| THE SCARLET EMPRESS by Paul Magrs |
| Story 15 Synopsis: The TARDIS lands on Hyspero, where Sam finds a double decker bus in a graveyard. The Doctor realises its owner must be Iris Wildthyme, an old acquaintance, and he rescues her from a pit, and is inveigled into her quest to reunite a gang of four former heroes. After an extended stop in the town of Fortalice, where the travellers split up, they come together again in Kestheven, where they find more of the gang. Having found what they sought, they befriend a giant spider, and use a lift to descend into an icy realm. They find the final member of the gang, but an attack by a walrus leaves the spider injured. Then representatives of the planet's ruler, the Scarlet Empiress, whom Iris is working for, come to claim them. Confronting the present Empress, the Doctor frees the original Empress, who had been stolen 10 years before when the gang split up, and who is able to stop the avaricious plans of her latest successor, and take her place back. Iris, who is nearly dying, is given a special elixir, and later regenerates aboard her TARDIS. The Doctor and Sam leave the Hysperons to their own devices. |
| Review:- A world of fantasy awaits, and a special planet-wide quest is on... Magrs brings what he believes is a personal touch to the story, putting the love that the show has given him back into his work. His uber-creation, Iris Wildthyme, is at the heart of the story, co-opting the Doctor into her batty and selfish quest across Hyspero. What she brings to things are an entirely self-absorbed hedonism, and a greedy penchant for over-analysis. If this is friendship, it's no wonder the Doctor has far more enemies than friends... The quest aspect allows Magrs to build a picture of the many differing towns and zones of Hyspero. Not that he does build a picture, or if it is, it's a surrealist picture. Fortalice is as different from Kestheven as that is from Hyspero city itself, and so on. There is no credibility in claiming that each place keeps to itself, except for the travels of the Scarlet Empress' guards. Whether this double level of fantasy would amuse children and adults alike in differing ways is hard to say. There often seems something lacking in each of these vistas that would surely put off a reader of any age. It is a huge giveaway that despite abandoning Sam and Gila in Fortalice, the Doctor and Iris simply meet up with them at their next destination, as if it were realistic that they could travel the same distances in the same time at different speeds. The absence of logic is one problem, and the crude tone is another. When Iris tells the Doctor "this is the planet of the fabulous old queens", it smacks of someone playing to their preferred narrow audience and to hell with anyone else. The fact that the planet's ruler surrounds herself with naked tattooed men might also fit in with this perspective. It would certainly bring disquiet to others. Ultimately, Iris completes her less-than-taxing mission to vaguely reunite a band of mercenaries and find the lost Empress, and then there is a brief battle for supremacy which results in the bad ruler replaced by the good one, and the Doctor magicked away to find a cure for Iris. Quite why the Empress couldn't do the restorative job herself is a mystery. Sam isn't really well served by this book, since it's more concerned with putting Iris in her place. I'm sorry, I'll read that again. Putting Iris in Sam's place. Oh, never mind. As an attempt to present an exciting story for the Doctor that puts him as the heroic centre of the story, it's a total joke. And not the funny kind, either. It reads clearly enough, even when it doesn't want to. It's just not very dramatic. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy of the book. |