The Doctor Who Information Network Myth Makers 12 A Collection of Short Stories

Editors	Scott Clarke and Richard Salter
Published	2002

Available to order through DWIN

• A Review by Bryan Burford

A Review by Bryan Burford 24/9/02

This is very nearly the very first fan fiction I've read. This can mostly be attributed to my not having been aware of such a thing until the last year or two, but even since then to having had grave suspicions as to what I might find in such a domain. Frightening fantasies featuring the Fifth Doctor and Adric. Tedious crossovers in which the Doctor thwarts a plot by Avon and Kirk to turn Yavin 4 into a new human homeworld. Fascinating insights into unexplained moments of Who lore, like why did Crayford never look under his eyepatch? That kind of thing. I did buy one of the highly praised charity anthologies, but to be honest I've not got around to reading more than a couple of stories.

So, cajoled by a highly aggressive marketing campaign on the Jade Pagoda mailing list, and the desire to empty my PayPal account, I took the plunge into Myth Makers #12 in a fairly open minded, but tending to the sceptical, way.

And you know, it's not half bad.

Twelve stories, of which the majority are far above the standard I'd expected.

Two are related to recent BBC novels - Mags L Halliday provides a Prelude/Postscript to History 101, while there is a missing chapter from Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris. The latter's effectiveness as a stand-alone is obviously limited, and as such its value for inclusion must be questioned, but it may be interesting to consider against the published novel. Halliday's contribution is more tangentially related to the novel, and as such more effective here. Concisely executed, it is essentially a character sketch of Anji, illustrating just what effect travelling with the Doctor has done.

Of the wholly original fiction here, Richard Salter's Note To Self and Greg McElhatton's Absence of the D***** (sic) are perhaps the standouts. Both Salter and McElhatton's contributions manage to generate some suspense, surprise and interest in a very few pages. The prose is perhaps stronger in Salter's, but McElhatton's is enhanced by a (presumably deliberate) meta-reading of the tale (a reading which refers to the sometimes over-eager protection of certain cyborgs by the copyright holders). This story also features the best illustration in the magazine - a visual pun by Michael Leis.

Other stories equally worthy of praise, for both conception and execution, are Footprints in Time by Scott Clarke, and The Interior by Alan Taylor. These are both archetypal 'mystery' short stories, the latter concerning dimensional problems with Compassion and a strange bookshop, the former dealing with temporal oddities in an old people's home. Similar stories in that they both deal with slightly confusing, slightly fannish issues, with a pinch of whimsy to see them through. Again though, far better than my stereotype of fan fiction predicted..

Only one story, Silver Puppet, Jumping on a String by Robert Smith? really approaches the fanwank horrors I'd feared of such publications, addressing as it does exactly what Kamelion was doing all that time, and why he never stepped outside. It does that quite well though, highlighting the suspicions the crew might have of 'someone' so recently controlled by the Master, and so providing some plausible reasoning behind one of the more distracting elements of mid-80s Who. As the only example of such gap-filling in this collection, it is perfectly welcome, and reasonably well-written, although perhaps slightly more perceptibly amateur in its execution.

The collection does not restrict itself to the typical short story format. Most radical is probably The Inheritors of Reality by Graeme Burk, a 'choose your own adventure style' tale. Never having been a fan of such things I can't really comment on it's effectiveness, but it reads perfectly well, and its mere presence is refreshing.

There's this Story by James Bow is a seriously short story of half a page, and is an effective vignette of how the Doctor might have spent a little time trapped on earth, enrolling in a creative writing course, and not necessarily liking the introspection asked of him.

Clark E Salter's Time and Relatives is the best of these steps outside the usual format. Presented as a script for a hypothetical synthesis between Doctor Who circa 1980 and bad soap opera of the same vintage. It manages to be very silly, and funny, at the same time - things which the final two stories I think might aspire to, but fail to deliver on, and as such provide the only real weak points in the collection.

Oddly, one of these is Lance Parkin's contribution (the Father Time-period Eighth Doctor has an unwitting encounter with the Master at Miranda's school). Oddly because you'd expect someone who has written some of the very best novels in the Virgin and BBC ranges to be leagues ahead of any of his 'amateur' peers in this collection. But on reflection, that probably explains it - Parkin tells his stories in novels, pieces like that here presumably provide a distraction from/alternative to the day job, allowing him to indulge in the sort of whimsy he demonstrates here. Other contributors meanwhile are telling their stories a bit more in anger, so to speak.

The other main failure for me is John Anderson's Great Spangled Fritillary. Some nice ideas, perhaps, but unclear in its execution. I just wasn't clear enough on what it wanted to be, what it was about. Written in a very strange tense it follows the Sixth Doctor around somebody's dreamscape (accounting for some of its oddity no doubt), but, for this reader to no real effect.

Even these low points though are of a fairly high standard, and criticism of them can only be subjective. I went to fan fiction expecting a derivative wasteland, but it's actually quite fertile. Doctor Who is often praised for the versatility of its format, and this is amply demonstrated in Myth Makers 12.