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STORY PLACEMENT
THIS SERIES TAKES EDITED BY PAUL MAGRS
RECOMMENDED PURCHASE BIG FINISH HARDBACK (ISBN 1-84435-155-6) RELEASED IN JULY 2005.
BLURB Iris is an enigma... an enigma wrapped in a mystery. With a shapeless, tasteless hat clamped to her head. and she's puff- ing on a gold-tipped black Sobranie.
And she drives a big red double-decker bus, ostensibly bound for Putney Common. Except it's not. She's been precisely once and that was by accident. That was when she picked up Tom, who is now her best friend.
Together they journey through the multi- verse: boozing and fighting; righting wrongs and buggering things up again. Here they meet monsters, ambassadors, insect- things, detectives, weirdos, psychics, fiends and sundry perverts...
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Wildthyme on Top JULY 2005
Before Obverse Books, our favourite Transtemporal adventuress got her own short story anthology, part of Big Finish’s New Worlds label. This is before Panda, back in the days when Tom was Iris’s companion of choice, but after she had taken on the physical form of the wonderful Katy Manning. Wildthyme on Top is a bit of a mixed bag, but at its best, offers some of the best Who-related short fiction out there.
The book of ten stories starts out with a couple of murder mysteries, each taking a rather different track. Most Horrid by Justin Richard is a suitably spooky ghost story, coupling a mysterious killing with haunting by a phantom Old Peddler Woman. The solemn events are offset by the intrusion of a naff TV crew and the mistress of the bus herself. A well-told tale, with some great lines and a satisfying twist. Jake Elliot’s The Sleuth Slayers, on the other hand, opts for high parody, as various thinly-veiled takes on famous fictional detectives are successively bumped off as part of a monstrous plot. Iris and Tom join forces with a pair of Avengers to solve the mystery. It’s pretty unoriginal, but entertainingly written, zipping along nicely. The Poirot parody, Hercule Smith, is hilarious once you realise he’s talking with a Yorkshire accent.
Minions of the Moon by Philip Purser-Hallard steps up the style, presenting us with a beau-tifully told tale of a society of Lunaries, elegant beings of the lunar city of Endymion. This is the Moon of the 15th century, portrayed as a wondrous place of oceans and cities because, wonderfully, nobody has yet discovered that it isn’t so. Iris and Tom tag along with an English ambassadorial mission, as well as an equal team from Florence, each determined to secure the alliance of the Lunaries. Written with great poetry and humour, this is an excellent story, putting Tom in the spotlight and fleshing out his character, whilst tackling the nature of what is ‘real,’ and even gender politics. Yet it never loses its sense of fun. A real highlight of the collection.
Beguine by Stephen Cole is an oddity, told in an unusual, time-twisting style. It begins in a dirty warehouse where the elderly perform strip shows as an attempt to shock and appall their offspring, before tracking back through the life of one of the pensioners, a man named Ben. It becomes clear that this Ben is / was / will be a writer of extraordinary art and power, capable of altering reality itself. As Tom tries to track his life, he is drawn into a nightmarish experience where nothing is as it seems. Haunting and affecting.
Another intriguing and enjoyable story is Kate Orman’s Rough Magic. Orman gets Iris spot on, and sets her against a powerful boy warlock and his familiar, in, rather wonderfully, an abandoned hotel in the heart of the Vortex. Iris is left out of her depth, without Tom or the bus, and the true nature of the threat is altogether stranger. A finely written tale.
Stewart Sheargold’s Blame Iris sees Iris meet the controversial 20th century authors Anais Nin and Henry and June Miller. I don’t know how accurate the writers’ portrayal is, but they come alive as eccentric characters. Drawn into a plot by paper-based aliens who inhabit a realm of stories and film, Iris, Tom and the three authors learn intriguing truths about the nature of life and fiction, while saving humanity from mental subjugation. Marvellously, the aliens are shadowing Iris as she is the perfect scapegoat for interferences in Earth history. Written with wonderful style, the story features an incredible picture of a realm made from celluloid and illustrated paper clippings, something that really deserves to be seen on film. And Tom gets laid, so good for him.
The exploration of the nature of fiction continues throughout other stories, including the highly amusing Jane Austen piss-take Iris and Irregularity, by Jac Rayner, and the less successful fantasy parody The Mancunian Candidate by Lance Parkin. Both take a metatextual look at a well-recognised story genre, playing them for laughs, but while Rayner’s story plays the concept of Iris crashing the 19th century social scene for all it’s worth, Parkin’s story simply isn’t as funny as it thinks it is, which is a shame, because he’s generally one of my favourite authors. However, a story about a talking squirrel running for government really ought to be funnier than this.
The met fiction theme continues in The Evil Little Mother and the Tragic Old Bat. Jonathan Blum’s story takes it right back to the earliest days of archetypal myth, and has Iris and Tom seek out Medea, wife of Jason and killer of her own children. It’s an astonishingly well-written take on the ancient tale, with Iris bringing Medea forward in time to view Eurypides’ play and its 21stcentury counterparts; not only does it ask the question of why and how Medea could perform such appalling acts, it posits that perhaps such archetypal characters might have existed, purely through the act of having been written about so many, many times. Perhaps, it suggests, Iris could be one such archetype, or a manifestation of one. It also contains the unbeatable line: “There is little more frightening than Medea with a hangover.”
However, my very favourite story of the collection is Came to Believe, nestled unassumingly in the middle of the book. One of the last stories to come from the imagination of the late, great Craig Hinton, it’s the story of one Barry Canley, a successful journalist who has coll-apsed into severe alcoholism. As he goes through the necessary hell of rehabilitation in the Mercy Clinic, he meets Iris, who has checked herself in - not for treatment, but to ensure that Barry recovers and realises his dream of writing a book, so that Iris is able to, one day, read it. Beautifully written but unafraid to be uncompromisingly ugly, it’s an astonishing piece of prose, one of the very best stories that I have read in the vast array of Who and its spin-offs. And, at the very end, just as a treat, we get to meet another version of Iris. Just perfect.
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Copyright © Daniel Tessier 2010
Daniel Tessier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. |
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