Considering that Matrix was a big letdown I wasn't quite sure what to think when picking up
Most of the Seventh Doctor PDAs that I'd read until this point had gloomy settings. London during the Blitz, a spooky old nursing home and underwater spaceship, and Whitechapel with Jack the Ripper on the loose. Even the a rural village in The Hollow Men utilized the cover of night and underground passages. And they all took place on Earth. Here I found welcome relief from the murkiness as Storm Harvest takes place on 43rd century Coralee, a planet whose surface is mostly oceans. About 98% of it with the paltry bit of land that human colonists have given over to resort development. Like a planetary Club Med. There's beautiful blue oceans, sand, and sun – a marked contrast to the previous novels.
After the depressing events of Matrix, The Doctor and Ace retreat to Coralee for some R&R. I found the picture of The Doctor stepping out of the TARDIS onto the beach with his trouser cuffs rolled up to his knees while clutching a red bucket along with a small shovel to be genuinely funny. (Oh, and he had a kite too.) He builds a sandcastle in the shape of the City of the Exxilons (it's from Death to the Daleks - had to look that one up) which he gets to glow. Again, I was humored but this time by the picture of a cable running from the TARDIS to a sandcastle.
Of course all is not well on this pelagic holiday. A research vessel, the Hyperion Dawn, is savagely attacked on the high seas by unknown forces with both the crew, minus one survivor, and the ship being shredded to pieces. The beauty of this opening sequence is its pacing and it extends through the whole of the book. Perry and Tucker let events unfold at a natural pace with no last second tweak foiling a complex plan and saving the day in one fell swoop when multiple stratagems over a couple hundred pages couldn't do the trick. They build a sense of menace and nurture it until it becomes dread.
In the scene we witness the crew working and learn a little about them. A couple divers work below while the rest of the crew prepare equipment on the ship. There's a bit of friendly banter with crew leader Holly Relf calling one of the divers by his nickname, "Bruiser". Things seem to be going well until the divers realize that all of the fish have dispersed. Not a single one remains in sight. They radio up to the surface and Relf decides to bring the divers back up immediately. The wench attached to the safety lines gets rolling. Relf is forced to fight the urge to vomit when she sees that all that is left of the diver is one incredibly mangled body. She is about to issue a strategic advance to the rear when the ship heaves. It is now under attack and the results won't be pretty.
Back on the shore The Doctor and Ace meet Edwin Bryce, a travel writer who is almost fond of the drink. He has written a cookbook consisting of the finest Androgum recipes for novices (Yay! A Sixth Doctor reference!) and is currently researching his next tome which will be a chronicle of his travels in the colonies. He blathers on about Coralee's original and highly bellicose inhabitants as well as a race of hideous creatures called Krill. The only thing left of the aboriginal population are their great cities which are ruins submerged beneath the waves.
This piques The Doctor's curiosity and trips some alarm bells too so he heads to the colony's administrative building. To get in, he does what many college students have done: creates a fake ID. Posing as an agent of InterOceanic, he gains entry where he meets, or rather discovers the colony co-ordinator, Brenda Mulholland, unconscious in a meeting room. He also inveigles his way into a mission to check out the wreck of the Hyperion Dawn with one Professor MacKenzie.
Meanwhile Ace decides to take the tourist route with an underwater sight-seeing tour of the ruins that Bryce described. The submarine is captained by Rajiid, a rather dashing Indian gentleman (Yay! A person of color!) that Ace is attracted to. Also part of the crew is the cicerone, a dolphin named R'tk'tk. Here in the 43rd century, dolphins are outfitted with headsets which translate their clicks into English. There are also these exoskeletons with mechanical tentacles that they use to move about on land. Professor MacKenzie has a cetacean companion as well named Q'ilp who smokes a cigar when out of the water and likes to talk smack. These dolphins could have been really cheesy characters but are done well. R'tk'tk and Q'ilp engage in some verbal sparring as dolphins are, as we learn, a quarrelsome bunch who have a few hundred ways of offending one another's immediate family members. (A nice nod to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you ask me.) And it isn't the humans who get all the action. R'tk'tk and Q'ilp get their chances at a bit of derring do. The cetaceans aren't relegated to being a prop in the background and they don't end up being delphinus ex machina either. They are just eminently likeable characters that have full subsidiary roles.
And then there are the Cythosi, a despicable race which have a penchant for keeping humans as slaves. Although they await in their ship out in space, they are monitoring the events on Coralee closely.
In addition to loving the change of scenery, I also appreciated that Storm Harvest had a fair number of non-humans. The Cythosi, Krill, Dreekans, and any number of alien tourists. Plus those dolphins. Perry and Tucker ably juggled them all. But the best part of the story is how the authors built up the menace with a bit of creepiness here and an attack there until it was all-out doom and the reader is confronting a base-under-siege story. Perry and Tucker leave themselves plenty of pages after the menacing and nearly indestructible Krill begin their assault and they come up with something a bit like Aliens. Truth be told, I was genuinely creeped-out by it all. Despite knowing that our beloved heroes would live to fight another day, I had a very hard time putting the book down.
I adored Storm Harvest and Perry and Tucker get bonus points from me for having The Doctor say, "I'll have you know that back on Gallifrey I was renowned for my sartorial elegance!" That made me chuckle. Easily the best Seventh Doctor PDA so far.
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