The Great Virgin New Adventures Review: The Also People & Shakedown

This time we look at The Also People, which sees some of the Doctor’s past sins coming back to haunt him in spectacular fashion, and Shakedown, an adaptation of a 1990s fan-film which sees the return of the Sontarans!

The Also People

Written by Ben Aaronovich

This was a book I was nervous to read. Everyone always talks about how good it is and how it’s quite possibly the best of all The New Adventures. It almost made me wish it was one of the ones that everyone hates and then I discover that actually, it isn’t as bad as everyone makes out!

Ben Aaronovich wrote the injection of adrenaline that the Seventh Doctor era needed with Remembrance of the Daleks and its brilliant novelisation. He also wrote one of these novels called Transit but I wasn’t too fond of that one, so The Also People didn’t inspire much confidence. It didn’t help that it opens with an index on character names like aM!xitsa, I couldn’t tell if he was having a laugh until I read the book and realised that all the side characters have some truly bizarre names. Given how much I hated Transit I was gearing up for a fight with this book, but I needn’t have worried. The Also People is just as excellent as everyone says!

But why is The Also People just as good as everyone says? Well, I think it’s because it’s actually quite a simple book. Struggling with their recent adventure in Head Games, the Doctor and companion decide to go for a holiday. This time though the Doctor takes them to a place where everyone is a robot of some description, some have made themselves, while some are drones or spaceships but all of whom have human personalities. It’s an interesting world for the characters to explore. Of course, the peace doesn’t last long as one of the drones is murdered and as Bernice, Roz and Chris investigate, they discover that the Doctor has been manipulating them again, and this planet wasn’t an accidental find when looking for a holiday destination. But ignoring that, the real reason that this story works is because it’s finally a character-driven novel, that shows the characters growing and changing as the events unfold around them.

We find out that the world they are on is actually a Dyson Sphere, an artificial environment built around a sun and while it’s a cool science-fiction concept, it’s only going to be as interesting as those who occupy it. This is where the “people” come in, which refers to anything that has thoughts and feelings, which includes kitchen appliances, drones and spaceships. All these creatures can extend their lifespans if they want to but ultimately they want to experience the human condition. We’ve got a parachute who has a lot on his mind and a group of spaceships which go to fancy dress parties. It’s completely bonkers and wacky but somehow Aaronovich makes it work excellently.

Of course as good as Aaronovich’s prose is here, I’m not going to learn a new language to understand a book, so I just took my chance with the names of the characters here. But it is always more important to know who a character is in their personalities than a name and to his credit, Aaronovich leaves a lot of what the characters look like up to the readers’ imagination. If there is one thing that I took away from this book it’s that it’s trying to tell us there is more to people than we first think. Roz is a great example of this here, it’s still pretty early days for her and Chris but up to now, Roz hasn’t really had a chance to get much development, she has just come across as a hard-nosed, justice-focused Adjudicator with little character. Unlike his treatment of Bernice in Transit, here Aaronovich takes his time chipping away at Roz, seeing what might make her tick. He also never shies away from her beliefs and prejudices, instead thanks to a helpful drug in this book called Flashback, he actively explores her past to see where these negative sides of her character might come from.

If anyone gets ignored here, it’s Chris but he gets a relationship with a character called Dep and he is drawn in by her beauty and her interest in flying machines. Their relationship is accepted by everyone but it does end with some unintended consequences that Chris is unaware of, leading hopefully to the undoing of the air of innocence Chris has about him. Chris never knowing that he is to be a father when he leaves is a dark twist, Dep making her decision not to tell him shows her growth as a human personality, even if it a rather cruel look at their relationship. Hopefully, as the series of novels continues the penny will drop for Chris as to what happened here.

The Doctor and Bernice meanwhile, like all good Doctor and companions continue to circle one another. She is perfectly aware he is up to something, and he knows she knows he’s up to something. It’s interesting to read the pair of them verbally sparring while not telling each other they know their up to no good. When the Doctor does eventually tell Bernice of the real reason they are in this Dyson sphere, he leaves her with a horrible choice that is perhaps the darkest thing the Doctor has ever done to his companions. Head Games explored the idea that he doesn’t relish these manipulations as much as it seems and The Also People continues that trend, looking at how he would rather be the jester than Time’s Champion but that these are the cards he’s been dealt so he has to make the best of it.

Aaronovich also looks at the Doctor and how he would rather be encouraging his friends in their pursuits instead of worrying his lies will push them further apart to the point they become enemies. Despite giving Bernice the literal life-or-death decision to make, it is also clear his mission isn’t as completely heartless as it first appears. He wants to see the best in people but he has rather dubious ways of finding that trait in people. He treats his companions towards the end with compassion, telling them to spend time with someone they’ve grown to care about despite they have been the villain all along. He finally realises here that his companions will only live once, they don’t have the benefit of multiple regenerations like he does.

I was really pleased though that Roz got much more character development here and she comes to understand the Doctor a little better. There is also a real feeling of positivity at the end of the book, something not many of these books have had and while bad things still happen in the book, the triumph over evil at the end feels amazing after a few books which gave rather gloomy looks at its main cast. And when it’s time for them to leave, each character feels a lot happier than they did when they arrived and read the book, they deserve that happiness, that happiness making this book feel a lot fresher than its predecessors.

Shakedown

Written By: Terrance Dicks

Shakedown? Where do I recognise that from? Oh, that’s right, it was one of the few fan films made through the 1990s featuring Doctor Who actors either in recognisable roles or brand new ones, and Shakedown featured the Sontarans. They actually filmed it on a battleship and it looked like it had a little money thrown at it. Really they made it into a novel?

That’s right Shakedown was originally a fan film, written by Terrance Dicks. It was Virgin’s idea to novelise the film, tying it properly into their Doctor Who continuity, but Dicks had a challenge as the film runs for 55 minutes, that’s a very brief novel even by some of his Target works. So to bulk it out a bit, he included a bit before the film takes place, novelises the film and then gives us a bit of an epilogue set after the film. So it’s easier to think of this as a really fancy Target adaptation.

As one might expect the best bits of this book are taken from the film. It would be unfair to say that Terrance Dicks wasn’t a great Doctor Who writer but, as controversial as this might be, for every great book he wrote like Exodus or Players, there’s a Catastrophea. Shakedown is almost the Catastrophea to his Exodus in this range. But to his credit, he throws himself into the main cast of the Seventh Doctor, Bernice, Chris and Roz and what they are up to before the main action kicks off. Of course, he needs to do this to explain what part they are going to play in a novelisation of a film none of them are in. He splits them up to hunt for a Rutan who then finds himself mixing in with the crew of the Tiger Moth – the ship from the film, and we learn what he did, apart from being a Rutan, to annoy the Sontarans so much.

Splitting up the characters used to be quite an irritating trope in these books, like the TARDIS getting into trouble and having to have a forced landing but since Chris and Roz have joined, splitting up quite a large TARDIS crew has become a necessary evil. But with them being future police officers, it does make more sense for them all to be apart, giving them a secondary investigation plot to enjoy rather than the capture and escape routine these books used to dish out to the companions!

In the Shakedown film, the hero – Kurt – makes it known he knew the Doctor and refers to him as a dentist, though it’s clear who he means! Here though we get some explanations for this, with the Doctor, already mid-adventure, meeting Kurt when he’s just been arrested by the Sontarans. He’s a bit dodgy and trying to smuggle guns to the natives of a planet that Humanity has colonised. When the Doctor saves him from the Sontarans, he promises to help him if he needs it in return. It’s a pacey prologue which sees the Doctor wholeheartedly topple a bad regime like the old days and in a way that’s nowhere near as dark as previous New Adventures. It’s a fun opening to the book which feels like something taken straight from his Target days.

While it gives Kurt more of a reason to know who the Sontarans are here than he does in the film, it does throw up some inconsistencies. Kurt barely remembered the Doctor in the film and he had no idea who the two Sontarans were in the movie, but here he does as he’d previously met them. Their not massive problems just issues that novelisation the film has dug up, but it does make the idea of not remembering the Doctor, a pretty memorable person – feel a little silly and the Sontarans don’t know him because he shaved his moustache is a little silly now. The trouble begins in the final acts of this book when Steg, one of the Sontarans survives his film death to wreak havoc and we have to learn about Sontaran death comas which is so interesting it will threaten to put you into one.

Dicks has written for Bernice and the Seventh Doctor before, but he handles Chris and Roz okay enough that they don’t feel completely different and he doesn’t undo the growth they’ve had in previous books. The problem is that he doesn’t do anything different with the characters that other writers haven’t done. He sticks with the idea that Chris is quite childish despite previous books tarnishing that innocence. And Roz feels a lot like she did in her debut novel, Original Sin, with a temper she can barely keep in check, but he does seem to get her character a lot more than he does Chris, especially in having her interact with an intelligent Ogron. This allows more exploration into her prejudices in an otherwise amusing scene.

As I said above the problem that Shakedown has is its problems once it enters its final act. The second act is an adaption of the film, though it’s surprisingly brief at 43 pages so it works out that each scene lasts for about a page in the book. But Dicks has to create a reason for Steg to survive and a reason for the Rutan having reproduced to get the Sontarans to invade where everyone has ended up. Its such a strain you can almost hear the book struggling with it. It’s all a little breathless when it gets to the end with the Doctor having to give an explanation for what has just happened rather than us actually being able to read it as it happens. The third act is a real slog to read and that’s a shame because Dicks had done an admirable enough job beforehand.

Shakedown is a weird one. On the one hand, its a good read and apparently good enough I got a reprint in the Monster series of books put out a few years ago, but does it really stand up as a Doctor Who novel in its own right? For me, the answer is no, the Doctor and his companions are in the opening and the end while the bulk of the book really relies on you having knowledge of a film that you probably haven’t seen. It’s not necessarily a bad thing you haven’t seen the film but it certainly helps when it comes to knowing what is going on. Dicks has done a decent enough job with the mission statement and it all holds together just enough to not really notice the squeaks, and while it isn’t one of the best of this range, it certainly won’t be languishing amongst the worst.