The Eleventh Tiger

David A. McIntee The Eleventh Tiger (2004)
While I may regularly gnash teeth over written fiction which wants to be telly, I realise there's probably a line to be drawn, and as usual I'm specifically talking about Who tie-in material because I've read a ton of it and still dig one out from time to time if I'm in the right mood. To generalise, the good stuff - such as written by Simon Bucher-Jones, Lawrence Miles or Lance Parkin - tends to work as science or at least speculative fiction regardless of certain characters or concepts having been on the box when we were little. The bad stuff gives the impression of having been written by persons who really, really, really love Doctor Who but who haven't actually read anything which isn't Doctor Who. Their work is usually characterised by pages dominated by dialogue, a reliance on clichés and sentiment, and a tendency to describe events as they would appear if dramatised for telly, right down to the invocation of specific camera angles.

David A. McIntee is possibly a bit of an anomaly in so much as that his books quite clearly strive to invoke the atmosphere of what we would have seen on the box, right down to the pacing and descriptions of what may as well have been low budget visual effects; and he's clearly happy to be an author of fiction which aspires to be telly; and yet he gets it right with thoughtful if admittedly breezy prose which does what it does without giving me cause to yell oh fuck off prior to hurling the book across the room - which is actually quite unusual. He even manages knowing postmodern chuckles without coming across like he's trying too hard.

'It's been a busy day, Doctor, as I'm sure you understand. One minute those kids are just running around chaotically, but the next minute they're focused and everybody's kung-fu fighting.'

'Those kids are fast as lightning,' Barbara added.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. 'Are they indeed? And was it, perchance, dear boy, a little bit frightening? Hmm?'

The Eleventh Tiger takes place in nineteenth century China and is so determinedly true to its mileau that it recreates the somewhat plodding pace of certain Hartnell era stories, particularly the mostly historical ones. I found it a little difficult to follow presumably through not being quite so invested in Who as I was in my thirties, but on the other hand I wasn't quite bored, and it's intermittently gripping.

I bought The Eleventh Tiger when it came out, and it was one of the last to be published before it all went tits up, so far as I recall, meaning it's taken me seventeen fucking years to get around to reading the thing - which strikes me as weird - but I guess I'm glad I did, at least for the sake of closure.

Peculiar Lives

Philip Purser-Hallard Peculiar Lives (2003)
At the risk of repeating myself, I sometimes find it quite difficult to maintain warm, fuzzy thoughts about Doctor Who fandom, which is awkward because I used to quite enjoy Doctor Who and would like to be able to continue to do so on some level without inadvertently finding myself reminded of the toxic idiocy practised by about 85% of the shitehawks who will inevitably turn up to pitch in at the faintest whisper of its name. When I say Doctor Who, I really mean the novels, and mostly - although not exclusively - the novels published after the show was cancelled but predating its resuscitation as an advertising franchise in 2005. As with Who itself, there was something progressive about those books, an exploration of relatively new territory, an expansion of horizons, and I vaguely recall someone suggesting that the New Adventures were intended to bring new science-fiction authors to the fore. The New Adventures ceased in 1997, but their momentum was sufficient to spawn entire series of related novels with the serial numbers filed off: the Bernice Summerfield books, Time Hunter, and of course Faction Paradox. This seemed like a positive development to me because I was quite keen to read more by the people who had brought us Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Death of Art, and others; but it seems that I've been out of step, and the thing Who fans really want is more Doctor Who, or anything which we can pretend is Doctor Who - cosy adventures in time and space reminding us of teatime all those years ago, an endless string of quirky time-travelling eccentrics having scrapes and solving crimes and occasionally cracking a joke which we'll all recognise as a cheeky reference to something which happened in episode three of The Dalek Masterplan.

Tee hee.

Did anyone here buy the adventures of the time-travelling police station? Me neither. It was like Dixon of Dock Green from when we were kids, and the building itself jumped backwards and forwards in time, and it was populated by these really barmy characters, yeah?

I have nothing specific against pulp adventures, or cliches, or corporate entertainment, or even things which - God help us - aspire to corporate entertainment, and it doesn't all have to be Crime and Punishment - which is handy because I find Dostoyevsky unreadable; but I despair at how few of those surfing this tsunami of increasingly repetitive time travel thrills and spills aspire to anything greater, and how the few who do tend to get lost amongst the many who just want to see what would happen if something a bit like the Daleks encountered something a bit like the Ice Warriors.

Time Hunter was born from a Doctor Who novella called The Cabinet of Light, written by Daniel O'Mahony and published by Telos Books. When the BBC reeled in all of its most lucrative licences, Telos elected to continue their series of novellas with the lead transferred to that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as Honoré Lechasseur. I've read both The Cabinet of Light and now this one, and I still don't really understand what the deal is, why the title identifies him as a Time Hunter, or why I should care; but it doesn't matter because Telos always seemed to favour authors with some genuine ability to write, as opposed to simply publishing anything by anyone who liked Doctor Who a very, very lot.

Nothing if not ambitious, Philip Purser-Hallard's second novel takes on the eugenic elephant in the historical room of twentieth century science-fiction, daring - where many have preferred to mumble something about people being of their time before wandering off to see whether Neil Gaiman is still signing stuff - to draw attention to certain themes common to all those futuristic Gernsbackian supermen, and the Third Reich; and in a display of prowess bordering on the ostentatious, he writes it as a sort of sequel to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and writes it in a pitch perfect homage to Stapledon's style, and the bad guy is George Bernard Shaw in a false beard. So there's a lot which could have gone horribly wrong, particularly given the subject, and yet the narrative is all nuance, not one slogan or generalisation, and a beautifully rendered and atmospheric period piece.

Practically speaking, the story falls somewhere between Wyndham's Chrysalids and Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human and, as befits both the subject and the genre, is mostly a discussion of morality, transcendence - a theme which runs through much of the author's other works - and how these relate to evolution and the mythology of the same. For the purposes of the reader who just really, really, really, really needs someone to have an adventure in time and space just like on the telly, this kind of leaves Honoré Lechasseur without anything much to do, arguably sidelined in his own novel, but with this being due to the novel's great success at doing what it sets out to do, no-one with a brain could reasonably object.

Even now, with Purser-Hallard's Devices trilogy on shelves in actual high street book stores, he seemingly remains a best kept secret, but one day the reading public will surely catch up, and they'll go back to this one - if they can find a copy - and realise that it was obvious all along.

The Black Archive: Image of the Fendahl

Simon Bucher-Jones The Black Archive: Image of the Fendahl (2016)
I blagged a copy of this because Image of the Fendahl was great, and because Simon Bucher-Jones could publish a collection of notes left out for the milkman, and at absolute worst, it would still be worth a look.

Also, I wanted to have a look at these Black Archive books and see what it was all about. Image isn't quite so academic as reviews of the range had led me to believe, in so much as that it isn't a thesis which sets out to demonstrate the viability or otherwise of some point; but it is a very thorough dissection of not only an old TV show, but the genre which it could be said to inhabit, even though Simon doesn't actually mention what was at the top of the hit parade for the duration of those weeks. In fact, better still is that Image, as a critique, is itself an example of what made Doctor Who so great during the era under discussion, specifically that its subject serves as springboard to more expansive discussion, taking the viewer - or reader in this case - off to realms beyond self-referential reinforcement of its own mythology; so what we have is a fascinating discourse somehow incorporating evolution, the formation of the solar system, the history of our understanding of the formation of the solar system, and comparisons of gothic and post-gothic horror - subjects which would otherwise have no business hanging around with one another, yet which become beautifully entwined within this genuinely fascinating and even amusing train of thought. In other words, it makes you think innit, which is after all what Doctor Who was always supposed to do.

My view of Who might be described as somewhat cynical - although I prefer the term perceptive, personally - so it takes a lot to get past my defences, and certainly more than some idiot jumping up and down yelling Daleks!; so, possibly ironically, this one has me eyeing up my old copy of the Target Image of the Fendahl thinking maybe I'll give it a look for the first time in three decades.

Also, extra points for mentioning Robert Moore Williams.

Nameless

Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham Nameless (2016)
Just to get it out of the way before anyone writes a tittering ten-volume slipcased comparison of the parallels, yes, I suppose this might be Grant Morrison revisiting H.P. Lovecraft because he saw Alan Moore do it; and I suppose the confessional we both liked the idea of creating a 'Lovecraftian' horror story without recycling H.P. Lovecraft, might indeed be suffixed with unlike certain other writers, not mentioning no names or nuffink; but otherwise, let's all just get over it. No conspicuously bearded Machiavellian allegories to see here, and aside from anything else, this might be one of the best things Morrison has done, possibly.

Oddly, more than anything, Nameless reminds me of Johan Harsted's 172 Hours on the Moon at least in terms of locale and atmosphere, although it's otherwise much better, obviously; and while it's a different story, arguably closer to all those films in which Bruce Willis saves the earth from collision with an asteroid, Nameless ticks quite a few of the same boxes as The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham. In fact, if you don't mind that we have Titans and Outsiders rather than Great Houses and the enemy, this is the closest we've had to a Faction Paradox comic book since Image's Lawrence Miles title went tits up back in 2003.

So what's it all about, Alfie?

We have an asteroid, possibly a chip off the old destroyed fifth planet, about to hit Earth, and which can only be understood in mystical terms, hence the astronauts covered in protective sigils; and it's fucking scary, and you'll just have to read it because that's all I'm going to give away. The art comes from another one of those guys who isn't quite all of the way there with his faces, but the whole is otherwise of such elaborate beauty that you don't mind in the least, and which almost gives the book the weight of something by Jean Giraud. The narrative is more like a piece of music than any conventionally linear scrape in space with rockets and monsters, and Morrison's afterword states this as having been intentional, which is nice because it works so well, doing that Nic Roeg thing of making sense despite that it feels like it shouldn't. There's also a heaping helping of mystic horseshit, but nothing which is allowed to get in the way of the story, and it all holds together beautifully without requiring that we skip to the reference section at the end of the book.

That said, I could have lived without the details borrowed from Mayan culture, presumably by way of Carlos Castaneda given the loose way in which terms such as tonal and nagual are tossed around regardless of original meaning in the actual language from which they derive; but the book works so well that I even got over that hump. Damn that Grant Morrison. Why can't they all be this good?

The Indestructible Man

Simon Messingham The Indestructible Man (2004)
I was having a shitty day and I wanted comfort food, and then I remembered that there were still a couple of these old BBC Who novels I'd never got around to reading, and this one seemed a safe bet due to a vague memory of someone or other saying it was amongst the better efforts.

It isn't. At least I hope it isn't. It's been a while since I was obsessively buying a couple of these things every month, and while there have been a few stone cold classics which I've revisited and found to actually be humungously shit, I know there were some decent ones - Ghost Devices, The Taking of Planet 5, Christmas on a Rational Planet and so on, all of which I've revisited and found worth the effort; but - to get to the point - rose-tinted spectacles or not, I can't quite bring myself to believe that this represents anything but the lower end.

It's essentially Doctor Who vs. Captain Scarlet with Patrick Troughton dematerialising in the world once painted for us by Gerry Anderson through the magic of string puppets. To be specific, it's the world several years after the events of Gerry Anderson's UFO as retrofitted to Captain Scarlet continuity so that the saucer people from UFO were actually the Mysterons. In case it isn't obvious from the cover with Wendy Padbury's face photoshopped onto a tinsel-wigged Anderson dolly bird, there are problems with this whole concept.

Firstly, there's no real reason for Captain Scarlet fanfic to exist. It was fine as a kid's puppet show. Excepting maybe action figures, Dinky toys and annuals at Christmas, it never needed to be anything else.

Secondly, the serial numbers have been filed off for the obvious legal reasons so that, for example, SPECTRUM becomes PRISM, and Ed Straker's SHADO becomes Hal Bishop's SILOET - shadow, silhouette, and Straker was played by Ed Bishop - do you see? The problem with this is that it becomes irritating quickly, bordering on unbearable by the time we arrive at bootleg Thunderbirds continuity with Brains recast as Boffin - because apparently that name was the next best alternative - and Tracy Island as Sharon Island.

Seriously? Sharon Island? That's what you came up with?

Thirdly, with just the details described thus far, we might have been all right but for how fucking grim this world has become. Society has broken down, much like in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta - so we have death penalties, paramilitary law enforcement, slave labour, rape, murder, death, broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care. I vaguely recall an episode of Captain Scarlet where our boy is sacked from SPECTRUM and ends up pissed with a five o'clock shadow in some dive bar asking what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this just before he falls of his stool like the hopeless radgie cunt he has apparently become, all of which turns out to be a ruse designed to lull the Mysterons into a false sense of security; and while it was grim, this is considerably grittier and nastier; and children's television characters being raped whilst taking heroin was amusing up until about 1979 at the most recent; so just no.

Fourthly, none of the above would have been an insurmountable obstacle were it simply written a little better, like with a hint of something other than a book clicking its heels together and wishing it were on the box, and in doing so mistaking tension and pacing with that vague impersonation of a Lynda La Plante voiceover which people who'd much rather be writing screenplays tend to equate with hard-hitting drama; because books are just telly with no pictures innit.

At last he turned, taking in Alex Storm's pockmarked, brutal face. A face that hid a searing intelligence. Oh, and a psychotic homicidal personality.

Why does that need to be three sentences, particularly when only the first actually does what a sentence is traditionally supposed to do?

Oh, and a psychotic homicidal personality.

See, that's just an isolated description of something, and not even a very good one given that the pertinent psychosis hardly requires statement because there isn't really such a thing as a light-hearted homicidal personality; and the tale shifts point of view from page to page, so oh, and used as though we're party to actual thoughts is simply annoying and reads like an author trying too hard; or who just doesn't read much.

The air was sweet with decay.

Dude, learn to fucking write.

The thing with TV tie-in fiction, or indeed anything using material established in another medium, is that at least some of the labour is already done for the author, allowing them to invoke a familiar character rather than endure all the usual donkey work of writing a book - usually amounting to having Patrick Troughton exclaim oh my giddy aunt every few pages in this case, although admittedly The Indestructible Man seems more or less untroubled by that particular cliché. Unfortunately this also leads to authors not bothering to do the rest of the work they might normally be required to do when writing a novel, instead just pinning a series of name tags to some half-assed plot and trusting that it'll be screened as an episode of a television show in our respective mind's eyes, but probably with better effects. This is why I would say it's actually harder to write this kind of thing well than it is to generate original material, because hands up who remembers Stingray? does not in itself constitute world-building any more than Peter Kay asking the same question constitutes comedy.

Fuck it, why not...

Fifthly, it turns out that the surviving Tracy brother - or rather the surviving Sharon brother tee-hee - very much enjoys the music of Scott Walker, which is probably harmless, but nevertheless seems to relate to one of those aspects I always loathed about written Who fiction, namely the bit where the author gives us a nod to his fave bands, which is almost always either the Cure or the Smiths, and just reads like okay, I know I can't write but I'm doing my best, and I'm aware that I haven't quite got these plot details to add up to an even number, but hey! Who likes Love Cats? What a classic!

I get the feeling I'm expected to submit an imaginary high-five. This guy digs the Cure! Wow! How cool is that!? It never works for me. If anything, it has the opposite of the presumably desired effect because apparently I hate the music beloved of most Who authors - particularly the Cure and the Smiths - so from my perspective it's like having someone you don't know digging you in the ribs as prelude to an uncomfortable conversation falsely predicated on a shared love of Jonathan King and Skrewdriver.

Of course, none of the above will have mattered to a section of the readership, because the narrative, what it does, or how well it does it are subsidiary to the cast of characters, the boxes ticked, the continuity slot it occupies between The Space Pirates and The Menagerie, or the fact of it carrying a particular logo on the cover. For some, the quality of the story will be its least crucial aspect, which is I suppose how so much of this stuff has managed to get itself published over the years.

Yet, in spite of all of the above, The Indestructible Man isn't terrible, although I realise that you'll have to squint one fuck of a lot to read that as praise. It's an annoying book and I didst groan and wail and gnash my teeth with some frequency, but mostly it manages to keep from becoming boring, despite everything. I think the tragedy - if that isn't an overstatement considering that none of this really matters - is that there was probably a half-decent novel in here. It's hard to care about the characters, so oddly, their shoddy construction doesn't really get in the way so much as it might, and the narrative just about holds together as an averagely intriguing mystery while we try to work out just what the hell the Myloki formerly known as Mysterons actually are, knowing full well the answer will probably be a massive disappointment.

So there you go. The Indestructible Man was better than I suppose I expected in so much as that it hints at the potential to have been readable; but could have been worse is hardly a recommendation.

Crome Yellow

Aldous Huxley Crome Yellow (1921)
Huxley's first novel was mentioned in passing by Simon Bucher-Jones during one of those sprawling email conversations shared between a number of subscribers, and then a week later I find a copy in a used book store in Boerne, which might not quite qualify as synchronicity but is probably the next best thing. Naturally I bought it, and have found that it slots pleasantly into a number of my current favourite openings, if you'll excuse the biological image.

Crome Yellow was written partially in response to Huxley's stay at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, then an informal community of artists, writers, and the like. Roughly speaking, it examines the cultural macrocosm of its day through the minutiae of the daily lives and preoccupations of a small group of vaguely creative types, which is to say either that it's a satire, or that Huxley was taking the piss, if you prefer. As such, it manages to be very, very funny without cracking any actual jokes, and through demonstrating sympathy for its subjects as opposed to just pointing at them and laughing, which probably isn't too surprising given that the Denis Stone character is most likely an autobiographical mapping of Huxley's own fears about his career as a writer. He'd suffered with keratitis as a teenager, a condition which eventually cleared up but rendered him near sightless for a couple of years, so, combined with the occurrence of the first world war, it's probably understandable that his writing should carry a certain pensive undertone - doubts expressed at the worth of his own work, and even the value of artistic endeavour as an end in itself.

'Of course,' Mr. Scogan groaned. 'I'll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives amongst artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.'

Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. 'You're entirely wrong,' he said. 'My novel is not in the least like that.' It was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written. He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.

Having veered uncomfortably close to commenting upon itself in the above passage, Crome Yellow settles into a series of Platonic dialogues examining society, its future, and how ideas of the same are reflected in the arts. In this examination it becomes quite clear how this novel relates to Huxley's later Brave New World in theme if not tone, and of course there are the obvious precursors to that particular line of thought:

Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, swan of Lichfield, experimented—and, for all their scientific ardour, failed—our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations.

Also:

All philosophies and all religions—what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognisably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and [Cubism] every time; give me ideas, so snug and neat and simple and well made. And preserve me from nature, preserve me from all that's inhumanly large and complicated and obscure.

It should probably be noted in the event of my having given misleading emphasis, that this is foremost a comic novel - comic as in examination through mockery, yet without quite letting the whole slip over into farce. One of the funniest protracted digressions here is the account of family history given by Henry Wimbush, the story of the dwarf Sir Hercules who marries a woman of similarly diminutive stature and runs the family estate along lines of consistent scale, replacing horses with Shetland ponies and hunting dogs with pugs; and even during this descent into a sort of foreshadowed Peter Cook or Hancock's Half Hour, Huxley plays it absolutely straight.

Crome Yellow still sparkles with wit nearly a hundred years later, and is one of those books which really everyone should read, especially Morrissey.

The Locksley Exploit

Philip Purser-Hallard The Locksley Exploit (2015)
Philip Purser-Hallard is the best kept secret in British genre writing, runs a claim from the British Fantasy Society on the cover, further qualified by a quote from Andrew Hickey identifying the lad as one of the two or three best science-fiction and fantasy writers in the world today. Regardless of Andrew being a possibly less than impartial source on the grounds that he sort of knows the author, I would say he makes a fair assessment; although it should be kept in mind that my own word probably isn't worth tuppence either, as I sort of know both of them, at least as internet presences and people with whom I have had occasion to work in a creative capacity.

Anyway, yes much as I love yer Charles Stross and yer Neal Stephenson and all those other more financially conspicuous chaps, not a one of them has written anything which I would rate quite so highly as certain works by Philip Purser-Hallard or - seeing as we're here - Simon Bucher-Jones, in the event of anyone being interested; and here's more reason as to why.

The Locksley Exploit is the second part of the Devices trilogy and sequel to The Pendragon Protocol which came out last year. The Devices trilogy seems a fairly simple idea on the surface of it, but the more the narrative progresses, the more it becomes apparent just how much work has gone into this thing - as characterised by the fact of it all unfolding at an entirely natural and seemingly effortless pace - the mark of a true master of his art, namely that he makes it look easy. The story takes place in a very familiar contemporary England policed from way behind the scenes by the Round Table, the Knights of Arthurian legend expressed in the words and deeds of their modern day hosts. Except the whole premise is much closer to a believable, modern and even realist narrative than its constituent parts might suggest. This isn't about possession, reincarnation, or the contemporary puppets of mysterious, ancient forces so much as it is about contemporary western society and the schism by which it appears to be slowly destroying itself. Even the major players in The Locksley Exploit appear to understand exactly what is going on here.

'The myth of the Round Table has shaped so many of the ways we think about being British,' he says. 'The awe we hold our monarch in, as if she'd been appointed by God himself. The way we defer to the royal family, the bishops, the lords, even so-called captains of industry, as if they were the heroic figures Arthur surrounded himself with. The way we as a nation trust to authority, prefer not to stick our necks out, refuse to rock the boat. Even our national anthem isn't about the p-people, but about the person reigning over us. And that makes a kind of sense if your King was once a paragon among men, and might be again one day. But the Circle aren't paragons. Men is all they are.'

The schism is represented by conflicting legends, the Arthurian in contrast with the more egalitarian avatars of Robin Hood and his pals. The Locksley Exploit draws upon a formidable body of mythology in providing support for its peculiarly familiar world, English myth going way back, the kind which once scared the life out of me as a child, seeming to be all scowling wooden faces and rural witch trials. As such the novel reads almost like a textbook in places; which works well, I hasten to add, and makes for a satisfying and stimulating read. What this all adds up to is a reflection of a society pulling itself apart through the conflicting tides of its own disunity, and a disunity wrought largely by abstract ideas, much as the Devices are themselves abstractions.

We - the Circle and the Chapel and the British Beasts; the Gormund Boys and Sons of Gore and Paladins and Frontiersmen; all our equivalents in every culture and all our predecessors back through the millennia, since, perhaps, the dawn of human consciousness - are suffering, he'd say, from a massive and pandemic mental illness. We've convinced first ourselves and one another, then our children and descendants, and now at last our entire civilisation, that the voices we hear in our heads are those of the heroes of old, when in fact they're just that; voices in our heads.

It's interesting that such words should be written by an author of - unless I'm getting my wires crossed here, and apologies if this is so - formerly Christian faith. For some it may read as a variation on Dawkins' somewhat overstated calls for reason, or specifically that which he and his followers define as reason - eschewing all which might be deemed a byproduct of the imagination. Without getting into an entire side issue, the main problem with most versions of the Dawkins argument is the presupposing of there being a single answer for each question, and a single answer working equally well for all people under all possible circumstances: either you agree with me or you're wrong. Whilst this sort of reasoning keeps everything nice and simple, particularly for those seeking some flag under which to march, it isn't very helpful in achieving any sort of understanding of human society as a whole, because that understanding will almost inevitably be a variation on fuck 'em because they're too stupid to live, which is neither helpful nor interesting.

So, to finally swing around in the general direction of the point, it seems significant that a writer with a fairly profound understanding of the mechanism of faith should produce a novel conveying such an astute understanding of where we've been going wrong all this time; and considering where we appear to be heading, we really do need astute understandings, as opposed to people who think pissing off Muslims in the name of free speech represents some sort of blow struck in the name of their beloved reason.

So in answer to a question I didn't actually ask, namely what The Locksley Exploit is about, it's sort of about everything.

Getting back down to earth, or at least to the level of me sat in bed reading this thing for most of the last week, my only criticism would be that I found myself beginning to lose track of certain characters amongst the cast of thousands, who they were, and what had happened to them in The Pendragon Protocol. However, I've a feeling this may just have been me, and it didn't really impinge upon my general enjoyment. The first person present tense narrative of Alan a'Dale, dipping occasionally into archaeological, mythological, or psychogeographical asides, remains lively and engaging for the duration, never really descending into anything you could describe as routine or workmanlike; and it works so well as to carry the reader along regardless of the occasional lost strand, confident of it all making sense and adding up at the end, as indeed it does. The Locksley Exploit seems maybe not so startling as was The Pendragon Protocol, but it maintains the standard, and I'll be sure to re-read both before tackling the final part of the Devices trilogy, because I'm fairly sure that it will be worth the effort on the strength of the first two.

Le Roi en Jaune

Thomas de Castigne (translated by Simon Bucher-Jones)
Le Roi en Jaune (1893)
Once again I find myself somewhat in the position of Homer Simpson required to present a dissertation on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment which, it should be noted, probably wouldn't be significantly more ham-fisted than my own fumbling analysis of Crime and Punishment some months ago.

Le Roi en Jaune or The King in Yellow is a lost play, one which has been alluded to in the works of a number of writers, principally Robert W. Chambers, an author of weird or supernatural fiction with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. It's a lost play through the stigma of having become a forbidden play, one which has the reputation of driving its audience to utter despair or even madness, a promise which rarely ever seems to have much success at getting bums on seats in box office terms. That said, it should probably be remembered that whilst H.P. Lovecraft chalked up a fair old word count in discussion of that which must not be named, he dedicated at least some of that text to quite specifically naming that which must not be named, presumably so as to avoid confusion leading to anyone naming that which must not be named by accident through not knowing its name on account of it being that which must not be named. Jocularity aside, Lovecraft is of some minor relevance here given that he winks at Le Roi en Jaune in a couple of his own stories, it being the source from which Hastur is derived, later reinvented as an unspeakable elder God by Lovecraft and then Derleth to varying degrees.

Another more familiar name would be that of the servant Ubu, popularised by Alfred Jarry and remembered as having been the Sex Pistols of his day in terms of faintly scatological wit in the tradition of Rabelais, some sexual swearwords, having the plugs figuratively pulled halfway through the performance, and the play's brief spark of admittedly lurid genius becoming a formative influence on all which followed - meaning here Futurism, Dadaism and much twentieth century art rather than Sham 69 and the Exploited. The name Ubu is popularly believed to have derived from Henri Morin, Jarry's school classmate who had written a satire called Les Polonais in which Monsieur Hébert, his unfortunate physics teacher, was lampooned as Père Ebé; but Ubu is identified here as a diminutive of ubiquité or ubiquity, a representative of the common man:

I am a man. And as such are found,
Everywhere alike, I needs must be common.

These words are met by the Y'htill character asking Ubu if he has not perhaps been known as Falstaff under other circumstances; and it is possibly significant that Jarry's Ubu - essentially closer in spirit to Shakespeare's comically boorish knight - first appears in print in 1893 within fragments of an early version of Ubu Cocu reproduced in a literary review - not to horrify theatre goers for another three years, by which point his credentials as a modern Falstaff seemed more firmly established.

Anyway, the significant detail here is not so much the possible influence on Jarry as the play being aware of its being a play - as suggested by the reference to a character from another play - and of characters achieving an insight into the future given that the events of Le Roi en Jaune are purported to occur in ancient times, at least prior to the Biblical flood.

The narrative describes the coming of seven Princes of which one will be wed to the Princess Cassilda, just as soon as she's made up her mind which of their number is the least disappointing. Unfortunately everything goes tits up, the Princes all perish before the meeting can transpire, and reality itself seems to break down. Cassilda becomes her mother, the Queen, and the Queen is now to be wed to one of the Princes, and time appears to flow in reverse, not only as mother becomes daughter but as the child Thomas is directed to walk backwards across the stage, all seemingly returning to the notional point of Original Sin so that it may be undone - although there's a fair chance I'm getting my wires crossed here, Cassilda's line reputedly having descended from Abell and Aclima, the line which in Hebrew legend endures without the stigma of the murdering Cain. In addition to this, certain characters appear to revive from the dead, or else are experienced prior to death in scenes occurring later. The nature of the play was further exposed by the final scenes of the second act being staged in differing orders on different performances, regardless of the inevitable contradictions and loss of narrative cohesion. It sounds like a nightmare in production terms, but peculiarly I can see that it may have worked at least in so much as the written form isn't significantly weirder than, for example, the plays of Tristan Tzara which it doubtless inspired.

The confusion of the non-linear narrative not only emphasises the artificial nature of the performance, but also the artificial nature of the reality it describes, not least once the suggestion is made that the direction in which time flows doesn't seem to matter that much. One might take as a similar example Lovecraft's fabled Necronomicon, a book with no existence outside the lad's fiction, and the fiction he ultimately inspired, and yet which has come to take on such a profoundly convincing life of its own that the detail of its origin and historical legitimacy has been reduced to a vestigial irrelevance. So too is Le Roi en Jaune a play which generates its own existence in so much as it seems to reverse the traditional primacy of words and that which they describe, relegating reality to a creation of its own description; so no wonder it freaked everyone out back in 1893.

This is a slightly bewildering work, although partially because I'm somewhat out of my depth with this kind of thing, but it greatly rewards all effort put in. I've now read the thing twice, and it becomes more and more engrossingly peculiar each time. Simon Bucher-Jones has done a tremendous job of translation and annotation, and in case anyone cares, I can see how this may have fed into The Brakespeare Voyage, even to the point that it seems to be where Captain No-one came from.

Buy it here.

Galaxy Four

William Emms Galaxy Four (1985)
Having discovered that roughly two years worth of grumbling indigestion has turned out to be a condition know as diverticulitis, I find myself bedridden, limited to a clear liquid diet of chicken broth, apple juice, and not much else, and smashed out of my box on such dosages of codeine as to render me ill-equipped to cope with Simon Bucher-Jones' translation and reconstruction of Thomas de Castigne's The King in Yellow. I have an Enid Blyton book on my to-be-read heap, which is about the right level but I'm just not in the mood for it. Then I recalled someone - quite possibly Nick Campbell - mentioning this on facebook, and the pleasant memories were accordingly stirred.

Galaxy Four for those lucky souls who didn't already have a ton of this crap rattling around inside their heads, was a four-part Doctor Who serial starring William Hartnell, one that has particular resonance for me, quite aside from the fact that I was born on the day before they broadcast the second episode. I was ten in 1976 when I discovered the existence of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society; and immediately joined up, receiving membership in return for my postal order along with the July issue of TARDIS, a fanzine which seemed to have been run off on a duplicator and as such belonged to an age when it actually required elbow grease to produce a fanzine. The thing which really struck me about TARDIS issue eight, aside from it signifying the existence of others who shared my interest, and others of such obsessive devotion as to yield essays about Sontaran biology, were the poor quality stills from Galaxy Four reproduced on the back cover, images of Chumblies and Drahvins which made me appreciate how the 1973 Doctor Who Radio Times Special - which I had come to regard as being at least as important as the Bible - revealed but a tiny portion of a much larger picture. So in my thoughts Galaxy Four became foremost representative of the mysterious black and white prehistory of Doctor Who, that which I had been too young to watch as it was broadcast. Years later someone lent me a privately made video reconstruction of Galaxy Four - still photographs accompanying the soundtrack because the BBC had set fire to the original tapes - and whilst it was ponderously slow and low on incident, it didn't disappoint me in any respect, which I suppose means I'm hardcore by some definition.

Anyway, if anything has been written on the literary influences of Doctor Who - and I'm sure it must have been somewhere - then I've not seen it, and I suspect that during those formative years, back when the show was watchable, there may have been at least some influence from the supposed pulp science-fiction writers of the forties and fifties - at least providing we acknowledge there having been an age when television referenced sources other than itself. Galaxy Four utilises what has become a fairly standard trope inverting the traditional association of beauty with virtue - the repulsive aliens are benign whilst the conventionally beautiful Drahvins are complete cunts. With this in mind I find myself thinking of Murray Leinster, but truthfully you would probably have a tough time finding a science-fiction writer who hadn't used this particular twist at one point or another; and if you squint, the Rill could almost be distant cousins to the multiple limbed reptiles of A.E. van Vogt's The War Against the Rull. Additionally, Galaxy Four makes use of the ruthless, militaristic culture based on logical principles, of which there seems to have been some fear during the fifties and sixties, I suppose either in the wake of the second world war or in response to Stalin's version of Communism. Here we have the lettuce-scoffing matriarchal Drahvins, although I assume their gender is no more significant here than their vegetarianism, it being a last minute change made to Emms' original script, presumably made in the name of giving either dad or Aunt Susan something to look at.

By the way, if anyone has any particular interest in this line of enquiry, you really need to take a look at Simak's Time and Again and They Walked Like Men in which the development of the Jon Pertwee version of the character and those first two Auton stories are foreshadowed to the point of absurdity.

Anyway, William Emms' novel seems to have been based partially on his own script, partially on how his script was developed for television, and to a lesser extent the broader mythology of the show which came a little later. It's a children's book, just as it's a children's show, frequently reclassified as being intended for all ages so that a few kidults don't have to feel self-conscious. This isn't necessarily to denigrate anything or anyone, but sometimes a children's programme is simply a children's programme, and it can seem almost insulting to have to elevate it - to Uncle Tom it - as is so often done with Doctor Who, logically implying that anything aimed exclusively at children must be necessarily dumb and poorly conceived. Although I can't recall whether such references occurred in the televised version, the Galaxy Four novel mentions both Plato and Bertrand Russell in passing, with some level of discussion; and not because this is Spiderman quoting Schopenhauer as he beats up the Green Goblin, but through its being produced during an age when it was assumed that children could cope with intelligent dialogue, and that they were learning at least something at school, and it was okay to expect people to keep up rather than talk down to them or sweeten the pill with sentiment or novelty beyond the story already involving aliens and an extrasolar planet. Galaxy Four may be slow and obvious by contemporary television standards, but there's no pandering, plenty of charm, and even wit:

'There's nothing to do now but wait.'

'I wish there were,' Steven said. 'This sort of situation makes me restless.'

'Stand still and think of your mother,' Vicki suggested.

Steven gave her a withering smile. 'What a great idea. Did anyone ever tell you you have a marvellous sense of humour?'

'Several people,' she answered brightly.

'They lied.'

I'm loathe to invoke the contemporary reverse-bowdlerisation of this show, but compare the above with today's wearisome jokes about blow jobs and girl-on-girl action.

Doctor Who has never been as good - or as always brilliant if you really must - as its most violently stupid advocates claim, not even with its own history as the only context within which such claims are usually made, but it once did absolutely everything claimed for it on the tin, and it had a hell of a lot of charm. Not only has Galaxy Four been a pleasant reminder of this fact, but it got me through a pretty rough day,  although the pair of dinner ladies painted on the cover bring me no closer to discovering the mystery of the appeal of Andrew Skilleter.

Burning with Optimism's Flame

Jay Eales (editor) Burning with Optimism's Flame (2012)
Despite my salivating each time some new Faction Paradox commodity extends itself into noumenal reality, it's taken me an age to get around to this one, and partially because it first appeared as I was up to my eyeballs in writing Against Nature. Initially I was cautious on the grounds of fearing there might be some short story coincidentally duplicating one or more of my own vague ideas or themes, and so I wished to avoid the collection as a source of possible influence - not least due to having heard that Daniel Ribot's La Santa Muerte was not only set in Mexico but would also feature a certain Death Goddess who briefly turns up in my own extended leaflet. Since then it's just been a case of it slowly rising to the summit of a mountainous to-be-read pile.

I had been primed with slightly lowered expectations by internet mumblings along the lines of it's not as good as the last one, is it? - referring of course to 2011's A Romance in Twelve Parts, the previous Faction Paradox collection. Thankfully and possibly inevitably said mumblings translate to it's not identical to the last one, is it?, for the tone and focus of this anthology is somehow quite different. It feels more like an extension into mainstream science-fiction writing, by which I mean Isaac Asimov and all of those guys, as opposed to Babylon fucking 5 or any of those Doctor Who affiliated Short Trips collections but with more skulls. Jay Eales, it turns out, really knows how to pull an anthology together, as distinct from just asking a load of mates to come up with stories. I'm still not entirely sure how the title figures in all of this, whether it refers to some overarching theme I've failed to spot, but whatever the book does, it does it exceptionally well for the most part.

As has probably been said by someone or other, the beauty of Faction Paradox is that it really doesn't have to be about Faction Paradox to the point that no-one has yet really demonstrated that it's definitively about either the shared universe created by Lawrence Miles and others, or even just something so vague as a certain aesthetic. Some of the connections made here are accordingly very tenuous indeed, but it doesn't really matter because the only legitimate reason to pick up a book so far as I'm concerned is in anticipation of good writing, which is what you get.

Admittedly I found the opening stories a little variable - either too subtle for their own good or a little closer in spirit to Neil Gaiman than I generally like in one case, although they're all decent in their own ways. Nevertheless, the contrast - at least for me - when I came to Kelly Hale's contribution was almost shocking - a woman apparently incapable of writing a dull sentence whose work exudes the sort of effortless class that draws the reader in without the need for any obvious narrative hooks; and this quality recurs throughout the collection making the necessity of clear ties to some unifying mythology entirely peripheral.

Stephen Marley's All the Fun of the Fear, for one example, seems particularly tenuous as Faction Paradox literature, but if you can't appreciate a story in which the moon is seen to appear in the heavens wearing a hat, then maybe books aren't for you after all. Similarly sickeningly impressive are contributions from Simon Bucher-Jones, Jonathan Dennis, Sarah Hadley, and Philip Purser-Hallard all of which inspire questions as to why these four aren't yet at the stage of finding themselves buried in gold by eager publishers in the style of Edifis at the end of Asterix and Cleopatra.

They each respectively pack enough ideas for a decent novel into short form; and to concede a couple of specifics, Remake / Remodel begs the question of whether we might ever expect a full-length Faction Hollywood book, and Philip Purser-Hallard's wonderful ecclesiastically themed De Umbris Idearum only makes me resent the time and brain cells I wasted on Mary Doria Russell's Godawful Sparrow, all the more demonstrating as it does that strong religious themes can make for elegant science-fiction in the right hands.

I seem to have ended up gushing again, which can probably be safely dismissed as symptomatic of a lack of impartiality on my part. This book hasn't actually changed my life, and may not be the greatest collection I've ever read; but nevertheless it takes its subject mythology in a variety of unexpected directions, and does so with consistent style, and is as such difficult to fault; even though I didn't get to do the cover. Mutter. Mumble.

Nemo: Heart of Ice

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill Nemo: Heart of Ice (2013)

On the positive side, this is a lovely thing to find within one's symbolic Christmas stocking - as I did - it being roughly the shape and size of the sort of book Santa would bring me in the days of my youth as a younger man back when everything was better than it is now - hardback, colourful cartoons, and the sort of endpapers I would stare at for what I recall as having been hours, but which were probably minutes at most; and much like the Hector's House annual and that Woody Woodpecker book bought for me by my grandmother, it seems kind of thin at just fifty-six pages, according to Amazon.

Of course, having sprung forth from the loins of Alan Moore it's all very readable and entertaining, and O'Neill's artwork is, as always, wonderful; but, having no clue as to the identity of the supporting characters revived this time - excepting himself from Citizen Kane, obviously - and it being pretty much a rewrite of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, it's difficult to find much to say about Heart of Ice except that it was enjoyable enough. I suppose to be picky I probably could have lived without yet another Lovecraft homage, because frankly it's getting so that one can hardly make it half way through any given book without it all turning out to be the work of the great old ones, yet again. Lord knows I loves me some of that H.P. sauce, but enough is surely enough. Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham did this much better in The Taking of Planet 5; as also did Grant Morrison in Zenith, and Lovecraft himself in At the Mountains of Madness, amongst others.

As I say, it was enjoyable enough but somehow a bit thin, both literally and figuratively.

The Brakespeare Voyage

It has occurred to me that there are people who may object to the following on the basis of its revealing certain details of a book they may not have read, or spoilers as is the generally accepted but nevertheless irritating term. Whilst I can appreciate that if one is a fan of detective fiction, a review praising and detailing the ingenuity of the means by which the butler did it might diminish one's reading pleasure, but there are limits - one of which was crossed when I recently found myself berated for revealing a specific plot detail of a television show first broadcast fifteen years ago. Seeing as I write these reviews principally for my own pleasure, as a means by which I compel myself to attend greater scrutiny upon a particular story than I might ordinarily have done, I feel no strong obligation to protect the fragile enjoyment valves of those whose reading pleasure is based principally on plot twists and revelations, who might be better served by a fucking jigsaw puzzle than a novel or comic book. So just to be absolutely clear, if you can't stand the thought of discovering something about a particular piece of fiction prior to actually reading it, please don't bother with my reviews.

Whilst we're here, I suppose I should also admit to a possible degree of bias on my part in respect to the following in that I wrote Against Nature, the previous Faction Paradox novel published by Obverse Books, and I painted the cover of this one, and will probably be painting the cover of the next one.

Jonathan Dennis & Simon Bucher-Jones The Brakespeare Voyage (2013)
I've been waiting for this a long time, at least since Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox ball and a seemingly wistful Simon Bucher-Jones posted the proposal and outline for a then abandoned novel called Nebaioth on his blog. Nebaioth sounded phenomenal - an author renowned for massive, wonderfully bizarre ideas extrapolated from the weirder realms of nosebleed physics really turning the volume up to eleven and letting it all hang out, if that isn't too gruesome a simile. Years later, I experienced a minor resurgence of squee upon discovering what all the banging noises coming from the cell next to mine had been, and then a fairly serious nerdgasm when our beloved Faction Paradox hitched its wagon to one of those publishers which likes to put out a book every once in a while just to see what happens mutter mumble don't get me started...

The Brakespeare of the title is a ship the size of a small universe, its decks, bridge, and rigging made up of stars, planets, and entire cultures. Its mission is the retrieval of an earlier ship from the outer darkness beyond our own spacetime, and ultimately a quest for the sort of extracosmic biodata which can only be found out there beyond the brane universes described by some of the stranger theories of contemporary physics, biodata which it is hoped will yield an advantage in the War of the Faction Paradox mythos.

You can pretend it's the Doctor Who Telly Zoo time war if you like, and whilst you're there you might also like to pretend that Busted were the Sex Pistols.

Simon Bucher-Jones - assuming The Brakespeare Voyage to have been his baby in its formative stage - is a master of this sort of fiction, specifically the novel which can be only a novel because it wouldn't work in any other medium, and does one hell of a lot more than simply describe a sequence of visual images. I'm less familiar with the writing of Jonathan Dennis, although what little I've read has been of a quality to suggest this collaboration being effected on very much equal terms; and the end result forms a beautifully woven whole with no suggestion of variant voices bolted together.

Nebaioth himself turns out to be a central figure, significantly named after the Biblical son of Ishmael who in turn gave a name to the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Further specific parallels are not overly pronounced beyond, I suppose, Captain Robert Scarratt's obsession representing a more measured version of that which drove Captain Ahab onwards, and Leviathan entities beyond the edge of our universe roughly equating to whales, although there's a reasonable chance I may not actually know what I'm talking about here. A more general comparison can be found in the strongly nautical thrust of the entire narrative which proves so dominant as to surely warrant The Brakespeare Voyage being termed nautical science-fiction despite the cosmic setting. Given the predominance of high-seas imagery coupled with a certain seventeenth century flavour, this novel puts me strongly in mind of the ur-science-fiction of Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe and others - voyages made beyond the limits of the world as was known at the time, and the investigation of terra incognita discussed as an imaginative rather than purely scientific endeavour. I'm inclined to suspect this may be significant given the purpose of the mission driving both the Brakespeare and its predecessor, ultimately the introduction of new data to a closed system, in this case our universe. This presents a broader restatement of a central theme of the War, as mapped out in The Book of the War and others, namely the forces of the inverted in conflict with those of the imaginative.

If that possibly verbose summary casts The Brakespeare Voyage as one of those novels about which people on bulletin boards make observations along the lines of I couldn't get my head around it, what with all the words and stuff before dashing off elsewhere to praise the stratospheric brilliance of a slightly Shakespearey episode of Charmed, then it probably shouldn't. Even the most ludicrous concepts found here are beautifully communicated with the atmosphere and sobriety of Ursula LeGuin at her finest, and whilst the narrative is sometimes information dense, it flows like a good wine. I occasionally had difficulty recalling quite who was working for what, but not so much as to present problems, and I've a feeling certain allegiances may have been purposefully ambiguous in a few cases.

In all honesty I haven't read anything this good in a long, long time, and nor have I read anything quite like it. It really has been worth the wait.

Purchase your copy here, then purchase additional copies for all of your friends, and just keep buying until it outsells Alastair Reynolds and accrues the recognition it most certainly deserves.

Ghost Devices

Simon Bucher-Jones Ghost Devices (1997)
It's been some time since I read Ghost Devices, but it left an impression of being something which would reward the occasional return visit, and happily this has very much turned out to be the case. This particular re-read may have been brought to you through subconscious anticipation of The Brakespeare Voyage by Simon Bucher-Jones and Jonathan Dennis, soon to be published and over which I've been salivating at least since I first read the proposal as it briefly appeared online back in 2006 or thereabouts; the first sitting, way back whenever, was as I recall inspired by The Brakespeare Voyage - or Nebaioth as it was then known - seemingly vanishing into limbo when Mad Norwegian Press dropping the Faction Paradox imprint. I'd never really warmed to Virgin's Bernice Summerfield, a wisecracking archaeologist sprung from their New Adventures line of Doctor Who novels, but Nebaioth wasn't happening, so Ghost Devices was probably picked up as the literary equivalent of a consolation shag, if you'll pardon the simile.

Bernice Summerfield always struck me as a supermarket's own brand Douglas Adams knock off - twee references to bonking, recycled Black Adder gags, and the mistaken assumption that any surreal juxtaposition of concepts is inherently hilarious when described in the language of a politely bewildered 1930s clergyman. Excuse me, old bean - I couldn't help but notice that you appear to have landed your interstellar battlecruiser on top of Mrs. Bixby's tombola...

Oh just fuck off.

Of course, established characters are only ever as interesting as their authors are able to write them, and Simon Bucher-Jones is exceptional in this respect, in that he could turn out an Insane Clown Posse tie-in novel and still leave readers struggling to recall the last time they read anything so thoroughly convincing; and he kicks off in particularly fine form here with a passage that I would suggest rates easily amongst the all-time great opening lines, as striking as anything Lovecraft ever said about how it's good to have a small brain because that way it's much harder to think about space monsters:

In the evenings when the star Sadr was the colour of burnt umber, the Factories crawled down the continental shelf to drink. Hoses with diameters measurable in kilometres rose and fell into fluorescent waters. Bodies of water the volume of the Great Lakes were sieved for deutronium and rare earths.

Drones hissed steam from their fierce metallic grilles and banged a few detaching metal plates back on to the decrepit moorings of their various home Factories, but the servicing was increasingly slipshod and careless.

Around the shoreline, a semicircle of towering machinery grumbled in hushed voices. The younger Factories hooted to each other mainly in brief ultrasonic bursts - high frequency stutterings of supply and demand, the interchange of mission statements and the gossip of office machinery.

Furthermore, the novel maintains the same standard in the pages that follow - breathtaking, surreal, poetic, and genuinely comic in all the right places. There's an element of Douglas Adams, mind-bending scientific whimsy mixed with moments of utter absurdity, but the blend is smoother, less laboured, and is built on firmer narrative ground. Massive ideas come thick and fast, all knitted seamlessly into the story without a hint of showboating or the suggestion of plastered over cracks. It takes real art to combine such elements as these, skipping from genuine tension to the truly ludicrous without missing a beat or conspicuously swapping hats. In this respect, I particularly enjoyed the Ninjucoids, once deadly robotic assassins whose errant programming has left a yawning gap between the perception of their own aspirationally violent deeds and what actually happens:

'Excellent.' The Ninjucoid reabsorbed its flaying knives and its acid-sprayers. It was quite surprised that the human was still alive, let alone giggling like that. The base-line data stored in its systems on humanoid vulnerability to painful stimuli were clearly out of whack. Still, it could rely on its instructions: find the Vo'lach traders responsible for the sale of the useless weapons and make an example of them. A big radioactive spreading example.

Sanok Vawn watched it go, its sinister walking gait spoilt by the still visible juggling dumbbells that were flowing back into its skin. He took a deep breath, and tried to stop his hyperventilation.

When the rebels broke down the door of the storeroom an hour later after their unopposed attack on the Citadel, and found him with perfect nails, surrounded by exquisite and dainty salad, even the hardest-hearted of the revolutionaries realised that he had suffered enough.

Ghost Devices is at least equal to anything I've read by better publicised names like Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Ian M. Banks, and Stephen Baxter whilst inhabiting similar territory. The nosebleed physics and grand scale of adventure are all there and entirely convincing, with the only obvious differences being sales figures and a more developed sense of humour.

I was not particularly well-read when I first picked up Ghost Devices, but I've made serious efforts since, and this still stands out as a landmark novel for me; at least as one of very few titles that made me want to write my own science-fiction. Never mind more widely read, this guy should be winning Hugo awards.

Grimm Reality

Simon Bucher-Jones & Kelly Hale Grimm Reality (2001)
In the event of either of my readers being somehow unaware of the fact, in between getting itself cancelled for trying too hard in 1989, and subsequent rebirth as a series of flashing lights in 2005, The Doctor Who Telly Show spent its wilderness years as a series of novels. Some were utter shite - yer basic button-pushing continuity landfill - and some were pretty good.

Grimm Reality belongs to the latter category, and succeeds for two reasons: firstly its having been written as a novel rather than as something to be purchased because there's a picture of the TARDIS on the cover; secondly its having been written by authors who can  form sentences without falling over or giving themselves a headache. As a recovering addict, someone who once splashed out on a couple of these things every month for about a decade, I really cannot overemphasise how greatly I appreciate authors and publishers making a bit of an effort. Too many of these books relied upon the tenuous novelty of what would happen if Cybermen teamed up with Ice Warriors to invade a Dalek nudist colony, the sort of stories in which people say things grinningly, which feature sentences like his voice went up and down, and which assume the reader to be a gurgling moron with a reading age of about nine. Pardon the acerbic tone, but I still don't understand why a few more of those Doctor Who books couldn't have been a bit more like this, given that all it would have taken is for editors to refrain from commissioning novels by people who can't actually fucking write.

Axe duly ground, Grimm Reality deposits the TARDIS crew in a world of fairy tale populated by gnomes, giants, sleeping princesses and the like, hence the industrial strength pun of the title. Happily, not only is this the more visceral pre-Disney strain of Brothers Grimm narrative, but the traditional cock-obvious plot twists are neatly anticipated and avoided:

He wanted to believe, but he had a lot of experience to put aside: in the last hundred years, nine times out of ten the banshee had been a thing from Antares 5, the foo fighters bemused alien jellyfish, and the ghost usually a teenager in a sheet. Even when he hadn't got a full explanation for things, he'd always felt there ought to be one.

In a way he'd be pleased to find indivisible Giants.

He wanted Giants that couldn't be reduced to men on stilts, or aliens from a low-gravity world in cyber-braces. He wanted Giants that rumbled the world with their ultimate bone-shaking largeness, Giants that couldn't be explained away.

Of course, an explanation is eventually delivered as the sort of bewildering nosebleed physics Simon Bucher-Jones always writes with such poetry; and its an explanation which cannily keeps the promise of the above, thus avoiding stooping to the sort of anything goes lazy writing currently informing the related television show wherein the entire galaxy is saved by someone having a bit of a cry.

I could be reading too much into it, but this rather neat solution suggests an underlying theme, perhaps a subtle commentary on narrative conventions enslaved by their own continuity: a story told for its own sake rather than that of a - shudder - franchise; and to this end, Grimm Reality reads very much as a novel featuring a character once played by Paul McGann, rather than just the four millionth exciting adventure for that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. It's less Harry Potter, more Clifford D. Simak writing gnomes into his science-fiction novels on the grounds that he's Clifford D. Simak and he'll write what the hell he likes.

Speaking of the accursed television show, I've found myself surprised at how the current incarnation takes so many narrative cues from novels like Grimm Reality, and yet still gets it wrong through overstatement, reducing everything to clichés, shorthand or gimmicks. This was how it could have been - intelligent, gripping, entertainingly weird with big ideas, jokes that don't outstay their welcome or require revolving bow ties to alert viewers to the occurrence of madcap antics, and pleasantly rounded characters - notably Anji Kapoor who I don't remember working quite so well in  other tales.

Both Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale have written better than Grimm Reality, and it's by no means the greatest Doctor Who story ever told, but it's pretty damn good. It just seems a shame that, with hindsight, novels of this standard should have been the average rather than upper range, but no matter.

The Death of Art

Simon Bucher-Jones The Death of Art (1996)
Simon Bucher-Jones is, for all the sense it may make, a sort of Lovecraftian Stephen Baxter without necessarily reading quite like either of those. Whilst more favourable reviews have recently emerged from the internet's nether regions, his first novel The Death of Art seemingly remains largely unappreciated, actively disliked in certain quarters. Writing in I, Who, Lars Pearson described The Death of Art as a long and convoluted nightmare, referring to it again when summarising Bucher-Jones' Ghost Devices in I, Who 2, and in doing so neatly encapsulating the essence of the criticism most commonly levelled at this author:

What's obvious between this work and The Death of Art is that Bucher-Jones' ideas work far, far better when a co-writer follows along and strips in a bunch of sentences and paragraphs to help define everything.

I didn't really quite get this at the time, and coming back to The Death of Art a good few years later, I have to disagree.

For those who were unaware of this development, back when Doctor Who dropped off the bottom of the television screen back in 1989, Virgin publishing undertook to continue Sylvester McCoy's run in novel form. Whilst some of the books were about as good as you'd expect of something based on a TV show, with no realistic prospect of the thing returning to the screen, Virgin at least aspired to publishing stories which would stand up as decent novels in their own right, as opposed to telly surrogates or something that was at best merely collectable. There were a few duds, but for the most part the Virgin New Adventures, as they were called, lived up to that promise. In respect to this, I hate to sound like a pompous cunt, but the received wisdom of Simon Bucher-Jones as the incomprehensibubble Will Self of the New Adventures derives, so far as I can tell, precisely from the fact that he sets his sights a little higher than running around a playground yelling exterminate! He may indeed use loads of long fancy book learnin' words, but he's a writer so that's his job. I don't understand why anyone would regard this as a problem.

Contrary to at least some reviews I've seen, rather than comprising random passages of James Joyce scrambled up with William Burroughs, The Death of Art is in fact a beautifully atmospheric science-fiction novel of mutation and weird physics in late nineteenth century Paris, the plot of which may be followed with ease simply by reading the words and making a bit of an effort rather than fixating on when that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as blah blah blah will show up in the hope that he'll slip in some amusing reference to something that happened in episode three of The Man Who Was A Bit Like Hitler. In other words, it's a novel, and it's written as a novel rather than something which, given the option, you'd much rather watch on television. Not everything is spelled out in primary colours, but then it wouldn't be quite so engaging if it were - or rewarding for that matter. Whilst it's easy to imagine Simon Bucher-Jones spending idle moments composing pun-heavy haikus referencing quantum theory in Chaucerian English, there's nothing intimidating about The Death of Art, nor a single dull sentence, nor a dearth of humour.

Simon Bucher-Jones may conceivably be one of the most underrated authors of the last couple of decades.