• Retrospective: Jim Mortimore by John Seavey
• Retrospecticus: "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" by Matthew Harris

Retrospective: Jim Mortimore by John Seavey 8/4/04

"Every once in a while, when reading and writing reviews of any sort, it becomes clear that there is no "Everyman" reviewer. Everyone brings their own personal quirks and preferences to the judgement of a creative work. Frequently, this doesn't matter because the work in question is either so self-evidently good or so self-evidently bad that a consensus can be reached... but every once in a while, you get an author who divides opinion sharply, and who cannot be categorized. "

I'm not one of those people, so they'll probably want to look elsewhere for a defense of Mortimore's books.

In truth, I find his books an immensely frustrating experience. He's got amazing prose. There's no question about that. There are sequences that are absolutely unforgettable in their sheer poetic intensity, the way he absolutely lays bare experience at its most raw. But his fundamental problem comes down to the fact that he can't actually tell a story for toffee. Virtually all of Mortimore's books are exercises in world-building, not story-telling, and worse, they're incoherent world-building to boot. I'm not saying he doesn't have a coherent concept in his own mind. Certainly, at times, it seems like he does. But he's so utterly bad at delivering exposition that crucial parts of the central idea of any given novel are just utterly lost. Sometimes the vital exposition is delivered in a paragraph or two of technobabble, other times it's simply not given at all. (For example, I defy anyone to explain why the Chalctose terraforming engine in Eternity Weeps just didn't start up for six billion years, or how the matter transmitter got to Mount Ararat...) This, of course, leaves the reader with the question, "Is there any fundamental difference between a book with no meaning and a book that has a meaning but can't convey it to you?" And, just as importantly, "Which is more frustrating to read?"

As I say, Mortimore's books are exercises in world-building, not story-telling, so the plot of any given Mortimore novel is basically a tour of whatever world he's built more than anything else. This can be the post-Silurian Earth of Blood Heat, the Artifact of Parasite, or the TARDIS-universe of Campaign. Characters wander through it, they see the sights, and then they die. And let me just stress that last part -- Mortimore doesn't know the meaning of the word "restraint" when it comes to bumping off characters. I honestly can't think of a single character outside the "unkillable" TARDIS crew that survived to the end of a novel he wrote by himself. As such, it's hard to ever develop emotional investment in anything he writes, because you can never bring yourself to care about his characters. Even Mortimore himself doesn't seem to care about his characters -- it's the same reason why scientists don't name the vivisection specimens.

So, given that I really don't like Jim Mortimore's books, would I want to see another one? To some extent, it's a moot point. Mortimore has become persona non grata at the BBC due to the fracas over Campaign, and it's uncertain whether we'll see him write for any of the other spin-off series. But in a hypothetical world, where I had the option? Possibly. It'd have to be under a very strong editor, one who could perhaps explain to him that when death is everywhere, it loses its meaning. 600 million dead is just a number. One person dead, when the reader genuinely believed they were going to live? That's heartbreaking. Mortimore's great fault is that he can never make you believe anyone's going to live.

Retrospecticus: "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" by Matthew Harris 21/12/08

Some time ago (I flatly refuse to believe it was three years) I got a joblot of Jim Mortimore books in out of curiosity. Specifically curiosity about Campaign, which such luminaries as Robert Smith?, Sean Gaffney and Finn Clark broke their brains on. What I knew about Jim beforehand: he was probably a damn good writer on the level of the purely techincal, he was also probably insane, and everyone dies oh god everyone dies.

Having read more or less all his DW and related books now (except for Lucifer Rising which still seems a little like hard work for me, The Sword of Forever which you can't find for love or fricking money these days; by the way, if anyone knows how I could get Damaged Goods for less than fifty bloody quid I would be eternally grateful), I can consider myself a fan, albeit one who doesn't necessarily want to read certain parts of his books ever again.

Herewith, the works of Jim Mortimore as seen by some bloke. This will probably contain spoilers, and a surprising amount of DC Comics references.

Blood Heat: The Children are Our Future

See my review for the full, explicit, throbbing lowdown, but this is one damn good book. People die, but not whole solar systems, and there is undeniable power in the use of the old names in an alternate universe setting. Inferno did the same thing (with the same characters, now I think of it - that might have been Jim's plan all along) but was, perhaps by necessity, far shallower than this (though still absolutely fantastic). Turning the Brigadier into a fascist monster with a coincidentally same name and similar title is one thing. Actually using the man himself, changed by events but not beyond recognition, is another. I'm still in awe at how Jim pulled this off. Admittedly, it starts off badly, but then he had the early Virgin line-up of a half-formed Benny and New Bleeding Ace to deal with (though the latter is better in this book than almost any other, with the possible exception of Set Piece), plus the inconsistent early Virgin Doctor. Plus he has to deal with kicking off the original Alternate Universe Arc (in my head, the EDA one is designated as the Crisis on Infinite Earths Arc), which is still the only explanation I can think of for whatever that prologue is. Once he gets to deal with his own concepts, you're laughing. Occasionally. Okay, you're weeping and wincing more often, but still. There is laughter. Honest.

People seem to have forgotten Blood Heat, but it's a book everyone should read.

Eye of Heaven: Leela, Warrior Princess

You'd think I'd read these books in chronological order or something, but no. This is actually the penultimate official DW book Mortimore wrote (and his only real PDA), but it's the second one I read. Go figure.

Fantastic book. Mortimore for those people who can't usually fit him in their heads. Again, I completed a full review of this eons ago, but just to reiterate: the switching narrators and non-chronological chapter ordering is brilliant, not least because it feels like a deliberate and legitimate stylistic conceit, and not the poncey load of old bollocks it would have under almost any other author (Dave Stone probably could have made it work, and I believe that Lawrence Miles could do almost anything if he tried hard enough, though at this stage of his career, whether it would be entertaining or interesting to anyone but him is another matter). Leela is absolutely fantastic, putting Jim Mortimore alongside Terrance Dicks as the only other author to do her justice apart from her creators. The first-person chapters narrated by the Doctor are incredible, even if they don't quite feel Tomish. And Rapa Nui is just plain cool, a fact which Mortimore clearly knows perfectly well and uses to great effect.

And this was the first Fourth Doctor PDA as well. Read this book. It is the law. And if you want to sample this force of nature we mortals call Jim Mortimore, this is probably the place to start, if only because it's the least grim of all his books.

Beltempest: Here Comes the Sun

Sir Joe Ford on Beltempest:

"I don't know what to say about Beltempest, as there has never been another Doctor Who book like it. I have never read another book like this in any genre. It is in a league of its own, brilliant, bold, deadly... a prose style that captures individual moments with shocking realism and yet passes over cataclysmic events with little more than a yawn. Where an entire solar system is devastated and the Doctor's companion achieves immortality. It's sick, sick, sick and yet strangely compelling, the scale and importance of the threat dragging you into its defeatist depths.

The only problem is I hate it."

Having started with two of his lesser-mentioned, supposedly carnage-light (by his standards) books, I took the plunge for my third read.

Beltempest. An Eighth Doctor and Sam v2.0 book. That didn't worry me much, having read Blood Heat. Sam was as badly thought-out and used a companion as New Ace back in the day. She's the anti-matter opposite of New Ace, equally annoying but for completely diametrically opposed reasons. But, as already pointed out, New Ace was, at least, an actual character with motivation and depth in Blood Heat, which is the best anyone could reasonably expect from her. And the Seventh Doctor at that stage of the NAs was as ill-defined and confusingly characterised as the Eighth Doctor at the end of the Sam era (and arguably throughout his whole existence, but that's another article).

Beltempest. In which an entire Solar System is doomed from the get-go. It's such a non-issue it's even mentioned on the back cover.

Beltempest. Religion, immortality, astrophysics, and bloody great creatures that incubate in suns.

Beltempest is an astonishing book, but I couldn't swear to wanting to read it ever again. The prose is fantastic, but even Mortimore-haters admit that that's his major strength. This is his ultimate James Cameron book - Cameron having once said that less isn't more, more is more. I am convinced that there physically cannot be more to Beltempest without the book developing its own centre of gravity and destroying us all. Mortimore would write the book about that as well. This is an incredible, huge book deliberately designed to drown you in scale.

And its regulars are... well, I for one liked the Doctor. Having read this out of context I had no inbuilt preconceptions about the Eighth Doctor based on where the line was taking him. He was a blank slate to me. And I was actually quite charmed by this improvisational, talkative Doctor. He felt like Peter and Tom mixed up in Alexander Luthor's Petri dish with maybe a dash of Pertwee. Of course, given the scale he was working on on, this was often terrifying. Both reactions - charm and terror - were undoubtedly Mortimore's intention.

And then there's Sam. Sam is an annoying self-righteous liberal, the kind that gives liberals a bad name. Sam cares, deeply, and vaguely, about stuff. Sam becomes a goddess.

There's very little to say about Sam in Beltempest that hasn't already been said. Suffice it to say that Mortimore knows what motivates Sam and places it, like his tornado of a Doctor, on a large scale to see what happens.

Not to spoil anything, but nothing good.

There's a lot to admire (I won't say "like" because there's nothing to like exactly) in Beltempest. The sheer scale. The fact that it still manages to almost be about characters, despite playing on a solar-system-sized canvas (almost - the Doctor and Sam are the only real characters in the book, but there are lots of little doomed people who are evocative for the five minutes you notice them before they die in pain). My favourite little detail is this: at the end of "Part One" of the book, Mortimore manages to elicit an incredible emotional and visceral response from two words.

The big problem with Beltempest is the one pointed out by Robert Smith?. I'd read his review, I remembered his warning, and I still wasn't prepared.

The "end of Part One" I just mentioned is, no lie, three quarters of the way into the book. And there's still a huge amount to wrap up in the remaining quarter. Like, basically the second half of the book.

Unfortunately, Mortimore doesn't manage it. Things happen, happen really fast, and aren't dwelt on long enough for the reader to know what the hell they were and what they meant. Sam's status is unclear at the end. Almost everything's status is unclear at the end. The immortality thing is explained (something about vacuum cleaners) but I didn't buy it, and I wonder if Mortimore should have just left it unexplained. Mortimore could get away with it. The Scarlet Empress came out two months earlier, so people might even have accepted it.

Oh, and the solar system explodes and billions die. The Doctor Who Reference Guide entry attempts to paint it as a hopeful ending, but the solar system explodes and billions die, including everyone we ever met long enough to recognise the name.

Still, ridiculously rushed ending aside (and it's not as if it's unique in the Mortimore oevure in that regard - only Eye of Heaven's narrative structure saved it from a similar fate by not actually ending with the end of the story) Beltempest is a good book. I don't like it, to quote another DWRG denizen, but that's a fairly small point.

Parasite: Fear and Loathing

Oh holy God. Holy Christ on the trapeze with Judas on a unicycle in the background juggling crucifixes. Oh Jesus Christ down a well with Lassie barking at him. Mother of all that we as humans hold sacred.

Parasite.

The above rhetoric pretty much sums up the book, but I'm going to go into details, if only because it deserves it.

This is the book, and I'm not being funny, this is the book that directly led to my going on Prozac. Seriously. I am deadly serious, it put me on the medications. Parasite got me on wacky pills.

Specifically, it was the epilastchapterwhatever that did it. A specific part of that epilogue, in which a couple of specific characters, who've survived the whole damn book, who we've followed for the whole book, who are good characters and good people, are found specifically dead. I remember saying, "Aw, come on" at the book. On a minibus.

The whole book had been a draining experience. This was a final twist of the knife that literally sent me into despair. A deliberate crushing of all remaining hope in the universe. (Had I fully understood what the hell had just happened in the preceding chapters it would have been worse - rereading it, post-happy pills, I discovered that Mortimore actually concludes with an entire solar system doomed simply because of arbitrary and meaningless nature, with the Doctor forced to leave billions of people to their fate of being overrun and destroyed by the parasitic offspring of the Artifact, a creature with, after all, precisely as much right to exist as anything else. Looking back, I'm lucky to have got away with the Prozac.) The last act by a human character in the book (Ace) is to scream in pain. This book dares you to smile ever again.

Parasite is a really good book.

Sure, it left me wrung-out and exhausted and diagnosed with clinical depression, but that was what Jim's aiming for. (Maybe not the last bit - but then I wouldn't want to assume.) In my Eye of Heaven review I compared that book to Rendezvous with Rama. EoH had Clarkian sections in the third act, but this genuinely is the Who equivalent of that book. Only from Hell.

That's not hyperbole, by the way. If Arthur C. Clarke had been a schizophrenic living in Hell, this is how Rendezvous with Rama would have turned out, in tone if not plot. God knows what that says about Jim Mortimore.

Anyway, as I said Parasite is a really good book. The prose is, as I'd come to expect by that point, to die for, and the characters, to the extent that they or anything else matters, are largely fantastically sketched. And then they die. Midnight blew my mind and the villain, apparently tacked-on at the insistence of a horrified Virgin, is perfect if only for his final scene.

The thing is, as much as it chewed up my very soul and left me a howling wreck on pills, Mortimore's decision to kill the last two - offscreen even - was the only possible ending. Leaving them alive would have betrayed the theme of Parasite - that nature, huge insentient nature, is bigger than any one of us little insignificant cogs in its machine, and all we can do is gawp helplessly as its pattern rolls on, crushing all in its path without even noticing. It's a jolly book, this.

Ed Swatland said in his review that it was grim and depressing, but not a slog. Didn't believe a word of it. However, shockingly, he's right. The pages fly past in horrified fascination. I have no idea how Mortimore managed this. All I can say is he's a very clever man.

I can't recommend it, if only because it put me on Prozac, but Parasite is awesome, in every sense. I never want to read it again, but that's okay: I can just leave it on my shelf and sort of stare at it.

At this point, I was becoming aware of a progression in my pattern - entirely unplanned - whereby the Mortimore books I read get steadily bigger and more outrageous with each step (there's an argument for flipping Beltempest and Parasite, but Beltempest didn't put me on pills, except maybe some paracetamol). Sure enough, as if Parasite weren't enough, the most astonishing (official) JM book was next on my list...

Eternity Weeps: It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

I really need to buy this book. It was the only one on my Odyssey that was prohibitively expensive and indispensable (I'll read Lucifer Rising one day, don't worry, although I'm not holding my breath on The Sword of Forever) so I got it from the library. But I really, really need to own this book. I think everyone needs to own this book, much like the Complete Works of Shakespeare. You don't have to read it, just put it on your shelf and marvel at its power.

Everyone knows about Eternity Weeps. Once again, hope is repeatedly stabbed with a cleaver. Liz Shaw has a surprise cameo, and then her flesh melts off. There's a Silurian, for some reason, who dies. There's a nice old lady who I flatly refused to get attached to (which took an effort of will), because it's obvious from word one that she's going to die, and so she does, in the coldest possible manner. Benny and Jason break up, violently, although they don't die. The Doctor's barely in it. Chris Cwej more or less takes his place as protagonistic thing, except that he's no use to man nor beast, after the death of Roz. Almost an entire planet's population is wiped out, although this time it's Earth, so it hurts even more.

And as Finn Clark pointed out, it's a comedy. Kinda. His review let me look at it that way, and... yeah, I can see that. It's the blackest comedy conceivable - making Robert Holmes' efforts look like Jimmy Cricket - involving as it does the death of a tenth of the world's population, and that's just at the Doctor's hands. It's easy to miss, not least because you'll probably find it hard to see the page through the tears (or fine scarlet spray of arterial discharge, depending how far into the book you are) but it's structured as a farce. A horrible, horrible farce. Carry On Up the Meaningless, Crushing Despair.

If you don't believe me, check out the awesome chapter - still my favourite thing of Mortimore's - where Benny and Jason have a massive marital set-to while zooming through the universe, straddling planets and stars. It's an incredible image, awesome and hilarious in equal measure. And then of course there's the mid section with President Springsteen (really) and the Don't Die of Ignorance style pamphlet.

The thing about black comedy is that you're not necessarily meant to laugh at it so much as react. Eternity Weeps is guaranteed to provoke reactions. In a sense, it works on two levels: the actual novel itself, and the reader reacting to what Mortimore's doing in it. Brutally killing Liz Shaw - which wasn't a good idea - is the best example of this. There's no reason for it to be Liz, except that it hurts even more. It was plenty in the first place. It feels kind of refrigeratory, to be honest.

The characterisation is just as extreme. Benny is - well, Benny's odd. She feels like herself, and yet she's about fifty times colder. As with Blood Heat, the character is different, but recognisably still the same person, just viewed from another angle, or more likely dimension. Maybe this is what a deteriorating relationship will do to a person; Mortimore drew from his own experiences for a lot of this book. (Read the faintly unsettling afterword). Jason, however...

Dave Stone probably screamed himself hoarse when he found out about Jason in this book. Remember those "New Frontier Adventures" in The Mary-Sue Extrusion? Where Dave wrote exaggerated, crappy, pulp versions of the Benny books in which Jason was portrayed as a whimpering tool of no use to anyone? The Jason of Eternity Weeps plays exactly like that. If you read it as a pisstake of how the character was treated post-Stone (or even as a satire of the cynicism involved in breaking up the marriage in the first place), it's brilliant. This is a man so bewildered and useless that, in trying to help, he dooms two civilisations and causes the deaths of billions. It's the equivalent of a scene where Jim Dale accidentally knocks down a bookcase, which knocks down another bookcase next to it, which brings down several shelves, which send a table careening through the air, which eventually leads to Sid James getting a bucket of water over his head right as he's putting the moves on Hattie Jacques. Except on a far, far, far larger canvas, so large that instead of ending in comical misfortune, it instead becomes an unimaginably horrific tragedy on an incomprehensible scale.

It was clear by now that something in Jim's brain is out of whack with the rest of the world. A lopsided flywheel.

Then he demonstrated that he is in fact genuinely insane after all.

Campaign: Join the Dots Dude.

Dude. This book.

I never use the word "dude" normally, but this book... dude. DUDE.

You know, I still don't know what "Crowned to the altar comes the bull. The sacrificer stands." means. Or "Join the dots" for that matter.

We all know the story, or at least the basic outline: Mortimore submitted a fantastic idea (basically a pure historical covering the entire lifespan of Alexander the Great, in which the sainted four Season One regulars get separated through time and end up living and travelling with him at different points in his life, from Alexander the Average to Alexander the OK, the Rather Good and finally the Great; Ian was going to be his boyfriend. In fact, that survives into the final version. Kinda.) The BBC - as represented by both Steve Cole and Justin Richards at different stages, as I remember - gulped, said it was very nice, but could you please change it so it's basically, they land in Greece, they meet Alexander the Great or OK or whatever, they run around, they leave? Mortimore resisted the tempation to chin them, went off to work on it further (pausing only to write a weird Babylon 5 book which for no obvious reason assumes Lyta Alexander is deaf) and eventually came back with a story which starts with Alexander the Whatever and ends up with the entire history of everything, via Doctor Who, poured into a drinking glass. The BBC run away screaming; Jim publishes it himself.

For a more in-depth explanation, courtesy of someone to whom these events actually happened, ie Jim, you can read the introduction to the enhanced 2008 special DVD edition of Campaign, which is actually now available on-line as Jim's put it under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. It's available to read, or even download [*] here, and I command you to click that link right this second. Because this book needs to be seen. In fact it's less a book than an experience.

[*] However, if you do download it, I urge you to make a donation of some kind to the Bristol Area Down Syndrome Association, or failing that MENCAP, because they benefited - and apparently continue to benefit - from the sales of the book.

We have the TARDIS as narrator. We have Cliff and Lola. We have Ian going feral. We have Barbara growing old and dying at Ian's graveside. We have Ian killing the Doctor over and over and over again. We have Biddy and Tardis and Barnes Common. We have an infinite recursion of Susan's babies. We have Alan and Ida and Ted and Alice. We have several false starts to Invasion from Space. We have maps of infinity inscribed as boardgames. We have John and Gillian in an original comic strip drawn by Tim Keable.

This book is the other reason I consider myself very lucky to have got the first Doctor Who Annual from eBay for less than #10.

Oh, and as if destroying whole solar systems wasn't enough, in this book Jim Mortimore destroys everything that ever is, was or will be. He's the freaking Anti-Monitor.

Also, Alexander the Great shows up, briefly, but this is so far from the four-way historical it started out as it's not even funny. In fact, this story appears to occur (inasmuch as this can be said at all, and frankly it can't) right after the story in the original outline has already played out, as the crew try to figure out if anything they did when they were with Alexander could have caused everything but everything that ever there was except the TARDIS to cease to exist. This is during the first quarter or so of the book, when it still has some semblance of sense and order, random changes in universe between chapters notwithstanding. This doesn't last long.

The more you know about sixties ephemera and the genesis of the series, the more you'll get out of this, incidentally; when I read it the first time, I was aware of names like Cliff and Lola and figures such as CE "Bunny" Webber, but I had no idea what was in any of the annuals and I didn't even know that Invasion from Space existed. This, however, wasn't a massive handicap; you just get swept along with the inexplicable insanity, the relentless jaw-dropping moments, the increasingly experimentation prose and typography. Parts of this book read like "House of Leaves" as written by Norman Bates. By the time Alan and Ida enter the picture you're practically a gibbering wreck of a being anyway, which, considering how the Alan/Ida bits play out, is just as well.

I've made Campaign seem kind of mannered, detached, cold even, weirdness without the human. If anyone else had written it, it probably would have been. But Jim makes it fly. Admittedly, it's hard to bugger up the Season One regulars, but a good way to do so would seem to be by trapping multiple iterations of them in a swirling tornado of rubber-reality and occasional violence and insanity. Jim gets away with it, though. The characters still seem right even as they age to death or kill each other repeatedly or go insane and unable to speak due to atrophy... actually, that last one, the feral version of Ian, is genuinely painful to watch, and that's not a criticism.

Some of the prose is absolutely gorgeous, surpassing anything Mortimore had given us before. The Barbara-narrated "India was carnival" chapter is simply magnificent. In fact, I'm going to quote a bit:

Old and wise, maimed yet beautiful, dancing here mountain-slow and now river-quick; time her dress and snow her hair; monsoon her voice and her touch the naked whisper of hard skin upon harder rock...

Words can't describe Campaign, let alone explain it. It has to be experienced. You'll lose your hair and your sanity, but it's worth it. Don't worry if you don't understand it. I'm not 100% certain Jim does either. Besides, how many Doctor Who books are you likely to read that contain the epigram "with apologies to Pieter Breugel"?

Oh, and I have to address the ending. Yeah, it's pretty much foreshadowed into inevitability. Some might call it a copout. Those people are wrong and don't know what they are talking about and should be shunned. For it to be a copout requires a normal book with a linear plot to have come first, and it didn't. In fact, it's an act of mercy. You'll see what I mean.

So Now Then (or, When Monkey Howls)

The Campaign incident essentially ended his career writing books for actual Doctor Who, but he didn't disappear. The re-release of Campaign earlier this year proves he's still around and as crazy as ever, and he's been in and around Big Finish, mixin' it up between his other field of sound design, and writing for Benny CDs and short stories. Most notable of these is "A Bell Ringing in an Empty Sky", the addendum to Life During Wartime. Not part of the actual unfolding story - on a number of levels - it concerns... Jesus Christ just read it and find out. It's less mindboggling than Campaign, but for God's sake don't read them one after the other. It seriously and genuinely might give you a stroke.

He did return to Actual Doctor Who eventually, of course, with the Eighth Doctor story The Natural History of Fear for Big Finish, his first script for performance since the old Audio Visuals. And once again it's very odd and difficult to follow. I've listened to it a few times. It's like Kid A in that it works best the second time around when you know where it's going. If you can concentrate enough to figure out what's going on, it's genuinely powerful and creepy, with an unsettling, ambiguous final scene.

Ultimately, it's just good to know he's around, and that he is no saner than ever (as evidenced by his intro to the new Campaign). Some part of me would love to see him write a new series book, just to melt the kids' fragile minds. If they keep hiring Stephen Cole, it should balance out anyway.

In this new universe of Doctor Who being mainstream and us fanboys being back on the level of Trekkies instead of the ones keeping the flame alive, I'm not sure there's a place for Jim Mortimore, at least not without diluting himself, which would simply be sick and wrong. But there's always Big Finish and Benny, and besides - it's nice to know he's out there, Jim Mortimore, going crazy for all us sinners. His work's not for everyone, certainly not for the faint of heart, but for those with the stomach/mind/patience, it is often truly brilliant.

Mortimore abides. Outtahere.