Category Archives: Speculative Fiction

Science fiction and/or fantasy.

British Summertime (and Paul Cornell’s Books in General)

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The cover of British Summertime.

British Summertime, Paul Cornell’s second entirely original novel, was published in 2002. Since then he’s published short stories but, aside from a novelization of a BBC webcast, no more novels. Lately he’s been writing for television and for Marvel comics. I can’t help feeling he’s come down in the world.

I’d like another book from Cornell. You will not believe that after reading this review. I ask that you take it on faith. Paul Cornell, I’ve come to realize, is one of those writers whose books I enjoy for reasons I cannot fully explain. Ask me why his books are worth my while and I’ll spend half the time on apologetic “okay, admittedlies,” “despites,” and “even thoughs.” I liked British Summertime, mostly, but all I can think to write about are my reservations, which have to do with Cornell’s obsessive sentimentality. His books drip with sentiment. Like Charles Dickens dipped in treacle. It’s both charming and irritating, in at least three ways. (Although as I’ve worked on this review I’ve come to think that “sentiment” isn’t the right word for the latter two. Maybe “unwarranted optimism.”)

Cornell’s books bask in nostalgia for a stereotype of early twentieth-century England (which seems to be the home of many Cornell characters’ speech patterns). It’s gotten worse over the years. In 1995 his Doctor Who novel Human Nature celebrated the death of Victorian values and the beginning of modernity; a dozen years later in Cornell’s television adaptation the hero learned to Do His Duty and die for his country. British Summertime, written in between, features Commander Leyton, an alternate-universe space pilot who talks like a stereotypical World War 2 RAF pilot. (Apparently this is a takoff on Dan Dare.) Leyton’s navigator is the disembodied head of a campy flapper. It’s like they walked out of the Powell and Pressburger production of Bring Me the Head of Zelda Fitzgerald.

What’s interesting is that, just while I’m reading, I’m willing to suspend disbelief in this sceptered-isle, stiff-upper-lip stuff. Continue reading British Summertime (and Paul Cornell’s Books in General) →

Knights of the Cornerstone

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Every so often I think I ought to start writing about the books I read, just to keep my brain in shape. I never seem to keep up with this. I’m going to try it again, but given how long it took me to finish this rather badly written review maybe I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

The Knights of the Cornerstone is about learning to engage with the world. Cal, James Blaylock’s hero, is a thirtysomething guy who lives alone, collects books, draws cartoons, and spends his time standing aside and watching life. As a thirtysomething cartoonist who lives alone, accumulates books—it doesn’t rise to the level of “collecting,” I fear—and doesn’t get out much, I may or may not be this book’s ideal reader. I was distracted by the subconcious expectation that, at any moment, the characters would turn to the reader and ask “Are you getting all this?”

Beyond that, for anyone who’s read Blaylock before this book is not particularly striking. It’s not bad. It’s like… have you seen Spellbound? The Alfred Hitchcock movie? Spellbound is worth seeing. More than once, even. It’s not a great movie; Hitchcock was not pushing himself. It says something that the best part of Spellbound was the work of Salvador Dali. But it is a Hitchcock movie, and it does the things Hitchcock movies do.

Knights of the Cornerstone is a James Blaylock novel, and it does the things James Blaylock novels do. Continue reading Knights of the Cornerstone →

A Couple of Torchwood Books

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Recently a couple of Torchwood books were recommended to me on the Jade Pagoda mailing list. I’ve now read Slow Decay, and decided to review it. I’m going to begin by talking about Another Life. I read Another Life, and tried to read Border Princes, not long after they came out. This is why I’ve only now read Slow Decay.

Torchwood is strange. It has moments of genuinely good drama, sometimes, but for the most part it’s fun for reasons the producers did not intend and will never fully understand. At heart it’s a series about dumb, horny college kids who somehow got the keys to the most powerful paranormal investigations agency in Wales… basically a Battlestar Galactica-style dark reimagining of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, except instead of a talking Great Dane it has Ianto.

Continue reading A Couple of Torchwood Books →

Doctor Who Reviews: Shadowmind

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You know what’s interesting about Shadowmind? It turns out I’d never read it before. I skipped it when it came out due to a limited teenage book-buying budget and mediocre reviews. Much later I decided I wanted an obsessive-compulsively complete New Adventures collection, picked up a copy at a used bookstore… and immediately forgot about it.

You can’t blame me. By that time I was all too familiar with Christopher Bulis. Among Doctor Who fans the Bulis name is synonymous with “meh.” As I’ve mentioned before, Bulis’s trademark move is to take a really amazing, ass-kicking central concept and surgically remove the fun. I’ll bet his novels sound wonderful in outline–Space marines meet Dungeons and Dragons! A steampunk expedition to the moon! I imagine Bulis working far into the night on his outline. Sweating over it until it gleams. With sweat. Finally he holds the precious document to the light. It’s perfect. “This is the most brilliant idea I’ve had so far!” exclaims Bulis. “Now… how can I make it suck?”

Continue reading Doctor Who Reviews: Shadowmind →

New Adventures Reviews: White Darkness

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Zombies are hip. They’re in our movies and comics and major investment firms. You can’t walk more than a few blocks without stumbling across some shambling horde of loosely anatomical types desperate for brains. Zombies, it seems, are the new ninjas. So the cover of White Darkness—on which a smiling Doctor, intrigued Ace, and off-model Benny greet their happy zombie friend—might look ahead of the curve. Not exactly. White Darkness gets into the kind of stuff that started the pre-pop-culture zombie legends. David McIntee “set out with the intention of giving Haiti and voudon society a fairer representation than is usual in fiction.” White Darkness is a straight-up historical adventure novel, with no pretentions to anything more, but it’s coming from a slightly smarter place than the books, films, and flash mobs covered in fake latex sores.

White Darkness innovated in setting the story somewhere other than goddamn London again. A lot of Doctor Who stories take place in and around London. I mean, a lot. There was a reason for this, once. The TV series had tight budget constraints and, hey, the Home Counties were right there. It’s slightly less understandable in the new series, which by the same logic should spend more time in Cardiff. When the novels and Short Trips collections head back to London again it’s plain baffling. It costs no more to set a novel in Africa, or India, or even on some entirely imaginary alien planet, than in Croyden. Apparently these stories suffer from imaginitive constraints… which may also explain those alien-world EDAs that could have been set in London. Conversely, many London-based stories could have taken place in any city and even at any time… but the TARDIS automatically, unthinkingly seeks out contemporary London again. (Preferably a neighborhood with some nice middle-class white people.) It’s like the default state of Doctor Who.

David McIntee did more than any other nineties author to claw the TARDIS from the death grip of southern England. Of his dozen Doctor Who novels only one is set in the London area, and that was a Pertwee-era UNIT story. Ironically, the author who in one book dropped in a lame joke about “political correctness”—which sounded completely bonkers coming out of the Doctor’s mouth, being normally used only by old-fashioned types who resent being asked to show some manners—did so much to diversify the series. When he wasn’t taking the TARDIS to strange new worlds, he set it down in 19th-century China. Or medieval France. Or imperial Russia. Or contemporary Hong Kong. Or, in this case, Haiti.

Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: White Darkness →

New Adventures Reviews: Lucifer Rising

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In their first couple of years the New Adventures covered surrealism, cyberpunk, high fantasy, space opera, a Quatermass pastiche, and even a right-wing religious authoritarian mystical horror novel (The Pit, which arguably took Doctor Who into places it should never have gone). Lucifer Rising was the NAs’ first Big Dumb Object novel.

Big Dumb Objects are one of your standard SF tropes—what Rudy Rucker calls “power chords,” the ideas that are to SF what the hooks are to a pop song. BDOs are the coolest gadgets in science fiction—both artifacts and environments. Rendezvous With Rama’s vast wandering starship is the canonical example. (And one of the blander ones, to my mind”¦ although it’s been years since I read it and if I went back I might have a different experience.) My favorite is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (from Solaris, natch). It might be stretching a point to class a living planet as a BDO, but Solaris does the same thing: injects Sense of Wonder straight into the novel’s jugular and gives the characters something mind-blowing to explore and react against.

Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: Lucifer Rising →

Possibly the Strangest Doctor Who Novel Ever

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A recent post at Tor.com on weird SF novels reminded me of Atom Bomb Blues by Andrew Cartmel. It may well be the weirdest Doctor Who novel ever. Also a very bad novel, although I can’t accuse it of a lack of imagination. Atom Bomb Blues is packed with ideas, practically all bad. It read like Cartmel just threw in anything that came into his head, and every other page there was something that made me blink and go “Huh?”

So… the Doctor is hanging around the Manhattan Project. In an alternate universe. And this alternate universe has been infiltrated by people from our own universe in the 21st century, who just happen to look exactly like people from this other universe’s 1940s. And the infiltrators plan to destroy the world because they think it will change history in other universes, causing Japan to win World War 2. Already we have reason to suspect that Andrew Cartmel has been snorting raw sugar. But wait! There’s more! Ace is taking fish oil pills that give her superhuman mathematical abilities! And she’s wearing a cowgirl outfit because she thought the Doctor was going to the Alamo! And she’s really, really dense! And one of the infiltrators is some kind of beatnik who talks like Maynard G. Krebs! Crazy, man!

And then there’s the alien. Named Zorg. Who keeps adding a “z” to the start of people’s names. And writes poetry. He’s not there for a reason. Cartmel just threw him in. Why not? And the Japanese agents in bright, color-coded Zoot suits. And the random encounter with Duke Ellington. And the stereotypical Indians. And Major Butcher, the Los Alamos security officer, who is heavily and obviously based on Dashiell Hammett for absolutely no reason I can determine at all. What’s up with that, Andrew?

And then the story stops dead for a bizarre chapter in which the Doctor, for no reason in the world, convinces Major Butcher he (Major Butcher) has been drugged with peyote. This is the chapter with Zorg, and the Indians. It has dialogue like “That was very dapperly done, Doctor,” and “Don’t be so literal-minded, Bulldog Bozo.” The whole chapter has absolutely nothing at all to do with anything else in the novel. Put it all together, and you’ve got something that left me staring at the book in my hands, muttering “what the hell was that?“

Finally, I’d like to note that I can’t read the phrase Atom Bomb Blues without thinking of “The Wedding Bell Blues” by the Fifth Dimension. It makes reading this thing even more surreal when, every time you look at the cover, you hear a choir of carousels.

Doctor Who Reviews: Sometime Never

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This is another old _Doctor Who_ tie-in review. If it seems oddly snarky, consider that I wrote it years ago, not long after the book came out, while I was still actively following a series that was determinedly running itself into the ground.

Sometime Never… is the culmination of over three years of eighth Doctor books. This is the ultimate fruition of the ongoing storylines introduced during Justin Richards’s tenure as editor. This is the climax that every EDA since The Burning has built towards.

Book cover

And it stinks.

It’s too damn long, for one thing. Sometime Never… only exists to tie up a number of dangling plot threads. That’s it. There is nothing else to it: no theme, no plot, no character development. The little that Sometime Never… accomplishes could be done in the space of a novella. But Richards has 280 pages to fill, and he fills them with padding. Lots of padding. The most superfluous padding since Robert Jordan published volume three hundred of The Wheel of Time. Over seventy per cent of the American sales of Sometime Never… have been traced to a single bulk purchase by the Wisconsin Federation of Mall Santas. They’re going to scotch tape copies to their beer guts this December.

Continue reading Doctor Who Reviews: Sometime Never →

Doctor Who Reviews: Palace of the Red Sun

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This is another old Doctor Who tie-in review, written years ago and revised only slightly.

Why do we always come here?
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like some kind of torture
To have to watch the show.

–The Muppet Show

Reading Palace of the Red Sun, I had occasion to think of Statler and Waldorf. They were the two old guys who sat in the balcony in “The Muppet Show.” Whenever anyone did anything, their response was a derisive comment and a forced laugh. This took a serious toll on everyone’s self esteem. Eventually Kermit had to keep a therapist on call backstage to prevent some of the less stable Muppets from slitting their wrists.

Obviously Messrs. S. and W. thought the show was crap. Yet for some reason, week after week, they kept coming back. You see, Statler and Waldorf led empty, hollow lives. The dreams of their youth had withered, leaving them unfulfilled. Their families had long since died or moved away. If not for the Muppets, they would have spent the evenings in their tiny, dingy rooms at the nursing home, drinking themselves into a stupor and reminiscing about their glory days before the war. I think on some level Kermit understood this, because he never had Animal drag them out behind the theater and beat them to a bloody pulp.

Palace of the Red Sun brought this to mind because it parallels my own relation to the literary works of Christopher Bulis. Not the drinking and the empty life–just the fact that, no matter how bad his books get, something keeps me coming back.

Maybe it’s the ideas. Bulis does almost nothing right, but there’s one thing he’s good at: coming up with interesting ideas to build his novels around. Palace of the Red Sun has a planet of fairy tale holograms and gardening robots, surrounded by a temporal anomaly and placed under siege by a megalomaniac who’s granted an extended interview to a mediocre journalist. In an alternate universe, a place of sunshine and lollipops, somebody like R. A. Lafferty or Philip K. Dick might have taken this stuff and turned out a quirky, interesting, exciting novel.

Unfortunately, this is the real world. It is frequently cloudy. The lollipops fell on the floor and are now covered with lint and crud from the avocado shag carpet, which hasn’t been shampooed since the late seventies. In the real world, this novel was written by Christopher Bulis, and Christopher Bulis could not write his way out of a wet paper sack with a sharp pencil. His characters are cardboard. His prose is flat. His dialogue is inane. He can’t even make a decent plot from the great ideas he managed to pull together. The Doctor and Peri spend 280 pages wandering through a morass of stupid cliches. They run around, get captured, escape, and meet rebels. The Doctor patronizes the secondary characters with shallow “wisdom,” and Peri is sexually harassed. There’s even a subplot about an intelligent robot learning what it means to be human. I looked in vain for some sign that Bulis was trying for irony–apparently he just doesn’t realize how stale this plot is. (You know an idea is past its sell-by date when it turns up on Star Trek. Multiple times, even.)

Palace of the Red Sun sucked. Yet I could not turn away. Perhaps someday Christopher Bulis will write another Doctor Who book. If so, I will buy that one as well, and read it. Because it feels so good when I stop.