Review: New Doctor Who Titles!

Hot on the heels of the last selection of Doctor Who books, we have some more!  Four new Target novelisations and an original novel.  So lets get to them!

First up, there is a paperback edition of the novelisation of 'The Church on Ruby Road' which I reviewed before. Lovely to have it in a paperback 'proper' Target edition as well, and the cover by Dan Liles is nice and works with the ideas of the book. These new Targets have reverted to a blue spine from the white previously but this is nice and helps delineate the books on the shelf.  I wonder if they're doing this by season or by Doctor, or if they've even thought about it in that way at all and that they'll all be blue now until someone randomly decides to change it.  

Onto the first of the new titles, and we have 'Space Babies' novelised by Alison Rumfitt, a name I was not familiar with. Looking at what she's done previously, and I find she's written two queer-defined horror novels: Brainwyrms (Shocking, grotesque, and downright filthy, Brainwyrms confronts the creeping reality of political terror while exploring the depths of love, pain, and identity) and Tell Me I'm Worthless (Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other) both published by Cipher Press (an independent publisher that amplifies writing by queer and trans-identified authors). Not really the back catalogue I'd expect for writing your first Doctor Who novelisation but there you go.

But what of the book? It's really good. Rumfitt takes the somewhat silly plot and moves it along at speed. There's some lovely asides along the way (like the AI editing out all of Nanny's expletives) and the characters all work well. What on television came over as a little daft (I enjoyed the episode though) is elevated by the writing into a novelisation of fun and charm. I feel it's the best of these three new books, and it would be great if Rumfitt was given more opportunity to play with the series and the characters again.

There's a nice expansion of the Bogeyman, and a little beautifully written prologue and epilogue about childhood terrors. One thing that this reminded me though was the ending of the episode where the Doctor does a DNA scan of Ruby ... this seems to come to nothing and, like in the TV episodes, we don't find out what the results are - except perhaps right at the very end of the series as a whole where there's a throwaway line that Ruby is completely normal in every way.

I'm not sure about the cover on this one though. It sort of works though the figures seem a little distorted. It just doesn't capture the story well.

Next up is '73 Yards' novelised by the series' story editor Scott Handcock. The television story promised much and was an interesting Doctor-free diversion into folk horror territory, combined with a strange dimension-shifting idea of living a whole life and then finding yourself back where it all started ... and it then doesn't happen at all. Very odd.

Sadly Handcock doesn't take the opportunity to explain anything here, and the book is a very competent, straight novelisation of what we were given on television. For the previous novelisations, one of the authors noted that he was told (by the publishers I assume) that he was not allowed to deviate from the TV Script (whereas other authors did nothing but) so there seems to be a strange element here that sometimes authors can, sometimes they can't. And the ones where they can are always better for it.

The biggest unknown in this story - aside from what the heck is happening in the first place - is just what does the strange female figure, always at 73 yards away from Ruby, say or do to the people who try and confront her to make them scream and run away and subsequently want nothing to do with Ruby at all. This includes her mother, and Kate Lethbridge Stewart and everyone else. It's a conceit that original scriptwriter Russell T Davies has said he will never explain ... and this could be because there is no explanation. And indeed in this book there is no explanation - it just happens. And at the end, Handcock taunts us when Ruby hears what she says: 'secrets which should never be shared'; but doesn't tell the reader. Just that Ruby forgives everyone for their reaction. Disappointing.

Sadly this weakens the narrative in my opinion as with folk horror (and just plain old telling a story) you do need a little rationalisation and explanation for it to be a satisfying tale. And in this case it all seems a bit pointless. The great big red RESET button at the end means the story never happened ... the politician Roger ap Gwilliam never became a threat to the world. Or did he as the Doctor knows and remembers what happened in the future? So is this a dimension jump? A fairy ring thing? A myth? A timeslip? A massive great paradox? We shall never know.

The cover here is nice: Ruby waiting for the Doctor with the figure in the background. Not more to say really, as that's what the story is all about!

The third novelisation is something of a surprising one as I would have thought that other episodes would have made better books. But it's of 'Rogue' by the original writers Kate Herron & Briony Redman. Now sadly this episode was probably my least favourite of the season. A slight tale of a bunch of cosplaying shape-shifters who gatecrash a Regency party and start pretending to be the various people there. It's very much riffing on the series Bridgerton - which Ruby namechecks a few times - but there's not much to it. Which may be why they also brought in a time agent-type character called Rogue, who is there to try and stop these shapeshifting aliens.

Basically Rogue is a Captain Jack Harkness clone, down to the invisible spaceship and gender fluid preferences. In the book, the authors add a lot of material, including opening chapters about one of Rogue's previous assignments, and there's bits and pieces added throughout. It's written light heartedly, with a few footnotes to add to the feeling that we're in some sort of Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett territory (though not as good as either), but overall it can't overcome, for me, the central issue with the story.

This is where the Doctor and Rogue seem to fall for each other, holding hands and running about and then kissing, and giving each other proposals and so on and so on. This may be controversial but I prefer my Doctor to be above all that. He's an alien. From another planet. And should not be interested in all that soppy stuff. Whether it's for a girl, a boy or a blue furry creature from Alpha-Centauri. Sex should have no place in Doctor Who. It's just not relevant and not what the show should be featuring. This spoiled the whole thing for me. I suppose that if it had been Ruby who fell for Rogue (and vice versa) then it really would have been a retread of the whole Captain Jack/Rose/Doctor situation.

Another item of note is that in some of these new books, we see events from the point of view of the Doctor. This always used to be something you did not do. Maintaining the Doctor's alienness and keeping things grounded from the point of view of the companions, aliens or others who appear in the episodes. So to see that the Doctor really was falling for this Rogue character (rather than, as on television, he could perhaps have just been pretending to see what Rogue was after and to get the upper hand) just emphasised how out of place I found this episode.

The cover is ... not good. A very strange composition and of course feeding into the element of the story that I didn't like.

Sorry to all those folks who loved it. Just not for me.

A final note regarding the books, and generally speaking there is not much description of the Doctor or Ruby in the stories. Apart from the Doctor being characterised by his speech patterns ('Honey' et al) he could be any Doctor. I miss the Terrance Dicksian 'capsule description' which sums up the particular Doctor perfectly in one or two lines.

Moving onto the original novel published this month (which is August 2024 for those that are counting) and we have a book apparently written by Bonnie Langford, who played Mel in the TV series alongside the sixth and seventh Doctors. I'm all for these sidesteps from the actual actors who have been in the series. I think it's a great idea from a marketing point of view, and this time the co-author gets a proper credit (it's Jacqueline Rayner by the way). 

The book is marketed with a cover suggestive that it's a cosy crime (as that is all the rage at the moment thanks to the inexplicable success of Richard Osman's efforts in the genre) but actually it's not that at all. Not really.

What it seems to be is sadly somewhat throwaway. There's a story with Mel and Glitz on Iceworld (where we left them at the end of the story 'Dragonfire') and them having an adventure on a generational ship where they have been throwing people into a furnace to provide power to the engines to get to another planet due to a misunderstanding of the instructions (shades of 'The Face of Evil'). But then it morphs into an Agatha Christie-type whodunnit (the cosy crime element), but with an added AI interface who looks like the lead presenter from a kids' Saturday morning show (Saturday Starship, a real show which Langford actually did co-present) along with an AI generated squirrel who throws acorns at everyone. It's just silly. And pages and pages are spent on this stuff while the other characters act out something like Alien meets 'The Robots of Death'.

Maybe readers will love this strange take on Doctorless Doctor Who, but it felt like three or so ideas all kludged together because none of them alone would make a full book. Added to this, there's a list at the back of shows that Langford has appeared in, and the reader is invited to spot the references in the text. This emphasises the nature of the book, that paragraphs twist to try and include these references. It's all a bit daft. Added to which we have a pile of references to older Doctor Whos including planet names and all sorts. And when the whodunnit plot hinges on an item from a Doctor Who story from 1964, you know that this is not something that Bonnie Langford came up with!

Maybe I'm being unkind. I don't know. But it's not a novel I enjoyed reading. It's just not Doctor Who. If I was going to try and place it within the spinoffery of Doctor Who, I'd suggest in the pages of TV Comic. One of those totally out there and crazy stories that the magazine used to run which were so far from the show as to be unrecognisable. And even, perhaps, written by people who had never actually seen the television show.

I don't think this is the case here, though of course I have no idea whether Langford has watched any Doctor Who at all. Maybe she has, maybe she hasn't. Maybe this whole book was based on her ideas. Maybe she did write it all. I've no idea. It's competently written, just not very engaging, and for the most part just silly.