I hesitated briefly when it came to cracking the spine of Atom Bomb Blues because it is the last 7th Doctor PDA. Then I remembered that there were dozens of Virgin New Adventures so I have plenty of Seventh Doctor literary goodness ahead. It was written by Andrew Cartmel who was Doctor Who's script editor during Sylvester McCoy's tenure on the show and the namesake of the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan" which involved adding more mystery to the character of The Doctor and also making him a bit darker and more manipulative. Would Cartmel stick to the tried and true formula or would he give us a more enigmatic portrayal of the Time Lord we all know and love?
The story takes place in America in 1945 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where J. Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists are concocting the first atomic bomb. Cartmel threw me for a loop by beginning the story in media res with Ace seemingly under the influence of sodium pentothal and being interrogated by a psychologist named John Henbest and Major Rex Butler. After spouting some very odd tales, Ace is rescued by The Doctor.
We then jump back three days to when The Doctor and Ace first arrived at Los Alamos. The former is posing as the physicist John Smith while the latter is pretending to be Acacia, Smith's assistant. They are picked up at the side of the road by Butcher who is head of security at Los Alamos and here he is pretending to be your average joe chauffeur. Once his cover is blown, however, The Doctor talks about the wonderful crime novels that Butcher has written which include The Hawk of Gibraltar and Shadow Man which are a fun play on Dashiell Hammett.
Once at Los Alamos, The Doctor and Ace head over to the Oppenheimer residence where everyone is cocktailing and smoking cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. Here we are introduced to Ray "Cosmic Ray" Morita who dispatches with the Wagner and cranks up Duke Ellington instead. Morita is a jazz-loving proto-Beatnik who says things like "Forget it, man" and of Ace's misplaced wardrobe selection "Dig Annie Oakley!" He loves Ellington so much that it seems like he does precious little mathematics and instead listens to his records on his phonograph which utilizes cactus needles.
The Doctor informs Ace that something is wrong with Cosmic Ray. The real Morita was right-handed while the one at Los Alamos is left-handed. Plus this one is much too smart as the Morita that he knew was a high school teacher. Something is definitely amiss. The Oppenheimer's housemaid, Rosalita, makes a mean chili but it turns out that the batch she prepared for The Doctor and Ace was poisoned. And, since the poisoning plot was foiled, Rosalita instead tries to send our heroes to an early grave with a .38.
For some reason after Cartmel reveals that Rosalita is the would-be assassin, her story, her motivation, etc. just ends. I don't recall the book every explaining why Rosalita wanted to kill The Doctor or how Rosalita fitted into the larger conspiracy at play. You see, Morita is from another dimension, a parallel 1945 - the dimension from which Ace hails. He has teamed up with some baddies who look to take advantage of his mathematical genius. Morita devised quantum equations which allowed for travel between dimensions but, when put into play in a particle accelerator, they can bring about other particles which are "highly volatile". So, volatile, in fact, that they could, in Morita's words, "destroy the Earth baby." In a meta twist, Morita's equations would actually bring those doomsday particles into existence. I guess writing the equations is like observing and thusly collapsing a waveform.
The bad guy and gal – Imperial Lee and Lady Silk – heard about Morita's work and got him to ally himself with them. They are keen on altering the course of the Manhattan Project so that the whole universe is destroyed while Morita just wants to get a hold of Duke Ellington recordings from 1942-1944 when, in his dimension, there was a musician's strike and no studio recordings of Ellington from that time.
I give Atom Bomb Blues credit for being fun. Considering the story involves atom bombs, racism directed against people with epicanthic folds, and the destruction of the universe, Cartmel is surprisingly light-hearted. He gives us Cosmic Ray's Beatnik dialogue, the titles which parody Dashiell Hammett, and a really odd side trip involving The Doctor pretending to dose Butcher with peyote and then taking him for a ride in an alien spacecraft.
So, although fun, the story has its weaknesses. In addition, to the dead end that is Rosalita's story, the whole Beatnik thing seemed woefully out of place to me. I didn't hate it, but it did make me cringe occasionally. The bellicose nature of Oppenheimer's relationship with Edward Teller here is, as far as I know, true to life and I found myself wishing Cartmel had expanded upon that as well as the racism of the day which surely would have made life for Morita and the German scientists there less than perfect. I think I would have found this more interesting than having The Doctor and his alien friend Zorg screw around with Butcher.
Atom Bomb Blues also keeps the DW tradition going of portraying American poorly. All too often DW portrays Americans as being loud, brash, and single-minded. Here Butcher is a bit like Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. His character revolves around the premise that there are Jap traitors and spies everywhere. He was just too clichéd and caricatured for my taste.
And then there's the nerdy Professor Apple who develops a crush on Ace. On the one hand, The Doctor's translations of Apple's letters are amusing but it also comes off as a cheap attempt at some laughs by making fun of Apple, who is severely lacking in social skills. His pursuit of Ace is unnecessary for the plot to advance and just doesn't go anywhere or add much.
As for our heroes, they are basically the ones out of the TV show. The Doctor doesn't tell Ace that they're in an alternate dimension until late in the book but he's not really a manipulator here. As far as Ace goes, the emphasis here is on the fact that she is a teenager. Apple's crush is essentially "icky" to her; she whines that she is supposed to get to know Morita while The Doctor goes out on his own. She's not the more mature woman that some of the previous PDAs gave us.
Overall Atom Bomb Blues was a fun read but some things were just distractions. At the very end The Doctor spins the light-hearted tone around and laments how Edward Teller would go on to promote the production of more and more of the deadliest weapons mankind has ever invented. I appreciated the gesture but wish this recognition of the story's more serious elements got more play.
A rather anti-climactic end to the PDAs.
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