Retrospective: Nigel Robinson by John Seavey 3/4/03
Nigel Robinson was one of the early writers for Virgin's line of New Adventures, back when the idea of a Doctor Who novel that didn't just recap a televised adventure was still a novelty. He was one of the four writers selected to write the initial slate of books, the 'Timewyrm' series; in retrospect, it seems obvious that the editors decided to hedge their bets by using three established TV tie-in authors (John Peel and Terrance Dicks being the other two) as well as the untried Paul Cornell.
Robinson clearly stuck to what he knew in his first book, Timewyrm: Apocalypse, which is not well-remembered by fans. On reading it, though, it's hard to see why; when not read in between the classic immediately preceding it and the classic immediately following it, it comes off as an enjoyable, if simple and straightforward, pulp story. The book is thin, scarcely 200 pages with large print and wide margins; nowadays, it could probably slip into the Telos line without too much effort. But Robinson makes the most of his story, telling it simply and economically with a minimum of Who run-around. After the earthquake of Timewyrm: Revelation hit, books like Apocalypse seemed decidedly underwhelming, but Robinson's book isn't without merit.
Even so, Robinson apparently felt he had to "up his game", and his next book, Birthright, does just that. Robinson here works with a more mature TARDIS crew in Benny and the more adult Ace, and while a few of the character traits seem dated now (Benny's talent for accent mimicry and reading body language are barely even noted now that she's got her own line of books), the author clearly enjoys the chance to put a bit more depth into his characters. Even more startling is his treatment of the Doctor -- Robinson out-Cartmels Andrew Cartmel by giving the Doctor mere cameos in the book. We see the Doctor only by the wake he leaves in the world behind him, and gain a sense of what it must be like to live in a world where a master of time and space manipulates humanity from behind the scenes, even if it is for benevolent purposes.
Again, the story is a bit sparse, and does contain a few old chestnut plot devices -- Benny gets infected by alien insect spores, and there's a virtual reality duel between Benny and Jared Khan for control of the TARDIS that feels very similar to several other such sequences in the early NAs -- but it does also contain a most interesting plot point, and what will probably be remembered as Robinson's legacy to the New Adventures. The mysterious figure Muldwych, a future version of the Doctor stranded on a future Earth, remains one of the more curious loose ends of the New Adventures, but definitely one of the more interesting ones. The final scene of the book, in which the Doctor explains that he's breaking several Laws of Time by even speaking to Muldwych, and in which Muldwych comments that Ace will have to get used to nineteenth-century France, gains more depth and resonance with the passage of time.
On the whole, Nigel Robinson is probably one of the more under-appreciated writers for Doctor Who. He only wrote two NAs, both quite short, but they showed that he had the potential to do a lot for the range. He managed to deliver short, sharp novels that got to their points quickly and without fuss, and it's a shame he never wrote anything after Birthright. It'd be quite interesting to see what he could do with a Telos novella.