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Title: Dark Progeny (Doctor Who) by Steve Emmerson ISBN: 0-563-53837-6 Publisher: Bbc Pubns Pub. Date: August, 2001 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Above-average run of the mill
Comment: "Dark Progeny", as you can see above, has one of the most charmless cover illustrations in the long, sad history of the BBC "Doctor Who" novels. The mutant baby pictured looks far too much like Robert Carlyle with a week's stubble. The descriptive back-cover blurb is also fairly uninviting. We learn there's a character named "Gaskill Tyran", and this can bode well for nobody. When the Doctor is described in the blurb's final sentence as a "mysterious infiltrator", I knew there was going to be trouble.
"Dark Progeny" itself is a thoughtful action-adventure piece, written in a very visual style. This is to be expected from sophomore author Steve Emmerson, who previously wrote the visually-innovative "Casualties of War". It's often a criticism hurled at DW book writers that they're trying too hard to write for the small screen, but Emmerson writes lush, big-budget SF. Here we have grotesque monsters, fierce storms, lots of holograms, pretty starscapes, and a city-sized Machine.
The plot is something of a mess. The prologue opens with a childbirth gone horribly wrong (and was probably inspired in the delivery room at 4 AM), and is followed by a parade of mean, cynical 30th-century human imperialists and corporate types. The Doctor's two companions are brutalized, both mentally and by rat attack. The 8th Doctor is his manic self, going over the top at a funeral and yet getting some nicely reflective moments when he's alone (and not acting). The final 20 pages are an awful mess, with lots of dangling probabilities. All the book's surviving characters burst into the same room all at once (but it's a big room) and there's one shockingly silly revelation about a villain's paternity. The weird two-page epilogue feels as if it were shot 6 months after producton, on another set, and Anji wearing a different hairstyle.
On the whole, this is the "default" Eighth Doctor novel. It incorporates all the positive and negative aspects of the line, and if DW were still a TV show, this would be that episode that was always on, the rerun you could never get away from -- but watched anyway.
Rating: 3
Summary: Great characters wandering around a hum-drum plot
Comment: DARK PROGENY could have turned out to be much worse than it actually ending up being. Despite it being quite well written, it has one major factor working against it; the plot is wafer thin, and stretched to its breaking point. This severely upsets the pacing, leaving a rushed conclusion where the threads from the first two hundred pages or so are slapped together inside about thirty. DARK PROGENY ends up being as enjoyable as it is solely on Steve Emmerson's strength in writing realistic characters.
There is a larger cast of characters in this story than we're probably used to seeing in the average Doctor Who story. In other books, this would have resulted in several people becoming faceless plot ciphers with little to do but run around and discover clues at exactly the right moment. Here, however, every character is extremely well created. One can tell that a lot of time and effort went into producing characters that are believable and interesting. Their lives, motives and thought processes are all realistic and engaging. We keep reading because we want to see how the plot affects these people, not necessarily because we want to see how the plot unfolds. Despite the flaws in storytelling, the characters make the book marginally recommendable.
The society that the Doctor and crew have landed in is also portrayed very well. The larger cast helps Emmerson show off the different parts of the world without any individual location left underdeveloped. The action feels like it's taking place in a city rather than a collection of sets. Emmerson is a deceptively good author. In only a few pages he manages to convey a coherent culture of the future. In a handful of cases, we can see where he fell back on pre-existing continuity, yet everything ends up feeling fresh. A few minor Doctor Who clichés are revisited, but they're given new life and don't drag the story down at all.
With a great setting and an interesting group of people, one would expect the regulars to benefit from their current environment. Alas, this is not the case. Unfortunately neither one of the companions is terribly active for much of this adventure. Anji ends up being a key player at the beginning and at the end, but for much of the middle she has very little to do other than passing out and requiring medical attention. Her passages have the advantage of being well written enough that I was almost distracted from the fact that she spent most of the book doing absolutely nothing at all. Yet it still felt rather unsatisfying.
Fitz also spends a lot of time in various states of health, but he is even farther away from the action. Thematically, it makes sense for the Doctor to believe that Fitz has died; many of the characters are forced to deal with the pain of loss followed by the shock of reunion (or at least the tantalizing hope that their loved one may not be gone forever). But in this case the thread is a complete dead end. It doesn't affect the plot, it doesn't really tell us anything about the setting that we didn't already know, and it doesn't give us any new insight to any other of the characters. Fitz's sections end up dragging flatter and flatter as one realizes that whatever happens to him isn't going to make a blind bit of difference to anything else. This sort of thing has happened to Fitz before in previous books, but here his subplot just isn't interesting enough.
Overall, this book ended up being quite average. Steve Emmerson is quite good at writing of actual prose, and he creates great characters that stand beside the best that the range has invented. The Eighth Doctor has rarely been better than the portrayal that he receives here. But the weakness in this story was the lack of a coherent and sustained plot. The pacing was way off and the manner in which the ending wrapped itself up so quickly really draws attention the flaws. However, despite the problems with this one, it's just about worth reading to see the setting and the characters that Emmerson created. I'll be looking forward to his next book and hopefully it will be better plotted.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great 8th Doctor book that marks a recovery from Slow Empire
Comment: After the monstrosity that was The Slow Empire (which I can't review, seeing as Amazon doesn't carry it), I'm glad to say that Dark Progeny marks a return to form for the 8th Doctor novels. Dark Progeny is, as the title suggests, a very dark novel, but it is still very well written with intriguing situations and not too many missteps.
The Doctor, Anji and Fitz make an emergency landing on Ceres Alpha after the TARDIS suffers a telepathic attack that also seems to be affecting Anji for some reason. Ceres Alpha is having problems of its own, though. The developing city-machine is having numerous breakdowns, and a bunch of strange babies with apparent telepathic powers has been born. What is going on? What is the connection between the terraforming, the babies and the malfunctions?
Steve Emmerson presents the reader with a very interesting situation, one that expands on traditional Doctor Who stories. The basics of the story could have been told on the TV series, but Emmerson increases the tension and the violence to an extent that would make this book pretty unfilmable. And isn't that the purpose of the books anyway? To expand on the series?
The Doctor and his companions are put through hell in this book, and they come out all the better for it. I sometimes shivered at the stuff that they were going through, even as I couldn't wait to read further to find out how they got out of the situation. The mystery of Ceres Alpha makes you want to read further to find out what is going on. I do have to say that the ultimate revelation is telegraphed a bit too early (I figured it out about half-way through the book while the Doctor figures it out on page 266). But it is an interesting one, so I'll forgive it.
The characters are well-portrayed for the most part. This is the Doctor and Anji's book and Fitz is sidelined for most of it. However, he is given a lot to do even if none of it really has any affect on the outcome of the story. While he again is very attracted to a female character in the book, at least nothing much is made of it. That would bother me usually, but since it happens so often and something *is* made of it, it was nice to have Fitz's feelings appear to be unreciprocated.
Anji is also very well done, though we don't really learn much about her. She spends the first portion of the book unconscious, and then spends the rest of the book running, being interrogated, running again, etc. She plays a very important part in the mystery of the book, however, so what she does go through is important, unlike Fitz.
The Doctor shines in this book, though. His compassion is marvelously portrayed, and he seems a lot more "Doctor-like" in this one than he has been in the past few books. There are no uncharacteristic violent tendencies that he's had. Not that this is a bad thing in previous books, but the fact that he seems more normal in this one is a sign that he's settling into his role to an extent. He's alternately whimsical, tender, and full of righteous outrage which makes him far more recognizable to the fan of the TV series than he has been before.
The other characters, Bains, Veta, Josef, Peron (applicable name in this case) and most especially Tyran are also well-portrayed. Tyran's motivation is very clear and he's not just a villain in order to be a villain. His background very much colours the way he is now. Each character has a part to play in the narrative, and none of them are wasted. Veta and Josef start out as very tragic characters, and I wondered what they would end up having to do with the plot. The result was very nicely done.
This is a good book to recommend to Who fans who have thought the books are too much of a departure from the series. It's very intense and very violent, so keep that in mind as well. But its roots are definitely back in the series, with the Doctor fighting bureaucracy and the military for the greater good of a society.
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Title: Grimm Reality (Doctor Who) by Kelly Hale, Simon Bucher-Jones ISBN: 0563538414 Publisher: Bbc Pubns Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: The City of the Dead (Doctor Who) by Lloyd Rose ISBN: 0563538392 Publisher: Bbc Pubns Pub. Date: September, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: The Turing Test (Doctor Who Series) by Paul Leonard ISBN: 0563538066 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: 15 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Reckless Engineering (Doctor Who) by Nick Walters ISBN: 0563486031 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Casualties of War (Doctor Who Series) by Steve Emmerson ISBN: 0563538058 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: 15 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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