When is a Doctor Who novel not a Doctor Who novel?...
Cat's Cradle : Warhead by Andrew Cartmel
Seventh Doctor Adventures number: 6
Originally published: April 1992
Companions: Ace
The place is Earth. The time is the near future — all too near.
Industrial development has accelerated out of all control, spawning dangerous new technologies and laying the planet to waste. While the inner cities collapse in guerrilla warfare, a dark age of superstition dawns.
As destruction of the environment reaches the point of no return, multinational corporations and super-rich individuals unite in a last desperate effort — not to save humankind, but to buy themselves immortality in a poisoned world.
If Earth is to survive, somebody has to stop them.
From London to New York to Turkey, Ace follows the Doctor as he prepares, finally, to strike back.
So the answer to my question above is, surprisingly, when its written by author of the "Seventh Doctor Masterplan", Andrew Cartmel.
Welcome to Cats Cradle - Warhead.
Which doesn’t feature a cradle, what you would traditionally call a warhead or anything at all to do with the previous novel in this so called trilogy. It barely even features a cat - or (once again) the title character. Plus, no aliens, monsters, renegade Time Lords or other such malarkey. Apart from some telekinetic powers, it's almost more of a techno-thriller heist novel.
Yet it does turn out to be, at times, a complex and gripping story - although not without its flaws.
Okay, we're still with the manipulative, chess master incarnation of the Doctor, so it kind of makes sense that he stays in the background, popping up now and again to say something enigmatic and keep his plans on track.
Which mean that in this bleak, dystopian world of the near future, one which depressingly doesn’t seem that far fetched, the bulk of the story falls on Ace and the supporting characters - and what an interesting bunch they are.
Unlike "Time's Crucible", where I couldn’t have cared less about the fate of the bunch of misfits caught up in the Doctor's wake, here Cartmel introduces us to living breathing people with lives and histories and problems. All via a series of vignettes that often last just a scant few pages. Some of them are gone as quickly as they are introduced - take Maria the cleaner for example - but what's unusual is that despite this brevity, you genuinely miss them. Reviewers often talk about world-building, but this is proof of an author who is great at character-building.
Unfortunately, it's the bits in between the character moments which I was less enamoured of.
Let's get the matter of Justine's drug fuelled hallucination out of the way first. Severed heads rolling into toilet urinals ? I'm sorry - what ?
And given we are this early in the New Adventures range, I'm not sure I can *quite* believe that the Ace of the TV series could hire and command a squad of hardened Kurdish mercenaries, take part in a mass shootout and happily wander around naked. But…it works I guess. It's certainly action-packed.
What's slightly more problematical is the fact that the Doctor seems to be quite cruel in the way he uses people. He lets people die. He abandons poor Maria. He allows Bobby Prescott to be murdered by a gang of street thugs that the Doctor himself has hired - and he uses Vincent and Justine as his ultimate weapon, regardless of the danger it puts them in.
Okay, so maybe the ends justify the means. And don’t get me wrong, I certainly enjoy characters that have a more grey coloured moral compass. It's just not how I'd expect the character of the Doctor to behave.
This *is* a well written novel. It has some interesting things to say about the direction we could be heading as a society. It has a well realised supporting cast and it cleverly pulls together a whole host of seemingly disparate threads into a cohesive finale.
By those standards it’s a successful and enjoyable book.
But as I said at the start, I'm not entirely sure it’s a Doctor Who book.
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