Lawrence Miles by Terrence Keenan 5/3/03
I think it's amazing that out of all the creative forces behind Who in all its formats, there is only one person who I think causes fan polarization more than any other -- and that includes JN-T, Andrew Cartmel, Pip & Jane Baker, Robert Holmes, Uncle Terrance Dicks, Lance Parkin, Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman, and Paul Magrs.
It's Lawrence Miles.
His books are seen as Big Events. His books make people think. His books cause violent reactions.
I put together a top ten list of most controversial Who stories. Three offerings from Miles -- Alien Bodies, Interference and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street -- all made it on there. To be honest, Dead Romance could have made the list with no effort as well, just for its ideas.
Miles has huge ideas. Continuity connecting and continuity destroying ideas. Ideas that make that Target book-devouring, Anorak-wearing fanboy within all fans bleed out of their ears. Ideas that not only cover the characters in Who, but also Who's mythology. What is most impressive is not the sheer volume of ideas, but how fearless they are. Miles throws out ideas, then carries them to their logical, sometimes frightening conclusion. His ideas are designed to correct perceived flaws with characters, concepts and even how stories should be told.
My introduction to Lawrence Miles is an odd route. Please allow me to ramble a bit here.
I had avoided the book lines for a long time, due to being out of fandom, and also because I wasn't interested in the seventh Doctor. But, when I was diving back into fandom, I found myself in a Barnes and Noble looking at Who fiction around the time the BBC was first started. I picked up a book called Alien Bodies. I didn?t bother to find out who the author was. But I read a few selective passages and found myself being sucked into what was happening. It was an EDA, but I felt a connection to the Robert Holmes stories I enjoyed during my big fanboy days of yore. And then I had to leave, so I put down the book, and left Who fiction alone for a while.
2001 was the year I dove head first into Who books. I stuck with authors I knew and tales that stayed on the conventional -- for Who -- side of things. At one point I did try to read Interference, but it didn't grab me. It felt mean and bloated.
Fast forward to December 2001. While waiting to see a movie at the local Octoplex, I walked into a Barnes and Noble and picked up The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. Two weeks later, it came up on the book rotation and I started reading. In five days, I had only read fifty pages. It was slow and dense, but I was getting a feel for its format, and understanding the premise. I finished the book three days later. With the last 70 pages or so, I was laughing and screaming at the book, feeling that I had been rewarded as a reader for sticking with it. I raved about this singular masterpiece to everyone in the groups I frequented. I wrote the fawning review posted here and subsequently posted it wherever I could.
Alien Bodies came next. The prologue with the Third Doctor and Sarah hooked me. I devoured the book in two days, took a day off, read it cover to cover again. I still pick it up and read selections to this day. More raves and huzzahs. Then it was Interference. And I knew every single revelation about going in. Read all the reviews, even read the famous Menace interviews. Didn't matter, because I enjoyed every single page of both books. I posted a review that was more an excuse to say Miles is God, come and worship him more than anything else.
Dead Romance was the result of a three month hunt on the internet to find a copy (A process I would repeat for Christmas on a Rational Planet and Down). I read it right after Human Nature, a book I found disappointing. I could have easily read Dead Romance in one day. I forced myself to spread it over three or four, then indulged myself in a single day readathon at a sidewalk cafe. After wanting to abandon the Virgin Books with Human Nature, Dead Romance gave them a second chance. I had bought Down in July, but waited till after I read The Also People to enjoy that one. I managed to track down a copy of Xmas in October. Read it in December. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard while reading a book. Down came next, a book I spread over a couple of weeks because I didn't want it to end. Initial thought was best Bernice Summerfield ever. Just as the thought after Xmas was best Seventh Doctor ever.
So, why does an author I enjoy more than any other Who writer cause more controversy?
It has to do with Miles's ideas.
Not only the volume, but also their sheer audacity.
Miles thinks big. He's not interested in connecting two TV stories in a novel just to feed any fannish impulse. Miles will take a TV idea and rework it to its best potential. The Krotons in Alien Bodies, for example. He manages to ridicule them and make them far scarier than Bob Holmes ever imagined them. The Time Lords in Dead Romance are a combination of the scary Gods in The War Games and the political monsters in The Deadly Assassin, and far more frightening than ever imaginable.
Speaking of the Time Lords, Miles is also the first author who looked forward with this omnipotent race, rather than backward. He showed a future of the Time Lords that was bleak, the fall of an empire both from within and from the outside. He created a group inimicable to them, Faction Paradox, which worshipped the very ideas that the Time Lords thought blasphemous. He created an enemy that was their equal and possibly more ruthless. He even showed a logical extension of what happened when their selected Interventionists saw the future and bailed, the Celestis. Logical, yet fresh and interesting.
Miles, although a fan, is also Who's biggest critic. He has no problem calling to task anything he sees as wrong with Who and what it should be and stand for. He ripped Kate Orman's Walking to Babylon, questioned the character of the Eighth Doctor in both Alien Bodies and Interference, dissected Samantha Jones's politics in Interference and whatever else bothered him. By showing no fear with his critiques, he risked alienating fans and fellow authors. What appealed to me was that his opinions, and critiques of Who were weaved into the story in a way that if you removed them, it wouldn't affect the story Miles wanted to tell. You can pull the aforementioned Babylon attack from Dead Romance and it wouldn't change the brilliance of the story itself. It's a trick other authors have failed at, IMHO.
Personally, why I have enjoyed all of Lawrence Miles's novels comes down to the simple fact that he sucks me in like no other author in Who (although Justin Richards comes close). I enjoy his prose style, his plot development, his ideas and his thoughts. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I don't think he forces you to agree with him. Miles also has an ability (like Stanley Kubrick) to pose far more question than he answers in his novels. This is a hard trick to pull off without insulting the audience. The best example of this is his dissection of Sam's politics in Interference. Miles raises a multitude of questions and answers, and leaves it to the reader to decide on their own which are important and which aren't.
I see why some fans don't like Miles's novels. They rarely follow Who conventions. They don't feel safe and nostalgic, like a Terrance Dicks book. They give radical interpretations to the Whoniverse which jettison or rework what has come before. They throw in new histories and show frightening futures. They're not for people who want Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks.
Which is a shame, because, if they could let go of their preconceived notions of what Who stories should be, methinks they might be surprised.
As a joke, the last line of my review for Down says "Miles is God. Accept it now." Yes, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer. Yes, I'm overstating my case.
But, IMHO, Lawrence Miles is the best author of Doctor Who fiction. And the most controversial.
Post Script: Miles has once again "retired" from Who fiction. However, he is due to have a Faction Paradox novel out by the end of the year. I'll be first in line to read it, without a doubt.
Retrospective: Lawrence Miles by John Seavey 8/10/13
The thing that's most difficult, when reading through the work of Lawrence Miles (Christmas on a Rational Planet, Down, Alien Bodies, Dead Romance, Interference Books One and Two, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and This Town Will Never Let Us Go) it determining whether he actually means anything he says. On the one hand, most of his works are highly polemical and charged with arguments guaranteed to infuriate his reading audience. On the other hand, his work is so densely packed with irony that it's hard to determine whether he's actually saying what he believes, or whether he's just enfolded his beliefs in yet another layer of deliberate controversy. When Sam Jones is swayed by the arguments of the Remote, is that because Miles legitimately believes that there's no underlying ethical structure to the universe and we all follow our cultural programming? Or is he just implying that Sam Jones has always been written as a straw woman by every other author, so why not take that to its logical conclusion and have her completely convinced by Compassion's eighth-grade debating tactics? How seriously can you take a man who suggests that pain and suffering is a necessary part of the universe when the story ends with Benny almost literally shoving the argument up the arguer's ass sideways? When dealing with someone who resolutely refuses to take anything entirely seriously, including himself, it's hard to say.
On the other hand, it's possible to be so sharp you can cut yourself. At this point, Miles is as famous for being "Mad Larry" as he is for any of his books; he's managed to alienate pretty much everyone in a position to get him more work, whether in Doctor Who or anything else. His books are notorious for containing thinly veiled cheap shots and insults towards his fellow authors, and his public statements are, if anything, even more controversial. Even if he is taking the piss, he's never managed to do so in a way that makes it clear to the people he's talking to or about. If your irony is so fine that the only person who knows it's ironic is you, you have probably failed at the task of communication, if nothing else. Even if Miles isn't sincere, he fakes it so well it hurts.
Then again, it's impressive to read someone who commits so fully to their narrative. Miles does an excellent job of getting inside the head of his characters, writing them with absolutely no efforts to impose his own views onto their narrative frame. The ending of Christmas on a Rational Planet is absolutely brilliant in that both the Carnival Queen and the Doctor are fully committed to their respective worldviews, even though they're mutually incompatible and even though they're both entirely unreliable as narrators. The important thing isn't which one of them is "right", it's how they react to their beliefs. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Sam and Compassion, of Christine and Chris, of Inangela and Valentine. Miles' books don't so much take a side as they throw the arguments up into the air and let you decide where they come down. As a result, you wind up thinking about his books long after you've finished them. (Even if one of the thoughts is, "Seriously, Sam? 'You don't care about people who die in car crashes'? You couldn't come up with an answer to that?")
Of course, all of these polemics and arguments and debates and philosophies would be boring if they weren't written in Miles' prose; for all that he's an infuriating and frustrating human being, he's at the top of the pack when it comes to writing style. Alien Bodies is a fabulously well-written romp with some of the best jokes in the series, and a clear influence on the new Doctor Who TV series. (In fact, I'd argue that it's the last truly influential Doctor Who novel.) Dead Romance is one of the all-time best-written novels in the entire range of Who and its spin-offs. His prose drips wit, power, fury, sadness, and horror, sometimes all in the same sentence. Given that, it's no wonder that he was commissioned at least once even after he managed to piss off every single person he's ever worked with. (Although some of the blame for that should rest with the editors. Did Steve Cole never think about cutting the lines that were clearly aimed at other writers? Did Rebecca Levene never say, "No, we're taking out the cheap shot about Walking to Babylon"? But I digress.)
Ultimately, reading Lawrence Miles is both an immensely frustrating and amazingly rich experience. It's difficult to read his books without getting upset, simply because so many of the points he's making are wrong-headed or insulting or insultingly wrong-headed (or wrong-headedly insulting). But, at the same time, I've not read a Doctor Who book that's done such a good job of making me re-examine my ideas; Miles has a way of getting under your skin, poking at you and asking if you've really thought about what you've been saying all this time. You wind up looking at the world a little bit differently after reading his books, and that's high praise for any writer. I may not agree with everything he says, I may not agree with anything he says, and I may not even be able to tell you if Miles agrees with anything he says... but it's well worth listening to him say it. It would be nice if, some day, he managed to focus and control his talent for irony and got back in the good graces of the BBC long enough to do another Doctor Who book, because they are well worth reading.
Then again, maybe there isn't any irony at all and he means all the stupid things he's said. That's the problem with irony; there's always the danger that people will start seeing it even when it's not there.