Trading Futures by: Lance Parkin

 

When most people draw parallels between Doctor Who and the James Bond franchise it is the Jon Pertwee era’s first three years or so, being mostly Earthbound with a sense of working with the government.  Beginning around 2013, the serial The Enemy of the World was also included in this discussion due to its world spanning scale and focus on espionage and action.  It’s specifically a tone and stylistic flair similar to the James Bond films over the books by Ian Fleming and their drier, more methodical style.  While the BBC Books have often taken direct inspiration from past eras of Doctor Who in terms of the stories that they commission to tell, it was actually quite a surprise to come upon Trading Futures, an Eighth Doctor Adventure that is directly Lance Parkin’s tribute to James Bond and what Doctor Who largely brought from it.  There are international organizations, several female characters with utterly ridiculous names, and a plot that at almost every turn provides a twist and turn.  Heck, the novel even opens with a cold open sequence that leads into what would be the gun barrel sequence of a Bond film.  Surprisingly, especially from what I usually expect from Parkin, Trading Futures is a light affair, dealing with a time travel service that is marketed primarily towards the general public, wrapped up in several prophecies of doom, and dealing with world governments that need to be saved.  Okay, that sounds like it could be a dark, political thriller, but Lance Parkin’s prose is incredibly light and there’s this general sense of urgency throughout that makes it an incredibly engaging read.  It’s probably helping that despite references to their previous adventures, the four remaining elementals, and Sabbath, Trading Futures is actually pretty friendly to the general reader.

 

Anji’s plotline is perhaps the one with the most emotional weight, deciding that she can use Baskerville’s services to go back in time and stopping Dave from dying way back in Escape Velocity.  There’s been a lot of focus recently on Anji’s grief, especially in Anachrophobia and Hope, but Trading Futures is one of those novels that actively feels as if it punishes Anji for it.  Baskerville, it is revealed, is a con artist at his heart, not actually having the ability to transport people back in time and the prophecies are all created by Baskerville and the fulfilment of the fourth is what the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji have to divert.  There ais also a fleet of Onihr surrounding the Earth that Fitz gets himself mixed up in.  Like Anji’s arc drawing on her grief from Dave, Fitz once again finds himself pretending to be the Doctor, something that even the prose at points acknowledges as a possibility by having several sequences with Fitz without referring to Fitz as Fitz, but just as the Doctor.  The Onihr are relegated to comic relief and feel like Russell T. Davies largely drew on them in designing the Judoon, at least visually.  The idea is that they wish to be the new Time Lords but are completely incompetent, making them largely easy (ish) work for Fitz to deal with.  The Doctor is essentially in the role of James Bond for the novel, and that’s generally one of the weaker aspects of the novel, mainly because the plot keeps putting him in Bond situations and Parkin can’t quite make the commentary on the differences of the Doctor and Bond as respective leading men.  There’s also some of the colonialism and imperialism baked into the Bond formula that Parkin doesn’t really reckon with, there is a character called Malady Chang that Anji impersonates which particularly rubs me the wrong way since Malady is East Asian while Anji is Pakistani.  The entire plot just conflates cultures and it almost seems like Parkin realizes it but doesn’t do anything about it.

 

Overall, Trading Futures is a great little Doctor Who novel that works so well because it’s sending up what is essentially the other British cultural touchstone in the 1960s and 1970s which was getting its own, far more successful reboot in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  It does have problems, mainly because author Lance Parkin isn’t really examining enough of the formula he is playing with along with the tropes, but it does make for such a good time.  8/10.