Dark Progeny by: Steve Emmerson

 

Doctor Who famously had three seasons of television between 1975 and 1977 where script editor Robert Holmes and producer Philip Hinchcliffe would almost exclusively pastiche and homage classic gothic horror stories and films from King Kong to Frankenstein to The Thing from Another World.  It’s interesting then that a lot of the original novels, even those set in that period of the early Tom Baker years, rarely take cues from classic gothic horror.  Dark Progeny is the second and final novel from Steve Emmerson and for its primary ideas outside of doing some tropes that are standard to Doctor Who, a human colony in the future, evil corporations, and mad scientists, it has some of its more interesting ideas out of literature.  John Wyndham was a science fiction writer who is most remembered for The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos (more well known for its film adaptation Village of the Damned), the later being where Steve Emmerson seems to have drawn inspiration from for Dark Progeny.  Dark Progeny is a book that for the most part doesn’t really do anything in homaging The Midwich Cuckoos outside of a group of superintelligent children who may or may not be aliens with their own goal that the government of the planet takes into custody for their own experimentation.

 

Emmerson taking cues from Wyndham is perhaps the most interesting part about Dark Progeny with the Doctor being able to rage about the injustices of the scientific system that would allow experimentation on children.  The big issue of the novel comes in the fact that the story moves at a glacially slow pace.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a book, some of the best books and indeed the best Doctor Who stories take their time in building up a mystery or a threat.  It’s a book that can be compared to Lucifer Rising in a bad way as Lucifer Rising opens with quite a few sequences outside of the TARDIS team to establish a mystery and even when the Doctor and company appear there are sequences outside of their perspective.  This is something Emmerson did so well in Casualties of War but it doesn’t really work here, especially as the Doctor isn’t an amnesiac and needs to establish what he, Fitz, and Anji actually have to do in the plot.  The character work of the supporting cast is interesting and Emmerson makes individual scenes especially tense, but this really is a book that lacks cohesive direction.  The ideas aren’t really consistent throughout the entire novel and there is genuinely a need for an editor to tighten this book up.  It’s not a particularly long novel but it does manage to reach the general length of the BBC Books novels.

 

Overall, Dark Progeny is a book with a lot of potential for a great story.  It takes its best cues from a classic piece of gothic horror and has genuinely interesting secondary characters, but doesn’t manage to find its feet by the time it’s over.  4/10.