From Doctor Who Magazine #49
A Review by Finn Clark 30/6/12
It's kind of brilliant. Paul Neary writes another playful experiment in hard SF, but this one's even more imagination-boggling than The Touchdown on Deneb 7.
The story's freaky. It's ostensibly the driest SF you could imagine, but by the end we've taken flight into something that's practically mythology or a fairy tale. A spaceship blasts off from Daemos on a mission so magnificent in its loopiness that you'd have to be either NASA or the Brothers Grimm to come up with it. You might have guessed it from the title. "Commander Azal and his crew settle down to the monotony of their mission... which is simply to see if the universe has an end!"
Hmmm. Could be flying for a while there.
Improbably though, "in month three of the fourth year of travel", they find something. Strictly speaking though, it's nothing. After weird balloon-physics distortions, they land in a white void akin to that in The Mind Robber or Warriors' Gate (bizarrely broadcast a month after this issue of DWM's cover date). They've no idea what's happened to them. It could be fatal out there. Nevertheless their commander Azal goes outside... where he finds something very surprising.
The obviously cool thing about this story is its big twist and the finale that grows from it. "Both poor insignificant universes equally needed his insight, his leadership! To go to one party meant dooming the other universe to a meaningless life without him!"
This is so funny that it doesn't matter that this "unanswerable question" is a non-dilemma that a non-retard should be able to resolve in under two seconds. Obviously Azal can't return to both universes, but wibbling there like a lemon means he's choosing neither. Toss a coin, man. If you're so wise and all-powerful, surely you should be able to work out that committing yourself to one of the available universes is at least better than blessing none of them?
Nevertheless it's still cool, because:
(a) he's now a god and so the mere fact of his inability to decide feels like a comment on what happens to your thought processes when you think you're superior to everyone else, i.e. gods can be stupid too
(b) it fulfils the reader's expectations of symmetry, hubris and cosmic irony
(c) the infinite line of dithering idiot gods is one of the most existentially hilarious things in Doctor Who
The other inspired thing about the story is its use of the Daemons. These aren't obviously Who-looking monsters and indeed there's no obvious reason why you should even be paying the rights owners for the use of their likeness, as is suggested by their use in a comic strip in The Dr Who Annual 1974. What's cool about it though is the combination of superstitious devil imagery and a hard-SF story that soon takes a screeching right turn into near-religion.
We begin with Daemons embarking on a scientific expedition of hubris that rivals Frankenstein's. They're pushing the limits of creation. It's almost the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, except obviously with a different outcome. If there was ever a mad scientist project not to touch with a barge pole, it's this. What's more, the first half of the story is pure nuts-and-bolts SF. Their ship's powered by a controlled nuclear chain reaction. "The chosen ones follow... in the name of technology!"
Nevertheless even here, there's religious language. "Chosen ones." "It is our promised land!" "One brave... or brainless act of faith later."
So our Daemons have reached what, to all intents and purposes, could be heaven. It's white, infinite and beyond the universe. The devil goes out into it. You can see what's going on here. Then the devil meets himself and becomes God. "And suddenly there is not simply Azal, nor Azal, but one who is infinitely more than either Azal was before! For in that instant Azal understood... he became immortal! A godlike being of knowledge and compassion, whose one thought was to return to and help his people!"
(It's also worth noting that although the name Azal is obviously a reference to The Daemons, it's also originally from the Bible. "And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley of the mountains shall reach unto Azal: yea, ye shall flee, like as ye fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah.")
...whereupon we discover that heaven contains an infinity of mad gods.
It's also a bit longer than usual for the back-up strips at that time. The norm was four-page episodes, yet this runs for six. In fact it's DWM's only six-pager to date, if you don't count Minatorius in the 1981 Winter Special or a couple of six-part instalments of "one page a month" oddities (The Cybermen: The Dead Heart or The Daleks: Return of the Elders). I like this. You could squeeze it into four pages if you wanted, but I think the extra space makes a difference.
David Lloyd again isn't quite as well served here as he was by Alan Moore, but that's a fearsome bar to meet. Anyway, Lloyd is cool. Besides, his style works for me with hairy, intense devils flying a spaceship off the edge of the universe. I think I love this story. It's definitely somewhere on a scale between "love" and "really like", but the whole thing's so glorious and loopy that I think it's got to be "love". It lacks the horror and emotional force of the Moore's back-up strips, but it's got a sense of cosmic irony second to none. Mad as a bag of frogs. It's one of those "I can't believe this is in the Whoniverse" stories, but in a wonderful way.