Alright, alright, quit torturing me and I'll confess! Yes, it's true: I don't get on with Lawrence Miles. He's just... too much.

To recap for newcomers: Miles is something of a cult figure in Doctor Who fandom. As a very young man, he made his name writing several novels for the range, at a time when prose was the main medium for the series, and thus highly important. Although he went on to write plenty of sci-fi novels and other works during the 2000s and 2010s, and thus I'm sure considers himself to have made a considerable achievement in the world of letters, he never got what many of his comrades received: TV fame. Many of the (slightly older) luminary writers of the novels and short stories - among them Russell T Davies, Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Chris Chibnall, Steven Moffat, Gareth Roberts - went on to be heavily involved in the TV program, not to mention now noted speculative fiction writer Ben Aaronovitch. Lawrence Miles had a different journey in mind.

Miles' view of what Doctor Who could be (should be?) is markedly different from Davies and Moffat in particular. They envision a family-friendly program, focused (to a certain extent) on standalone hours of television which are fan-inspired but can appeal to grandma or your lunkhead cousin. Miles wants the program to be more along the lines of those old sci-fi series like Farscape or Babylon 5: dense, complex sci-fi stories, deliberately plotted over multiple seasons, even though they will languish on cable channels and be ever at the brink of cancellation. The fact that Davies views Who as a modern drama in the soap opera mould and Moffat sees it as a fairytale without the need to dig deep into character or science especially galled dear Lawrence. He was boisterously, savagely critical of what he perceived to be the former's faults, but was - dare I say - venomous and rancorously unpleasant about the latter. (As it happens, I share ol' Larry's view about Moffat, although I also recognise he made an entertaining program that delighted millions. Conversely I think that Russell produced some of the best Who in its history. So, there.)

How does this impact Alien Bodies? Well, Miles had already written numerous books but this was his first for the new Eighth Doctor range, where he had more opportunity to influence the world-building and broader concepts of the series. And, my goodness, he went broad. There are a heckuva lot of ideas on display here. A putative future in which the US (or at least a Republican-controlled part of a Balkanised former US) invaded Canada. In which the military organisations at the heart of the series for decades were broken up and replaced. In which science has found a way to bio-engineer leopards whose visual and aural memories are passed through their urine, allowing people with the right technology to "read" those memories from puddles of the stuff. In which a species is able to exist as a type of mental parasite, inside your head and communicating with you by manipulating your mind to read their words in newspapers and signs. In which a dead man shows up to an auction, and it's a perfectly normal part of his species. Not to mention the expansive editions to the program's own mythology: semi-sentient TARDISes from the Doctor's future! A military-industrial complex that has been trying to find ways to assassinate the Doctor for three hundred years! A Time War taking place well into the Doctor's future which could destroy his people! Not to mention an age-old cult of Time Lords who thrive on tearing apart the rules of time.

You see what I mean? It's a lot.

Now, there are two schools of thought here. One would say that Miles' approach is simply "not Doctor Who". Every framework should be malleable but there are limits to what can be part of a series and what can't. (I think of those Murder, She Wrote episodes from the show's middle years where Angela Lansbury was overworked and so a completely unrelated detective would investigate a completely unrelated case for an entire episode. Multiple times a season. Was it really MSW or just a way to sell some ads?) If you need to rewrite vast tracts of what we've known for thirty-five years and disorient the physics and history of the world we've come to understand, have you in fact just created your own program under someone else's banner? The other viewpoint is that this is the very reason Who stagnated in the 1980s and, indeed, into the novel range. It had been playing it safe, Who by numbers, and it was time to tear down the fabric and start weaving it again.

Ultimately, I'm in the first camp. I agree that the program could play it safe, and I have found several of the other novels dissatisfying for this reason. Indeed, given that it's clear that Davies and Moff stole or absorbed or coincidentally latched on to several of Miles' ideas (I suspect all of the above, as some of them - like the sentient TARDIS - are clearly lingering in the air in fandom) for the TV series, Miles is not completely out of the realm of possibility. But there are just so many ideas all the time. He wants to make the world weird and conceptual and Douglas Adamsy, and as someone who doesn't enjoy Adams and rather likes his stories to make some level of sense, this isn't for me. There are some phenomenal moments, and I admire that he rehabilitated the Krotons. And I'm sad to make this complaint because, as I say, I am broadly anti-Moffat. I want my stories full not empty, I want my stories to have ideas not just plots. But this just made me tired. And it's not merely the concepts that annoyed me; there's a level of pretention to the approach which I couldn't endorse. The 25-year-old author has a confidence in his own abilities which isn't always matched by the output. Take for himself his occasional interruptions into the narrative voice ("It was a Kroton thing; they wouldn't understand") which strive for for playful but read as juvenile. Of course, the range's editors bear some responsibility for this. The cute allusions to popular sci-fi of the time (Twin Peaks, The X-Files, etc) are the kind of "clever" elements I would have included in my story ideas of my early 20s, so I see what Miles was going for. But we're a long way from that period now, so they help to date the book dramatically. (Not in itself a fault; authors don't tend to write books for consumption 25 years later, and nor should they. And this has been a problem with most authors of this range. But it stings nevertheless.)

(I amend this review to note that I recognise some of the circumstances which led to this. The BBC had reclaimed the novels from Virgin Publishing, had set about without much initial guidance in order to get the series going and, allegedly, had an editor who didn't really care at the time. Miles took what he saw as a dull companion and a bland focus and determined to knock it on its head. For that he can be commended, and I'll be intrigued to see whether the novels fight back or if they accept this new direction. I suspect not.)

I don't feel great about criticising Miles for his ambition or his iconoclastic nature, but sometimes these things must be said. Grand ideas can be positive; I recently read Paul Leonard's Venusian Lullaby which does a wonderful job of bringing several challenging approaches into the standard Doctor Who framework. "Everything and the kitchen sink too" can also be a valid approach; I've enjoyed every one of Gareth Roberts' novels, and he's never one to leave any passenger behind. Uniting those two approaches though proves to be an aggressive combination, at least for this naive millennial reader. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1091478.html

I am working through the 8th Doctor books not in order of internal continuity, but in order of popularity on LibraryThing (in the hope that I will thus discover some neglected gems towards the end). I'm afraid I didn't get a lot out of Alien Bodies. I liked the vignette of the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith burying Laika at the very beginning; and I applaud Miles for bringing back and making effective the Krotons, of all unlikely Old Who baddies, half way through.

But as so often, I stumbled on the means and motivation of the villains - in this case the Celestis, with quasi-magical powers including over the afterlife, squabbling with an unlikely assortment of bidders over the Doctor's corpse (from way ahead in his own timeline). I understand that this book is the basis for Miles' own run of spinoff Faction Paradox, so I understand why he was trying to do this, but didn't quite get what he was trying to do.

Sam Jones is the initial companion in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, and this is the third novel I've read featuring her. Miles strives to inject her with some extra background and cosmic significance, rather as the Old Who writers did with Ace in the last season in 1989 (the parallel is made explicit). This looked at one point like it was going somewhere interesting, but wasn't really resolved; I hope it will be in one of the other novels.

In summary, doesn't really seem like essential reading to me, but maybe its significance will become more obvious as I work through the series. ( )

I'd decided to get back into reading my Eighth Doctor novels and figured I might as well catch up on the beginning of the story. Alien Bodies was the next of the 'Eight and Sam' novels on my bookshelf and it was...not awful. My notes on it were brief and state that it was slow in the beginning, excellent in spots and weird in others which is, on the whole, a pretty decent summation.

I believe this book was one of the first to introduce the Faction Paradox and they are just as screwed up and weird as I'd expected. I admit that I kind of skimmed over some of the blood ritual stuff, not because of being squeamish, but because it was kind of boring. I have to give credit where it's due, though, and award Lawrence Miles some serious props for trying to make the Krotons badass. He almost succeeded at it, but the scene where the Kroton is trying to explain just how menacing its incoming warship is and none of the characters will take it seriously, is highly amusing.

At any rate, the book was overall a fun read and may be one I go back to eventually. ( )