The Space Age

The Eighth Doctor Adventures continue with The Space Age by Steve Lyons.  The arc of stories from The Shadows of Avalon onwards has focussed hugely on Compassion and her transformation into a human TARDIS.  The novels themselves have generally been quite good (after The Shadows of Avalon, which was horrid).  Both The Fall of Yquatine and Coldheart were pretty solid, fun adventures with well-written regulars.

The Space Age breaks a good run with a fairly middling story.  It’s not bad per se, but it does fizzle out after a strong conceptual start, has a bunch of thinly-drawn fairly interchangeable characters and does practically nothing with the regulars.

The Space Age sees the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion arrive on a strange planetoid with a futuristic city.  The city is populated by two groups of humans, with a third group living in the wilderness outside.

This third group is completely forgotten about after the first few chapters and referred to once in a sentence at the end.  It feels really sloppy and smacks of Lyons forgetting he had introduced them till he came to write the resolution.

The other two groups are, like the plain dwellers, from Earth – Earth of 1965 to be precise – and are a gang of Mods and a gang of Rockers.  Many years previously, an alien visitor to Earth transported them all to this planetoid in a misguided attempt to give them the future they desired.

As a concept, there is a lot of interest here.  The idea of Mods vs Rockers gang warfare playing out in a futuristic environment – one based on 1960s predictions of elevated walkways and moving pavements, gleaming chrome towers and food machines – is certainly a good basis for a Doctor Who story.

Unfortunately, the story is not capitalised on, mainly due to a thoroughly unengaging guest characters.  The two gangs are practically interchangeable – aggressive male leaders; emotional women; a hardened ‘technician’; an angry teenager and his ineffectual parents.  As a reader you are not made to care for them at all.  The futility of their constant aggression towards each other is repeatedly referred to but nothing is developed and because there is no point to the conflict, there’s no point in caring for the characters.  The leaders learn hardly anything; the women get to rally against the idiocy of the men; the angry teenager dies leaving his parents distraught.  It’s all just so cliched and dull.

I’m not usually one to be down on a Doctor Who story as I will always strive to find something to enjoy but this one ended up as such a disappointment that, towards the end, I was forcing myself to pick it up to read.  Aside from the unengaging cast of characters it also does nothing interesting with the regulars.  The Doctor falls in with the Rockers and is tasked with making them weapons to defeat the Mods – which obviously he doesn’t do, preferring to solve the mystery of why the city exists in the first place; Fitz falls in with the Mods and does nothing except strive to save his own hide until he can be reunited with the Doctor.  They are recognisably written but just do so little throughout the story.

Worst of all though is Compassion, who is literally sidelined for the whole story.  She ‘freezes’ at the outset of the story and then suddenly appears in the Mods base, communicates with the aliens responsible for the whole farrago and then leaves with the Doctor and Fitz.  It is, unfortunately, as if Lyons simply didn’t know what to do with her, despite the fact that her ‘special’ situation didn’t prevent her being used well in Coldheart (or, for that matter in the following novel, The Banquo Legacy).  A novel has the time and word count to accommodate plenty of characters so this seems like a failure on the part of Lyons.  It’s something which I don’t like writing because I’m a fan of Lyons other work – Conundrum, Killing Ground, The Murder Game, The Fires of Vulcan, Son of the Dragon and, recently reviewed in my other marathon, Harry Houdini’s War and Smoke and Mirrors – two excellent audios exploring the Doctor’s relationship with the famed escapologist.  The Space Age, unfortunately, feels like a job where Lyons has rather dropped the ball on a number of fronts – beyond the initial ‘pitch’.

Hopefully the next novel, The Banquo Legacy, can redress the balance somewhat.