Speed of Flight
Dancing the Code
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Speed of Flight |
Virgin Publishing Dancing the Code |
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| Author | Paul Leonard |  |
| ISBN# | 0 426 20441 7 | |
| Published | 1995 | |
| Continuity | Between Planet of the Daleks
and The Green Death |
| Synopsis: When the Doctor invents a machine to predict the future, he sees the death of himself and Jo at the hands of the Brigadier. Deciding that separating is the best way to avoid this fate, Jo is sent on assignment to Africa where she discovers a deadly threat is hiding in the desert. |
Break Dancing the Code, a disco fandango of a great book by Matt Haasch 11/6/00
I finally got it in the mail, and I began to read, despite I was still in the midst of Matrix. It was a book I read throughout a week misspent in school learning nothing applicable. I probably learned more, and sure was more entertained by this book. Reasons to love the crap out of it till the binding looks awful:
Overall -- read this one it's good, except for a couple gratuitous references to have the urge to urinate. (I could never imagine a woman saying "I have to piss") A definite plus and thing to look out for is the Doctor flying a jet, with the Brig in the seat behind. Wonderful stuff!
A Review by Stuart Gutteridge 23/8/00
One of the better MAs, given that the only previous novel to feature the Third Doctor was The Ghosts Of N-Space and that itself was a novelisation of a radio play.
PLOT: Interesting yet simple and engaging enough to hold the readers attention throughout. The number of deaths however does seem to contradict what Paul Leonard is trying to get across however.
THE DOCTOR: Perfectly Pertwee, complete with him trying out various vehicles.
COMPANION: Jo here is definitely more grown up, obviously preparing her for her departure in The Green Death; certainly refreshing.
OTHERS: UNIT are really the only other characters that stand out, certainly the Brigadier, who is the initial thrust of the storyline.
VILLAINS: Well, said villains are in fact an alien race of insects, attacking Kebiria (the desert to you and me). The alien Xarax are at least believable, although they don`t carry the same weight as the Venusians in Leonard`s previous Venusian Lullaby.
OVERALL: For the refreshing change of setting, characterisation (especially Jo) and for being a particularly enjoyable novel Dancing The Code gets a deserved 8/10.
A Haiku by Finn Clark Updated 3/5/20
Faceless enemies.
Dull plotting. Leonard never
Mixed well with Pertwee.
A Review by Brian May 24/4/06
In Dancing the Code, Paul Leonard takes the Mawdryn Undead line, making the 1970s the contemporary setting for the third Doctor/UNIT era. To his credit, he has capably recreated the feel of the decade. The novel is part political thriller, featuring international tensions between the Arab world and the west, civil war, celebrity terrorists and the shadow of nuclear annihilation (and, three decades on, everything old is new again!) And look at UNIT: it's finally an international body with all the clout and credibility such an organisation deserves; on screen The Claws of Axos and to a lesser extent The Ambassadors of Death were the only Pertwee stories that gave UNIT this scope.
UNIT is also done another long overdue favour. It's personalised. The troops are no longer the faceless cannon fodder extras so casually zapped out of existence by various alien marauders. They're flesh and blood, real people with loved ones, whose individual deaths are rightly treated as tragic. Anton Devereaux left behind a wife and two children; Mike Yates is relieved he doesn't have to inform them of his death. But it probably will be down to him to tell Jenny, Private John Shoregood's partner, that he won't be coming home. So too all the other families: those of Sergeant Dave Green, Barry Ryman, Pepworth, Morgan, Richard Moore and Tim Witchell. The Brigadier knows the number of the UNIT morgue off by heart and it disturbs him. UNIT has never been so human.
Our "UNIT family", thankfully minus the Master, are depicted extremely well. Yates is great: when he's in his office, he actually has work to do. And when he's in the field, he's a soldier, seeing action and getting his hands dirty, as he did in much of season 8 and practically never afterwards. Benton gets to carry a good chase/action moment towards the end, and Jo is capable, resourceful and intelligent, very much as she was in The Mind of Evil. The Doctor and Brigadier are by far the best. Their bickering is great, as is the Doctor's constant flouting of authority, delightfully revisited during the flight in the Superhawk; the dialogue between the two is rich and humorous. We even see a deeper, more introspective side to Lethbridge-Stewart as he ponders the implications of the Prognosticator's image of his shooting the Doctor and Jo.
The rest of the characters aren't that special, mainly because few of them are fleshed out properly. When they are, in the case of Catriona, they don't succeed for being too uninteresting. Conversely the potentially interesting ones, such as Vincent, the Sakir and his son Tahir, aren't given much examination or depth, and so proper characterisation suffers. But Leonard has a great grasp of drama. As with the UNIT soldiers, individual deaths, even those of unsympathetic and antagonistic characters like Vincent, Benari and Catriona's prison guard, are each a pointless waste of life. The bombing of Free Giltea is the dramatic centrepiece of the book, and the resulting carnage as witnessed by Jo is very sobering indeed. There's also some breath-bating action, the jailbreak in particular.
Of course there's an alien threat present, or this wouldn't be Doctor Who: the Xarax. They're well conceived, but not spectacular and not really that memorable. It's when describing them and their habitat that Leonard's normally high standard of writing suffers. Moments inside the interior of their base are often stilted and confusing. The pace also drags in the middle sections, when all the different parties are making their way across various strips of desert. While the fictitious country is quite effectively realised overall, here it lacks a sense of scale. You're not sure how far, or near, everyone is from each other.
I also feel that the positioning of the story - between Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death - isn't the best. It would have worked much better during the Doctor's exile. All the journeys to and from Kebiria are by plane. Had this been pre-Three Doctors it would have been the only fast way to travel. In that case the author wouldn;t have had to contrive the rather silly moment on p.71 that puts the TARDIS out of action. It would also have given more edge to the Prognosticator situation. The Doctor reasons the prediction won't be fulfilled if he and Jo separate; but without the option of simply getting in the TARDIS and flying away, the scenario could have had added tension. But on the other hand this is offset by a couple of lovely moments that benefit from its placing: a quite touching bit of eavesdropping on Jo as she reflects on her time with the Doctor. (p.41) Even with the writer's benefit of hindsight, it still makes the foreshadowing of The Green Death very poignant. And on pp.20-21 we learn of the apprehension felt by the Brigadier and Mike that the Doctor will soon leave for good.
But at the end of the day, Dancing the Code is a decent read: a great use of the regulars and UNIT with a good period feel. The so-so alien race and the sub-par guest characters don't spoil things too much. The Prognosticator subplot is interesting, but when we learn the Xarax can replicate people, it's obvious the Brigadier will shoot the copies (compare this with the Blake's 7 episode Redemption). But the novel is certainly worth a look.
And I love the title! It's incorporated into the story like a Baker & Martin catchphrase. I'm not sure exactly what it means, but to quote Paul Cornell, it sounds way cool. 7.5/10
Code Breaking by Matthew Kresal 20/12/18
The 1990s saw a plethora of Doctor Who. The TV series might have been over but, under Virgin at least, the series was thriving on the printed page. It was perhaps inevitable that a range would start up featuring the first six Doctors, with writers keen both to recapture a bit of nostalgia while expanding upon the eras in question. Paul Leonard's Dancing the Code, the ninth book in the Missing Adventures range, is an example of trying to do both at the same time and the dangers in doing so.
Let's start with the nostalgia bit first. If, like me, you're a fan of the Third Doctor era on TV, there will be plenty to like about the book. Leonard seems to have a gift for capturing the Third Doctor/Jo/UNIT team of the Season 10 (since the back cover and various internal references set this between Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death). Pertwee's Third Doctor reads particularly well, while Jo, thrown in at the proverbial deep end without the Doctor for much of the novel's length, gets to shine in some heady situations. The Brigadier comes across the best of the returning TV characters, coming across more as a soldier than the comedic foil he became in stories like The Three Doctors. The plot feels very much of the era, with lots of running around, pitched battles and escaping that became the hallmarks of the longer stories of the time. For a Pertwee fan, there's a particular thrill to be found in reading that.
Leonard wasn't content just recreating the era. While the New Adventures got the pitch of being "stories too broad and deep for the small screen", works like Dancing the Code prove that was true of Virgin's Who output in general. Set principally in a war-torn African country with cities on the Mediterranian and great desert wastelands, the setting alone would have broken the budget for the show in the early 1970s. Indeed, it's hard to imagine even New Who in the 21st century, with its borderline-cinematic production values, being able to stage the massive battles between flying insects turned helicopters and UNIT with the firepower thrown about in the novel's conclusion. Perhaps Big Finish, having the ability to create soundscapes without having to worry about visuals, could do it. At times the book seems like a fit for their current range of Third Doctor Adventures (minus the Brigadier, of course). That's only at times, however.
For the scope isn't the only way in which Leonard expands things. Though the Third Doctor era on TV was arguably Classic Who at its most political, the writers and the production team often did so with allegories or burying things within enough genre context to separate it from the real world of the time. While the country of Kebiria may be fictional, it could well be any number of real post-colonial African countries confronting civil wars, competing visions of the future and tribal politics. It's a heady mixture and one slightly ahead of its time in the idea (explored in later books and audios) of a country's leaders trying to solve their problems by using found extraterrestrial technology. That's a heavy dose of realism that gets added onto by Leonard's descriptions of violence, which is stark and, to some extent, realistic, if not off-putting at times. The problem ultimately becomes what happens when you try to present the fantastical side of the Pertwee/UNIT stories with Leonard's commentary, combined with the verisimilitude of the setting and the violence: it just doesn't quite work.
Perhaps, in the end, Dancing the Code is guilty of being too ambitious. It wants to be a part of the Third Doctor era, expanding it while also trying to put it in the real world. While David Bishop did that successfully with Who Killed Kennedy (itself a unique book), Paul Leonard doesn't quite pull off the same trick here. Maybe it's something down to the clash of styles between the fantastic with the real world or, even, the sheer grisliness of his prose, with its depictions of violence. In any case, it's a read that is at once exhilarating and unsatisfying, too little and yet too much at the same.
Land of Milk and Honey by Jacob Licklider 13/2/19
The exile period for the Third Doctor had him working with UNIT, which stood for the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. You would think that involved working with the United Nations to stop problems, which rarely ever occurred on television. The only two times they dealt with United Nations problems was when they oversaw the security for the peace conference in The Mind of Evil and the missing scientists in The Time Warrior. This changes with Dancing the Code, a story that involves UNIT being used to diffuse a situation in the Middle East as a commentary on the terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, even though the novel takes place sometime between 1973 and 1974. I won't get into the UNIT Dating controversy here, and this is when the story says it takes place, so I'm keeping it as such.
The fictional nation of Kebiria is under civil war between Muslims and Christian, not unlike Israel and Palestine, and a faction of terrorists have discovered an alien army built underneath the capital, which the terrorists are using to try and win the war. It is at this point that we meet journalist Catriona Talliser, who has an interview with the terrorist group where she is told about legends of demons and eventually runs into a UNIT officer who leaks a honey-like substance and mutters "dancing the code". This causes UNIT to get involved where a conspiracy is unraveled about the alien Xarax, a corruption of Xerox, who make copies of people filled with the honey stuff, which will be used to take over the world and reproduce, and it is up to the Doctor and Jo to stop this.
Of course, there is a twist: the Doctor has created a machine to see into the future and has seen the Brigadier, his best friend, shoot him and Jo dead in cold blood with apparently no motivation, which only adds intrigue to the story, as we know that, while the details may be different, the Doctor and Jo will be shot. It shows why you should never know the future, much like The Space Museum, as they can't do anything to change it, but they do the logical thing and split up. Jo takes the dangerous route and goes into Kebiria to help out with Yates investigating the UNIT soldier's death and the strange honey substance. This plot is extremely strong; reading it has a pace that just flies by, unlike Paul Leonard's first novel. I read the novel in the span of the day, and it feels so much like a thrill ride that just doesn't let up, as you want to know all the twists and turns of the novel as things get revealed.
Leonard also works extremely well with his cast of characters. It is like they have leapt off the screen and into the pages, much better than The Ghosts of N-Space. This is set firmly after Planet of the Daleks, so the Doctor has freedom and is using UNIT funding for his own special projects; throughout the novel, he just feels like he is being voiced by Jon Pertwee. The double of the Doctor is also creepy, as you don't know when the Doctor is the Doctor and when he is the double, which makes rereading certain passages a real treat. Everything is left so vague, which is the intention, as you aren't supposed to know who is who in what seems to be a comment on the Cold War.
If the Doctor was a great representation of his screen counterpart, Jo Grant fares even better, as, instead of being ditzy, she is even more capable, as she is the one trying to figure out what the Xarax wants even after she is infected by them, which I actually find really interesting. She also has an interesting relationship with Vincent, who is a terrorist leader whom she almost falls in love with. It isn't quite love, but it has an extremely interesting dynamic.
The entire UNIT family is here in this story and are also impeccably presented. Sergeant Benton gets the least amount of screen time as usual, but, whenever he is on, he is just as lovable as always. Captain Yates gets a much larger portion of the novel devoted to him, as he is paired with Jo for some sections and stays as UNIT's liaison for much of the plot of the story. You can just feel Richard Franklin oozing off the page, which is the same with the Brigadier. We get into the head of the Brigadier, as he doesn't want to shoot the Doctor and Jo, and the thought of it actively horrifies him. It gets even tenser with the Doctor, Jo and several UNIT personnel being replaced with copies a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he can't tell if he actually shoots the Doctor or just a copy. The main problem I have with Dancing the Code is that the thing has way too many characters, which get a bit difficult to remember and I am really trying with it.
To summarize, Dancing the Code continues the great streak the novels have been running, with a tense Cold War era thriller. Its main characters are all greatly portrayed, along with many of the side characters, but there are just too many to actually make this novel perfect. 95/100
The Cold Equations by Jason A. Miller 19/10/26
In August 1954, Tom Godwin published a short story in John W. Campbell's Astounding Magazine. It's about a plucky young woman who stows away on board a rescue rocket. The rocket is delivering vital medical supplies to a frontier-planet colony (in space), where the girl has a brother she wants to visit. But the rocket's only carrying enough fuel for the pilot and the rescue supplies; it can't afford to carry the girl's weight, as well, and she has to eject herself into space to save the mission.
This short story, The Cold Equations, made quite a splash upon release, and it's been adapted many times, including a UK adaptation starring Peter (Planet of Fire) Wyngarde as the rocket pilot, once for the 1980s' Twilight Zone revival, and in many other media and formats. It's a gripping premise, isn't it? Of course, it's also a faulty one: no real rescue mission would run with such little margin for error in the fuel supply. And Godwin almost certainly stole the premise from EC Comics (the forerunner to MAD Magazine), which almost certainly stole it from other places, but that's a separate discussion.
And then came the Virgin Missing Adventures. Dancing the Code is the ninth book in that series, the second 3rd Doctor MA (after Barry Letts' novelization of some gawd-awful radio play), and the second Paul Leonard MA (after his acclaimed Venusian Lullaby --- which we know is acclaimed, because his author blurb at the back of this book, says it was acclaimed).
It's also something uncomfortably like The Cold Equations, and a bitter disappointment.
There's a burning, seething, writhing misogyny, at the heart of The Cold Equations. The man is running a rescue mission, and the stupid girl gets in the way, and the man sees that the girl must die in order for the mission to succeed. That's a long way to go to kill off a young woman in print.
On its surface, Dancing the Code is meant to be a love letter to Miss Josephine Grant, the 3rd Doctor's longest-serving companion. Jo spends the book uttering a refrain on the line "We have to do something!" Set in between Jo's final two TV serials, Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death, this book is meant to mature Jo, to transform her from the bubble-head, easily-hypnotized spy-by-nepotism of Terror of the Autons, into the confident activist of The Green Death.
But, if that's Dancing the Code's mission, it's unnecessary. Jo Grant was a tough, independent, highly competent female spy long before The Green Death. Turns out that the people in charge of the Pertwee era --- Barry Letts, Terrance Dicks, Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning --- really knew what they were doing. Jo has dozens of competent moments in her earlier stories. This book doesn't know what it's doing.
In this book, Jo leads a deadly jailbreak, becomes radicalized when a North African Islamic state carpet-bombs a desert rebel encampment and sacrifices herself to the novel's enormous mutant insect queen in order to save the Doctor's life and ensure world peace. Or something. In a sideshow, the insect queen's clones of the Doctor and Jo massacre UNIT HQ, and the six-million-strong population of the North African state are, apart from a few solitary desert encampments, all killed at the end of the book. Also, if you're a named guest character in the book, you're also going to die. But apart from that, we're supposed to accept a happy ending.
It's impossible to watch The Green Death and accept that the brutal carnage unleashed within the pages of Dancing the Code ever could have happened just days or weeks earlier; not with Jo cheerfully eating an apple while reading the papers, while the Doctor chides her for her low-protein diet. Dancing the Code is a poor fit for Season 10. I see a lot of reviews above praising the realism of the Doctor and the UNIT family. I remember reading this book when it came out in 1995 and thinking it was truly wonderful. But, um, it's not. The Doctor is barely in it, with only one brief scene told from his POV. He doesn't get any of Jon Pertwee's signature moments of charm until the very end, about the time that he finally reverses the polarity of something. The Brigadier sprains an ankle and doesn't save a lot of lives. Yates and Benton get a few scenes each, and the name Sergeant Osgood appears a few times. But the carnage at UNIT HQ in the second half of the book is just too much, too unpleasant.
But the book's biggest sin, and the way in which it most closely resembles The Cold Equations, is in it main original character, a journalist named Catriona Talliser, who's on assignment in the story's fictional North African nation, visiting an Islamic terrorist camp in the desert. She's the story's main plot engine... until, halfway through, when she commits a series of blunders and errors that gets her ensnared in the Xarax nest, and she suffers a fate worse than death, until dying for good in a confusing and unclear fashion in the final chapters. Oh, and Leonard never even bothers to give us her description, either. What does Catriona look like? No idea.
So, um... what was the point of Catriona then? If you're going to start off your book with a strong female journalist, then murdering her as an afterthought after she does a bunch of stupid things first is a really bad idea. Heck, even The Cold Equations went to very careful lengths to try and say that murdering its heroine was for the greater good.
Why do we read books? To learn about other cultures? To learn about human nature? To get more officially licensed Doctor Who six years after Peter Cregeen pulled the plug on the JNT era? Dancing the Code starts off asking tough questions about terrorism versus freedom fighting; the rebels interviewed by Catriona at the start of the book are interested in democracy, not an Islamic caliphate, and a sort of Islamic Che Guevara character named Vincent who's in most of the rest of the book is given a little more moral complexity --- it's not Leonard's fault, I suppose, that world events after this book came out, up through September 2001, showed the reductio-ad-absurdum of supporting this kind of freedom-fighting. Jo being radicalized when Vincent's camp is carpet-bombed also doesn't have much of a payoff. And why on Earth would you start your book with a plucky Jane Fonda--esque reporter, if you're going to make her terminally stupid, and then kill her off the way that Leonard does?
The book’s politics are interesting, at least. By taking place in North Africa rather than the war-torn Middle East, Leonard avoids treading into ill-informed or controversial waters; he references Kebiria as having multiple splinter factions and invents a Kebirian mad scientist as the main culprit in activating the Xarax. There's a mention of the Polisario Front and a slightly optimistic take on how the few Kebirian survivors will lead their new nation. So at least this isn't a one-dimensional political screed, and it does take Doctor Who somewhere it's literally never done before.
But in its hands-off treatment of the Doctor, brutal treatment of women and liberal helpings of graphic violence and body horror channeling 1979's Alien and 1982's John Carpenter remake of The Thing, this is an unusual take on Season 10, and a rather heavy-handed way of salvaging Jo, a character that didn't need help growing up or standing on her own two feet. I'd like to say Leonard was coming from a good place in writing this book for Jo, but there are some questionable authorial choices and a ludicrously high death toll at the end, with little chance for Pertwee to teach some charming moral lessons for the survivors. As a first draft from a repeat author, I understand why Dancing the Code was commissioned. What I don't understand is why it was allowed to see publication in this format.