Everything Picture 6 - Timey Wimey Remix

Even if you removed the cover images and the names and descriptions of the Doctor and his companions from the text, you could easily tell these books are based on Moffat's version of Doctor Who - all of them play tricks with time and all three take place in different time zones, although all three come up with very different variations on the timey-wimey theme.

Touched by an Angel comes across as an attempt to rewrite One Day as a Doctor Who novel via (I assume) the Highway to Heaven-esque US TV show from which the book steals its title.  Given that much of the best Doctor Who is stolen from recognisable stories, it's a matter of taste as to whether you think it's a good thing or not - many of the best stories have been openly based on obvious antecedents.  Morris opens the novel with the tragedy that forms the book's MacGuffin, a woman called Rebecca dying a meaningless early death in an accident on a minor country road.  Morris' way of integrating One Day into the Doctor Who format is to make the story about Mark, Rebecca's husband, being offered the chance to prevent the accident via a mysterious letter from a Magwitch style benefactor.  And the price of one man's happiness?  The end of Earth's history just to provide a feast for a band of Weeping Angels.  It's well executed stuff, with the Morris using the Angels as the omnipresent threat they were in Blink and Mark and Rebecca being as convincing as they need to be to carry the novel.  Morris perhaps overdoes the use of pop music as shorthand to show when the book's set, and takes a turn to the saccharine for the ending but the book retains enough charm to more than compensate for those faults.

My previous encounters with George Mann were both via short story, one in the Short Trips collection Transmissions and the other from Obverse Books' Iris Abroad. It's a rarity for me to say that I enjoyed both as Doctor Who can be a difficult format to condense into a short story.  Mann's short story experience isn't quite as irrelevant as it may seem, as with the other two books here it's shaped around one main guest character who the author spends plenty of time establishing.  Angelchrist is an Edwardian adventurer in the literary lineage of Professor Challenger or Allen Quartermain, a one man forerunner of UNIT.  As such, he couldn't really fail to be thoroughly entertaining and you can easily imagine a veteran British character actor making a memorable success of the part were he ever translated to screen.  The antagonists of the book are the Squall, a hive mind creature that resembles a gargoyle and feeds on minds.  Of course, if they manage to spread their infection beyond the confines of the part of London we meet them in they'll suck the Earth dry and irrevocably change galactic history.  They're an ingenious and effective race, and I wouldn't be sorry to see them make a return appearance.  The major paradox is perhaps a little too straightforwardly resolved for my taste, but again, it's a flaw overcome by some good prose and excellent characterisation.

The final book in this batch is easily the best to feature Matt Smith's Doctor, perhaps even the best of the NSAs full stop.  Doctor Who's previous satire about the monetary system, The Sunmakers, was something of a sour attack by Robert Holmes on the tax system of the 1970s, the usual profusion of droll lines not concealing an ill disguised ire on the part of the writer which blunted the satiric intent.  Naomi Alderman's satire is equally as unsubtle, perhaps less, but as it's less judgemental it works much better.  Alderman uses the notion of a satirical portrayal of the banking practices to underpin the whole novel, letting it feed into everything from the nature of her villains to the settings, characters and resolution.  The temptation offered by the villains - more time - is one few people could refuse, a desired convenience out of our current technological reach.  And as it's one you can imagine normal humans falling for in a heartbeat, there's already a note of verisimilitude to characters that, say, everyone in the world having the same satnav system doesn't really provide.  You can sympathise with the characters because they're acting in a believable way from the start.  Alderman's use of the regulars to take a sly poke at corporate culture is ingenious too - it uses our familiarity with them, and Amy and Rory's normality, to point out the little idiocies that build up in any workplace, particularly high powered ones.  Alderman delivers a solid gold idea wrapped up in a rollicking adventure with a soupcon of wit.

In short then, easily the best batch of books the NSAs have yet delivered.  The future's bright... unless, of course, it's destroyed by dastardly aliens...

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1969 - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 by Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

It's always slightly awkward to review middle volumes of a story. Whatever you do it'll be somewhat imperfect - themes and storylines will have emerged but you won't be seeing the full picture by any means. Nevertheless Alan Moore's stated aim with the Century trilogy is for each one to tell a self contained story as well as form part of the overall tale. So it's fair game.

What we get is a story rooted firmly in 1969, the end of the hippy dream. The main elements of the story, aside from those introduced in Century: 1910,are drawn from two contemporary films that indicate the darkness that (by conventional interpretation) crept in at the end of the peace 'n' love hippy era. The first is the 1970 film Performance, which featured Mick Jagger as a dissolute rock star, the second Get Carter. From the moment Moore and O'Neill open with a recreation of the death of Brian Jones it's clear we're going to see a lot more of the League universe's version of the Rolling Stones,the Purple Orchestra. And by that extension one of the main characters is based on Jagger's character in Performance. Except now we're in the minefield of the copyright era it's Terner rather than Turner. It's not the only time a crafty copyright dodging wink is used in the volume either, the rich fictional background that could be freely employed in the volumes up to now largely reduced to almost cameo spotting. I'm still not quite sure as to whether it robs the League of a large degree of its charm. It doesn't bode entirely well for the final volume in the series, particularly when coupled with Moore's murmurings about finding 2009 a barren cultural wasteland. Perhaps the frontier of pop culture of today has simply moved beyond his interests, as it must eventually move beyond us all. Certainly his pronouncments on the state of comics (however valid you find them) indicate a certain degree of alienation from modern fictions.

Moore's discomfort with modern culture is perhaps best reflected in an emergig theme, shown in a division between the two core characters of Allen Quartermain and Mina Harker over their attitude to effective immortality. Mina attempts to embrace the social changes of the era, seemingly not entirely successfully whilst Quartermain remains uncomfortable with change, mired in Victorian values to a degree. Moore is ambivalent about both approaches, showing them as both being ineffective as neither approach really deals with the major problem of living beyond your era. The longer you live, the less you understand of an ever changing world, and that seems to be the real problem at the root of the contrasting approaches. It'll be fascinating to see how that's resolved in the final volume.

As usual though, what makes the story work is the synchronicity between Moore and Kevin O'Neill. Once more there's a wealth of devils in the detail, a blizzard of references salted away in the artwork (including at least three to Doctor Who, something almost certainly pure O'Neill given Moore's oft stated distate for the post-Hartnell Doctors). As ever this means it requires multiple reads to catch the references, and even then you can't be certain of catching everything without recourse to Jess Nevins' ever excellent annotations. It certainly flavours what might otherwise be fairly dull exposition and journey scenes, but as usual he references are an added bonus and not really essential in understanding the tale at hand - maybe it helps to know that the song soundtracking the Hyde Park sequences is based closely on Sympathy for the Devil but that's pretty much it. It's not just the enhancement of Moore's stories with all sorts of detail that distinguishes O'Neill's work though, it's the shifts in style and tone to reflect mood and time that enhances the story here. Indeed, the psychedelic sequences that provide the backdrop for the climactic battle of wills is probably a highlight of O'Neill's work on the series. And I say that as someone who's absolutely adored O'Neill's previous work on the series.

As ever with Moore though, there's an edge to his story I don't particularly like. Sometimes it manifests in extreme violence (as in, say, Watchmen), but more often in a creepy sexual elemen. Here, if you can catch the references to identify Mina's companion in the Hyde Park scenes, then I'd be surprised if that character fingering a tripped out Mina wouldn't have one of the biggest selling authors of the past ten years activating her legal magicians. Certainly, it fits with the souring edge of hippydom that the Orchestra's gig represents (and which the Stones' Hyde Park gig represetned in our universe) and I'm certain such thins happened, but I'm not sure it's entirely necessary to the story.

Century: 1969 certainly ends up functioning as a story in its own right, ending not on a direct cliffhanger but instead in an intriguing position with the shade of Haddo escaping to continue his moonchild/Antichrist plans and Mina missing, possibly dragged off to a madhouse but possibly to another, more nefarious fate. And the final punk song is as ominous as the ending of Century: 1910, foreshadowing nothing but misery. Satisfying then, but as to whether it's the second course of a gourmet meal we'l have to wait another year or so to find out.