Doctor Who_ Rip Tide - Louise Cooper [1]
Talk about taking your pleasures neat ...
Her love for that environment pays dividends in the story you're about to read. It has a pin-sharp sense of place and a memorable texture of reality. Yes, reality, and yes, it's Doctor Who. There's no reason why the two don't belong together. One of the great things about this new generation of Who fiction is that it takes the character and the concept into places that, in the context of British children's TV, the original show's makers were able to flirt with but never fully enter or explore.
It was back in 1982 when I was working on a story for the television series called Terminus that Eric Saward, that season's script editor, mentioned that the shows drawing the highest audience-appreciation scores tended to be ones in which the Doctor either visited Earth or became involved in some part of Earth's history (if I'm remembering correctly Eric's own debut script, the one that had put him in line for the script editor's job, had been set around 1666).
Over time I began to understand the dynamic behind the notion. The strange really does become more strange and takes on a more enticing character if you place it in a context of the familiar. The more credible the context, the more gripping the weirdness. When Stephen King moved horror out of the antiquarian's library and into the local supermarket, that once-despised genre hijacked the mainstream for more than a decade.
Now, I'm not suggesting that every Who story should have been an earthbound one. But the signs are that the greater sense of reality one works into the scenario, the more substantial the drama becomes. And the more substantial it is, the more affecting it can be. It isn't only a matter of locale. Even more important is the need to get a sense of reality in character, in emotional reactions, in relationships.
One area that always fascinated me, but which in my own stories I could do little more than hint at, was that of the complexity in the Doctor's attitude toward the rest of us. Never without a companion, clearly in need of companionship, this inveterate loner chooses to spend his existence with a series of beings whose individual lifespans must seem, in his eyes, to pass with the brevity of a mayfly's. Even when, for once, his companion is a fellow Time Lord, their association runs its course and ends in exactly the same way as all the others.
He's always moving on, and yet we matter to him. I can remember the discussions and the questions when I suggested that, after losing touch with Nyssa under dangerous circumstances and fearing the worst, the Doctor might express his relief with a hug when the two of them were reunited. A humane moment, an expression of affection. Did we dare to cross that line?
Well, we did it, and the sky didn't fall, and the audience feedback suggested that we'd made a rare connection.
But sex? Don't even think about it.
Now, and away from the screen, Who has begun to grow up in ways that it was never allowed to before. Yes, there are the videos and the audio adventures and the 'Rolykin' Daleks and all that spin-off and nostalgia stuff, but there's also an increasing body of prose fiction that brings a new depth and maturity to a format that demonstrates, again and again, that it has a robustness and the franchise potential to be at least the equal of a Buffy or a Star Trek. And I'm not talking about fan fiction, either, but the work of professionals like Louise Cooper herself, author of more than fifty novels and a respected writer of Fantasy and Young Adult fiction.
Rip Tide carries you along with a deceptively easy style and a whathappens-next sense of story. Here's an engaging place seen with an insider's eye, and within it there's a wonder-filled strangeness lying just beyond the everyday and the recognisably real.
All that is available to you here. If you're ready to reach