finally breaks out the Blake analogies, describing the Timewyrm as being “like one of the Songs of Experience: dangerous, intelligent… but not as subtle as Innocence.” It’s fitting, then, that Timewyrm: Revelation employs not just the structure of the Holmesian epic, but that of the Whitakerian one. In this case the narrative collapse is brutally straightforward: fairly early on in the novel, both Ace and the Doctor get killed.

Not long after the narrative starts collapsing Ace, and later the Doctor, find themselves in a landscape that is defined by the material history of the program. Twice An Unearthly Child is referenced, first as a supporting character remembers hearing a distant voice in her childhood muttering, “fear makes companions of us all,” and later as Ace finds herself in a library within the Doctor’s mind that is tended by the First Doctor, and where the floor is tiled in a mosaic showing various pictures and patterns, including one of Ian and Barbara sitting outside I.M. Foreman’s. The interior of the Doctor’s mind, in other words, is in the end laid out in accordance with the material history of the series.

Having set himself up like this, Cornell lets loose a huge chain of philosophical and conceptual ideas. Some are idiosyncratic pieces of his own agenda and views on Doctor Who. He spends a lot of time sharply critiquing the basic concepts of Pertwee’s Doctor in a way that is very clearly a fictional working through of the same ideas he raised in DWB a few years later in the Terror of the Autons review where he infamously described the era as having “exiled the Doctor to Earth and made him a Tory.” But unlike his bomb-throwing invective in DWB, here Cornell calls the Pertwee era to account on its own terms, framing the critique (and indeed the whole story) in the Buddhist philosophy that ostensibly underpinned Letts’s tenure on Doctor Who, finding the Third Doctor lacking not from a broadly leftist perspective, but on the exact principles the era espoused.

In opposition to this Cornell presents the Fifth Doctor as the Doctor’s conscience - the one incarnation to object to the Seventh Doctor’s increased manipulativeness. Ace’s freeing of the Fifth Doctor, who has been imprisoned within the Doctor’s mind, allows the Doctor to see a solution to the problem of the Timewyrm that doesn’t involve killing her. And the Fifth Doctor’s fix to the Doctor’s mind is a parallel to the Third Doctor’s “daisiest daisy” story from The Time Monster, a comparison heightened both by the presence of the Third Doctor in the story and the fact that K’anpo himself makes an appearance in the story.

This portrayal of the Fifth Doctor is interesting. Davison’s tenure on the show is difficult to get a bead on - it’s in many ways the chunk of the blog I’m least satisfied wit, but equally, I’ve not seen much in the way of takes I like better, and I think Cornell’s here is just about the reigning gold standard. On the one hand he’s portrayed as a pleasant, innocent figure who just wants to play cricket in retirement. This is, in turn, shown to be necessary to the Doctor in a very fundamental sense. But equally, the Fifth Doctor is shown to be a source of at least some danger. The Doctor is shown to be haunted particularly by the death of Adric, after all - an event that is firmly within the Fifth Doctor’s responsibility. So the Fifth Doctor is, on balance, portrayed as an inadequate ideal - in one sense the noblest of the Doctors, but in another the most tragic, and perhaps the least effective of them because of it. It’s a wonderfully subtle take, particularly when extrapolated to his era as a whole instead of just his character.

These commentaries and insights on the past of the program are accompanied by more straightforwardly big and ambitious ideas. The introduction of a personification of Death waiting on the moon for the Doctor is a startling and intriguing jump in the stakes and scope of things. The establishment of the idea that the TARDIS can, with effort, land inside the Doctor’s mind (a concept that is lightly paralleled with traveling to the Land of Fiction, which comes up in the novel and is described as a similarly difficult place to travel to) is on the one hand merely a restatement of a throwaway concept in Enlightenment, and is on the other a at once astonishing and inevitable extension of the basic concept of the TARDIS. And then there are other ideas dispensed almost casually, like the moment when Ace confronts “the Doctor’s female self, the principles of maiden, mother, and crone,” who the Doctor has long ago lost contact with, hence his reliance on his companions. This is worth at least a book unto itself, but is instead as much of a throwaway as the TARDIS being inside the Doctor’s mind was in Enlightenment.

And yet for all that the book introduces a staggering mass of new ideas, it also grounds itself in the intimate and the small. All of these ideas are presented not as big, cosmic epics but as the foibles and terrors of the Doctor’s mind. Perhaps most significantly, this is a novel in which one of the most cathartic moments comes from the fulfillment of a basic fantasy of far too many Doctor Who fans - the Doctor comes to fight off the schoolyard bully. That’s the register in which these vast revelations that challenge so many fixed assumptions about the series come. This is a book that makes casual King Lear and Blake allusions, but never budges an inch from an intensely human frame. It proposes a narrative collapse of the series, then restores order on the basic principle of the friendship between the Doctor and Ace. The staggering, painful cost of surviving a narrative collapse is a single life, and the Doctor is suitably horrified at having to pay it.

It’s difficult to even frame the aftermath of this book. This book is hugely influential - Russell T Davies, in fact, has cited it as a major influence from which he has freely stolen over the years. But even with that knowledge it’s difficult to condense the implications of this book into a single image. There are so many new directions implied by it. More than any writer in decades, Paul Cornell has embraced the central tenet of the series - the fact that it can do anything - and decided to take it further than it ever had gone. But he did so entirely within the premises of what the series had been. And not just in the Holmes/Whitaker approaches - Cornell also owes a visible debt to Terrance Dicks, from which he clearly learned a tremendous amount about effective prose - something Davies also points out about the novel. The book reads like exactly what the New Adventures strove to be - both successors to the novelizations and bold new approaches to Doctor Who.

In many ways Doctor Who is still sifting through the implications of this book. Its central innovations are that big and that transformative. It completes the fusion of Whitakerian and Holmesian epics that the Cartmel era was approaching. It finally finds a way to have the Doctor be at the emotional center of a story while retaining his alienness and his status as a force of narrative. It introduces enough new concepts and images to sustain dozens of stories, and many of them do. Simply put, there’s no way to understand how the series got to where it is today from where it was in 1989 without this book. It is as important to the series’ history as The War Games or Genesis of the Daleks - a point where everything that follows has to be read, in part, in its wake.

And on top of that, it’s damn good.