Virgin New Adventures #23 - "No Future" by Paul Cornell

Paul Cornell has been, for a very long time, one of my favourite Doctor Who writers ever; and since Rob Shearman never wrote an original Who novel, I can safely call Cornell my favourite author from the Wilderness Years. From the groundbreaking Love and War to the gorgeously rich Goth Opera, Cornell has had a pretty much flawless streak throughout his tenure, so didn’t it come as a surprise that one of his books seemed relatively maligned. No Future is usually brought up as Cornell’s lesser effort - an opinion seemingly even shared by the man himself - so I found myself entering it tenaciously. Especially after the absolute joy that was Conundrum, did I find No Future to be the let down I was told it was?

Somebody has been playing with time. With his TARDIS crew divided and his old home of London falling into anarchy, the Doctor finally enters an end game with an unseen foe. But with even his closest friends turning on him, can the Doctor win this match?

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Let me just begin by saying this is by no means a bad book. Cornell is one of the writers who I think can never do true wrong. All of his books carry an excellent style and characterisation to them and even though this is probably the worst solo effort I’ve seen out of him, it doesn’t lose the charm that makes him so good.

Anyway, let’s recap: this is the end of the alternate time cycle - the arc of books that began way back with Blood Heat - and Cornell has the tall task of wrapping up all the plot threads and reuniting our characters, who have drifted apart in recent novels. Not easy, certainly, but if anybody should be up to the task, it’s this guy. Right? 

Well, first of all, I think No Future is perfectly serviceable in all these departments, the arc is decently concluded by the time it wraps up and we can move on to bigger and better things. However, there are a lot of ups and downs in the way he carries it out. For instance, I think his biggest challenge was probably character since things had become so strained between members of our cast. In my opinion, he succeeds the most with Ace, who is at the forefront of this novel.

Ace, in this iteration, is a soldier, a violent and volatile woman hanging by a thread, ready to turn on her travelling companions at any point. And here, she does. I. Love. This. This is something I have wanted for so long: a companion who actually betrays the TARDIS team in a believable and sympathetic way. Ace has been through some s**t in this series so when she seems to switch sides half way through, we believe it. Do you know how difficult it is to have a character actively try to murder the other leads and still feel sympathetic? It’s like the perfect culmination to where she’s been going since Deceit and I was enraptured with every detail about her heel turn. And then it turns out she was just manipulating the antagonist. Frankly, this is understandable - she still had to be a companion, that wouldn’t really work if she tried to murder the Doctor and Benny in this book. But to that I say: “cowards!”. Do something new, do something fresh, this was predictable! Granted, it’s not bad, it still feels natural and ties off her character growth nicely but personally, I would’ve found it way more interesting if she fully did betray the Doctor here. Although, betrayal or not, this is still a great book for Ace.

As for the rest of our cast, the Doctor is also pretty damn stand out. This seems to be the end of his overly moody phase, which is a relief, but you can really tell how much Cornell gets Seven. The chessmaster is robbed of his board, his pieces retroactively taken away from him, and he has to save the day on his own two feet again. Really, this only works because of his dynamic with our main antagonist - the Monk. The Monk is not a character I would’ve thought would work in the VNAs, he’s a decidedly silly 60s villain whose concept doesn’t really work anymore because the Doctor has turned meddling with time into his MO. However, in came Cornell and he absolutely solved it. One, he doesn’t change the Monk’s character to be darker or anything, this is still a gloating, self-aggrandizing asshole with a huge ego and the book still makes him a threat through his unhinged abilities as a time lord. He’s a really interesting villain because he’s not outwardly threatening and obviously flawed, which we honestly rarely see in these grand, time hopping villains. And then there’s the relationship he has with the Doctor, which is where the real good stuff comes in. To exemplify this, I’ll just talk about my favourite scene in the book; the Monk has captured the Doctor and is monologuing about how he acts all superior and criticises the Monk’s own use of time travel whilst turning around and doing the same thing himself and when he tries to turn it around on the Doctor, ask why he can do it and the Monk can’t, the Doctor just replies: “skill.”. And that single line saves the Monk as a character whilst also perfectly capturing what makes Seven so great. The Doctor meddles with time, sure, but the Monk bulldozes it. There’s so much good stuff between these two, from when the Monk realises he’s nearly revealed his entire plan in a monologue and stops himself to the final confrontation between the two, where the Doctor tries to save the Monk’s life despite everything. They’re really the crutch of this book and were by far the best part.

Nobody else in the cast really hits the same highs but they’re still pretty strong. I can safely say I love Benny now, even if she doesn’t grow that much throughout the book. She joins a punk band and has some great scenes with the Doctor, it’s enough. We also have UNIT returning, which should be an instant positive for me but I do feel their characterisation was a little weak. The Brigadier didn’t feel quite as lovable as usual here, I don’t know how to describe it. However, it’s still UNIT and I’m still happy.

So, our characters are all pretty strong and their development is solid, we can confidently call that part of the story good. But how is the rest? Well, this is where No Future’s failings begin to show themselves because this book can only be described as a mess. So, I mentioned how the Monk was our surprise villain, yeah? Well, so are the Vardans, who have been working with the Monk to invade Earth. But also so is a chronovore that the Monk has trapped in his TARDIS. And that chronovore is talking to Ace in her dreams and also that punk band Benny joined have to do something to save the world and UNIT’s been mostly replaced by Vardans and- it gets cumbersome quickly and ends up being pretty damn hard to follow. You can tell too much stuff needed to be in this book because a lot feels rushed. Scenes happen without context sometimes, whole plot threads barely go anywhere, a lot of the novel feels like filler, it’s a very unpolished novel in my opinion.

And what makes it stranger is that there is genuinely brilliant stuff here; the aforementioned moments between the Monk and the Doctor are obviously the highlight but there are whole stretches of this book that felt like true, 10/10 material, with some incredible ideas and moments of character. The way I’d describe it is I feel like this is a great book that got published a few drafts too early. It’s very rough around the edges and it begins to hurt the story in major ways. For one, the first half is very slow and takes a good hundred pages to get to the real plot and all that great character development is just kind of written off in the end. For as much as I love what this did with our companions, the conclusion is a travesty. Ace was faking the whole time, the last however many books of tension are instantly forgiven and they literally go hand in hand back to the TARDIS. I understand that they had to resolve the tension because it was beginning to impact the stories too much but when half the story is about the end point of that tension being a betrayal, the sudden hokey skip off into the sunset doesn’t hit well at all.

Which is a real shame, because No Future felt so close to being great. The energy is really there, the use of a counter-culture movement in the plot really gives the whole novel such a lively momentum that makes it a super easy read. It’s just that the plot is so cumbersome and poorly handled. I think Cornell did what he had to do and the arc concluded well, but there’s too many plot points being juggled for this to feel satisfying as an individual novel.

6/10

Pros:

+ Incredible introspection of Seven’s character

+ Ace gets some all-time great material

+ Kinetic and rebellious tone

+ Peppered with moments of true greatness

+ The Monk was a surprisingly interesting villain

Cons:

- Overstuffed and incohesive

- Difficult to follow in places

- Pacing is all over the place

- The conclusions to the character arcs are disappointing