Short Trips, Indefinable Magic 31.02: The Power Supply, by Eddy Robson

I mostly know Eddy Robson from his audio scripts, where, like Jonathan Morris, I associate him with a reliable base level of quality and a good variety of styles. His strength there, for me, lies in his humour and humanity: his most enjoyable stories have either been straight comedy (Grand Theft Cosmos), or ones where he has combined the humour with weirdness (Memory Lane, The Condemned) or with a strong focus on character (Urgent Calls, The Five Companions).

The Power Supply falls more into the weirdness camp. The premise - which I won't spoil - is fun, and a genre clash I don't think we've seen before in Who. Robson then twists it in an unexpected way, and, indeed, he packs a lot of ideas into a small number of words. There's not much action (though there is a medical emergency the Doctor has to deal with that reminded me of Room for Improvement), but then that's not what the story is about.

The short stories I've read in this inter-season gap have been quite varied (except for the lack of historicals, which has been more than made up for by other media), and another thing I enjoyed was that Robson employs a very different style of prose to the others. It's not quite as polished as I would ideally like - early on he massively overuses the word 'day' over the space of two paragraphs - but other than lacking a final edit it is an enjoyable read.

Even though it's been revisited rather too often in prose, Robson manages to find a new angle on the TARDIS translation circuits, which is impressive. He also discusses the TARDIS having agency, which I don't believe has come up since David Whitaker's time. On the other hand, the epilogue made me roll my eyes slightly - it would be fine taken as a single instance, but it's something I've just seen too much of now.

Overall this feels like a lot of good things packed into somewhat too small a space. More room to breathe would have upped my score, I think.

Published:
Date: March 2009
ISBN: 1-84435-384-2

Rating:
4.5/10.

Ordering Stories
Right, since this is the last story I'm covering before the start of season 3 (have I really only got that far in my marathon?), I'm going to lay out my stall for an order. As usual I'm going to try to break up the different kinds of story (forward, backward, sideways) and the different media (comic, novel, short stories, and audios) - and here it really matters that we have frames in the audios, so I'm going to include them separately.

1. Are You Listening?
2. The Suffering
3. The Power Supply
4. The Three Doctors (first Doctor bit)
5. The Empire of Glass
6. Upstairs
7. Mars
8. Frostfire
9. The Schoolboy's Story (ends Steven's time as a new traveller)
10. Corridors of Power (has to be after they've landed on a spaceship)
11. The Suffering frame
12. (stories yet to come in this marathon)
13. Frostfire frame (after Vicki's departure)
14. Upstairs frame

I know this is incomplete, and at some point I'll get The Bounty of Ceres, The Founding Fathers, and whatever else has appeared in the meantime. I'll do timeslips for those at a later date. Long may the audios continue, even though it makes a definitive cross-media marathon impossible!

Next Time:
Four Hundred Dawns.