Tara Samms

This is the first book in Cows In Action, one of those series of early-chapter children's books where the heroes have an adventure to a specific place in time (in this one it's Henry VIII) and defeat a bad guy who wants to destroy all of human history, but somehow at the end of the book end up neatly back where they started so they can have a remarkably similar adventure next book in a different exciting moment in time.

It's sweet, it's readable, it's funny, it's probably Astrosaurs with the show more dinosaurs filed off and replaced with cows, but I haven't read Astrosaurs, so that's quite unfair of me.

If you will permit me two bits of overthinking:

It really got me thinking about the nature of story, particularly children's stories, and Wild Imagination type stories. It, err, doesn't make a lot of sense. The cows live on a farm, but have managed to turn their shed into a time machine using things the farmer threw away with no-one noticing, despite no-one else on the planet being able to build a time machine (there is a very token 'the person next door is a scientist and throws cool things away in his bins'). The cows drink tea, despite not having hands. The cows have magic nose rings that make them look human to humans but not to other cows, but this amazing technology that can change what people see seems incredibly limited to just this one transformation, but perfect at that one. Changing time in big ways is super dangerous because the space time continuum is unstable and so the bad guys must be stopped in case they are all never born, but no-one has to worry about kicking someone in the testicles so the wrong sperm doesn't grow up into a different King. If instead of parodying Harry Potter Eliezer Yudkowsky had had to explain the ways in which Cows In Action makes No Sense, he would have had a field day. It is ridiculous. But it does highlight how stories don't have to make sense, and are still doing something important when they don't make sense. If you want to tell 'wouldn't it be cool if people could travel through time defeating bad guys and seeing major historic events? Oh, and also they're cows. Cows are cool' maybe it is better to get on with it and every time you hit one of the Huge Impossibilities just go 'that's not the point! They can travel in time because .... they've got a time travel shed! The humans don't know they're cows because ... magic rings!'. Maybe this is escapism at its purist, we want our favourite animals to save our favourite historical heroes, and the fact this couldn't happen in any meaningful or plausible way, well, duh! It's a story! We're making it up because it's fun! Things that can Actually Happen happen all the time and are Dull! But they are not very bovine cows, Watership Down this is not, they are some people having adventures who happen to be cows because cows are cool.

Again with the overthinking, the identification of the 'good' guys and 'bad' guys amused me (or should that be a-moo-sed me?) In the CIA-verse, cows are sentient people, perfectly capable of complicated science and meaningful relationships. In the future, cows have achieved their own utopian country just for cows (Luxemburg, now known as Luckyburger), which they have definitely done by Peaceful Democratic Means, like standing for election. The Bad Guys (the Fed-Up Bull Institute) has gone 'hang on, we have time machines, 300 million cows were killed every year, maybe we could go back in time and stop this mass slaughter?' The Good Guys (Cows In Action)'s response to this fairly reasonable case is broadly 'Luckyburger is really really nice for the cows here, don't mess up our nice thing', or to quote directly 'if the horrid history of cows is changed in any way then this fabulous future awaiting us all may never happen.' It is hard not to read about a population historically killed and enslaved that now have a little country just for their own kind, and not go 'huh, it feels weirdly backwards that the bad guys are time travelling to try and stop the slaughter of millions of their people, and the good guys are trying to stop them because messing with bad things in the past might mess up the creation of their independent state, and are there some really awkward parallels here?' It is also quite weird to read a book where the oppressed people are the heroes, and their main job is to save their oppressors from some angrier oppressed people who want actual revenge for genocide, or ideally for it not to have happened at all. Reader, I was not 100% on the side of the CIA for this book.

At that point I decided I was probably the wrong audience for these books, and actually 'cows! That travel through time to save all of humanity!' is a good idea for a story, just not one that bears poking too hard. show less

This slim anthology collects Doctor Who material created or published during 2020's coronavirus lockdown; some of it was for the Doctor Who web site, some of it was released as part of the series of tweetalongs organized by Emily Cook, some of it is original to this book. I always like a good Doctor Who anthology, and this is a great one. Steven Moffat explains what the terror of the Umpty Ums is as the Doctor faces down the DeathBorg known as Karpagnon; Russell T Davies gives us a glimpse show more into the way the Time War could have ended if Paul McGann had regenerated straight into Christopher Eccleston; Neil Gaiman reveals an incident in the life of the Corsair; Pete McTighe discovers that the Doctor also enjoys watching her past adventures; Paul Cornell revisits both Daughter-of-Mine from "Human Nature" and Bernice Summerfield; Mark Gatiss reunites the Doctor with her granddaughter. All this and some great illustrations, too; my favorites included Valentina Mozzo's of the Doctor fist-bumping a Judoon and Chris Riddell's of the Corsair.

It reads briskly but it reads well. Moffat shows that he can always craft an engaging Doctor Who story by mixing the fear of a child with the solace of the Doctor and yet always find something new and fun to do with it. Plus, of course, good jokes! Davies's closing pages of a faux Time War novelization are an utter delight, firing off more great Time War ideas in ten pages than Big Finish has in ten dozen box sets.

I really like Paul Cornell's "Shadow" trilogy: three linked stories of the Doctor coming to doubt that her punishment for Daughter-of-Mine in "The Family of Blood" was just, though the best one is probably the one that has the least to do with that premise; "The Shadow Passes" focuses on the thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan spending time in a bunker on an alien planet. Cornell has a good grasp of the voices of these characters, especially the Doctor and Yaz, and make them likeable. I like the Doctor and her companions well enough on screen, but I feel that series 11-12 haven't done a great job using them. In fact, I think all of the authors here render a pretty great Doctor: Chris Chibnall, Moffat, Joy Wilkinson, and Gatiss also really shine. The promise of the thirteenth Doctor was, I think, a light of compassion burning in the darkness. The tv show struggles to make this work, often giving us a Doctor that seems ineffective and a "fam" that just stands there, but Adventures in Lockdown plays to her strengths, with Whittaker's compassion echoing off the page in a time where we need it most.

The only thing that didn't work for me is that seeing the script for "Rory's Story" is pretty pointless; that segment only worked for the novelty of getting to see Arthur Darvill play Rory once more. And though I did like "Shadow of a Doubt," it definitely loses something in not being read aloud by Lisa Bowerman. show less

This is a Doctor Who spin-off novel featuring the Sixth Doctor and partly set in the present day (i.e. 2001 when this was written) and 1945 Berlin. An alien artifact crashes in Dorset in 1944, and the local village is immediately evacuated and maintained as a closely guarded military secret for decades right up to the present day. Journalists are trying to investigate this village, while at the same time trying to penetrate the lair of neo-Nazis incongruously gathering in a millionaire's show more mansion in Cornwall. The Doctor, travelling at this point without a companion (so it must be between Peri and Mel's spells in the TARDIS) is summoned to help by the now retired Brigadier. I never cared for the persona of the Sixth Doctor on screen, and for me the Brigadier is the real hero here, and the leading and most appealing guest character is young TV journalist Claire. In investigating the alien craft, and the mystery of the disturbingly familiar toothbrush-mustachioed figure leading the modern day Nazi group, the trio travel back to Hitler's bunker in the ruined Berlin of April 1945 as the Russians advance on the collapsing Nazi behemoth. Our heroes face some highly disturbing revelations and very uncomfortable compromises to uncover the truth about the modern day Nazis while uncovering secrets of the 1945 versions, and also save the present day from radiation leaking from the alien spacecraft. In the process, poor Claire shockingly meets a nasty fate. I really enjoyed this story, which is one of the best Doctor spin-off novels I have read. show less

Doctor Who is as perfectly suited to the short story as it is to any other medium, if not moreso-- Doctor Who thrives on the strange juxtaposition, and where does that work better than the short story? I may be talking rubbish, but there's no denying that when a Doctor Who short story anthology is done right, it can show all the myriad possibilities of Doctor Who within a single "work"-- something no novel, comic book, or even episode could do in a single installment.  Short Trips and Side show more Steps was the first Short Trips book to have a "theme," a loose one of journeys into slightly divergent continuities, which enabled those myriad possibilities in just the right way.

The book is very thoughtfully organized, with several of the stories broken up into multiple installments so that you read them slowly across the course of the book.  Plus there's a series of stories called "Special Occasions" by four different authors that flits in and out.  The whole thing has a nice and unified reading experience, with the right amount of variation to keep one going throughout.  I'm not going to review every story here, but I will try to hit the high and low points here.

The book is flanked by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham's "A Town Called Eternity," a two-parter starring the fifth Doctor, Peri, and the Master, and part one is fantastic; it feels exactly and utterly like one of those two-part Davison historicals (Black Orchid, The Awakening, The King's Demon).  It's written in this very clipped way that makes it seem like a Terrance Dicks novelization of a so-so television episode, and why normally I'd demand a writer do something more proseworthy, here it's just so perfect. I loved every bit of it, Master's zany plan and all.  Unfortunately, part two is just boring, but I suppose you can't have everything.

All of the Special Occasions stories, featuring the fourth Doctor and the second Romana, are varying degrees of fun, but the first one, "The Not-So-Sinister Sponge" by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman, is the best.  The Doctor and Romana forget a very important day at the same time they land on the oddest planet.  It's six pages long, and in reading my wife the best bits, I essentially read her the whole thing.  Norman Ashby's "Do You Love Anyone Enough?" is a joke about Rolo ads, but a good one.  Steven Buford's "Better Watch Out, Better Take Care" is the weak link here, a not terribly interesting tale of the Doctor playing at Santa Claus for some reason.  The last one is "Playing with Toys" and is by David Agnew, writer of the television classics The Invasion of Time and City of Death, and I didn't really get it, but I wanted to like it.

There are a couple stories that take place in oddball continuities, but almost all of them suffer from not actually doing anything with them.  Gary Russell's "Countdown to TV Action" takes place between some old comic strips, but aside from the occasional (humorous) "Because I'm Dr Who and I'm a scientist" plays the story entirely straight for some reason.  Justin Richards gives us a tale in the world of the 1960s Peter Cushing films, but "The House on Oldark Moor" is a dead boring mashup of other things Peter Cushing has done-- there's a character named "Tarkin," hur hur.  The worst offenders are Steve Lyons's "Face Value," which follows The Ultimate Adventure stageplay, and Mike Tucker and Robert Perry's "Storm in a Tikka," which bridges the gap between Dimensions in Time and the in-character appearances of the Doctor, Ace, and K-9 on the educational video Search Out Science.  I've never seen/heard The Ultimate Adventure, but a story bridging the gap between two of the worst pieces of Doctor Who ever created should be hilarious... instead it's just a boring adventure that happens to have K-9 in, and "Face Value" is little better.

And some stuff is just fun.  Michie Docherty's "The Android Maker of Calderon IV" is a three-page joke... but a hilarious one.  Graeme Burk's "Turnabout is Fair Play" sees the sixth Doctor and Peri swapping bodies, and Peri attempting to impersonate the Doctor is excellent.  Other stuff wants to be fun, but doesn't succeed, like Christopher M. Wadley's "Gone Too Soon," which wants to be a heartfelt sendoff for the sixth Doctor, but ends up a schmaltzy tale about a character who sounds nothing like anyone ever played by Colin Baker.

The real triumph of the book is Daniel O'Mahony's "Nothing at the End of the Lane," a three-part reimagining of "An Unearthly Child" from the perspective of Barbara-- as a piece of literary sf that's much more rooted in the cultural concerns of the 1960s than actual 1960s Doctor Who ever was.  The idea is good, but the execution is brilliant.  Barbara is one of Doctor Who's best characters, of course, and this is surely the best writing she's ever had.  This is the kind of thing Doctor Who short fiction should be doing, and I loved every bit of it.  Why doesn't Daniel O'Mahony write more things?

Of course, there are some other stories peppered in there, some forgettable, some not, and unfortunately the forgettable ones are weighted to the back of the book a little too strongly, but on the whole, it's a diverse collection of enjoyable tales, showing how fun, how dark, how funny, and how moving Doctor Who can be.  Probably my second-favorite Short Trips volume so far, behind A Christmas Treasury.

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