The Doctor Who Information Network Myth Makers 14: Personal Reflections A Collection of Short Stories

Editors	Scott Clarke and Richard Salter
Published	2004

Available to order through DWIN

• A Review by Stuart Douglas

A Review by Stuart Douglas 12/2/05

The last Myth Makers (Essentials) was one of the better collections of Who short fiction I've read, whether official or otherwise, and knocked those Big Finish Short Trips books I've read out of the park. I was delighted to find that the latest Myth Makers continues that trend: editors Scott Clarke and Richard Salter have once again excelled themselves and, to be quite frank, Big Finish could do worse than ask them to edit a collection on their behalf.

Having said that, Myth Makers #14 starts with its weakest story, Pete Kempshall's Never Runs Smooth. There's nothing objectionably bad about the prose in this slight tale of a man very briefly torn between two women, but neither is there really much of a plot or, more crucially for this type of collection, much need to involve Doctor Who in it at all. Without wishing to be unkind, this story could have been written as a 100 word drabble without too much difficulty as the first two pages seem merely to be padding designed to mention The War Machines, whilst the resolution uses a plot point from The Faceless Ones for no reason other than to justify its inclusion in a Who collection. Still it's not badly written, and reading it isn't a chore or anything, so on we go...

...to Dale Smith's second brilliant Myth Makers story in a row, after the stand-out Recursion from issue 13. Blossom is a fable in the Angela Carter-mould, with an aged Grandfather lost to Wicked Wolves, Narnian-style TARDIS doors in the woods and a friendly magician wrapping his arms in flames as he talks to a little girl. It's just wonderful, with barely a wasted word and a sketch of the Troughton Doctor which is out of this world. I won't say it's the perfect Doctor Who short story, but it's up there with In the Sixties and The Crystal Flower which makes it not far off.

It's a huge compliment to John Anderson that the next story up, Josephine Grant and the Assassins of Fashion isn't a dreadful comedown. The extent to which you'll like this story will, I suspect, depend on what other writers you like away from Doctor Who. If you're a fan of Michael Moorcock and the British New Wave, you'll love this mad rush across the pages of early 70s Who, with cultural and fictional references aplenty, and a lovingly synthesised prose style spookily reminiscent of Jerry Cornelius and his ilk. Closer to home, if you liked Paul Magrs' BBC Short Trips story, Femme Fatale, then this is just the thing for you, featuring as it does a sort of Jo Grant version of Sam Jones from that story. I love that kind of stuff and I loved this. The only minor gripe I have in fact is that on occasion it seemed to be trying just a little too hard in its metafictional referencing (a description which substitutes the author's own words for the short-hand of noting that it was just like a specific passage from Timewyrm: Revelation, whilst clever, was just a step too far for me, although other readers may disagree). All in all, another high point of the collection and one made all the better by John pointing out all the influences in his 'About the Author' bit at the end of the magazine.

Mags Halliday's The Night is Long, and Dreams are Legion is one of that particular genre of stories you tend to get in fan publications - an extract from a longer work and a teaser for an upcoming novel. Don't get me wrong, it's good, intriguing stuff and if I hadn't already been eagerly anticipating Warring States then this would certainly have pushed me in that direction, but it's not really a story in a traditional start, middle,end sort of way. Actually, it's also a teaser for Of the City of the Saved... which, given its award-winning status as the Pagoda equivalent of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is surely a little redundant...

Richard Booth is, presumably, a first time author (or at least his previous stories don't get a mention on the DWIN webpage) but it doesn't show. Weaving several interlinked but different viewpoints and timelines into one another in the space of a brief short story is a tricky proposition for an experienced writer, but Booth pulls it off with no obvious difficulty in Broken Hearts. The story features a nicely observed Sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe stumbling across an underground cache of powered-down Cybermen while solar flares ravage the Earth above their heads (which, for me, was a very evocative and unexpected setting). The various viewpoints come together, drift apart and then come together again effortlesly and although the moral questions at the end of the story are starting to become something of a cliche when applied to this particular pairing of Doctor and companion, Booth just about gets to the end without descending into the type of trowelled-on Smytheian emotion which has blighted at least one of the more recent Sixth Doctor audios.

To be honest, I'm not sure if I liked Ian Mond's Perfect Moments or not. For most of the story I thought it was heading to be a fan injoke, riffing on Rob Shearman's Scherzo audio and the entire 'let's show everything via phantasms and dreams' element of the Divergence arc, but in the end it's a story about the choices people make and the prices they're willing to pay. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination and there are some lovely lines (Mond's description of the Doctor - 'you selfish, British lunatic' - is probably my favourite line in the entire magazine) but it left me curiously unsatisfied at the end, with the intense build up leading to something which was actually fairly insubstantial. One minor complaint aimed at the editors here - having Richard Booth's tale of lost love immediately prior to Ian Mond's seemed a bit strange.

Digging in the Dirt by Dave Hoskins starts a little clunkily, with the prose in the first paragraph somewhat reminiscent, for me at least, of the first few pages of The Pit. Actually I have to put my hand up and admit that at first I thought that that was both deliberate and a play on words, as the story is about an archaeologist on the Braxiatel Collection. Second hands up moment - I presumed the archaeologist was Benny (the whole story is told in the second person singular so, in my defence, it was an easy mistake to make). Third hands up moment, I also presumed that the fact that the story is about 'Citizen Kane' and the possibility that Orson Welles was a total conman was a subtle(ish) metaphor for Jason Kane, formerly of this parish. Obviously I analyse things a little too much sometimes. In retrospect, it's almost certainly about none of those things, but is instead an enjoyable tale which makes some decent points about the nature of academia. I can't help wondering if that's the Master at the end though...

It's nice to see a REG story in here, and Steve Hatcher's Venceremos ('We will Succeed' in Portuguese apparently) has several things to commend it, not least it's portrayal of a decidedly flawed Doctor. In spite of the absence of any great REG backstory, Hatcher's 9th Doctor comes across as very much a genuine personality, helped in no small part by the author's decision to avoid the temptation to have him witter on about alcohol incessantly. Instead, Hatcher picks up on this Doctor's unwillingness to get involved, and preference for an easy fix over a difficult one and effectively shows the consequences of this approach. The prose itself is workmanlike if not spectacular, although (personal bugbear time) Hatcher twice utilises the horror which is the very short declamatory sentence ending in an exclamation mark! ('They were gunshots!', 'It was Isobel!') and the planetary inhabitants do seem to speak in Stock Stilted Spaniard English. Other than that though, this is a worthwhile addition to the adventures of a Doctor likely to end up in print about as often as Peter Cushing.

Nearing the end of the magazine now, but there's no sign of a drop in quality with Simon A Forward's Pincer Movement. With links to his Telos novella Shell Shock and the possible fate of Peri post-Mindwarp, the standard of writing in this story is exceptional. Reading this portrayal of Peri as Warrior Queen and comparing it to Uncle Terry's version in Warmonger is to recognise that Who is very fortunate to have SAF around. The whole concept of Peri leaving with Ycranos makes at least some kind of sense after reading this story and while I've seen it suggested that Forward's creation of a fairly adult backstory for Peri in Shell Shock was a misplaced endeavour, he builds on that here to great effect.

The final story in the collection is the second from what I presume is a first time writer, James Milton. Tinker is a solid, traditional story and is, in fact, one of the few stories in the collection which feels like a straight Doctor Who story, rather than one merely set in the Whoniverse. It's an early Seventh Doctor story which paints a recognisable picture of that Doctor. There's manipulation aplenty here, but it has an innocence about it which has disappeared by the onset of the NAs and a sense of the small-scale which is refreshing. That the Doctor pretends to need a Stellar Manipulator in order to bring the two protagonists together, even though we know he already has access to a perfectly working one, is a nice touch in an excellent story.

As a final comment, the artwork in Myth Makers #14 is as good as ever. Everything is excellent, but I was particularly impressed with Carolyn Edwards full page spread for Blossom and by Mark Stevens actually using a different image of the REG Doctor for Venceremos.