New, New Moonbeam Blues

Telos Publishing released a series of Doctor Who novellas starting in 2001 and continued until 2004. This was my first Telos novella and I had no idea what to expect going in. I am very ambivalent about the Doctor Who short stories as I prefer letting adventures take their time. Still, a good tale can be had in fewer pages.

I figured 90-odd pages would be more a meal than a snack but what kind of stories did Telos want? Was the remit for authors to keep to conventions or were they free to do their own thing?

The basic story here revolves around a hippie chick, well, a young woman who became a hippie and adopted the name Summer. She is in the Haight-Ashbury area seeking out her boyfriend, Denny, and encounters the TARDIS crew of the Doctor, Ben, and Polly.  At one point, a boy appears to them and he pulls a Cyberman head out of a bag. This starts a short series of weird events that indicates that someone or something is trying to communicate with the Doctor.

Meanwhile, Summer's attempts to track down her old man reveal that there's a nasty drug out there called Blue Moonbeams that is rumored to make those who take it disappear. As in literally blink out of existence.

The story is told from Summer's point of view and author Mark Chadbourn takes an interesting tack here as there are several times she bitterly complains that the Doctor is indifferent to her situation. Normally our hero is a real Johnny-on-the-spot but he seems lost in his own world for most of the story. While he offers Ben and Polly to assist Summer, he is usually off pursuing the answer to his own mystery.

Of course, Denny's disappearance, the Blue Moonbeams, and the strange appearance of figures from the Doctor's past (Menoptera!) are all related and, in classic Doctor Who style, everything is revealed at the end and the Doctor makes everything alright.

What I didn't expect were the asides that pepper the story from an older, more cynical Summer. At the beginning, she is young and full of hope. She thinks the communal vibe of Haight-Ashbury can spread and affect real, systemic change in American society. All you need is love, right? But in these reminisces of the more mature Summer, she has her Oliver Stone moment of looking back at the JFK assassination as being the start of the ascendancy of the Deep State. Paranoid and gone into hiding, Summer muses about the futility of her youthful optimism and admits that They have won.

"Wonderland" is a neat little story. There's a few very dark, grotesque scenes along with several where youthful idealism and weary pragmatism clash giving the reader some food for thought. Plus, it's simply funny envisioning the Doctor wandering around the Haight-Ashbury area. I envisioned one of those slow motion scenes where he's walking along and a young Jerry Garcia passes him going the other way. Far out, man.

"A Gathering Of The Tribes For A Human Be-In", a rock concert, essentially, that took place on 14 January 1967 in San Francisco is part of the story. Here's some footage shot at the event.