Retrospective: Daniel Blythe by John Seavey 23/6/03
Reading the works of Daniel Blythe (The Dimension Riders, Infinite Requiem) is an interesting, if not always pleasing experience, that I can best liken to sitting in on a social gathering of very close friends that you don't know. The conversations somehow seem abbreviated, confusing, even sometimes as though they're speaking in code -- but what it really means is that the people involved know each other so well that they don't bother to fully convey their ideas, because they know that their intended audience will understand the abbreviated versions. Unfortunately, they've forgotten you're there, and that you're not familiar with the ideas or the way they're being conveyed.
This shows up both in his plotting and characterization, and it makes his novels a curiously unengaging experience. In The Dimension Riders, Romulus Terrin is (I think) meant to be a human analogue to the Doctor, doing the best he can to be an open-minded explorer and seeker of insights who left the Academy to travel, and whose greatest fear is to not get the chance to see everything the universe has to offer. He and the Doctor are (probably) meant to be kindred spirits...and yet the book gives Terrin so little time "on-screen", and so little to do, that his sacrifice leaves the reader cold. It's not a case of "tell, don't show," which is a problem a lot of authors have, but a problem of "neither tell nor show." We just don't get to know him.
Ditto with his villains and their plans -- and the Doctor's counter-plans. The Garvond and the Sensopaths never get a fully-realized origin, because there's too much being juggled...and yet, nothing seems to be really happening. They plot, yet their goals are explained as afterthoughts. The Doctor counter-plots, but we don't know what he's doing until the end, and really not even then. It does feel like Blythe had great ideas, but that he doesn't quite know how to convey them to us as the reader. Only the President, a "wanna-be" renegade Time Lord, comes off with any degree of real panache. (It probably doesn't help that The Dimension Riders is in part a sequel to Shada, a "lost" Doctor Who story that some fans still might not be altogether familiar with.)
He does do a good Seventh Doctor, though, and I think it's a pity he didn't do a novel later on in the series (after Happy Endings), where the Doctor is obsessing over his own future regeneration. Blythe's Doctor is ancient, world-weary, and somehow ineffably sad -- and while it works well, I think it would have worked so much better in the period around Damaged Goods or So Vile A Sin. His Benny and Ace are competent, but unspectacular.
He does uncork some very vivid prose, especially when he touches on the "horror" end of the Doctor Who spectrum -- it's no surprise that his post-Who work was done in that genre. A character's flashback to the discovery of a cave-in survivor who'd eaten his fellow scientists, the horrific description of Darius Cheynor stepping in the remains of the Phracton Commandant, and of course the numerous descriptions of aging to death in The Dimension Riders... Blythe has a gift for getting under your skin with horrific imagery, even when it's hard to care about his characters overmuch.
Supposedly, Blythe is planning to get back into Who in the near future, and I think I'll be interested in seeing what he's doing next. His weak points seemed to be those of a young novelist still finding his feet, rather than of someone who wasn't going to improve, and time might very well have made him into a very good writer indeed.