More Short Trips edited by: Stephen Cole

 

Short Trips as an anthology release was a success, something that shouldn’t have been a surprise as the three Decalog installments published by Virgin were quite the success, so almost immediately another volume was commissioned for release the following year.  Stephen Cole remained editor on the edition and brought together many of the same authors, plus a few surprises but decided to ditch Short Trips’ original theme of trips in history in favor of letting the authors explore whatever aspect of short fiction they desire.  This means the book was published under the name More Short Trips, being the only prose volume to not really have a central theme, the follow up would be Short Trips and Side Steps before the short fiction would be handed over to Big Finish Productions to publish through several themed Short Trips anthologies.  This is a double-edged sword, leading to stories of all sorts with no limitation outside of having the Doctor involved (though for one this actually includes an unspecified future Doctor unique to these anthologies).

 

Stephen Cole once again takes the opening of the collection on himself, writing “Totem” under the name Tara Samms and as an opening it’s the bad edge of the double-edged sword.  It’s one of the Eighth Doctor stories for the anthology and is quite weak as an opener.  It’s only about eight pages long and Cole doesn’t actually do much with those eight pages, it wants to largely be a character piece musing on loss and grief, but Cole’s prose is rather simplistic making it come across as unemotional, and there isn’t nearly enough to make things work.  There’s the germ of an interesting idea here but it really needed to be in the hands of a different author to really work.  4/10.

 

Cole then follows up with a story from a debut author, Ian Atkins, who would go on to write several Short Trips for Big Finish Productions, as well as serving as the range’s producer after the unfortunate passing of Paul Spragg.  “Scientific Adviser” fares far better as a story than “Totem”, mainly because it is a fun romp that explores some of the cover-ups put in place after various invasions that were handled by UNIT.  Unlike the novel Who Killed Kennedy? which serves far more as a deconstruction and examination of the era as well as integrating Doctor Who into history, “Scientific Adviser” feels like a writer having a lot of fun in terms of getting around the central premise, the cover up is that a film is being made of The Invasion and the Second Doctor, travelling alone likely post-The War Games, has been recruited as scientific adviser, reporting to the Brigadier in between takes and changing the script to make it ever so slightly inaccurate.  As a story it’s quite fun and is all building to the reveal that the Cybermen have been secretly behind the film, kidnapping the director’s daughter briefly and returning her to get a foot in the door on the filmmaking process.  The climax of the short story is clever enough, if a bit of an anti-climax and a lot of the ending feels like it’s meant to hint towards the Doctor eventually fulfilling his exile on Earth, though the setting of “Scientific Advisor” being the then-present of the 1990s just adds to the weirdness of the UNIT Dating Controversy.  Still a very fun time and Atkins as a writer shows quite a bit of promise, shame he’s really only done short stories.  7/10.

 

Next is another incredibly short story “Missing, Part One: Business as Usual” by: Gary Russell, the short premise being Mel gets back to Earth.  Russell, having written for Mel in Business Unusual characterizes her well and this is a fine little snippet, but that’s all it is a snippet.  6/10.  Mike Tucker and Robert Perry write “Missing, Part Two: Message in a Bottle” which is even shorter than “Missing, Part One: Business as Usual”, quite literally just being the message in a bottle thrown into space for the Doctor.  It’s just as fine a little snippet.  6/10.

 

Dave Stone is a writer I’m always very mixed on and “Moon Graffiti” is just a Dave Stone story that doesn’t work for me.  Now, before I go into detail, this is one that may work well for someone who is a Dave Stone fan, it has all the hallmarks of his work.  The prose is incredibly dense and the ideas surrounding it are largely in the absurd, though the short story format feels incredibly limiting for an author who even in novel format feels limited.  It’s also very possible that this story works better when performed by Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as it was originally released about six months before the publication of More Short Trips in the audio anthology Out of the Darkness.  The concept is just as absurd as you’d expect from stone, the setting is a desolate Earth in the far future and the Sixth Doctor and Peri have to fight off the Pararachnid alien threat, with several supporting characters along the way while there is another group of aliens stranded on Earth called the Wibliwee, plus a third group called the Monitors.  Again this is too convoluted for a short story, even with Stone making the story one of the longer ones, but so much of it feels like it’s mean to be read by Baker and Bryant.  Reading it makes it quite difficult to take in everything that is being said, but I can easily imagine hearing it makes it feel more like you’re listening to an audio drama or being told an actual story, it just didn’t work for me in this format.  4/10.

 

“One Bad Apple” didn’t really come at a great time for me to actually read.  I ended up reading it not long after relistening to Simon A. Forward’s The Sandman and like The Sandman, this is a story that has a lot of the problems associated with his work.  “One Bad Apple” is an allegory for the Book of Genesis, specifically the creation, the fall of man, and the story of Cain and Abel.  This all sounds like an interesting setup for a Doctor Who story, but Forward doesn’t actually ever do anything interesting with it, just keeping the Biblical allusions and having them play out as you would expect.  That and Forward really likes to add in references to other pieces of Doctor Who to try and make things bigger than they are, specifically the Cybermen and the Cyber Wars are extensively referenced in the story.  The actual fruit is used as this almost infection, Leela opening the story by eating it yet for her it never actually feels like a problem for her though it is for the supporting characters.  The ending is suitably dramatic and that saves this from being a particularly bad story, but it’s also one I could see myself disliking more on reread which isn’t a good sign (it happened with The Sandman). 6/10.

 

Just as the worry was setting in that More Short Trips would be significantly weaker a collection than the original Short Trips, Gary Russell’s “64 Carlysle Street” comes to make a great little historical piece.  Russell clearly understands how to use the team of the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo, and that is to present them all as mischievous as they were in The Gunfighters, slowly integrating themselves in the title household: the Doctor by invitation, Dodo as a maid who can’t keep her mouth shut and really isn’t fit for being in service, and Steven as the eccentric chauffeur for the Doctor.  That takes up just enough time before the story shifts into one essentially about possession and exorcism which shouldn’t really work for the TARDIS team Russell is using, but it reads far closer to the hypnosis in The War Machines than say The Exorcist, leaving us with this great little story to shift the collection.  8/10.

 

This quality turns into a streak with Steve Lyons’ “The Eternity Contract”, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa story for the volume, and like Short Trips, it’s one of the highlights.  This is a story exploring the concept of death through a surreal setting, this time a house eternally caught in a storm.  The story starts with someone dying in a car crash and the Doctor and Nyssa on a completely different planet being attacked by an alien wolf, and all ending up at this house where they are informed they are dead.  The rest of the story is Steve Lyons’ musing on the various ways people can find themselves dead, and the setting of a halfway house for the dead clearly has its roots in other pieces of fiction but he uses it very carefully.  The Doctor and Nyssa are the only two who both refuse to take their scenario at face value and have the potential know how to escape and uncover just what is actually happening here.  The eventual reveal is one that is far closer to something published by Virgin, the master of the house Nicholas Carnon made a deal with Death, yes that Death, to borrow six souls for his own purposes, those that he replaces every so often whenever he gets bored.  It’s quite a cruel scenario but it also allows Lyons to slowly dig into how the Doctor and Nyssa are after the death of Adric and make this story a celebration of life and death as part of the natural order of things.  9/10.

 

Mike Tucker and Robert Perry writing something not for the Seventh Doctor and Ace honestly feels kind of odd, made even weirder by the fact that they make “The Sow in Rut” a sequel to K9 and Company, with a dash of the vibes of The Daemons thrown in for good measure.  It’s Sarah Jane Smith’s story through and through and is honestly a fairly good time, complete with witches and demon pigs, but the ending feels like another anti-climax and tries to hint that some of the supernatural wasn’t supernatural at all which brings the story down slightly.  7/10.

 

I’ve often said that Paul Leonard is a writer who does brilliant work until he has to get to an ending of a story, then the ball is dropped.  It’s always nice when he is able to prove me wrong as he did with “Special Weapons”.  Leonard placing the Seventh Doctor and Mel in the middle of World War II while the Nazi’s are working on several experiments on an alien being to isolate a small British town, holding the residents hostage and terrorizing them.  That’s just the surface level, for much of the story the Doctor and Mel are actually split up and Mel is paired with young Oliver, an adolescent who ends the story traumatized but determined to go off to war in the next year to kill Germans.  It’s difficult to describe just how tragic that ending feels, he is going off to kill Nazis after all, but even doing that means he will come back a changed man.  This is also a story that despite the reader knowing that the Doctor and Mel must make it out alright, the tension is some of the thickest I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who, making it a very nice companion piece to Lance Parkin’s Just War which was being adapted to audio around this time.  10/10.

 

“Honest Living” is another story from a first time writer and like Ian Atkins before him, Jason Loborik actually tells a fairly engaging little Third Doctor romp.  Loborik, clearly a fan of Day of the Daleks uses the story to play around in that space with the original pitch idea of changing around history.  This becomes a story where there are two timelines, one where a man is killed in a car accident and one where he survives.  It’s quite surprising that there are some plot similarities to “Father’s Day”, though as this is not as good considering it’s just a side character dealing with changing history and not the companion, in this story that would be either Jo or the Brigadier.  Still it’s quite fun and Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor is captured quite well especially for the early Season 9 setting of the story.  7/10.

 

Like “Moon Graffiti”, “Dead Time” had its initial release in an audio anthology, Earth and Beyond read by Paul McGann, though unlike “Moon Graffiti”, this isn’t one of those stories that suffers from being in prose and not read aloud.  It does suffer from having to use Sam Jones as a companion though, as the story while set in the TARDIS and in a void like setting so Andrew Miller really focuses in on the Doctor/companion dynamic.  Except the Doctor/companion dynamic between the Eighth Doctor and Sam is a particularly weak one.  “Dead Time” is a story that also focuses on the Doctor as a character, locking some cosmic entity in his own mind’s past that is straight out of Gallifrey’s past as well.  The story would work better had there not been a companion included in the proceedings and we could just focus on how the Eighth Doctor integrates with Gallifrey’s past, especially considering this collection came out post-Alien Bodies (and directly would be the first time using Gallifrey proper since Lungbarrow).  Still Miller writes a solid story.  7/10.

 

I’d like to say it’s odd that David A. McIntee’s contribution to More Short Trips is quite literally a smallish piece exploring what happens to the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki in between scenes of “The Slave Traders”, but seeing as “Romans Cutaway” is both a pure historical giving two little plot threads to the Doctor and Vicki and Ian and Barbara respectively while focusing on who these characters are at their core.  It’s a classic setup from McIntee with a TARDIS team he clearly adores to bits, giving so much insight into Vicki as a character immediately post-The Rescue.  On television while she was characterized well and particularly well performed by Maureen O’Brien, “Romans Cutaway” really wants to explore her emotions post-The Rescue with this understated fear of abandonment after the death of her father and her decision to travel in the TARDIS.  Ian also gets some particularly nice moments remembering people he knew on Earth who died tragically.  He also gets to fight a lion and McIntee keeps the tone of The Romans intact despite going down some darker paths.  8/10.

 

“Return of the Spiders” is Gareth Roberts’ love letter to Planet of the Spiders, doing a sequel set squarely within Season 17, the era of Doctor Who he is best at writing.  You’d think this makes for a brilliant story like the likes of The Romance of Crime, The English Way of Death, or The Well-Mannered War, but “Return of the Spiders” is fine.  Roberts is great at getting the Doctor and Romana’s characterization and banter down to an exact science which makes it bearable, but he is taking the piss out of the spiders too much meaning this feels like a reinvention that is disrespectful to the thematic end of the Third Doctor in a way bringing the story down.  It also takes way too long to reveal the spiders.  6/10.

 

Christopher Bulis writing for the Fifth Doctor and Peri already led to The Ultimate Treasure which is one of the early Past Doctor Adventures that is squarely a miss in terms of a story.  “Hot Ice” fares better, but doesn’t fare particularly well.  It’s a story that is just kind of there, the Doctor and Peri are actually quite well characterized but it’s also the second time Bulis has written a story that feels like the first time Peri is taking a trip in the TARDIS.  This is particularly messy of as tory and ends very much with a Warriors of the Deep style there should have been another way that feels somehow less earned.  5/10.

 

“uPVC” is an unknown writer, Paul Farnsworth, who writes a near perfect examination of who the Doctor is through both the Second and Seventh Doctors and a window salesman.  That’s all I’m going to say because this is a story that nearly brought me to tears.  9/10.

 

Peter Anghelides’ “Good Companions” is honestly a weird little story, it’s the one that features an unspecified future Doctor traveling with a companion called Anna, his housekeeper.  This is a story that also is told through the framing of an older Tegan Jovanka, married and widowed, having written up this encounter in Good Companions.  A lot of the appeal of this short story is the future Doctor, an incarnation entirely down to Anghelides who sadly feels a bit generic.  Unlike say The Infinity Doctors or the Merlin Doctor, this Doctor is more a composite of other Doctor’s traits up to that point, though there’s certainly room for development since Anghelides does use this Doctor in multiple Short Trips.  The big problem for me is actually the characterization of Tegan: she’s a bit too mellow in her old age that makes her feel more a generic companion, Anghelides not really reflecting on her exit in Resurrection of the Daleks or Adric’s death in Earthshock or the death of her Aunt Vanessa in Logopolis.  It honestly feels like she could have been any female companion who was left on Earth, leaving “Good Companions” more “Meh Companions”.  5/10.

 

After the success of “Old Flames” and The Scarlet Empress, Paul Magrs closes More Short Trips with “Femme Fatale”, an adventure for the Doctor, Sam, and Iris meeting Andy Warhol.  Oddly enough this is one of the ‘weaker’ Magrs stories, it lacks a lot of the depth that his novels do.  It is just as fun as “Old Flames”, if not slightly more so with the 1930s and 1960s period settings and the use of Andy Warhol as a character, though not by much as while Magrs is certainly one of the better writers when it comes to the use of Sam Jones, she is still Sam Jones.  This is also a story about the assassination attempt on Warhol by Valerie Solanis which has the typical Magrs twist, though I’m not entirely sure on how much I like the way it’s presented here, it reeks of an inexperienced writer not quite thinking through the implications.  “Femme Fatale” is still a great little story because Paul Magrs is almost incapable of doing a bad story.  7/10.

 

Overall, despite More Short Trips ditching the theme meaning that you lose an interconnectedness of the stories, even if it is just vaguely thematic, creating the risk of this being a meandering collection it’s actually a slightly stronger collection than Short Trips.  In terms of the stories it actually has more stories that are added to my new favorites than the first volume, and despite more misses, the misses were less severe.  6.8/10.