The Wheel of Ice
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BBC Books The Wheel of Ice |
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| Author | Stephen Baxter |  |
| ISBN# | 1 84990 182 6 | |
| Published | 2012 | |
| Featuring | The second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe |
| Synopsis: The Wheel. A ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, and home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth. It's a bad place to live. Worse to grow up. The colony has been plagued by problems. Maybe it's just gremlins, just bad luck. But the equipment failures and thefts of resources have been increasing, and there have been stories among the children of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. Many of the younger workers refuse to go down the warren-like mines anymore. And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction. Aboard the Wheel, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation - and they are suspected by some as the source of the sabotage. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could kill them all. |
Reimagining the Past by Niall Jones 23/2/22
For a long time, books were at the heart of Doctor Who. Between 1989 and 2005, an era that fans often dub 'the Wilderness Years', Doctor Who was largely kept alive by novels written by fans of the show, several of whom would go on to write for the revived TV series. While The New and Eighth Doctor Adventures pushed the Doctor's story into the future, The Missing and Past Doctor Adventures revisited the show's past, telling new stories with old Doctors.
When the show returned to our screens, however, books ceased to play such a vital role. Although the BBC continued to publish novels featuring the current Doctor, such as The Clockwise Man and The Feast of the Drowned, these were aimed mainly at children and - while often easy, fun reads - were seen as disposable spin-offs. In 2013, however, with Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary just around the corner, things began to change slightly. A number of classic Doctor Who novels were reprinted, some for the first time since the 1990s, and the first new Past Doctor Adventure since 2005 was released.
Written by veteran sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, The Wheel of Ice features the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe and is set on a mining colony orbiting the moons of Saturn. It's the kind of location that you would expect from late-1960s Doctor Who, with its oppressive government and sense of being on the frontier. The Wheel even mines bernalium, a mineral first mentioned in 1968's The Wheel in Space.
While the novel's setting is straight out of the Patrick Troughton era, its plot is a combination of old and new elements. Although the situation into which the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe enter is recognisable from stories such as The Moonbase or The Seeds of Death - a near-future outpost suffering from a series of mysterious sabotage incidents - the novel's plot and many of its characters are clearly influenced by the revived series. The character of Phee Laws, a teenage girl who helps to rescue the TARDIS at the start of the novel, would not be out of place in a Russell T Davies script. Neither would MMAC, a very large, very Scottish robot.
Similarly, while the the novel's setting would lend itself well to the base-under-siege type plot that was popular in late-1960s Doctor Who, The Wheel of Ice avoids this trope. Instead, its plot is one of discovery, with Jamie ending up on the moons of Enceladus and Titan with a group of rebellious teenagers escaping from the Wheel, while Doctor and Zoe travel deep into the heart of Mnemosyne, a small moon with large reserves of bernalium. (Somewhat confusingly, Mnemosyne does not actually exist, although it does share its name with an asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter.)
The time Jamie spends with this band of rebellious youth, led by Phee's brother, forms a key sub-plot in the novel and highlights the extent to which Baxter pays close attention to his character. The fact that Jamie is a Highlander matters here. The landscape of Titan reminds him, at least initially, of the Highlands, while the rebels remind him of his younger self. Despite this similarity, the teenagers disparage Jamie, referring to him as 'granddad'. In the end, though, Jamie becomes invaluable to them, saving them from the various perils of Titan and defusing conflicts between individual members of the group.
The Titan chapters reflect one of the biggest strengths of the novel: that Baxter sees the Doctor's companions not as generic audience surrogates, but as distinctive characters who have been shaped by the environment in which they grew up. Jamie is a man out of time, a young fighter who doesn't understand the scientific world around him; Zoe, in contrast, is the product of a highly regimented and technocratic society: intelligent, but occasionally cold. Crucially, though, their travels with the Doctor have helped them to develop in ways that couldn't be imagined in their own times. Jamie may be a man out of time, but he has become used to strange new worlds and is a fast learner. Similarly, while Zoe finds ample use for her scientific knowledge, she also discovers a new side of herself when she has to look after Phee's three-year-old sister.
Zoe's perspective in the novel is particularly interesting, as it shows the extent to which Baxter takes the characters' backstories seriously. Whereas, for Jamie, the Wheel is located in an unknown future, for Zoe, it is in the recent past. While there is a lot that is recognisable from her early life, there is also much that is strange, such as the base's technology, which she finds primitive.
Baxter also does a good job characterising the Second Doctor, capturing his impatience and anti-authoritarian attitude particularly well. Being the Doctor, of course, he remains mysterious, with only the occasional reference to his 'people'.
Baxter's writing is strong throughout the novel, which is enjoyable and fun to read. His description is straightforward but vivid, giving the reader enough detail to paint a mental image of the novel's alien landscapes but not so much that it gets in the way of the storytelling. The novel is broken up into short chapters, which keep the plot moving at a fairly fast past. Inserted sporadically throughout the novel are chapters told from the perspective of non-human characters. This is an interesting innovation, which also reflects the extent to which the Second Doctor's attitude towards alien life in the novel differs from in the TV series. Whereas, onscreen, the Second Doctor doesn't hesitate to completely destroy alien threats, in the novel, he is far more conciliatory and interested in learning about new species.
This difference gets at the heart of why The Wheel of Ice works. It takes a recognisably late-60s Doctor Who setting and uses it to tell a story that probably couldn't have been told at the time. If the Patrick Troughton era were being made for TV today, it would probably look something like The Wheel of Ice. For a Past Doctor Adventure, there can be no higher compliment.