Tara Samms Frayed (2003)
I obsessively collected Who fiction up until the thing returned to the telly in 2005, at which point it all revealed itself as pretty much a complete waste of time. The generally decent screen version had originally gone tits up back in 1989, to be reborn a couple of years later as a series of novels; and if there was an occasional dud here and there, the crucial thing was that the novels were generally better than the thing they were based on, at least enough so as to rise above being only a series of adventures. They weren't just fan fiction, placeholders, merchandise, or substitutes for the experience of watching a weekly TV show - or so it seemed to me. At their best, they were the next logical stage. They were a progression.
Then it popped back up on the screen once someone noticed they could still make money out of the thing, and we were back with captured companions and flashy CGI versions of the traditional man in a rubber suit; and it felt like a massive step backwards, just as the novels published by the BBC had felt like a backwards step after those published by Virgin.
The novellas published by Telos were another thing entirely. I initially resisted adding them to my obsessive monthly shopping list because it felt as though I was being played. We didn't need yet more Who product, and these books were a tenner for something fairly slim, or considerably more than a tenner if you wished to invest in the deluxe edition with a frontispiece. They were hardbacks, some by established authors, and each with an introduction by someone vaguely famous, usually Neil Gaiman or whoever explaining how he used to watch Who on the telly when he was a kid, because this was a quality product, the sort of novella one might read while scoffing Ferrero Rocher.
Novella sounds a bit French really, innit. Very sophisticated.
There was a sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look wherein David Mitchell plays a Bond style master criminal looking to upgrade his hideout, his discussion with the builder being conducted before a stately wall of leather-bound books, one of which is revealed to be a volume of Miss Katie Price's Being Jordan; and even now, that's what these things feel like, a bit.
I obsessively collected Who fiction up until the thing returned to the telly in 2005, at which point it all revealed itself as pretty much a complete waste of time. The generally decent screen version had originally gone tits up back in 1989, to be reborn a couple of years later as a series of novels; and if there was an occasional dud here and there, the crucial thing was that the novels were generally better than the thing they were based on, at least enough so as to rise above being only a series of adventures. They weren't just fan fiction, placeholders, merchandise, or substitutes for the experience of watching a weekly TV show - or so it seemed to me. At their best, they were the next logical stage. They were a progression.
Then it popped back up on the screen once someone noticed they could still make money out of the thing, and we were back with captured companions and flashy CGI versions of the traditional man in a rubber suit; and it felt like a massive step backwards, just as the novels published by the BBC had felt like a backwards step after those published by Virgin.
The novellas published by Telos were another thing entirely. I initially resisted adding them to my obsessive monthly shopping list because it felt as though I was being played. We didn't need yet more Who product, and these books were a tenner for something fairly slim, or considerably more than a tenner if you wished to invest in the deluxe edition with a frontispiece. They were hardbacks, some by established authors, and each with an introduction by someone vaguely famous, usually Neil Gaiman or whoever explaining how he used to watch Who on the telly when he was a kid, because this was a quality product, the sort of novella one might read while scoffing Ferrero Rocher.
Novella sounds a bit French really, innit. Very sophisticated.
There was a sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look wherein David Mitchell plays a Bond style master criminal looking to upgrade his hideout, his discussion with the builder being conducted before a stately wall of leather-bound books, one of which is revealed to be a volume of Miss Katie Price's Being Jordan; and even now, that's what these things feel like, a bit.
Still, I overcame my reticence because Kim Newman's Time and Relative was genuinely great, and at least as good as anything which Virgin had published, and excepting one absolute stinker, the rest approximately maintained the same high standard until the BBC withdrew the license, having decided that henceforth they would be milking this particular cow themselves without bringing in outside contractors. This was among the last Telos Who novellas to be published, and one I never got around to reading. I'd begun to experience a degree of Time Lord indigestion, and then before I got to this one, I discovered it had been written by Stephen Cole under a pseudonym; and if Stephen Cole was a merely competent rather than actively unreadable writer, as co-author of The Ancestor Cell - which was pure shite - I found it difficult to drum up much enthusiasm for Frayed, until now.
Against expectation, Frayed is actually decent, and at least as good as any other Telos novella. It's set prior to the television series, before the Doctor arrives on Earth, and - as an aside - explains a couple of things no-one had actually wondered about, yet without any of it feeling like fanwank; and best of all it reads like a book rather than something which wishes it had been on the box and spends its time asking you to imagine what that would have been like. The fancy edition, the introduction like what you have in a serious book, and general ostentation remain superfluous because this is a genuinely fine bit of science-fiction, or possibly science-horror, and enough so as to leave me wondering if I should take another look at a few of Cole's other efforts. Above all, this one has come as a pleasant reminder of how it was before Russell T. Davies and Billie Piper soured the well.
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