Ten Little Aliens by: Stephen Cole

 

Ten Little Aliens is a strange little book. The title is taken from the original title of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and in the 2013 introduction Stephen Cole wrote for the reprint, it’s made quite explicit that at the forefront of his mind was Christie’s general body of work.  That, combining it with Starship Troopers, and adding the gimmick of an extensive Choose Your Own Adventure section in the middle.  That’s three very different things that Stephen Cole is pulling from for what Ten Little Aliens is trying to do, this is a novel that is an identity crisis wrapped up in about 300 pages.  It’s also a novel featuring the First Doctor, Ben, and Polly set between The Smugglers and The Tenth Planet because Stephen Cole rightly wanted to use a TARDIS team that hadn’t been used in novel format before.  Tonally Ten Little Aliens is weird, although the novel is taking its name from one of the most famous murder mysteries of all time it only vaguely resembles a murder mystery that Agatha Christie would have written: there are already ten bodies, specifically of terrorists, and they start disappearing one by one.  Sure, Christie wrote stories where the murder has already happened and there has to be a reason to solve it, but And Then There Were None isn’t one of those.  And Then There Were None is one of Christie’s focused on class and British imperialism through the lens of ten well off British people who have all gotten away with murder and are picked off one by one as the veneer of well-bred British respectability is eroded away.  It’s a masterpiece.

 

Ten Little Aliens aesthetically resembles Starship Troopers, though it’s far closer to the Heinlein novel than Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation.  The supporting cast is entirely space troopers who are all introduced early in the book literally through little character blurbs that tell the reader the stock soldier that they represent.  Cole doesn’t take any time in this book to explore the military mind or what the expansion of military force throughout the galaxy means.  He’s just drawing on the aesthetics of Starship Troopers because they are cool and they have worked for Doctor Who in the past, while the stock characters are just that, stock characters.  They don’t actively matter in the long run and could have been an interesting foil to the aspects of the Earth Empire to actually use an Agatha Christie style commentary at the very least, if Cole wasn’t able to go down the Verhoeven route.  Because it’s aesthetics of the military mind and expansion of empire it feels like Cole tacitly agreeing more with Heinlein over Verhoeven.  The Schirr rebels called the Ten-Strong are an interesting idea and indicate Cole almost had plans to go through Verhoeven over Heinlein, they believe themselves to be physically perfect though to human eyes they are grotesque and disgusting (Cole playing on some honestly ableist tropes throughout Ten Little Aliens in a lot of ways that I think are meant to make the reader uncomfortable but again Cole very much is a writer who likes his aesthetic references over examining them).

 

The biggest gimmick of the book is the Choose Your Own Adventure segment is actually the gimmick that is the most interesting: it’s presented as a neural net and its where you get glimmers that the stock characters have a little more than the stock they are given and you get insights into Ben and Polly.  Polly is a character Cole really wants to explore but sadly he reduces Ben to a stock Cockney sailor character.  Part of me gets why, this is 2002 and the only stories to really feature Ben and Polly that were readily available were The War Machines and in incomplete form The Tenth Planet (with the surviving episodes of The Underwater Menace and The Moonbase on VHS compilations while The Faceless Ones would not be released for a year).  Cole does characterize the Doctor well and gets the dynamic between the First Doctor specifically to Ben and Polly, though again that dynamic had the most material and it does reflect the two stories closest to completion.  Polly is a character who while occasionally reduced to a screamer does get to be more proactive than Ben who feels in a lot of ways dead weight.  It is nice to have this as an example of this TARDIS team, some of it does form the basis for what Big Finish Productions would develop years later with Anneke Wills on board.

 

Overall, Ten Little Aliens is certainly a novel with potential and Cole has definitely experienced everything that the novel goes out of its way to reference.  The biggest problem is that there are several gimmicks at the heart of the novel that are generally making it difficult to really flesh out, Cole needing to focus on one exact thing to really bring the novel to work.  Cole can be a great storyteller, but here he doesn’t seem to have the guiding hand to make this anything more than average.  5/10.