A Retrospective by Lance Parkin 30/4/13
Some people are just born contrarians. Tell them that the sky is blue, and they'll delight in describing the exact shade of green it turns right before a thunderstorm. Say that the grass is green, and they'll take great pleasure in pointing out that they call it Kentucky bluegrass for a reason. Even if you let them argue you around to their point of view, they'll only start taking your original position, just to see if they can defend it as well as they attacked it. For a person like this, it's the discussion that's interesting, not necessarily the conclusions.
Having spent the better part of a decade both arguing and agreeing with Lance Parkin on a host of topics both Who-related and otherwise, I hope he takes it as a compliment that I consider him to be a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian. It's not that I don't think he's sincere in his points of view (although I do think he might have been taking the mickey when he suggested that Joss Whedon was a hot young screenwriter on "Roseanne" who descended into cult obscurity...). It's more that I can tell that he relishes, without a trace of malice, the cut-and-thrust of defending his points of view against all comers. Lives Before Hartnell, UNIT Dating, the Problem of Susan... To Lance, it feels like these are enjoyable wrangles that help us see Doctor Who through a new lens, rather than questions that must be settled with a Right or a Wrong answer.
Most importantly for purposes of this retrospective, this tendency shows in his books (Just War, Cold Fusion, The Dying Days, Beige Planet Mars, The Infinity Doctors, Father Time, Trading Futures, The Big Hunt, Warlords of Utopia, The Gallifrey Chronicles, The Eyeless) as well. Every one of them feels like it was written in answer to a particular piece of received fannish wisdom, from "You can't do anything fresh with the historical anymore" to "You can't do a big epic alien invasion story with only two monster costumes" to "There's just not a lot to do with Anji as a character" to "The New Series Adventures can't be anything more than kiddie books." It always seems like whenever someone is saying something can't be done, Lance Parkin is there to say, "Why not?"
Sometimes, of course, this works to his disadvantage. Being the guy who rises to the impossible challenges does mean you get the impossible challenges, like writing a book to bring the Eighth Doctor Adventures to a satisfactory conclusion without giving the Doctor back his memory, writing a regeneration sequence, bringing back Gallifrey, or tying it in to the new series. But even a brief like that isn't enough for Lance. There's almost a certain cockiness to his work, a sense that he's so undaunted by that level of conceptual difficulty that he's going to deliberately do things that shouldn't work, just to see if his talent can make it happen. He breaks the fourth wall, he drops inside jokes, he refers to his own private continuity (one that he's never been able to get past a single editor, to the best of my knowledge; to understand why Marnal, Ulysses, Penelope and Patience all matter to Doctor Who, you pretty much have to go on the Internet and ask him). He even extends it to his character names, throwing in cryptic anagrams and characters named after a Winston Churchill quote (I suppose we're lucky we didn't get "Sodomy" as well)... it all feels a bit as if he's daring himself to pull off each book.
It all works, though, because he genuinely does have the talent to pull off things that shouldn't work. Each of his novels has the kind of high-concept brilliance other writers would kill for (I never get tired of describing "All the parallel universes where Rome never fell at war with all the parallel universes where the Nazis won World War II"), his plotting is so tight you can bounce a coin off of it, and his dialogue makes you want to read scenes from his books out loud to random passers-by. Trading Futures, to pick my personal favorite, is quite possibly the single most entertaining Doctor Who story ever. And it's not like I'm at a lack of things to compare it to.
If you could sum up Lance in a single word, it would be "audacious". Nobody has ever been as willing to risk utter failure as Lance Parkin. In a series with a lot more fan orthodoxies than we're sometimes willing to credit, Lance has been excited about challenging them all. Not everything Lance has ever tried has succeeded, but he's certainly succeeded far more than he's failed, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. He might be a contrarian, but so's the Doctor in his own way. Perhaps the reason his Doctor Who books come off so well is that Lance is writing what he knows.