I was taken by surprise when The Wheel of Ice came out in 2012. This was a Second Doctor book. Zoe and Jamie were at the Doctor’s side, not Amy and Rory. What madness was this?!
Were the Past Doctor Adventures being regenerated? Was this merely the first entry in a newly resurrected series? Well, we did get a Third Doctor adventure, Harvest of Time, the following year and a Fourth Doctor novel, The Drosten's Curse, a couple years later but that was that. OK, you can argue that Scratchman and Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen count but, really, the PDA’s were not fully revived. Maybe there was an abandoned plan to tie things in with the show's 50th anniversary, I don’t know. But we did get a handful of new adventures with classic Doctors.
I wasn’t sure where to put The Wheel of Ice in the Second Doctor chronology so I read it just before watching The War Games. The author, Stephen Baxter, was unfamiliar to me but he is a science fiction writer by trade.
The book begins by introducing us to Arkiv, a thing or a creature that ran into a bit of trouble when Home was destroyed and it, well, she became embedded in an icy moon. We’re then in comfortably familiar territory – the TARDIS console room, where the temperamental ship is preparing to land on a moon of Saturn to investigate a Relative Continuum Displacement Zone that it detected. However, the moon isn’t there and the TARDIS refuses to move lest it get caught up in the RCDP. Instead, it is being bombarded by chunks of ice, the stuff that Saturn’s rings are made of.
Luckily a teenaged girl, Phee Laws, is out cruising the rings on her scooter accompanied by her AI robot pal, MMAC. MMAC is able to throw the Doctor a cable which he wraps around the console and the ship is towed to safety. Phee boards the TARDIS during this procedure and it detects Pedleron particles about her which means it has traveled through time. Curiouser and curiouser.
Our heroes soon find themselves aboard the Mnemosyne Cincture, a.k.a. – The Wheel of Ice, a structure that encircles Mnemosyne, one of Saturn’s smaller moons. The Wheel is home to a mining operation that is digging the bernalium out of the satellite.
Phee’s mother, Jo, is the mayor of the Wheel, who is struggling to keep the operation going and her children, Phee, Sam, a few years older than her, and the two year-old Casey, safe and on the straight and narrow. Helping her is the chief medical officer, Sinbad Omar, top cop Marshal Sonia Paley, and Luis Reyes from the Planetary Ethics Commission who is there to make sure everyone behaves, well, ethically. Oh, and there is also Florian Hart, the corporate representative from the mining company, Bootstrap, Inc., that is funding this venture.
Our heroes come to the Wheel and find that things are going missing and the colony’s teens are being blamed. They’re grounded en masse but escape out to a moon along with Jamie who tags along to keep an eye on Phee and her pendant which the Doctor suspects being the source of the Pedleron particles. Tailing Phee means our loveable Scotsman gets to have a few different adventures outside of the Wheel zipping through the void of space and on the surface of a moon of Saturn. The kids call him “grandpa”, which he finds irritating. Nonetheless, Old Man Jamie saves the life of more than one of the teenagers.
On board the Wheel, the TARDIS crew swear they catch sight of a little blue man but their observation is rebuffed. Then a review of an act of sabotage reveals the corpse of a little blue humanoid. Something else is afoot.
Things point to the icy moon, Mnemosyne, and a certain something at its center…
This was a good story, though not great. MMAC having a Scottish accent was a fine move and when it poked a little fun at Jamie, it was funny. The Doctor does an autopsy on one of the blue thingies and finds that they’re basically automatons and not living creatures. They don’t talk, they lack much in the way of distinct features, yet they huddle together as if sharing body heat. Those things are rather creepy. The little blue things are supplanted by big blue warrior things that are rather menacing.
I also liked how the Wheel itself has that gritty Alien aesthetic instead of the 2001 aesthetic where everything is shiny and new. The Wheel is cobbled together from chunks of ice and parts of older ships and space stations with interstellar duct tape and high tensile twine. It demonstrates that a bunch of uncaring, miserly bastards run Bootstrap, Inc. and the image of a patchwork orbiter instead of one with clean lines and smooth angles is just a neat visual in your head.
One of the things I didn’t like about the story was how the Doctor would decide he needs to go to the moon for answers so he and a group go down. Something happens and everyone returns to the Wheel. But, not having gotten the answers he needs, he goes down again. Rinse and repeat. These trips are just overly repetitive. But the lunar excursions do provide some harrowing scenes of the away parties encountering the blue things. The shootouts are thrilling and well-written while the scenes where they sneak through a cluster of the blue things that are simply lying on the ground or hanging from a wall watching them are really harrowing.
And just as the Doctor gets stuck in his rut, so does Jamie. Surly, rebellious teens do X. Old Man Jamie saves the day. Then teens do stupid thing Y. Old Man Jamie again saves the day. These repetitive scenarios were fun in and of themselves but they piled up and made wish the Scot had more time to interact with Zoe and the Doctor.
Florian Hart ends up being a real two dimensional character. Just a corporate lackey that tows the company line until she can do so no more. While it’s not like Doctor Who isn’t full of these characters and Baxter can be said to simply be adhering to a convention, it was still disappointing. She goes from someone mindlessly promoting corporate interests to being almost psychotic as she commandeers some missile warheads and is prepared to satisfy her bloodlust and keep the mining going at any cost.
Baxter writes well and his prose reminded me of latter day Isaac Asimov. There was a modicum of scientific jargon as the physics of the Wheel gets explained and only a little more. The way the emotional lives of the characters is portrayed reminds me of those 80s and 90s Foundation novels. The emotions are explained and are comprehensible but I never felt them.
As for our heroes, Jamie is certainly a man of action here as he saves the day while ably, if not gracefully, flying a space scooter, multiple times. And his banter with MMAC was humorous. Zoe and the Doctor fare less well, though. It’s not that they were never portrayed this way on TV, it’s that those episodes are lesser ones. This is likely due, in part, anyway, to Jamie’s absence. Zoe and the Doctor just sort of get on with things with no playfulness and a lot of good banter goes missing.
I am still not sure where to place The Wheel of Ice in the Second Doctor’s chronology. There’s a reference to The Mind Robber yet Jamie tells Zoe something to the effect of, “You had better get used to this kind of stuff if you’re going to travel with us in the TARDIS,” which made me think it came earlier.
While I have my problems with this tale, The Wheel of Ice is still a fun read.
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