It can't have escaped notice, despite all my personal efforts to the contrary, that we're now on the slippery slope to Christmas. We've not even got Halloween out of the way, but there are mince pies and christmas puddings in my local supermarket and the kids are scouring the catalogues to write up their letters to Santa.
Now the latest Doctor Who novel from BBC Books has landed with a thump on my doormat to complicate matters further.
"The Silent Stars Go By" by Dan Abnett is the second in the range of 'big hardback' novels, started last year with Michael Moorcock's disappointing "The Coming of the Terraphiles". The title is a lyric from the Christmas carol 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' (a conceit extended to the chapter titles also) and seems to be aimed (or at least marketed given the cover image) squarely at the seasonal market. Somewhat unnecessarily, I feel.
In an attempt to get Amy and Rory home to Leadworth for Christmas, the Doctor manages to land them in a typical misadventure several centuries and light years away from the target, but smack bang in the middle of a Christmas-esque 'wonderland' of snow, ice and deadly danger. In fact, that's pretty much the extent of the Christmassy-wistmassy. There's no Christmas carols (apart from the titles), or brightly coloured decorations. No robot Santa’s or parties on the Titanic. This isn't what we've come to know and expect from Doctor Who at Christmas since David Tennant first leapt about sword-fighting in his PJ's. This is an old-fashioned tale of a winter solstice where (as the tagline says) 'Life is Hard' and 'Death is Easy' and as long as you go in expecting that, then life is a lot simpler and it also makes the ensuing story a great deal easier to read at any time of the year.
In short order, the TARDIS crew are separated with the Doctor and Amy encountering the locals and Rory running for his life from something big, green and scary. (Separating the team is a cliché, but it’s gone so far towards being a cliché that it’s come out the other side to become a necessary story-telling tool.) The Doctor and Amy learn the background of the peasant village of Beside and, thanks to a nice subversion of the usual 'get out of jail free' psychic paper frolics, are quickly blamed for the woes that beset the villagers. (In fact, we see a couple of occasions where the tropes of the new series are undercut to propel the story along.) The setting invites a favourable comparison with the neo-Dickensian planet of the 2010 Christmas special. Beside, with its well drawn mix of ancient peasant village tending to future technology does give it all a somewhat timeless quality.
Rory, while getting the raw end of the deal at this point, always gets the chance to shine when isolated from his wife and her best (imaginary) mate. Let's face it, Rory is reliable, intelligent and loyal, but he'll always be in the Doctor's shadow and he does tend to follow Amy around like a big-eyed puppy. Put him in the spotlight and his qualities spring to the fore, so a definite plus for Rory fans.
Author Dan Abnett may not have the 'mainstream name' status that Michael Moorcock, Stephen Baxter or Alistair Reynolds might have, but he is a prolific writer. Probably best known these days for writing in the Warhammer and Warhammer40K universes, he has also written comics for all the major companies in the UK and USA and is best remembered by myself for his work in 2000AD on Sinister/Dexter and the Strontium Dog spin-off, Durham Red. Dan demonstrates in every page his ability as a writer. The dialogue is crisp. The characters are the actors and the actors are the characters. Every word you can hear being performed by Matt and Karen and Arthur. The world that is painted in the words is fully realised, but with enough efficiency of language to stop it becoming dull or laboured.
Even without knowledge of the writers’ previous career you can tell that he knows his Doctor Who inside and out. Dan contributed comic strip scripts to Doctor Who Magazine between 1988 and 1994 as well as entries into modern Who and Torchwood through BBC Books. Having written continuity based crowd pleasers like The Mark of Mandragora, Pureblood (featuring the Sontarans) and The Harvest (for Big Finish featuring the Cybermen), he's an ideal writer to bring the books main antagonists, the Ice Warriors, to the page. (No, that's not a spoiler. They're on the cover.) It seems a positive no-brainer to put Martians into a wintry landscape, so I'm amazed that we still haven't seen them reinvented for the 21st century on the television. No longer are they just the lumbering, hissing behemoths of sixties Who. These are the honourable, but pragmatic warriors that were developing in the Jon Pertwee Peladon stories and have been expanded upon in spin-off literature over the last twenty years.
"The Silent Stars Go By" is undoubtedly going to end up under many fans Christmas trees this year and I can't think of a better way than passing a few wintry hours in the company of this book, but it stands alone as an excellent Doctor Who novel that can be enjoyed anytime and anyplace.
Published by BBC Books, 29th September 2011. RRP £12.99
Dan Abnett can be followed on twitter @VincentAbnett and has his own website at http://www.danabnett.com/
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