Back to the novels.
A sullen Doctor graces the cover of The Colony of Lies with an Old West town behind him and the hulking remains of a crashed spaceship in the distance. I was a bit ambivalent going in as I am not the biggest fan of westerns. The Past Doctor Adventures have gone into this territory before in Heritage which was not bad at all. I think I just need them to be light on the High Noon approach with good guys wearing white hats riding white horses taking on bad guys donning black hats on black steeds. Thankfully the western motif here is simply a backdrop.
The story begins with the Seventh Doctor and Ace at the Museum of the Tellurian Stain where our Nitro 9-loving companion learns about a fellow named Stewart Ransom, a 25th century rich guy who embraced the "Back to Basics" movement, influenced by some comments his daughter Kirann had made. The movement espouses less dependency on modern technology and more self-reliance. Sounds like Thoreau and Emerson made a comeback in the early 2400's.
He is so enamored of this neo-transcendentalism that he goes from being an Elon Musk type character into someone more like Stephen Gaskin. He packs thousands of adherents into a ship and flies them far off into space to establish a colony based on the Back to Basics principles, a bit like Gaskin establishing the hippie commune, The Farm.
Ace is intrigued but the Doctor says he has already visited the colony and doesn't want to return. The prologue ends with the Time Lord reliving those experiences via his Five Hundred Year diary.
The colony was established on a planet called Axista Four and eschewed pre-20th century technology, hence the Hadleyville vibes. It's been about a hundred years since the founding when our time travelers land at Plymouth Hope City. But all is not well. A group of colonists who feel that the colony's leaders are martinets whose rigid adherence to Back to Basics doctrine is ridiculous and will get them killed have formed a splinter group called the Realists. They have settled many kilometers outside of Plymouth Hope City in the ruins of an alien outpost. Those who remain in the town are deemed Loyalists.
The Realists occasionally pillage the wreck of the ship that Ransom and his adherents arrived in to help eek out an existence. It crashed and the site is a no go zone.
Not only do the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive into this situation but so does another ship, the Earth Colony Support Vessel Hannibal. We learn that Major Jonn Cartor (from Mars?) commands it and that one Administrator Greene is revived from suspended animation upon arrival at Axista Four. Greene is something of a mystery and, being a bureaucrat, is not well liked by the military folks. Needless to say, I pictured him as Paul Reiser in my mind. Their job is to inform the colonists that they are going to have company very soon in the form of thousands of refugees from the Dalek Wars.
While the colonists have no way of knowing of the Hannibal's arrival, others do. The ship is detected by a sensor array around Axista Four disguised as a group of orbiting asteroids. This in turn sends a signal to the surface to revive some of the aliens - Tyrenians - who slumber in a chamber underground that the Realists had stumbled upon. After all, they built their settlement on top of the remains of the Tyrenians'.
The Tyrenians have a rather neat suspended animation system which involves parasitic/symbiotic creatures called Alisorti which hug the chests of the sleepers and keeps them fed and whatnot. While 2 of the Tyrenians awaken just fine, another named Dyselt runs into some problems including a rather nasty one called an Intelligence Reducing Virus which results in him developing pandorum. It turns Dyselt into a homicidal maniac.
Brake does a nice job of setting up a story with several protagonists and conflicts. You've got the colonists split into factions, the newly-arrived space marines, the Tyrenians, and our TARDIS crew. They spawn all manner of conflicts. For starters, there's the intra-colonist squabbling. Next, while it was Cartor's ship, it sure as hell was Greene's mission. This guy adopts a scorched earth policy and orders everyone on the planet too be exterminated in anticipation of the refugees' arrival. (A very Dalekian approach to resettlement.) Dyselt is running amok (and he threatens Zoe) which causes the Tyrenian commander, Lorvalan, and his sidekick Zenig to go on a rescue mission involving death and mayhem. In the middle of all this, Jamie ends up with the realists, Zoe is hurt, and the Doctor has to try and mediate all of the conflicts and figure out the truth behind this colony of lies.
Brake juggles all of this quite well. The Tyrenians aren't really monsters. We know that they got there first and so they're just defending themselves, really. Plus, as we learn, they are a hybrid race of humans created by a friend of Ransom's as super-soldiers who escaped the clutches of the military with Ransom's help. The Doctor finds the state of crashed colony ship to be rather odd and he eventually discovers that Ransom knew of the presence of the Tyrenians and followed orders to exterminate them. However, the ship was fired upon while in orbit by those defensive asteroid thingies and crash landed after sustaining damage.
Lies, lies, damnable lies!
Jamie and Zoe prove quite heroic here. The Scotsman challenges a Tyrenian to hand-to-hand combat while Zoe connects to the town's computer system via a neural connection that involves needles piercing her skin for the hook up. It's a deep connection that proves traumatic for her. For his part, the Doctor is all over the place trying to negotiate peace and figure out just what the hell is going on.
Our heroes are well done and it's a fun story with some mystery to it. I read along wondering about the motivations of characters and the history behind everything which was great fun. The story is pretty typical Doctor Who stuff - Brake doesn't break with the conventions of the show - but he layers it nicely.
The mechanics of the story aside, Brake introduces some interesting thematic material, namely, the role of technology. You've got the Back to Basics movement to start. I don't recall the book ever going into much detail about its philosophy. Instead it gave me a sense that its adherents feel humans kind of disappeared up their own collective ass via technology and that an excessive reliance on doodads and gadgets has a dehumanizing effect.
This idea is manifested in the Tyrenians. They're humans that have been genetically crossed with canines - literally dehumanized. Plus they're disposable. Once the type of genetic engineering that had produced them was banned, they had to go. One can imagine Kant going apoplectic upon hearing that their humanity was denied. "You are treating them as means to an end, not an end in and of themselves!!"
Later in the story, the Doctor manages to revive Kirann Ransom, Stewart's daughter, from suspended animation. She's been sleeping in the shipwreck for 100 years. The colonists had wanted to revive her after the death of her father, but they were too scared of killing her in the process. So she awakens to the horror that the colonists have taken the Back to Basics philosophy to, perhaps, its logical conclusion. I think she says that it was meant as a guide, not as rules set in stone.
The Loyalists have become slaves to doctrine instead of using the human gifts of creativity and toolmaking.
I am not arguing that The Colony of Lies makes any grand arguments one way or another on this topic. Instead, it offers up food for thought. And I was reminded that in the previous TV story, The Invasion, the Doctor expresses his dislike of computers. At one point he says he hates computers and refuses to be bullied by them. As an IT professional, I concur!
This subject has just been on my mind lately having written a few posts about things related to San Francisco and a former hippie girlfriend - the back-to-the-land movement of that time, Herbert Marcuse, etc. In addition, I've gone deeper into being an old geezer because I am really frustrated with the expectation that my life should be run from a smartphone.
To quote Neil from The Young Ones, "I wish there were no machines and we all lived a pastoral existence. Trees and flowers don’t deliberately call out and go beep in your ear."
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