You say want a Revolution Man

I recently finished a moderately dense history book that was made all the more complex by the fact that it concerned a place and time that were almost wholly unfamiliar to me. We're talking Japan in 950 C.E.-1050 C.E. or so and, while the text that was ostensibly written for a lay audience, methinks it was for one rather more educated than me. But it was a book that I'd been meaning to read for nearly 25 years and I figured that I had procrastinated long enough.

Having gotten it under my belt and indulged myself in some warm memories of the person who recommended it to me, I decided my next read would be something more easy going and, unsurprisingly, it was Doctor Who. I returned to the Eighth Doctor Adventures and Paul Leonard's Revolution Man.

I eagerly dug into the book but ere long got a feeling of déjà vu. Had I read it already? It would have been very easy to determine this but instead I continued reading thinking that I'd figure it out soon enough. Well, soon enough ended up being something on the order of 3 chapters before I was fully convinced that I had, in fact, already read it.

"In for an inch, in for a mile," I said. And so I plowed on reasoning that refreshing myself on the events here might come in handy when reading the next book.

It is the Summer of Love in London when the TARDIS crew land and find that some pseudonymous Banksy-like anarchist who goes by "Revolution Man" is taking responsibility for graffiti being carved into monuments around the world. Our heroes go meet Jean-Pierre Rex, a local anarchist, for coffee but he's all talk and Sam is appalled when he hits on her. For his part, Fitz has no luck hitting on the waitress there, Maddie, but he is invited back to the flat she shares with her boyfriend to crash.

Maddie's significant other is a musician named Ed Hill who just happens to have a stash of this funkadelic drug called Om-Tsor. It turns out that Om-Tsor is better known outside of Earth as Rubasdpofiaew, a telekinetic drug from Tau Ceti Minor where locals use it to catch their prey. The stash on Earth originated in Tibet and Maddie and Fitz have an adventure there - but not before a brief stop in Nepal - which results in Fitz being captured by the Chinese. There he becomes a Manchurian Candidate and sent back to England to see if he can retrieve more Om-Tsor.

Well, it turns out that Jean-Pierre Rex had indeed been the Revolution Man but forsook the title when he realized that Om-Tsor just wasn't the right tool for him to bring about change. The title then reverted to Ed Hill who had had an accident which left him paralyzed. But instead of becoming a kindly, avuncular rock music figure like Robert Wyatt, Hill turned to the dark side.

As the tale wound to an end, Fitz ends up shooting Hill, who has become deranged by the drug, onstage at a rock concert. It doesn't quite do the trick so the Doctor does his best Nathan Gale and shoots Hill to finally put an end to the dangerous predicament.

I think that Revolution Man is better than my inability to recall having read it last year would indicate. While I won't say it's great, I did like the portrayal of revolution as something that's perhaps not as obviously good as we've seen previously in Doctor Who and that revolutionaries are imperfect and sometimes not particularly nice, however worthy their cause. It was neat that Fitz ended up in China for a couple years doing struggle sessions and getting brainwashed.

The Doctor's rather uncharacteristic use of firearms and the sad fate that befell Maddie at the end made for a real downer. No happy ever after here. Will the events here temper Sam's idealism? Had it already been tempered in a previous novel and I just cannot recall?

It was disturbing to have the Doctor blast Hill to his demise after Fitz was unable to complete the job. The whole thing seemed so primitive and ungentlemanly. It came down to a bullet rather than application of intellect. The Doctor didn't lead a revolution leading to the poor and down-trodden finding dignity and freedom but rather a revolutionary spirit proved to be nothing more than Thanatos. Common Doctor Who conventions are inverted and twisted here.

I liked all that but found the plot lacking. The stuff between the good scenes just wasn't all that good. The non-TARDIS crew characters weren't all great either. Maddie especially came across as uncompelling despite the interesting milieu that she finds herself in. She's a puppet with the strings being manipulated by others.

Not great but certainly not bad. I have decided that this bout of EDA's will take me up to Interference - Book One.

Dust in the Martian Wind

This tale is told by one Jovian Pallis, a man approaching middle age and who is a member of an early Martian colony. He tells of being in love with a woman named Marissa, who was 16 years his junior, but he never actually got around to letting her know of his feelings for her. She died out on the Martian surface as a seal that was part of her suit's air supply apparently had a crack in it. Pallis isn't distraught, though. It meant the end of his anger at not having her in his life the way he wanted.

We learn that Pallis, along with a woman named Isabel, are the ones responsible for the daily check of all the space suits and their air supplies. Hmmm... 

And then a man named Uther dies. He died out in the Ponds, which are the Martian equivalent of those lakes of toxic sludge in China that unscrupulous smartphone manufacturers just dump all of their waste into after those iPhones are shipped off.

And then the Doctor arrives and quickly enters Hercule Poirot mode. He deduces that Pallis killed both Marissa and Uther. Marissa because he couldn't stand the thought of having to live in the same environment as the woman who was the object of his theoretically unrequited love. And so he poisoned the air in her suit. Uther was an accident. Isabel was harboring suspicions about Pallis so he poisoned the air in a suit he thought she'd take but Uther carelessly grabbed it instead.

In order for the colony to continue for another 2 years until the next transport ship arrives, there must be no more killing. So the Doctor takes Pallis and drops him off on a planet by himself where he can live out the rest of his days.

This recent spate of short trips have largely featured a protagonist who wasn't the Doctor or a companion. But none until now had one that was a killer. We learn that there were murders at the colony in the first paragraph when Pallis tries to recall when he felt it was "over". He places that moment "about the time of the first murder". Still, I didn't recall this until much later in the tale when I should have thought about it on the next page.

Pallis comes off as unstable and rather pathetic. He describes himself as being physically clumsy but we learn that he is also socially clumsy as he never even reveals his feelings to Marissa.

"My thoughts are often disconnected, as well," he admits. "I leave behind me a chain of random associations, incomplete tasks: half-empty mugs, dropped clothes, abandoned poems."

I really liked this peek into the mind of a madman and murderer. From Pallis' descriptions, it seems that his state of mind really mirrors that of the colony. There's the Ponds and the fact that funding for the colony is slowly dwindling. It is simply in a pitiful state. And I don't recall there being any explanation for the Doctor's appearance, which I thought was neat. He just comes in with his crime-solving skills blazing.

It is a nice change of pace to have a villain that is a bit banal. Pallis is not some megalomaniac bent on ruling the universe, but rather an average Joe who has watched the Martian dust creep into everything, despoiling the colony, and has lost touch with reality, perhaps, amidst the isolation. The colony was a failure, if he is to be believed, and they're all stuck there.

Still no Jamie.