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A mysterious ghost haunts a hotel in India. The terrifying
alien C’rizz attacks commuters in King’s Cross Station.
Beneath a London council estate, a creature waits to be born.
And on a distant world, an old man trades stories with a strange
time traveller. Throughout his adventures in time and space,
the Doctor meets many people, and each one is affected in
some way: the waiter who keeps a special table for the Time
Lord’s granddaughter, Susan; the American student who
befriends lost Lucie Miller; the teenage girl who discovers
that she may be something more than human. What is it like
when that peculiar blue box appears in your world? What is
it like to be given just the briefest snapshot of the Doctor’s
life? What is it like when everything changes...?
With these anthologies, I usually find that there’s
at least one story that makes me think: “This wouldn’t
have been out of place in the previous collection,” and
then wonder: “Perhaps it was a leftover from that book,
or at least inspired by its themes.” This volume is no
exception, containing another Golem-based tale, um, “Golem”,
by Lizzie Hopley, and another Kafkaesque giant bug, in Colin
Harvey’s “The Eyes Have It”. Meanwhile, Steven
Savile’s “The Sorrows of Vienna” does for that
place what Short
Trips: Destination Prague did for its city
of choice.
The particular “gimmick” of this volume might not
appeal to all Who fans, especially if you like the
Doctor and his companions to be the primary focus of your
reading. Each of these stories is told from the viewpoint
of a guest character, a witness to one of the TARDIS travellers’
adventures. This makes for some interesting storytelling.
Two of the tales, “All of Beyond” by Helen Raynor
and “Osskah” by Gary Owen, are expressed in the
peculiar dialect of an unfamiliar culture. Two others, Scott
Handcock’s “Attachments” and Stel Pavlou’s
“You Had Me at Verify Username and Password”, are
conveyed as email messages. Sometimes the full implications
of the travellers’ actions and/or dialogue are lost on
the observer, as is the case with James Swallow’s “Piecemeal”
and Gary Russell’s “The Report”. Often, the
impact upon the life of the observer is negative, sometimes
even fatal, as is the case with Andy Frankham’s “The
Misadventure of Mark Thorne” and Benjamin Adams’s
“Puppeteer” (a story that owes more than a little
to Star Trek’s Wolf in the Fold). The final
tale, “Fanboys” by Paul Magrs, doesn’t feature
the TARDIS crew at all, but rather deals with the sci-fi inspired
reactions of a young Who fan to a traumatic but ultimately
down-to-earth incident that occurs during Christmas 1981.
This is a good volume for fans of the Fourth Doctor, who appears
in no fewer than six stories: the aforementioned “Attachments”,
“My Hero” by Stuart Manning, “Plight of the
Monkrah” by John Davies, “In Case of Emergencies”
by Ian Farrington, “Puppeteer”, and “The Glarn
Strategy” by Brian Dooley. In several of these narratives,
the Doctor is accompanied by Oliver Day, a companion created
specially for this collection. A similar device was used in
Short
Trips: Time Signature, which featured the character
of William/Isaac.
However, my favourite stories are “Indian Summer”
by James Goss, “Osskah”, and “She Knew”
by Nigel Fairs. “Indian Summer” is a characterful
ghost story. “Osskah” depicts a fascinating bird
culture and also intrigued me with its apparent references
to the Time War. It eventually transpires that the “storm
in heaven” of which the Eighth Doctor speaks is another
catastrophe altogether, but ultimately an intensely tragic
one. “She Knew” ingeniously compares recent events
in the lives of two fellow drinkers in a Llanfairfach pub:
a gay man, who has recently split up with his long-term boyfriend,
and the Third Doctor, who has just bid a sad farewell to Jo
Grant in The
Green Death.
Eddie Robson’s “Remain in Light” isn’t
bad either, marking a welcome first appearance in prose for
the BBC 7 companion Lucie Miller. “The Misadventure of
Mark Thorne” and “The Glarn Strategy” are both
amusing in their own ways, owing to the presence of a rude
would-be celebrity chef and a flippant Fourth Doctor respectively.
“The Sorrows of Vienna”, featuring a post-Charley
and C’rizz Eighth Doctor, contains ominous forebodings
for the companions’ respective fates in forthcoming audio
dramas.
Some stories I found to be flawed. For instance, “All
of Beyond” features a Second Doctor who speaks more like
the Ninth or Tenth Doctor (this is written by Helen Raynor,
a script editor on the new television series) and uncharacteristically
utters the word “damn”. Lizzie Hopley’s “Golem”
will probably make more sense if you are familiar with the
writer’s one-woman show, Pramface. “There’s
Something About Mary”, by Simon Guerrier, and “My
Hero” also seem to lack full explanations for certain
story elements. Similarly, the ending to editor Joseph Lidster’s
signature piece, “Salva Mea”, doesn’t seem
entirely logical (without giving too much away, how does the
Doctor know which date to visit King’s Cross Station?).
However, please don’t let the fact that I’ve ended
on a negative note allow you to make a snap judgement about
this book. With 21 different stories and as many different
viewpoints to choose from, Short Trips: Snapshots is
well worth a shot.
Richard
McGinlay
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