The Space Age by: Steve Lyons

 

It is an odd day when a review of a book by Steve Lyons turns out to not be up to almost the gold standard of Doctor Who.  His novels up to this point have essentially all been highlights for the Virgin New Adventures, Virgin Missing Adventures, and Past Doctor Adventures, but his debut for the Eighth Doctor Adventures is one which falls into several pitfalls of the range thus far making a story that doesn’t actually add up to anything substantial.  The Space Age has a fairly intriguing premise, though it is nothing unusual when it comes to a Doctor Who premise, seeing on the surface an alternate history of Earth where technology has taken on that future aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s ruled in a sealed city.  Lyons uses misdirect with an extended prologue setting up power couple Alec Redshaw and Sandra McBride, a couple of teenagers who are deeply in love in the year 1965.  Only the prologue indulges in that saccharine style of romance which sets up the book excellently, with Lyons really selling this whole star-crossed lovers angle going out to somehow change history.  Their jaded selves as essentially puppet rulers of this city and this city’s gangs also fill the role.  The Mods and the Rockers are clearly influenced by the subcultures of the 1960s with some flair, but the actual characters in the gangs are fairly bland and really don’t get a lot of focus or sense.  While The Space Age has numerous problems, the worldbuilding clearly isn’t one as Lyons excels at filling this faux future city with such atmosphere and intrigue that it almost single handedly saves a lot of the book from the numerous flaws that it has.

 

Compassion stands out as the biggest problem here, Steve Lyons like Trevor Baxendale before him, just doesn’t know what to do with her.  Gail Simone names the trope of killing off a woman simply to advance the plot of the male characters around that woman fridging or putting the woman in the refrigerator after a character in Green Lantern, and that’s essentially what happens here with Compassion.  She isn’t dead, but she starts the book, already landed in the city, deactivated and unable to move or even speak.  This is how she remains for most of the novel which is simply not a good move: the Eighth Doctor Adventures have setup Compassion as the focus of the arc, so giving her a full book where she barely features is simply a problem.  At least Coldheart featured her as a character where she got to interact, here she simply does nothing.  Fitz is served at least a little better in that Lyons characterizes him, but Fitz kind of fills a role that could have been filled here by literally any other companion.  There’s a little fun here with Fitz enjoying himself in this future which is essentially modeled itself after the media he would have consumed in his own time, making it an interesting little idea.  He also gets stabbed which feels like a kick of adrenaline in a book that limps through an already short runtime.  The Doctor is actually characterized really well, as he plays throughout quite a lot of the city with a flair for the dramatic.  When it’s eventually revealed that an evil computer is behind everything Lyons starts to go down the tribute to The Green Death route, but then lampshades that fact as it’s clearly a story that he’s enjoying writing.  Lyons’ writing style is at least an easy read, but it really doesn’t feel like something which ends up creating a book that could have been great.

 

Overall, despite it’s genuinely evocative title, The Space Age doesn’t ever amount to anything of note.  This feels like it could have been released literally at any point as filler which feels like an attempt to avoid the harsh reality of the Compassion arc (especially The Shadows of Avalon and The Fall of Yquatine) by playing into problematic tropes and genuinely just leaving the reader with a genuine bland taste in the mouth.  It could have been a much more interesting book if perhaps it was released before The Shadows of Avalon, but it does not do enough to actually bring things together for a good experience.  5/10.