Ten Little Aliens - Stephen Cole

If ever there was a book of two sides, it is this. On the one side, it is great, a taut, fast paced, claustrophobic thriller that is quite horrifying in many places. On the other side, it's a horrible mess.

Let me try to explain this supposed contradiction. Ten Little Aliens wears its influences on its sleeve. Alien the movie and Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (Her original title of Ten Little Niggers having been written out of history).

I've never read Ten Little Indians, never read any Christie in fact, so perhaps I should give it a go, but I'm guessing the plot of Cole's story holds some resemblance to Indians (Notwithstanding the People eating reincarnated Aliens). So if the plot is essentially a mystery, the setting is pure space horror. Confined tunnels in an artificial asteroid that is powered by chewing up people. Invulnerable stone Angels whipping terrified space marines off to die. Disappearing corpses of Alien Terrorists. So good, so cliche, but it works because Cole really puts the atmosphere across. He deploys a couple of tricks including the Find Your Own Adventure Chapter 14 to place the reader right alongside the characters. While Find your own adventure may sound cheesy, Cole has written it right into the story. It makes sense, it really works, and incredibly, the atmosphere builds if you do it properly and read just one path through instead of trying to read all the paths.

If this had been a Space Hulk story say, then job done. Great read for a sci fi horror fan. But it isn't. It's Doctor Who. And this is where the book starts to fall down.

You can't fault Cole for bravery. Into this horrendous tale of wholesale slaughter in horrible ways, he's chosen the First Doctor as his hero. A quite astonishing choice. Bill Hartnell isn't exactly Ellen Ripley.

This is unfortunate. Doctor Who has rules. I hate to say it, but it does, indefinite rules perhaps but there are some things which just aren't going to work. Doctor Who can work in almost any context. That's one of the beautiful things about it. But putting the First Doctor into what is essentially the Space Hulk/Aliens Universe, doesn't. Or if it is going to work then it needed a better writer of character than Cole. His description is wonderful. His characterisation, apart from Frog and flashes of Ben and Polly, isn't. The Doctor is generic, apart from the blatant nods towards the oncoming regeneration, but there's nothing else to say that this couldn't be Troughton running around. The setting is of course, base under siege, although the intriguing twist is that the base is owned by the Aliens - the Schirr. Cole has certainly thought hard about the placing of the book, both The War Machines and the The Tenth Planet are base under siege, but still, the Doctor just isn't Hartnell, although to be fair, it's almost impossible to imagine the First Doctor in this setting.

This is why Cole was brave. He gave himself a very tough job, he couldn't quite live up to it.

The marines don't fare too much better either. Alright, they are cannon fodder. But it's kind of a mistake to kill off the marines who actually have a character and allow the survivors to comprise, among others, two who have received absolutely no characterisation at all. That said, as I've already mentioned, Frog is a wonderful character and Shade and Haunt are reasonable.

There are other problems with the book, considering that it is Doctor Who and not some other series. The worst being the magic aspect. The Schirr's entire plan relies on a ritual that is never fully explained, but requires ten of them and ten of the humans, except that one of the Schirr is executed for betraying the others, should this alone not have destroyed the ritual? In the ritual, the Schirr commit suicide, some of the dead Schirr are brought back to life, some of the humans are transformed into Schirr, the original Schirr then eat the bodies to gain eternal life and then meld with a mental life form. Er, what???

Such a convoluted ritual seems to suggest that Cole doesn't actually know what's going on, at some points he seems to be making it up as he goes along. This is compounded at the end by the Doctor simply stating that anything we don't understand may appear to be magic but is simply higher technology. In other words, a cop out. It lets the book down.

I can think of other things too, Ben gets the best deal out of the regulars, but again, his anachronistic comment of "bricking it" and gaining an injured ankle which ceases to trouble him immediately after the incident, rankle. The Christie part of the novel - the mystery, apart from the double dodge in the first couple of chapters, is pretty much pointless. The Doctor does some of the hard graft and then the chief alien tells him all his plans. All these things contrive to pull this book down.

And yet. Having pulled the book to pieces, I enjoyed it immensely. I read it through in two days and was hooked every step of the way. Here lies the contradiction.

This is a blockbuster movie of a book. Really well written science horror that is great to read. Put it under any kind of scrutiny however and it starts to disappoint, although it won't fall apart. But as a Doctor Who novel, which should stand up to scrutiny and shouldn't be about the blockbuster, it fails.

So the best thing I can say about the novel is, I enjoyed it, immensely. And the worst thing I can say about it is that it would have been improved by not having the Doctor in it at all.

6/10