Nuclear Time
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BBC Books Nuclear Time |
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| Author | Brian Minchin |  |
| ISBN | 1 846 07897 0 | |
| Published | 2010 |
| Synopsis: As death falls from the sky, the Doctor is trapped. The TARDIS is damaged, and the Doctor finds he is living backwards through time. With Amy and Rory being hunted through the suburban streets of the Doctor’s own future and getting farther away with every passing second, he must unravel the secrets of Appletown before time runs out. |
Back to the Future! by Andrew Feryok 7/3/16
My opinion of this story swung wildly as I read this story. From the start, I was really bored with the premise. A nuclear blast site town in the Colorado desert. Didn't I just see that in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Killer robots that looks like regular people. We see that all the time with the Autons and the Terminator. The military up to no good in a secret desert base? Well, that is pretty much any story set in Area 51 including Crystal Skull and Doctor Who's own Dreamland. I went along with it all but found myself yawning at the start. When was the time travel hi-jinxes promised on the back cover going to kick in? Actually, from the moment that the Doctor captures the nuclear bomb in the TARDIS, the story started to get interesting!
Unfortunately, it was also at that moment that the story of Albert and Geoff started to take over. Up until then, every other chapter told the unfolding story of how scientist Albert and military Colonel Geoff came together to collaborate on a project to create killer robots that ultimately went wrong. But then once the Doctor gets off the truck at the military base and Amy and Rory get stuck in a burning house surrounded by killer robots, they sort of leave the story for a good chunk of the middle of the book as we witness Albert and Geoff's story a half hour prior to the Doctor, Amy and Rory's arrival. Albert and Geoff are definitely well-rounded characters and their story does prove to be an interesting and worthwhile one. But I kept wondering when we were going to get back to the Doctor and friends! This was supposed to be a DOCTOR WHO story! Not the story of Albert and Geoff! But, in the end, the wait is worth it because establishing the series of events and the characters affected by it makes it all the more dramatic when the Doctor resolves to change the outcome of things.
Doesn't it seem like the Eleventh Doctor gets away with changing time more than any of his other incarnations? He seems to share the Seventh Doctor's penchant for setting mind-bending plans in motion, but the Eleventh is the only one who outright changes history as part of his solutions (versus the Seventh Doctor who will set up pieces in the past so that they can come into play as part of normal history in a future battle). It's rather neat when we see the Doctor perceiving the web of time and then defying physics in order to jump timelines and rearrange history. Some of his explanations for what he is doing seem a little ridiculous, but I like the fact that the author tries to dumb it down a bit with real-life examples. For instance, he explains how he is jumping time tracks to alter the past with a piece of string, or explains how he diffused the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud by comparing it to throwing something out of a car window while in motion. That last one by the way had me groaning, as I can't actually see that working.
As for the regulars, I found them to be spot on and a little ahead of their time. The Doctor is not just funny but gets to be dark and brooding as well. Amy and Rory actually act like a married couple! If I had to guess when this book was written and released, I probably would have guessed during Season 6 or Season 7 part 1, but this was actually released not long after the finale of Season 5! Remember that was the season when Matt Smith was off-the-wall wacky without much darkness and Amy was overly obsessed with "having fun" (wink wink, nudge nudge) with the Doctor and having second thoughts about her marriage? Oli Smith seems to be writing against their Season 5 characters and instead presents far more mature interpretations, which thankfully is actually how their characters developed in subsequent seasons. The Doctor does get some scene-stealing silliness though. I love when he's riding backwards on a bicycle and proclaiming "They thought it was impossible to drive a bicycle backwards!" I also like when he steals the bike at the very end as a personal Christmas present to himself! Or his increasingly desperate attempts to convince Geoff and Albert that he is first a Health and Safety Inspector, then a man living backwards through time, and then a Pentagon undercover agent, which Geoff just finds increasingly ludicrous!
If there is one thing I wish the book could have done more of is give us more of the robot Isley and her relationship with Albert. She makes it clear towards the end that because she has been active for five years longer than the other robots, she has had a longer period to learn both military tactics and human interaction and in that time has also learned to be less of a weapon and more of the girl that Albert had projected onto it. I would have liked to see that growth in her a bit more as I think it is a really interesting concept to see a robot grow from simple-minded programming to being more human. However, the ending makes me wonder a bit just how long Albert can keep her military program suppressed before she goes on the rampage again? Or does she adapt for so long that she is able to suppress and control her own military programming?
On the whole, this turned out to be a much better book than I was initially anticipating. It's definitely an Eleventh Doctor story with lots of time-bending interference and the Moffatt-era-styled monsters who will kill you if you blink, breath or say the wrong word (in this case saying the word robot or android around the robots). Is it a classic? No, but it is definitely an above-average book and left a lot of food for thought. I am definitely interested in reading more from Oli Smith!