Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock
Clearly, this book isn’t going to be for everybody. Not everybody is a Doctor Who fan, for a start. And even among the millions of people who watch the TV series, very few want or need to buy a book based on it. Equally, although Moorcock is a fairly big name - I hope I won’t cause offence by saying he’s massive by the standards of the regular authors of DW books - he isn’t the most mainstream writer in the world. That said, the announcement that Moorcock was going to write a full-length Doctor Who novel provoked some serious excitement out in the small Venn-diagram intersection of people who like DW and also think he’s a brilliant writer. That includes me - I used to follow all of the DW novels, although I stopped some point just before the new series started, and I have read almost everything that Moorcock has written. And believe me, that’s quite a lot of books - his output is prolific, and they range from the throwaway fantasy books for which he is, perhaps, most famous to the astounding Mother London. I’ve got them all (well I don’t have some of his very early work and juvenilia, mostly published under pseudonyms), so there was never any doubt that I was going to be picking this book up. I managed to get hold of a proof just before I went away on holiday, and it jumped straight to the top of the ‘to read’ pile.
The first point to make, I think, is that this is a Moorcock book with some Doctor Who trappings, rather than a straight-forward Who story. That isn’t a problem for me, and Moorcock is such a skilful writer that anyone who started the book knowing nothing about his work would, I’m sure, know that they were in good hands. It was fun for me to spot the links to his other creations - some obvious, some more subtle - but they wouldn’t get in the way of the story. This does have the added bonus of meaning that the Who and Moorcock continuity obsessives will now have whole new worlds to explore - all of Moorcock’s work is linked, and therefore now part of the Who world, and vice versa.
That’s me a being a bit silly, really, but one of the things I’ve always loved about Moorcock’s work is the way in which everything tie together. Cameos, quotations, actual cross-overs, echoes and hints - there’s always a connection somewhere. That this book is business as normal, and that the editors have allowed their star author free reign, seems like a good sign. I would have hated a book that had been written under constraints, that had taken Moorcock’s talent and energy and dissipated it with rules and strictures. What would be the point? I’m sure some Who readers would have preferred a less idiosyncratic book, and I do understand that point of view - the characterisation of the Doctor and (especially) Amy Pond is simplistic at best - but somehow it all hangs together. It feels like a Doctor Who book, and it feels like a Moorcock book, which means that it works.
Plot-wise, I don’t want to give too much away. In the far future the Doctor and Amy hook up with the Terraphiles, a group of Old Earth re-enactment types who have a very dubious understanding of what they’re trying to re-create, leading to some very funny misunderstandings. For various reasons it turns out that the Doctor has to ensure that a certain team wins the upcoming grand tournament of Old Earth games - confused iterations of Cricket, Archery and other Olde-Englishe pastimes - and recover the trophy. How and why the book gets to this final game is, plot-wise, almost irrelevant although everyone, especially the reader, has fun on the way, and everything is deeply Moorcockian. Having said that, the first half of the book (at least) feels like an insane version of a Wodehouse novel, and this is clearly intentional on the author’s part. A hat stolen from a hotel room, angry matriarchs, old buffers who only want the quiet life, a blustering hero called Bingo who has to steal the aforementioned hat, falls in love with Amy and tends to give “his by now celebrated performance of a space-beacon on full traffic duty, blushing red and blanching white in a matter of seconds”, and so on. I didn’t realise that what I needed in my life was a science-fiction version of Wodehouse, with added Doctor-ness, but it turns out that I did. I can’t bang on for too long about how entertaining and fun this all is, because this review is too long already, but clearly I loved it.
As I said at the beginning, this book won’t be to everyone’s tastes. If you’re a Moorcock fan, you’ll love it, and I can say that with no hesitation whatsoever. Doctor Who fans might, I worry, be a bit split - it isn’t hugely Who-ey, although I think there’s enough here to keep most fans happy. People who just like really good, fun, energetic, well-written escapist literature will also approve, although I fear that it might be hard to convince them to buy it. You might even be able to convince a Wodehouse fan, as long as they were prepared to see things refracted through a Moorcock point of view. For what it’s worth, I loved it, and recommend it hugely. But then I sit in all four of the above camps, so I was always likely to be pleased. The sales sheet says that this is the first in a series of Doctor Who book specials, and if the calibre of the authors - and the writing - is as high in the future, I’ll be along for all of them.
I read a proof on holiday in Wales, from the fifteenth to the twentieth of August (well, I had other things to do). The book is out in October, ISBN: 9781846079832.