The Quantum Archangel is a sequel to the old Third Doctor episode The Time Monster. I hadn't watched that one in ages so reading the book was just like encountering the story anew. However, I have watched a good part of that story since finishing the book and it's easy to see that author Craig Hinton rehashed a lot of the plot elements from the teleplay for his own tale.
It begins with a lengthy prologue describing the travails of Prometheus, a Chronovore, and Elektra, an Eternal. The long and the short of it is that they have a child, Avatar, that is taken away from him by the Council of the Guardians. Prometheus' timeline is completely undone and Elektra watches in horror and her child is taken away from her and hidden away. So who are these characters?
The Quantum Archangel is a complicated story that unravels slowly. While Prometheus, Elektra, etc. are introduced to us right off the bat, it is only later that their identities make sense. Way back when the universe was created there were 11 dimensions. Five of them became the time and space with which we are familiar while the remaining six, a.k.a the Six-Fold Realm, became home to various groups of transcendental beings, the Chronovores and Eternals among them. (Hinton also invokes the Cthulhu pantheon again by mentioning Nyarlathotep. Apparently the Great Old Ones are also denizens of that realm.) The Ancient Convenant was established long ago to ensure that folks from our dimensions never crossed paths with those of the Six-Fold Realm. Another provision was that Chronovores and Eternals don’t go to the horizontal disco together. Prometheus and Elektra violated that bit of law and so they were punished.
It is important to note that the Chronovores eating time for supper and that the Guardians and other beings in the Six-Fold Realm make the Time Lords look like insects. In essence, they are gods and they can manipulate time and space with ease.
Whew! With the prologue done, we jump to The Master who is having a wee bit of trouble as his body is decaying and he's also on the run. And from there we finally meet up with the Sixth Doctor and Mel. Mel was never a favorite companion, although the Big Finish audio dramas have boosted my opinion of her greatly. Here she is seething with anger at The Doctor. They landed on the planet Maradnias and The Doctor attempted to end the civil war going on there but he miscalculated. He didn't think that one side would actually use their nukes. When they did, it left billions dead. The Doctor is mortified at what he helped come to fruition and Mel just can't forgive him. Finally his attempts at playing god ran afoul and she wants to go home. And so The Doctor drops her off on Earth in 2003. Mel tries to begin her life anew by getting in touch with old friends. She discovers that her pal Anjeliqua Whitefriar is now an evil marketing bitch, a long way from the liberal do-gooder Mel once knew. A couple of her other friends, Arlene Cole and Paul Kairos, are working on the TITAN array which would punch a hole into Calabi-Yau Space, known to more advanced races as the Six-Fold Realm.
Here the story harkens back to The Time Monster. The Doctor detects the first run of the TITAN array and returns to Earth. He searches out Stuart Hyde, who was in the TV story, who tells him about TITAN and its designer, Paul Kairos. And of course The Master shows up as well in the guise of Branko Gospodar, a Hungarian investor. His plan is to use the TITAN array to grab some of the power of the Lux Aeterna, a realm where all 11 dimensions meet, to get a new body and kill off the Chronovores who are the ones chasing him. Things don't go as planned. Instead Anjeliqua becomes a human/Lux Aeterna hybrid – The Quantum Archangel - intent on making everything alright for everyone by manipulating time. And by everyone I mean everyone in the whole universe.
The problem is that, although The Quantum Archangel is extremely powerful, it doesn't quite have the knack for changing the timelines of everyone in the snap of a finger and it seeks out the Mad Mind of Beophemeral, the most powerful computer ever created to help out with calculating all the changes to the time line. But Bo is also a very dangerous computer. Craziness ensues.
I was surprised by just how quickly the ultimate in peril came out in the story. Usually in Doctor Who the build-up and emergence of the most dire situation ever encountered gets you through half or more than half of the story. Here you have The Quantum Archangel rearranging the time lines of the characters, eventually including The Doctor, Chronovores bursting into our Five-Fold Realm and feasting, The Master and The Doctor teaming up, and essentially the shit hitting the fan in the worst possible way and I look at the book and I've still got more than half of it yet to go.
But Hinton ably keeps things moving at a brisk pace and engaging as well. We get alternate timelines, narrow escapes, and a country ton of lore and backstory. Like it or not we learn about the whole underlying structure of the universe, the catastrophic Millennium War…Hinton really goes all out in explaining various bits of the Doctor Who universe. I do have to question one section of the book in which The Master flees from a flock of Chronovores. His TARDIS careers through various points of the universe and he launches some funky missiles. Although these are simply setbacks for the Chronovores and catching The Master is inevitable, I thought that the beings of the Six-Fold Realm were more powerful than to be thrown off by some measly missiles. This doesn't ruin the story by any stretch but it did seem rather odd to me.
The back of the book states that the story takes place between Colin Baker's final season, the stories collectively known as Trial of a Time Lord, and the first appearance of the Seventh Doctor in Time and the Rani. Hinton's portrait of The Doctor here is one of a Time Lord battling with himself. Looking back at the events on Maradnias, just how different is he from The Valeyard?
No comments:
Post a Comment