Review: Doctor Who: EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner

Originally published: 2001
Acquired: July 2021
Read: August 2021

Doctor Who: EarthWorld
by Jacqueline Rayner

 

This was a delight. EarthWorld is the first proper adventure for the new TARDIS team of the (amnesiac) Doctor, Fitz, and Anji following the trapped-on-Earth arc; Anji was introduced in the previous book, Escape Velocity (which I read back around the time it came out, in 2001), but this was her first trip in the TARDIS. I don't have much memory of Anji despite reading five novels featuring her back in the day, but she is great here. Rayner has an exceptional handle on her, much the same way she does Bernice Summerfield. She is real, funny, and inventive, and her internal monologue utterly convinces; much of the novel is told from her perspective, and the book works all the better for it. I liked the e-mails she writes her (dead) boyfriend sprinkled throughout the text; I liked her interactions with the three would-be rebels; I liked her solutions to the situations she ends up in. I have three more Eighth Doctor Adventures featuring Anji that I am slated to read in the coming year; I can only hope those writers measure up to Rayner.

At one point, I started to wonder if Fitz was a bit flanderized-- he seemed pretty pathetic. But I think Fitz actually kind of is pathetic, it's just that he's normally written by male authors who sympathize with his patheticness. And if he feels flanderized, well, that's because (as the novel delves into a bit) he was literally flanderized in the novel Interference. His existential crisis was well handled, and I liked his resolution at the novel's end.

The one weak point of characterization is the Doctor himself. I liked the slightly off-kilter Doctor we got in the Earth arc novels The Turing Test and Father Time, and here it seems that he knows a little too much about how he is "supposed" to act on an adventure considered it's his first one. But there is a neat moment at the end, where he does some stuff no other Doctor would do, and Rayner captures Paul McGann's performance as well.

All this, plus it's that rarest of things: a media tie-in with thematic depth! This is a story about memory, and the gap between what we remember and what actually was. The Doctor has lost him memories, Fitz is made up of memories, Anji struggles over her memories of Dave, the planet New Jupiter is in a war over to what extent their cultural memory of Earth should dominate them, the EarthWorld theme park is entirely made up of misremembered Earth history, the president of New Jupiter struggles with false memories he's invented. It all comes together quite nicely, without being ham-handed. Definitely one of the best EDAs, and a worthy choice for BBC Books's fiftieth anniversary reprint line.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Year of Intelligent Tigers