Retrospective: Stephen Marley by John Seavey 25/11/03
Every once in a while, there's a certain synchronicity that occurs in fiction -- not just Doctor Who fiction, but any fiction; a great author writes a great book, and it becomes something of a phenomenon. Everyone sits up and takes notice, and that author is catapaulted from the massed ranks of his profession to prominence in the field, and is asked to follow up on his singularly wonderful novel with more. Unfortunately for us, that didn't happen with Stephen Marley and his lone novel for the Doctor Who range, Managra.
Part of it, I think, is the timing. Marley wrote Managra in the middle of the great Virgin era of Doctor Who, well before the idea of a "Doctor Who spin-off" had gained much currency. He created a world in Europa so dazzlingly audacious, so charming and mythic and yet so simple, that it simply cries out for a dozen more novels set there without even needing the Doctor, but because this was a year and a half before Bernice Summerfield got her own book line, and even more ahead of Faction Paradox, Miranda, and the Time Hunters, it never got a follow-up.
Part of it lies in the line it was written for. According to most accounts, the Missing Adventures were viewed by the Virgin editors as the "weaker sister" of the two lines, inherently less interesting because they traded so heavily on nostalgia. Marley seems to have been aware of this, and I've always had my suspicions that Managra was originally pitched as a Seventh Doctor and Bernice story set between Set Piece and Original Sin, then hastily rewritten to accomodate a change of crew when that gap filled up. (The Doctor as written reads much more like the Seventh than the Fourth, and Sarah suddenly acquires two dead parents that Persona uses to manipulate her -- not to mention, there's a mention of the Doctor "dropping off" Sarah and having a side adventure, something that sounds much more like what the Seventh Doctor might do with Bernice.) But because Managra wound up as an MA, it doesn't seem to have gotten the press it deserves.
And that's a shame, because Marley is an excellent author. The book is filled with delightful characters, drawn from the pages of history and fiction and brought to life in a technological melange of every era of Earth's history. The story abounds with wit and sophistication, mixed with horror and action, and although the world is so intriguing that it sometimes threatens to upstage the Doctor and Sarah Jane, they both get their parts to play. Oh, and there's a lot of clever word-play with anagrams and riddles, too, if you like that sort of thing... which I do.
The last time I suggested it was unlikely that a Doctor Who author would ever write for the range again, within days he was announced as the creative head of a new televised version of the Doctor's adventures. It is with the most fervent hope that reverse psychology will work again that I state my belief that Stephen Marley probably won't follow up Managra, and that it's just as much of a shame... a book like this deserves more recognition than it got, and the same goes for its author.