Doctor Who - Dragonfire by Ian Briggs

Published: March 1989

If he had known. But he didn’t." (p.94)

My copy was also signed by Ian Briggs at a convention in Liverpool in 1989.

In fact, it may not be far off the mark to suggest that this vortex of ideas and allusions is the real star of Briggs’s story- the combination of fairytale quest narratives, supporting characters named after a host of film theorists, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula and the Biblical implications of the mark of Kane/Cain is something that late 1980s Doctor Who did rather well, remarkably so when it’s easy for such a set of references to come across as little more than the writer showing how well-read he is. At the centre of ‘Dragonfire’ is of course the character of Kane, and it’s encouraging that in print he retains much of the power of Edward Peel’s characterisation, apart from a late scene where Ace finds him hiding in her fridge-freezer which probably couldn’t have been realised seriously. His nemesis, the bio-mechanoid Creature, was evidently something rather different in Briggs’s original conception of the story, as he describes its skin and so on, it’s clearly meant to be something rather more organic although probably coming up too closely against the boundaries of taste, particularly when its head comes apart. Belazs is somewhat more vulnerable than on television, while much of the expansion of the book is taken up with Stellar the Starchild’s journey through Iceworld after Kane’s mercenaries have wreaked havoc. As with ‘Delta and the Bannermen’, however, it’s also a relief to find that Briggs takes time to make clear which of the supporting characters is which.

This being her debut story, it’s also interesting to see Briggs’s first take on the character of Ace, and I have to say there’s a slightly strange feel to her here, as if what he envisaged wasn’t eventually what we ended up with. Perhaps it’s her odd and unnatural way of speaking- a kind of sanitised street language filtered by the Nathan-Turner blue pencil, although she’s allowed the "hells" in prose that she wasn’t on television, combined with a compulsive tendency to give everybody a nickname on first meeting- or perhaps it’s the strangeness of the character full stop, as if she was conceived to be at one and the same time a child genius, angst-ridden teenager, representative of a 1980s London teenager and equally somewhere on the faultline between exceptional and bizarre. In any case, the character is something of a blank canvas here surprisingly- I tried for a few chapters imagining Sara Griffiths playing the part, but found when I stopped that I couldn’t visualise Sophie Aldred either- so perhaps it’s just as much that the character we’re familar with was a collaborative effort, but here we have undiluted Briggs.

If the televised serial ‘Dragonfire’ was one of the first stories to start pointing the direction the later McCoy stories would start to take towards more intelligent narratives operating more by implication and illusion and forsaking some of the commonplaces and traditions of earlier eras, Ian Briggs’s adaptation is equally an opportunity for some of those ideas and allusions to be given more of a free rein and allowed to grow. That said, from a personal point of view I wouldn’t say that it points the way to the New Adventures at this stage as its power lies in the concentration of ideas in a small space rather than the expansive environment of a full-length novel. However, it’s all the more rewarding for retaining the intensity of that cocktail of ideas and influences while allowing the ideas to expand within their natural compass, so as to erase much of the memory of three televised episodes compressed so as to lose much of their potential.