In The Time Of The Breaking
Andrew Darlington
Alien Buddha paperback £12.49
**** (4 stars) review by Steven Hampton
Vaguely referencing Asimov’s classic Nightfall, as a planetary catastrophe becomes a personal apocalypse, In The Time Of The Breaking is about the seemingly colonial Qulan people that live inside huge mobile habitats, like Star Wars walkers, linked as a restless wagon-train. Young hero Culak Va-Saar is the viewpoint-character for first-person storytelling that injects the reader into a rush of narrative, while richly poetic descriptive flair gives many paragraphs and passages a vivid sense of place, with sensory intensity and immediacy, although some of the story’s events might be taking place only in the protagonist’s head-space.
Profoundly affected in their wanderings by the hazardous orbital approach of a super-Moon, the Qulan prep for stormy weather prompted by lunar gravity, while Culak fears for his own sanity due to EM disturbances that confuse and muddle individual thoughts with the memories of ancestors, apparently leaks from Culak’s inheritance of cyber-implants - embedded archival personalities and knowledge store-keepers. These implants provide hoarded familial wisdom and social continuity beyond death, if not exactly an artificial afterlife that is, perhaps, in conflict with reason or any psychological unity.
After pirates attack the Va-Saar vehicle, doomsday anxiety infects rationality and the survival plans of a wholly superstitious culture of guilds. Culak must confront his weird connections to all the voices in his mind, including his own shouldered angel and private demons, as the Qulan struggle to recover their questing spirit, harking back to the Wellsian era’s Things To Come, to endure and overcome crisis-management problems that recall When Worlds Collide.
Into this arena of ‘New Directions In Scientifiction’ (as the novel’s subtitle so audaciously proclaims), author Andrew Darlington scatters the grand mythic aspects of lost civilisations and a Phantom City, and offbeat vibes concerned with a competitive creativity festival, a futuristic artistic Festos, where Culak performs his phonetobardics composition, wisely inferred by its flavoursome taste only, and not explained in great detail. An adventure crashing out from the inner mind’s ‘paradoxical imagination’ to the outer limits of astrophysics, on an endangered world where the Moon looms terrifyingly larger than any of three Suns in the sky.
DOCTOR WHO: SCRATCHMAN
Tom Baker
BBC hardcover £16.99
**** (4 stars) review by Christopher Geary
An irresistible novelty book, this delivers on the promise of genre-franchise fiction in a manner rarely seen but always welcome. An actor famous for a beloved incarnation of a favourite character turns his hand, somewhat belatedly in his professional career, to an original novel based on his own performance of British SF-fantasy & horror superhero, the Doctor. The book attempts, quite boldly, to distil everything admirable, fascinating, and quirkily eccentric about Tom Baker’s tenure on the TV show into a chaptered story that flits effortlessly thorough Whovian lore, and Gallifreyan mythology, complete with much space-time gallivanting, with engagingly distressed, and endangered, companions. It never challenges readers' loyalty to the on-going show, and mostly fulfils expectations. OK, so there are no Daleks, but a Cyberman guest-stars, and both Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan are very well represented in a devil-bracing narrative dotted with mortal perils. All things considered, Doctor Who: Scratchman is great fun, and nearly a new kind of retro-Who masterpiece.
It starts with a small island, besieged by animated scarecrows. Not just any old farming-related traditional menace, but zombified creatures, seemingly the ‘possessed’ bodies of local folks, victims of an inter-dimensional invasion. It’s a fairly typical Doctor Who foe, at first, but shocks accumulate, horrors increase, and stakes are raised as eldritch forces behind the evil goings-on makes a claim upon planet Earth, and the mystery of ‘Scratch’ unfolds. In-between all of the present-tense developments, on the morbidly conquered island and later, in a surrealistic version of ‘Hell’ that Terry Gilliam might have once imagined, the Doctor confronts antagonism outside of his familiar adventures in an episodic court-room drama that requires him to educate the immortal Time Lords about fear itself and its philosophical consequences for a multiplicity of intelligent life in a wholly indifferent universe.
Yes, Scratchman is often a genuinely subtle story concerning the mortal dreads found at the heart of horror as a distinctive genre. Its varied menaces, drawn by Scratch from ‘the dreams of ghosts’ depend upon widescreen cinematic mayhem but, in this ever-relatable incarnation of the Doctor (all of our hero’s dialogue is carefully worded so as to facilitate the tones of Baker’s distinctive voice in the reader’s imagination), even troubles of death-games on a fantastical, enchanted battlefield that rudely mixes pinball and chess, can be overcome by a charming ideological perseverance, sincere brand loyalty, and honestly heroic self-sacrifice to honour human friendships.
The inclusion of jelly-babies and neutron-flows are wittily integrated into this SF/ fantasy adventure and will surprise no fans of Doctor Who in the 1970s, but the Doctor’s knowing humour extends far beyond a merely jokey approach, and exploitation of such familiar check-list items. Appearances by previous Doctors are handled with levity but also respect for the other actors potent contributions to the franchise. Scratchman delivers an expansive narrative in less than 300 pages, and it’s a publication that offers the hugely satisfying appeal of a ‘last chance to see’ event.
