Doctor Who: Blue Box by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: Blue Box
by Kate Orman

I've been reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures and related books every three months since October 2019, starting with the novelisation of the TV movie: ones I owned but hadn't got to, supplemented by ones that had been rereleased. Trading Futures was the last of those, so now I'm on to some vaguely related books before I draw this project to a close. The first is Blue Box, a Past Doctor Adventure rereleased as an ebook; it has no link to the EDAs, but it's by Kate Orman, one of the very best Doctor Who novelists, so I made an exception.

 

Published: 2003
Acquired and read: December 2022

Blue Box features the sixth Doctor and Peri, seemingly some time in the run-up to The Trial of a Time Lord, in 1981 America. The novel is told in the form of a piece of long-form journalism by Chick Peters, who stumbles into a plot by a prominent D.C.-area hacker to acquire a piece of alien technology, and the attempts of the Doctor, Peri, and their friend Bob to stop her. It's got a lot going for it, and I really enjoyed it on the whole; surely one of the very best PDAs.

First, Orman as always has a good handle on characterization. Here we get some probing of Peri's tempestuous relationship with the sixth Doctor: why she likes him, why she wants to leave him, why she ultimately stays on. The sixth Doctor is in a bit of a different mode than normal (Orman perhaps channeling some of the seventh Doctor, with whom she cut her teeth as a Doctor Who novelist), but I could still imagine Colin Baker delivering his lines with gusto. (She does get him out of the coat, which was seemingly obligatory for PDA writers back in the day, though I did like the image of him wearing all black except for a rainbow cat tie.) The new characters, especially Chick, Bob, and the villain, Sarah Swan, all pop off the page. There's a pretty neat turn of events as regards Chick, one I wouldn't have excepted in a 2003 novel. Though it's not handled quite the way I would imagine for a 2023 novel, it was still pretty impressive.

Second, I really liked how the story was told. Peters writes in the first person from his perspective. Sometimes it's stuff he saw, sometimes it's stuff he reconstructed from his sources. It's a neat way to tell a Doctor Who story, and an effectively different way of getting into characters' heads. Orman does a good job of imitating the style of long-form journalism, like those occasional forays into people's backstories, the plucking out of their small idiosyncrasies, and beginning with a scene that occurs much later than most of the action. The book is able to give exposition in terms of both character and plot without it feeling belabored, and there is a nicely poetic recurring bit about someone riding a bull that wrong-foots the readers. As always, Orman reads smoothly and nicely. It feels like a novel, not a novelisation of a tv show, in the form of the story, too: the story here is about people, and the kind of action that is present, plays to the strengths of prose.

Third, I loved the topic. I watched War Games and Triumph of the Nerds a lot as a kid. I have a real fondness for the early computer era, an era where—as this book points out—individual people could still meaningfully comprehend and control computer programs and the emerging Internet. There are some good jokes about what was to come with computing, and lots of delving into the mechanics of hacking. I don't know if it was all plausible or not, but it felt plausible. (The "blue box" of the title is not the TARDIS but a real device that lets people manipulate phone lines.) I always get a kick out of this kind of thing, and Orman made it come alive.

Add to that a creepy concept and you have a winner. I don't know that I would give it "five stars" if I went around doing such things, but this seems to me to be the platonic ideal of a PDA.

(I read it a week before Christmas... and it actually takes place from December 23 to 26 or so. I guess I could have included in my readthrough of Doctor Who Christmas books. It's not very Christmassy, but no less so than, say, The Sleep of Reason.)

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: The Glamour Chronicles: Big Bang Generation

Review: Doctor Who: The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin

Originally published: 1998
Acquired: July 2010
Read: August 2020

Doctor Who: The Infinity Doctors
by Lance Parkin

This is an odd book. The Doctor seems to be the one portrayed on screen by Paul McGann, but he lives on Gallifrey; the Time Lord we would call the Master is a government official called the Magistrate, and they are friends. There are hints that would indicate it's a Doctor who's settled down after a long time traveling the universe; there are also hints that indicate the tv adventures we know didn't happen. Is it a Doctor who returned home? Or one who never left? Or one who has yet to leave?

The real pleasure of the book is in the worldbuilding. When I was a young Doctor Who fan, I was fascinated by the Time Lords; after years of mediocre Big Finish stories about them, I've come to think that killing them off was the best thing that ever happened to them, and I'd happily go a decade without going to Gallifrey or hearing about the Matrix or transduction barriers. But Lance Parkin does a great job with the Time Lords and Gallifrey, arguably better than anyone ever. The details of how the Capitol operates, the Citadel, the relationship between the Time Lords and other Gallifreyans, the details on the technologies they possess, they're all so well done. You get an amazing sense of scale and power at the same time you see how and why a Time Lord can never actually do anything: a group of people whose power is so momentous they can never make use of it. The book is chock-full of great ideas; I loved the Needle and its inhabitants; I thought the Sontarans and the Rutan have rarely been so well depicted.

On the other hand, I did kind of wonder what the point of it all was. Why tell a story about the Doctor not leaving Gallifrey? What kind of point is this book making? I'm not quite sure. It's very epic-- but on the other hand, it feels like just another adventure in a storyworld where the Doctor lives in Gallifrey. Why tell this story in that world? What is Parkin trying to say about a Doctor who lives on Gallifrey?

I'm not sure, but I do think Parkin does a great job with the (kind of) eighth Doctor. You can hear Paul McGann saying the lines. More than that, this story does a good job of maintaining the Doctor's essential Doctorishness in a non-Doctor situation. This is the kind of thing Doctor Who writers often struggle with-- on audio, when the Doctor becomes someone else, you often wouldn't even recognize them as the Doctor except for the actor playing them. But if the Doctor did live on Gallifrey and try to work within its structures, this is how he would do it. He's playful and committed to justice and clever, and improvising so much he impresses himself; he just happens to be confined to one planet.

This book originally came out in 1998, for Doctor Who's thirty-fifth anniversary (is that really a thing?), when the television show had been off the air for nearly a decade; Big Finish wasn't even making Doctor Who audio dramas yet. There's an attempt to build up a new mythology around the character. There are hints about the Doctor's secret past, about his parents, about his past loves and losses; there's old friends we've never heard of, and new lovers. In some ways it's very like what Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat would do in the revival, but in others its very different. It adds romance and myth as they did, but it can feel a little backward-looking. Twenty years later, it feels like a bit of a dead end. I think it suffers a bit from being read out of context; it's part of something building through the novels of its era, but it's been around twenty years since I read Alien Bodies or Unnatural History or The Gallifrey Chronicles! A lot of it was lost on me. (It is fun, though, to imagine the coming doom for Gallifrey that is hinted at is the Last Great Time War against the Daleks.)

The ending is a bit sudden and definitely disappointing. But up until that point, it's always enjoyable even when it's odd. Parkin has a sense of tone that many tie-in writers don't. I might sound a little down on this novel, but I'm not really. I don't entirely get what it's trying to do, and I think some of what it's trying to do is a mistake-- but what it's trying to do is big and interesting, and pulled off fairly well, and I was almost always engaged. This is a weird side-step in more than one way, but it's a great one and well worth reading.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The Turing Test