The Great Virgin New Adventures Review: Zamper/Toy Soldiers and Head Games

The last few novels of this range, with the exception of the terrible Sky Pirates! have been brilliant. Sanctuary, Human Nature and Original Sin were all three great books and while Sky Pirates! and Zamper buck that trend, Head Games picks up where the previous three great books left off and delivers another great read, continuing author Steve Lyons’ look at The Land of Fiction.

Zamper

Written By: Gareth Roberts

Gareth Roberts is a bit of a problematic character. I’m not going to get into that here, but to give him his due he has written some good Doctor Who stories both in prose and on screen. Zamper however isn’t one of them. All the Roberts’-tropes are there, there’s a comedic tone, satire, Chelonians and whimsical prose throughout but the book is so short that it takes over half the book to set the story up leaving little wiggle room to conclude business.

As with many of the New Adventures, the TARDIS team of the Seventh Doctor, Bernice, Chris and Roz have to land the TARDIS after a malfunction and land on Zamper, discovering it is an out-of-reach planet that helps fix out-of-date spaceships. The planet is odd, mainly desert with only a handful of human crewmembers, almost all of the work is carried out underground by the mysterious and telekinetic Zamps who build and fix spaceships using the power of their mind.

Everything is overseen by The Management, the group of human crewmembers who use a computer system that can think for itself that is experiencing glitches. When they find they have to cater for a group of warmongering Chelonians after a really good ship to help with their ailing war effort, things start to go very wrong and the humans and Chelonians have to put their differences aside and help one another.

Really what Zamper ends up as is a collection of mildly entertaining segments connected by a boring and pretty basic plot.  Even the locations are boring, with endless similar corridors and a cave system that could be any old cave system. I nearly died from boredom, never mind the actual crew in the story! It was also a little strange that there wasn’t really a reason why the Doctor needed to be there. Things don’t really start going wrong till he and the TARDIS get there, so had they not arrived then Zamper wouldn’t have become a disaster. The treatment of the Zamps is obviously bad and needed sorting out but there was no real driving sense of mystery behind it. And it’s not okay to still be wondering how things work on Zamper after one hundred pages, it really didn’t make me care all that much.

Roberts has a very clear template for how he writes his characters, each one is a satirical look at what he is trying to say but because it is often negative, it doesn’t go a long way to making us readers feel sympathy for them when something horrible happens to them. The only characters aside from the Doctor and his companions that are remotely interesting here are the small group of Chelonians, who get more development than the human characters. The elderly Chelonian Hezzka spends a big portion of this book with Bernice and this allows him to change his opinion on humanity, these passages are easily the best bits of the book.

Given how brief this novel is, there’s not much else to write about, The Doctor spends much of his time pottering around in caves not really doing anything apart from squeezing through holes too small for him. Bernice doesn’t really get to do anything until she joins forced with Hezzka but its all too late for her by that point and Chris and Roz are just running around the planet not doing anything, the only interesting thing is learning that Roz doesn’t quite know where she fits in with this TARDIS team, at the time Bernice had been the only older companion so Roz is a little older still and doesn’t relate to anyone around her.

I know I sound more disappointed about this book than I was when I actually read it. Reading it was enjoyable enough but its fault was plain to see. I think the biggest problem Zamper has is that it doesn’t make you care, it’s trying to do that grim type of storytelling Eric Saward was famous for just at a flower-picking pace. This ultimately holds Zamper back from being the daft read it should have been and it’s good to note that now Roberts stuck to writing a couple of popular entries into The Missing Adventures range for here on in!

Toy Soldiers

Written by: Paul Leonard

Unfortunately, I couldn’t read Toy Soldiers due to having brought a copy with a huge misprint inside, which I understand a large number of copies had received when it was originally published. Luckily I didn’t really notice anything in upcoming books that Toy Soldiers led into so I haven’t missed much!

Head Games

Written By: Steve Lyons

Lyon’s previous entry to The New Adventures was Conundrum which saw the Doctor, Ace and Bernice getting stuck in The Land of Fiction. Head Games sees the Doctor return to that realm, or rather – that realm returning to us, with The Land of Fiction bleeding out into our reality and slowly starting to change things. We’ve got the return of Jason, who was left in charge of that mystical realm at the end of Conundrum, only this time the Time Lords have wiped his memories of that period just not very well and his memories and powers are slowly beginning to return.

So now Jason is running around with his fictional hero, Dr. Who in glorious comic book style. But his morals are rather dodgy and so Dr Who is quite happy to wipe out entire civilisations, blow up planets and then decides that the Queen of England was dodgy too so sets about trying to wipe out Earth. Lyons succeeds at giving us a rather demented parody of Doctor Who in the interactions between these two, exploring how the Doctor might be viewed by those he defeats.

I have to be honest, I wasn’t too keen on this book when I first started it as it felt a little all over the place. The Doctor and his companions are already mid-adventure, trying to shut down The Miracle, a black-hole powered by fiction, surrounded by crystal and providing heat and power for the planet below. So we switch between the actions the Doctor and co are undertaking and the actions of the people below who are having to deal with Jason and Dr Who. It’s unfortunate that the most boring bit of this book is the opening chapters but things pick up when Jason and Dr. Who decide to come to Earth instead. But his desire to overthrow the Queen is a little silly. Of course, Jason is supposed to be silly but even so, it doesn’t do much for his character and I’m not sure if we’re supposed to actually like him or not.

The situation on the planet Detrios, which is powered by The Miracle is a little dull too, there’s a Romeo and Juliet-like plot thread but even that isn’t all that interesting. It might have worked had they turned out to be fictional creations and the Doctor had to decide to save them, but that doesn’t happen so you might find yourself wishing the Doctor and Co would finish there and finally join in with the main action. Being a book that could have broken the fourth wall, Head Games sticks with its cameos, references and nods to some of the dodgy special effects work. We’ve got characters like Sabalom Glitz and Brigadier Bambera making an appearance, nicked lines from Dimensions in Time and gags about the green-screened dinosaurs from Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

And as the cover suggests Mel makes a return, but this isn’t the same character from the television series, she’s had a bad time since she left with Glitz and regrets leaving the Doctor, maybe even resenting him a little for inviting her on board the TARDIS in the first place. Despite what people may think about her television counterpart, it’s actually quite nice and refreshing to have an old companion joining in the action in one of these novels. This isn’t the Seventh Doctor she remembers, and things go from bad to unfixable when she discovers it was the Doctor who had manipulated her into leaving him at the end of Dragonfire. So he’s ultimately responsible for how bad her life has been since.

Her breakdown surrounding the Doctor doesn’t make for easy reading and she is ready to murder the Doctor when she discovers that stopping The Miracle will doom Detrios, though she does refuse to listen to why the Doctor has to do this, believing that he should try and find a different way of saving the day. Though her characterisation is a little too different from her television counterpart, one might wonder if this is a fictional take on her. But it does have a purpose as showing the differences and how far the franchise had grown since Season 24 when this book was published in 1995, is the heart of Head Games.

Things in these books are simple, The Miracle has to be destroyed otherwise it’ll end the universe. This means taking the sun and power from Detroit but since the people of that planet had survived underground before The Miracle, the Doctor has every faith in them surviving again in the same way. He no longer has the right of just blundering into situations like The Sixth Doctor and his friends and companions just have to accept that. Sometimes things aren’t going to go well, but if you’re travelling with the Doctor, you need to know this.

To further prove this, Chris is left heartbroken when his attempt to rescue a Detrion goes wrong, for no other reason other than sometimes things go wrong in life and you can’t make promises you can’t ultimately keep. Roz knows that he will come around eventually and thanks the Doctor for allowing him to try nonetheless. Both the Doctor and Roz get some interesting outlooks in this book, Roz adding a surprisingly human tint to the novel for a change. Bernice, who continues to be written really well and doesn’t pull her punches here when dealing with the Doctor and Mel, finally comes around to excepting the Doctor for who he is and the return of Ace didn’t go as badly as I thought it would.

Head Games also goes to great lengths to show that the Doctor isn’t happy about his situation. He says he would rather be on holiday or exploring a really interesting planet with no universe-ending monsters or disasters to defeat. It’s clear that Mel’s breakdown, his current line-up of broken and beaten companions and his manipulations are taking their toll on him. Following this book there will be no more hiding his true nature which I’m looking forward to exploring.

All in all, this is an odd book. There is a lot of interesting character stuff and a look at how the villains of these books aren’t simple anymore. Jason isn’t necessarily a bad guy, just a young boy who is struggling with the powers he had been granted but never kept in check and a Cult leader on Detrios genuinely believes that his death with lead to the end of the universe plunging his planet into war. Reading this in 2023 gives you a lot of chew over thinking about the state of Doctor Who in 1995. We’ve got a story that is a little too frenzied, even if has an interesting premise but leads to character pit-stops.

Ultimately Head Games works as a refresher on Virgin Books’ take on Doctor Who, reminding us that they are telling stories too deep and broad for the television. It’s a shame it doesn’t do much for pushing the main characters forward it just lets them stand and as clever and funny as it is, it isn’t enough by the time the book is finished.