Infinite Requiem

Daniel Blythe Infinite Requiem (1995)
Regular readers may be dimly aware of my general dislike of Doctor Who and the possibly record breaking levels of bile to which it and its devotees have occasionally driven me; but, as is probably obvious to any passing psychologist, I was once quite the fan, and my anger is therefore driven by what fucking idiots have done to the thing I once loved. I'm not saying it was ever the most brilliantest brilliant thing of all time as its contemporary cultists would claim, but it was fun and it had something, and it was mostly half decent as science-fiction. Perhaps significantly, my favourite era of the show ended up being those years when it wasn't actually on the telly due to having been cancelled, but carried on as a series of monthly novels selling to a presumably dwindling hardcore of readers.

Virgin Books had bought the rights and took to publishing these New Adventures as a continuation of what we'd seen on the screen, but without the fucking terrible music. The idea was that they might stand as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, perhaps even launching the careers of promising new science-fiction authors in the process. Fandom being what it is, what careers were launched were mostly in the direction of yet more Who novels, and the discovery of the next Asimov never really happened; but on the other hand, most of the New Adventures actually worked as decent science-fiction novels in their own right, or were at least of a standard allowing one to regard them as spiritual successor to at least Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan and Sexton Blake rather than just yet more product on the shelf adjacent to the one sagging under the weight of all that Star Wars tat.

That being said, my first impression upon seeing one of these in a book store was oh for fuck's sake, let it die. Then a couple of months later I noticed a few of them cropping up in my local WHSmith, and Paul Cornell's No Future - which sends Sylvester McCoy's Doctor to London in 1977 to defeat an alien invasion which intrudes upon the formative years of punk rock - was apparently just stupid enough to warrant my buying the thing. Then I read Jim Mortimore's Blood Heat because there was a Silurian on the cover, and I decided that was it. I was nearly thirty. I had a girlfriend and we were having it off and everything. I didn't need to collect yet another series of anything, not least because there were already thirty or forty of the fuckers at a fiver a throw and it was just too much. I think The Left Handed Hummingbird was next because it sounded like an unreleased Nurse With Wound album, followed by this.

I bought it because it was the only one they had in Chener Books, my local book shop on Lordship Lane, and in buying it I knew I was doomed to collect the fucking set.

Curiosity is therefore why I'm reading it again in 2022. Infinite Requiem made an impression at the time, although not much of one, but enough to inspire my shelling out for the other four million in the series over the years which followed. I read it back before I could really consider myself a regular reader of anything, back when it might take me up to six months to get through a book, and I rarely strayed from my lane, thematically speaking. I wanted to see how well this had aged, and whether it turned out to be better than I remembered.

Thankfully, it actually is reasonably well written, and my own generally increased literacy hasn't left it beached as time travelling Harry Potter or equivalent. It features the man from the telly having an adventure and is about as deep as you need it to be, but Blythe avoids the sort of clichés and shortcuts which often blight ventures of this kind. The only real problem is that, as the title possibly indicates, it pits our man against one of those all-powerful and omnipotent greatest threats to everything ever - or three of them if we're counting - attempting the kind of horrifying scale which never seems to work in print and isn't massively interesting here. This is a shame because the peripheral detail and supporting characters are great, and thus significantly more engaging than the menacing psychic tosspots who want to destroy everything because that's the sort of thing that menacing psychic tosspots go in for. Being the fruit of 1995, we get a futuristic space library where everything is stored on disc, but on the other hand we get the Phracton Swarm which could have been one of the more interesting alien species to run riot across Who continuity, but I guess it wasn't to be.

Internet research reveals that Daniel Blythe went on to write a shitload of other things as distinct from the same thing over and over again, and as such achieved a sort of escape velocity from the cult ghetto which developed once Who made it back onto the telly. So that's good, and if Infinite Requiem probably isn't a masterpiece, it nevertheless had enough going for it to translate into a generally decent read three decades later.

Oh No It Isn't!

Paul Cornell Oh No It Isn't! (1997)
I realise this is the third Who related thing I've read this month, which is a bit depressing. Having spent much of the last decade wrestling with a to be read pile the size of the Empire State, I've avoided stocking up on too many new books this year, intending instead to read all those I've had for at least a decade which I either never got around to reading, or at least read so long ago that they may as well be new books. Practically speaking, this means that when I come to the end of one thing and suddenly decide I feel like reading something in the general direction of science-fiction, ruling out anything read in the last decade leaves me with either a back issue of some digest magazine or one of four-million Who tie-ins; and yes, it is a bit depressing, because despite the magic of Who being that it can tell any kind of story, it rarely has much to say outside a few very specific kinds of story, with one of the main ones being where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal - which I state in full knowledge of having done this myself.

Anyway, so as to save the usual preamble, let's just assume this is Doc Savage or some other piece of serial fiction. It's Who, but one of the Virgin Who novels after the point at which the BBC reclaimed all of their copyrighted material, the stuff they decided might still yield a few shekels if they could just squeeze hard enough; so it's Who without Who, if you will, sort of like:

Bernice Summerfield is Emma Thompson as an archaeologist who has adventures in outer space, but generally more entertaining than that may sound depending on who was writing. At worst, her books tended towards generic Douglas Adams impersonations based on the sort of boffo larks we all had at uni, unfortunately predicated on the notion that the word bonking was still funny; but occasionally someone got it right with a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Paul Cornell always seemed like one of those authors with more to offer than just further Who, which I guess you could say has turned out to be the case. Here he does that thing where reality has gone wonky and we need to spend a couple of hundred pages working out how to get it back to normal, but it works because the premise is so deeply fucking ludicrous as to defy expectation, namely that reality has come to resemble pantomime. Professor Summerfield is granted access to an archaeological dig upon an alien planet just as a species called the Grel show up in argumentative spirit and suddenly we're in a world of glass slippers, princesses, and shoddy scenery.

'We have not escaped from a show!' exclaimed Moody. 'we work in our mine, and sell the rubies and diamonds that we find there in the village market.'

Bernice frowned. 'Is there much of a market for precious stones in a small agrarian community?'

The dwarves all looked at her blankly.

Truthfully, it all gets a bit knotted up at the end with far too many characters chasing around for reasons I couldn't quite follow, but it doesn't really matter. This sort of thing could have fallen flat on its arse, but is otherwise actually as great as one might hope, and genuinely funny without digging the reader in the ribs and smirking the whole fucking time. In this respect it reads a little like Terry Pratchett with the post-modernism turned up a notch or two, notably while self-consciously posing for the cover art.

She put her hands on her hips and inspected the room, a rueful expression on her face.

Wolsey looked around the cave to his right, leaning his weight on his right front paw, holding the gun in his other hand.

They stood like that for a moment.

Somehow, there also seems to be a point to all of this beyond the basic requirement of scrapes and chuckles, namely that this sort of thing is essentially absurd at the best of times even without the pantomime, so why the fuck not?

One might easily view Oh No It Isn't! as heir to Simak's Out of Their Minds or even Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky, at least more so than to The Underwater Menace or even Cornell's Love and War. As with the best of the line, it counts as a respectable effort in its own right.