Interference - Book One: Shock Tactic by: Lawrence Miles

Interference is something so odd and contradictory that it can only be described as peak Lawrence Miles.  It’s split across two novels, published at the same time, and attempting to bring the disparate threads of the last 25 books together and setup the next story arc which I think culminates in The Ancestor Cell.  This is the book that’s meant to say goodbye to Sam and to really bring Faction Paradox to the forefront and set the BBC Books apart from the Virgin New Adventures before it.  This review is only for Interference: Book One: Shock Tactic, and is coming from the perspective of someone who has not read Interference: Book Two: Hour of the Geek, because it was published as one book and claims to be a book one.  Lawrence Miles’ first installment is weird.  It is 309 pages, split into several different sections to attack parts of the plot, and doesn’t feel like a Doctor Who novel.  The Doctor is barely in this first half, and when he does appear, he is confined to a cell, while Miles takes more time to explain Faction Paradox, aka his baby.  The book is all setup for something.  Something that Miles doesn’t even really hint at what it means for the characters or even what that something could be.  This isn’t to say that the setup is bad, far from it.  Like Christmas on a Rational Planet and Alien Bodies, Miles’ prose is beautiful and effective at making a surreal landscape of the events in the mind as from the very beginning there is this sense that everything is off.



Interference is wrapped in a frame story where the Eighth Doctor, alone and possibly broken, arrives on a place called Foreman’s World where over the course of a day he tells the story of what happened to him on Earth and what happened to the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith on the planet Dust to I.M. Foreman.  I.M. Foreman is a character who is left a mystery by Miles throughout the novel.  She is this character with a history with the Doctor and is implied to be on a self-imposed exile to this little planet which may or may not be in a bottle universe.  Miles explains the bottle universes in the prologue of the book as how parallel worlds work and where the Time Lords will go after some great war.  This war is something that is clearly setup for later in the books and the bottle universe concept is supposed to be Miles’ answer to how the VNAs fit in, but where the frame story works is to set the tone of the story.  The Doctor here is distant and clearly reeling from some sort of loss.  There comes a point where he just stops the story halfway because he doesn’t quite know where to go with it, before starting a completely different story showing that he has become pretty erratic in what he has been doing.  The frame story does fall apart as an end to the story as Shock Tactic isn’t a book that ends on a cliffhanger, or with resolution, it just kind of stops midway through the story.



“What Happened On Earth” is the section of the book that deals with the Eighth Doctor, Sam, and Fitz and takes up a majority of the novel.  It’s also the portion of the novel that has the closest plot points to a Doctor Who story, but after a few chapters Miles just sort of goes off the rails with it.  The Doctor and Sam are dealing with weapons dealers in London, 1996 while Fitz is kind of off on his own doing things.  The Doctor immediately gets captured and put in prison cell with Badar, a writer whom the Doctor has a good relationship with as he is tortured and broken down following the threads started in Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum’s Seeing I.  The Doctor is used scarcely in this section, but when he does appear it becomes incredibly emotional as he is broken down to his breaking point.  The real star of this section is Sam Jones who investigates Guest, Kode, and Compassion, a trio of characters from Anathema, a human colony, possibly from the future, possibly from the present.  Sam’s story is incredibly meta as once she confronts the trio with Sarah Jane Smith, who is also investigating alongside Sam, she is captured and put in the Remote which is a concept.  The Remote might be something alive, it might be a piece of technology, Miles doesn’t provide answers, but it allows Sam to undergo a series of scenes which are incredibly meta in nature.  These scenes are more often written in the form of a television script and described as a BBC interpretation of events which is interesting.  It’s meant to make Sam, and the reader, feel disoriented and unsure of what’s been happening, bringing back the Dark Sam concept from Alien Bodies and Unnatural History.



Guest, Kode, and Compassion are all characters with their own quirks and differences.  Kode is the least developed, while Guest is the over the top villain of the piece in the style of Mavic Chen and Tobias Vaughn and Compassion is the hardened criminal with a plan.  Fitz’s story is told through interludes within this section while he is in the custody of UNISYC which is an offshoot from UNIT and is sent into the future through the Cold.  The Cold is a suspended animation technology from the future which on it’s creation Fitz exited.  In the future, Fitz isn’t allowed to leave an apartment and is eventually driven to joining Faction Paradox as an initiate which is where Miles drops in the history of the Faction and much of its operations.  The Cold exiting Fitz becomes a paradox in and of itself and the second part of the book is where the origins of the Faction come to light.  Fitz’s fall to the dark side of the Faction is justified, but is in need of more exploration because like Sam’s story, it just sort of stops.  “What Happened On Dust” is the second part of the book which basically establishes I.M. Foreman’s Travelling Circus, the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane arriving after The Monster of Peladon, and the Faction going to the planet.  It’s the weaker portion of the novel as it doesn’t do much in terms of plot, just that the Faction is going to invade.  Magdelana Bishop is an interesting character, but the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane don’t do much except foreshadow that the Third Doctor’s regeneration is going to occur on Dust instead of during Planet of the Spiders.



Overall, Interference – Book One: Shock Tactic may be an incredibly compelling read, setting up a world and the potential for a galaxy spanning conflict, but it’s only setup and it doesn’t find a good endpoint.  It just stops.  9/10.