Cat's Cradle: Warhead

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1391423.html

I was rather impressed by this Doctor Who novel in the New Adventures series. The Seventh Doctor and Ace get caught up in the nasty machinations of a near-future biotech firm, variously in the US, London and a small island near Istanbul. Cartmel is a very good descriptive writer, both in terms of establishing the physical setting and in terms of getting inside the heads of Ace and the other characters. The Istanbul chapters in particular had some memorable set-pieces. As often happens, it wasn't clear that the bad guys' conspiracy made sense (and even less clear how the Doctor had got involved in stopping it; or for that matter where the cat's cradle of the title comes into it) but I very much enjoyed the ride. Possibly the first really adult Doctor Who novel. ( )

This is one of the Doctor Who "New Adventures" series, which came out in the 1990s while the show was off the air. I was very impressed with these at the time; on the whole, they were astonishingly sophisticated for books based on a TV show, and often surprisingly well-written. Being a starving college student, though, I wasn't able to purchase all of them back then, so when I found a bunch of them in a used bookstore a few years ago I took the opportunity to fill in some of the gaps in my collection. Only, the state of my To-Read Pile being what it is, it's taken me until now to start in on them.

This particular novel has a sort of Cyberpunk Lite setting, featuring environmental degradation, urban decay, evil corporations, and a dependence on computer technology that's... well, that's actually rather less than it turned out to be in reality. Reading near-future SF that was written in the early 90s is always kind of interesting that way. In any case, it all somehow manages to feel slightly less cliche than I was expecting.

The main distinguishing feature of the story is the fact that it's told mostly in bits and pieces through the eyes of various secondary characters, none of whom has a clear view of the big picture. Meanwhile, the Doctor, whom one might normally expect to be center stage, flits in and out in a shadowy fashion, obviously setting up some plan the details of which are not fully clear until the end. I kept going back and forth on whether I felt this worked or not, but in the end I think it does make the plot much more interesting than it would be otherwise, if only because it helps distract from the fact that said plan may be implausibly over-elaborate and that it ultimately features a resolution that's a little too pat. One can maybe argue about whether all the details of the scheme, which frequently involve a fairly high level of violence, are entirely in-character for the Doctor, even in what is unquestionably his most manipulative incarnation. But since it's often not entirely clear what's part of the plan and what's not, it's a bit hard to say for sure. I do, however, rather approve of this portrayal of the Doctor as a mysterious, powerful (though far from infallible), and slightly scary figure. He really is all of those things, and it's a good thing to be reminded of that once in a while. ( )