Eighth Doctor Adventures #11 - "Dreamstone Moon" by Paul Leonard

One thing keeps bugging me about the EDAs, one thing that keeps coming up, and resolving itself and unresolving itself and taking over my reviews: Sam. Sam, for a long time, was my least favourite companion ever. I found her a bland retreading of better companions that had nothing new to say or do. Then came the Finding Sam arc and with Longest Day, I had finally started to come around to her. And now I don’t know anymore. I have a confused relationship with Paul Leonard - I remember reading and liking quite a few of his works, but then I forgot them and read the absolute mess that is Genocide. Dreamstone Moon isn’t quite as annoyingly convoluted as that one - in fact, it’s astoundingly simple - but it still carries over his worst qualities, leading to yet another dud for the EDAs.

Separated from the Doctor, Sam finds herself on Dreamstone Moon, where the eponymous mineral that records unconscious thoughts is mined. But with the Doctor hot on her tail, she discovers the horrifying secret about Dreamstone Moon, and how it might just kill them both.

(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Leonard is often called a “complex writer”; I remember from collection videos back in the day his works being described as having complicated plots and being hard to follow. I disagree, from what I’ve seen of his work, he’s relatively bland with his storytelling. However, he is mind numbingly confounding with his prose. I had the same problem with Genocide, where he comes up with all these unique, detailed alien locations and then fundamentally fails at conveying them to the reader. His worldbuilding is thorough - I may criticize the man’s storytelling capabilities, but he has some great sci-fi concepts in him - but it’s so hard to visualise anything he’s writing. His descriptions are always a little too short or a little too vague, they focus on the wrong things or entirely omit details. For the record, I love how interesting and alien the setting of Dreamstone Moon is, it really feels like a lived in galaxy and not the usual convergence of future humans. However, reading this book is a chore and so often I just ignored some of his descriptions because they were so confusing.

The purpose of this little rant was to tell you the backdrop with which I read the rest of this book, because for all intents and purposes, this is a very simple story. We’re on a moon, there’s a mysterious substance, the moon is alive. Throw in some action, some character deaths and a snappy climax, and you have yourself a book. Now, a simple story doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad one and I can go as far as to say I enjoyed quite a bit of Dreamstone Moon; it didn’t blow me away, but it was a decently engaging story with a nice little mystery to it. For all of the problems I have with it, this book is not substantial enough for my issues to be more than surface level. This is certainly not a terrible book and after Legacy of the Daleks, it’s a godsend. However, I still have some points I really struggled with.

For one, let’s talk characters. Our sidecast this time around is actually pretty good. The stand out character is alien environmental protester Aloisse, who’s paired up with Sam for most of the book and is by far the most realistic and interesting. The friendship the two form is actually quite endearing and she was at the centre of most of this book’s political allegory. There is also temporary sidekick Daniel, who’s somewhat bland but gets the job done and then there’s Cleomides. See, like I said earlier, this book has some political allegory in it. The main thing is environmentalism - a company is harvesting parts of a living being for profit, it isn’t subtle - but there’s also some stuff about racism, with Cleomides being a soldier with a harsh distrust of aliens. She’s a little all over the place for me, I like the idea of her character arc and learning to trust the Doctor but it’s really not handled well. The story ends with her siding with the Doctor and that’s kind of the point where we see she’s redeemed, but she’s also just left two people for dead because they’re aliens. Her character doesn’t change naturally, it changes for the plot. And that’s my biggest problem with this book’s commentary, it doesn’t feel well written into the story, it feels like window dressing. It comes and goes and there are glimmers of interesting stuff in there but it feels entirely disposable.

And then there’s Sam. So, Sam’s been growing on me recently and, especially in Longest Day, I’ve been accepting her more and more as a nuanced character. And it all came crashing back down in this book because I really don’t care about her here. She’s the central focus for most of this novel and I don’t really know what it is about her that makes her so lifeless to me but there’s definitely something. She’s spunky and foolhardy and optimistic but it’s all so one note. The fact that she feels so much like earlier, better companions really harms her but also, it might be that all these traits feel less like traits of Sam Jones and more like traits of a generic companion. Sam is a seventeen year old girl from 90s London and it barely shows. She’s confident, mature, determined and none of that really feels to me like it lines up with that backstory. She’s far too generic and what possible uses she could have are overlooked. There was some stuff later on I did like, where she feels guilty for leaving the Doctor and is conflicted on her feelings for him. I do really like the idea of a companion being in love with the Doctor but being completely unreciprocated, it fits the character a lot better and is a nice subversion of expectations. I also think Eight’s a little bland in this one, I couldn’t picture McGann speaking a lot of the lines and he seems very uninterested in getting Sam back. The whole Sam and the Doctor being separated thing feels very contrived here, there’s literally a moment where the Doctor has the option to go get Sam and says “oh, that can wait”.

So, as it stands, we have a generic but entertaining story with a decent side cast but some really weak theming and characterisation. Not a terrible book, but also not the end of the world. However, the conclusion really screws this book up for me. Dreamstone Moon doesn’t have an ending, not really. It wraps up incredibly abruptly and leaves a bunch of plot threads unceremoniously dumped. Everything goes from zero to a hundred in a second, the moon is destroyed and we’re dumped on the planet below for a bit. We barely get to explore it, some technobabble is thrown at us and we leave the story behind with very little satisfying resolution. Combining all of this with Leonard's miserably convoluted prose and the final thirty or so pages were utterly tensionless for me. It’s a real shame because I was looking forward to seeing where everything was going, but it all really went nowhere. It’s not like everything before this was amazing and this was all a massive let down, but it’s still a great disappointment in my opinion.

I did enjoy Dreamstone Moon, it engaged me for most of its page count and I think that’s the main thing a book should do. However, I was not invested in the real meat of it all, none of the arcs or themes engrossed me and I left it feeling a little cheated. It probably doesn’t help that I really don’t get on with how Paul Leonard writes things, but this was an unfortunate dud. The EDAs are slipping back into painful mediocrity, can anybody save us? Maybe Kate Orman.

5/10

Pros:

+ Really unique and thorough world building

+ Decent side cast

+ The story, whilst simple, is relatively engaging

Cons:

- I really struggle with Leonard’s prose

- The entire conclusion feels rushed and underdeveloped

- Has a thin allegory shoehorned in

- Sam goes back to being bland and generic

A pretty solid story, and thank heavens, after the slogfest that was 'Legacy of the Daleks'.

Quite a few characters in this one, but all of them have a purpose in the story, are well used, and well characterized. The mystery of Dreamstone Moon (I kept forgetting in what order the words 'dream', 'stone', and 'moon' were supposed to go) was solid, meaning we can figure things out along with the characters, not be told what they have understood. The environmental message was nothing groundbreaking, a classic 'the moon's alive!', but it explored the politics behind protesting against mining corporations in a compelling way, specially through Aloisse (very good character) and Daniel. Xenophobia and (alien) racism were also big points explored mostly through Cleomides' interactions with Aloisse and the Doctor. It was a bit more clumsily done, not woven into the plot as neatly as the political discussion, but still interesting.

In terms of the general structure of the book, my only complaints were that 1) things are a bit too fast and confusing in the final act, when they go from the moon to the planet, 2) some descriptions of locations are kind of hard to follow (could be just a me problem, though), and 3) Sam almost dies way too many times. Seriously, I think she has 5 or 6 near death experiences, being saved at the last possible second.

I am happy to say Sam Jones is a proper character in this book! She has a good characterization, makes decisions, fights for what she believes in, tries to save people, screws up, gets saved, all of it! I spent the whole book on the edge of my proverbial seat waiting for her and the Doctor to reunite, as the writer no doubt intended. A bit frustrating how many times they find each other, but get immediately separated again. Sam is incredibly guilty for abandoning the Doctor for dead in 'Longest Day', even though it was absolutely not her fault. It was not even her decision to do so: she was in shock, Anstaar put her in a ship and sent her away. Similarly, Cleomides is the one that forces her to abandon him in Mu Camelopides VI. But now Sam thinks the Doctor must believe she's abandoning him on purpose. And yeah, he kinda does. It was very strange of him to consider not going to look for her in 'Legacy of the Daleks', as it was obvious he should at least make sure she was alright. He finds her here, but they only have two direct interactions in this story: when they see each other across the crowd in the moonbase, him yelling her name, her begging the soldiers not to shoot him; and through the shuttle radio at the final act, when she doesn't say a word to him because she's overwhelmed by emotions (guilt and love, mainly). So yeah, he has assured she's alright, but he doesn't know if this means he should scram. I would be mad if this wasn't so in character for Mr. Abandonment Issues. Paraphrasing Aloisse, 'Just go talk to the girl, mate, ffs'.

The list of bodily and mental harm remains unchanged. The Doctor does get shot in the leg, but this makes 0 difference during the story, so I'm not counting it. If this was Sam's list it would be 1382 points on Near Death Experience, though.

Hyped for 'Seeing I' next!