Re:Collections: The Best of Short Trips

With the end of Big Finish's long-running series of Short Trips anthologies, came this, a collection of the best stories from each of the preceding twenty-eight volumes (as picked by each volume's editor). I own fourteen of the volumes, but I've only read six of them, and I decided it was probably best to read Re:Collections: The Best of Short Trips before reading any more, rather than after: this way, more than two-thirds of the book are new to me, not just half.

It certainly does live up to its title: these are some of the best Doctor Who stories ever published, bar none. A few aren't to my taste, and though, and in the case of some of the volumes I have read, I would have picked other stories: I don't think Justin Richards's "The Glass Princess" is terribly affecting, for example, and out of The Muses, I would have plumped for Robert Shearman's sublime "Teach Yourself Ballroom Dancing" instead. But there's only three stories I out-and-out disliked: "Lost and Founded" by Andrew Pidoux from Christmas Around the World just seemed pointless, while the other two were both from anthologies edited by Gary Russell: maybe we just have very divergent tastes in prose fiction? (That would also explain my reactions to most of his novels.) Suffice it to say, that Stuart Manning's "Venus" (from The Solar System) is a neat idea wrapped in an incredibly dull plot (I'd have rather seen the sf adventure pastiche Russell says was the story's original premise) while I though Andy Frankham-Allen's "The Dead Man's Story" was dreadful the first time I read Repercussions, and it remains so. His prose is incredibly awkward, his characters flat, and his plot dreadfully overdone.

Aside from that, though, it's hard to quibble with any of the choices from the volumes I've already read. "Apocrypha Bipendium" by Ian Potter (from Companions) is brilliant multigeneric tale featuring the eighth Doctor, Charley Pollard, William Shakespeare, Troilus, and Cressida, and just as funny the second time around. Steve Lyons's "All Our Christmasses" (from A Christmas Treasury) is a nicely self-referential tale about getting what you want. Most of all, I was beyond pleased to see "Life After Queth" by Matt Kimpton (from Farewells) here: who would have thought that a sequel to Frontios featuring the Gravis in his only outing as a companion would be so much fun?

Then, of course there's the material from volumes I haven't read yet. Stel Pavlou's "Checkpoint", a tale of Cold War Berlin has a limp solution but a great atmosphere, and it had me looking forward to The Centenarian even more than I already was. "The Avant Guardian" (from Time Signature) has a typically ingenious Eddie Robson premise: a 1950s BBC electronica composer who uses her music to rewrite the space-time continuum. "Lare Domestici" by Anna Bratton (from How The Doctor Changed My Life) captures the second Doctor with brilliant precision in a neat little story. And then there's "The Spindle of Necessity", a story by Allyn Gibson (from The Quality of Leadership) that sees the sixth Doctor in a Socratic dialogue and broadening his horizons in a way he would never have expected. At first I was a little wait, what? at the way it ended, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

And finally, there's all those stories from volumes I haven't read and probably never will; I don't have that much time and money. It's nice to sample them this way: having only read the best from each book, I'm ensured to have a good memory of each volume. Marc Platt's "Ruins of Heaven" (from Steel Skies) is a great Peri story that really delves into her characters and sees her meeting angels. "The Thief of Sherwood" by Jonathan Morris (from Past Tense) is a work of genius, relating an adventure for the first Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara in the form of excerpts from episode guides, Doctor Who Magazine, and so on. Amazing! Paul Magrs brings back Iris Wildthyme in "Suitors, Inc." (from Seven Deadly Sins), and she's as batty and enjoyable as ever, though unfortunately the story abruptly ends. Simon Guerrier serves the seventh Doctor quite nicely in "How You Get There" (from A Day in the Life), which is all about the people he meets as he travels across the city via public transport to a showdown with a deadly villain. "Losing the Audience" by Mat Coward (from Defining Patterns) is another journey into the early BBC, this one into the world of radio comedy, and it is also quite good: I love these stories that can make me nostalgic for something I've never experienced! And Richard Wright's "Lonely" (from Transmissions) is suitably creepy, and a story that can only work in text.

Probably my favorite story in the whole book is "The Glarn Strategy" (from Snapshots). I haven't read anything by Brian Dooley before, but this is a gem. It perfectly captures the fourth Doctor and the second Romana, while also some suitably unnerving moments, strongly characterized guest characters, and a suitable bonkers alien. Does being the best story in a book of best stories make it the greatest Doctor Who tale of all time? Maybe, maybe not, but it's dang close.

As you might imagine, this is a strong collection: Short Trips would have had to be pretty crap for it not to be, and it was generally quite good. There's a lot of more "experimental" stories in here, but I think that plays to the strengths of Doctor Who and the short story medium: a "typical" Doctor Who story (if there is such a thing) doesn't condense well, nor does it work quite so well in print, so I always welcome the stories that do something a little bit different. I think sometimes editors don't want too many experimental stories in one volume, but I think that works against the strengths of Doctor Who, and I'm glad we have a book here that lets us concentrate the brilliance and range of Doctor Who into 468 pages. From "'I Was A Monster!!!'" to "The Fall of the Druids", from "The Dead Man's Story" to "The Glarn Strategy", Re:Collections shows us everything Doctor Who can do.