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.
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| Published: 2003 Acquired and read: December 2022 |
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
