The Ship of a Billion Years (2006)

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Well, this what we know....

That I really should stop saying I'm going to do stuff "next" or "soon", as I always forget: galactic cycles ago, in February, I said some things about Coming to Dust, the first part of Lawrence Miles's The True History of Faction Paradox audio series, as released by the stout fellows at Magic Bullet, and said that "soon" I would say things about this. Oh well.

Ship of a Billion Years picks up the story, straight from where Coming to Dust left off. Cousin Justine of the Faction Paradox has passed through the space-time tunnel to the titular Ship, while Cousin Eliza and the Society of Sigismondo try to find out more from their captives Jala and Merytra. Meanwhile, Sutekh is planning a coup....

There are many great things about this.

First, the dialogue, an aspect which is perhaps even more important than usual in a non-visual medium. Examples, as the cliche goes, abound, but to pick a few: when asked if Jala, their captive great ape is dangerous, Eliza replies, "Not now I've broken its legs." (This is actually a prelude to a genuinely rather harrowing torture scene [which in typical Miles fashion, begins nevertheless with John Pemberton feebly saying to the captive Merytra, "Believe me, we can be quite firm when we want to be!"] The switching from dark humour to genuine emotion in brief brush-strokes is splendidly done throughout.)

Julian Glover as the Osiran Lord Upuat gets the best lines, however. Justine has become his chamber slave, and at one point Upuat points out various other Osirans to her: "That's Bast. She's worshipped as a goddess of not following orders on some worlds. You'd probably like her. I think I had sex with her once. Left scratches on my pelt for days..." Later, after Sutekh, arch-villain that he is, has told him he must "submit or be destroyed", Upuat replies, "Hmm. I'm not keen on either, to be honest. Couldn't I just sit back and not interfere?"

One of the things that it's hard not to do with the Faction Paradox audios, which generally pre-date the current return of Doctor Who, is to list ideas that first appeared here and are done rather better than they were in the more famous TV behemoth that followed. To pick a trivial example, the formal tongue of the Osiran Court is like a more spooky version of Judoon-speak, and, much more importantly, there is the idea of a Time War. In the RTD-era Doctor Who, it seemed to me, there was no real sense that the Time War actually happened in four dimesions: often the images made it just seem like a space battle between the Daleks and the Time Lords. Here, after Justine has travelled through the tunnel to the Ship, her companions back on Earth try and find out what's happening to her now by reading ancient texts and legends -- one of the non "history-proofed" members of the Society reads a line from an ancient Greek text, then reads it again and doesn't notice that he reads something completely different on the second occasion. (Yes, I know that there is more sense of Time being a factor in the current series of Who, in the arc about Amy's crack [if you'll pardon the expression] but even so...)

Which leads to the other great thing about this -- the characterisation. In an interview he did years before these plays appeared, Miles said that (admittedly in the context of TV drama rather than audio plays) that the idea of "character-driven" TV was overrated, and that "great television runs on iconography, not on giving characters stock emotional problems and letting them drone on about them for hours on end." Certainly the Egyptian Gods of the Osiran Court are icons, here, but the other characters generate genuine emotion in the listener in a series of completely non-droney, excellently written touches, the prime example of which is the story of Corwyn and Astarte (a great performance from Patricia Merrick) Marne's eight-month old daughter. Rescued from the poisoned Faction Paradox race bank discovered in Coming to Dust, her adoptive parents find that she slips out of their memories, that her room sometimes briefly appears unfurnished and empty when they enter, and that, when they remember things they have done, their daughter is not present....

This is genuinely emotional and affecting, and so much more effective for being sketched in brief moments rather than dolloped about like (as it seemed to this ageing cynical fellow on his first viewing anyway) the rather over-done and shallow cry-now-dammitry of, say, that Van Gogh episode of the new Doctor Who....

Anyway, marvellous stuff, and we haven't even considered the hints and reversals in the latter stages. Not soon or next, but when I remember, then: Part 3: Body Politic...