The arrival of a new John Higgs book is an exciting event. I held off opening Exterminate! Regenerate! until finishing work, then read the first section out loud to my housemate. It’s a gripping scene: Verity Lambert is working on a live TV broadcast when the main actor drops down dead. It’s noted that Verity is 23 years old, the book’s first appearance of the number.
There are superficial similarities between this book and the previous one, Love and Let Die, where Higgs looked at Bond. Both Bond and the Doctor emerged in the early sixties, both have been played by multiple actors and both have changed to fit the times. Higgs tells the Doctor’s story well, producing a brisk, fascinating account. But this is a stranger book than simply a history of a TV show.
During the course of the book, Higgs builds a case that the Doctor is alive: an incredibly successful memetic lifeform. He queries the difference between “something that is a living thing, and something that just acts like one”, and talks about how this creature functions, and the ways it attempts niche construction.
I didn’t recall the word egregore in the text, but that is what we’re talking about here. Doctor Who, more than almost any other 20th century fictional character has begun functioning independently. The only character that has come close to this is the somewhat more obscure John Constantine, who keeps slipping into reality. Other science fiction characters and superheroes seem different to the Doctor – there’s something grounded about him that allows him to interact with our world with some level of autonomy. The TARDIS allows him to function in many types of stories, whereas superheroes often rely on a static, unrealistic background setting.
Higgs talks about the Doctor as “the most perfectly evolved story-creating entity that there has ever been”, keeping itself alive by generating new narratives. I’d not realised how many stories have been released by Big Finish Audio alone – hundreds of them, filling in different eras. “Doctor Who had been a living progression of adventures, but now every moment along that timeline was fizzing with potential and capable of generating new stories. Doctor Who had become fractal.”
Along with the discussion of the doctor, there is an interesting observation about the time lords, and how they represent the show’s editors. There’s an interesting parallel here with the function of the crisis in DC comics, and how these keep occurring to fix editorial issues (many of them created by the first DC crisis).
I loved reading this. It’s full of interesting asides and diversions, as well as a very provocative theme. And, if you accept the book’s conclusion that Doctor Who is alive, what else can you do with that idea?