Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson

Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson

I picked up this Tor.com novella (though I think it must be a novel by actual word count) because it was by Eddie Robson, one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, one of those whose senses of tone, character, and world are generally strong enough that I could imagine him succeeding at original science fiction, which is not a thing I believe of most tie-in writers.

Published: 2020
Acquired: December 2021
Read: June 2022

For its first half this is very strong. It has a weird setting: a city where everything is made of wood, ruled by a king with a talking cat, where the imperative is to just build build build. The parallel narratives follow the king and the chief architect, both of whom are beginning to suspect that their world doesn't entirely make sense. (What is... concrete?) The story is told with a dry, factual narrative voice that works well to highlight its absurdities.

About halfway through, though, the novel explains what's going on, and at that point, I was like, "This is just a Doctor Who story!" And indeed, when I flipped to the Acknowledgements page, I found Hearts of Oak was based on something Robson originally pitched to Alan Barnes, former script editor of Big Finish's Doctor Who range. At that point, the story becomes much less interesting; what's really happening is much less striking than what went before, and the disconnected style works against the narrative from then on, too, as to be interesting what comes next, we would need to be invested in the characters as people more.

That said, I like Robson in general and the first half of this novel in particular enough that I would give his original work another chance; I see that this is actually his second novel, so I'll have to seek out his first and see how it is.