Short Trips and Side Steps

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 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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The third and last of the BBC anthologies of stories featuring the pre-New Who Doctors, published in 2000. I choose my words carefully, as the collection includes several side steps into non-standard continuity - a brief sequel to the Sixth Doctor stage play, The Ultimate Adventure; a story from the Third Doctor's timeline in TV Action magazine; a rather poor effort with the Seventh Doctor, Ace and K9 (as in Dimensions in Time); and most memorably a piece by Justin Richards set between the two Doctor Who movies, featuring a villainous aristocrat called Tarkin who may or may not have an evil twin. There is also an exploration of what might have been happening behind the scenes at Coal Hill School by Daniel O'Mahony. Nice to see this brief series of books ending on such an adventurous note. ( )