Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice by Stephen Baxter

this is as socially conscious as any other Doctor Who story. There are plenty of subplots and underlying themes about social organization, surveillance states, corporations overreaching themselves, etc. It definitely feels Doctor Whoish, and it feels Second Doctory, with his penchant for history, science, and generally trying to avoid authority figures as much as possible. But that means navigating the politics of interstellar profit lines and trying to communicate with a billions-year-old, failing artificial intelligence with tremendous guilt.

The TARDIS has detected a “relative continuum displacement zone” and refuses to take off until the Doctor does something about it. The TARDIS takes them to the rings of Saturn, slightly in our future, where humans are preparing to mine the moon Mnemosyme for its abnormally rich deposits of bernalium. The Wheel of Ice is a Second Doctor story with Jamie and Zoe as companions. I was curious, then, to see what a Doctor Who story as told by Baxter would bring. So what compelled me to pick this up when I spied it in the library stacks? It has been a while since I read anything by Stephen Baxter-his hard SF novels fascinated me as an adolescent, but his flat characterization started to bore me as I grew older. Maybe I should check out the audio plays-I think I would genuinely enjoy those. Especially for something as iconic as Doctor Who, I need the actors to pull off that characterization. I am just as surprised as you are that I’m reading another Doctor Who novel! As I explained when I reviewed Engines of War, media tie-ins are not my thing.

A mystery that could destroy the Wheel-and kill them all. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that goes all the way back to the creation of the solar system.

Once on the Wheel, the Doctor and his companions face a critical situation when they become suspected by some as the source of the ongoing sabotage. Some of the younger workers are even refusing to go down into the warren-like mines any more.Īnd then one of them, surfing Saturn’s rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction. And there are stories among the children of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. Maybe it’s only a run of bad luck, but the equipment failures and thefts of resources have been increasing. It’s a bad place to live-and a worse place to grow up. A ring of ice and metal turning around a moon of Saturn, home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth. Like it or not, they’re coming in for a landing, who knows where or when… The TARDIS has carried the Doctor (as portrayed by Patrick Troughton) and his companions, Jamie and Zoe, to all sorts of places, but now, when they don’t want to go anywhere, the TARDIS makes a decision for them. Hurtling through a vortex beyond time and space is a police box that’s not a police box.

Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice by Stephen Baxter