With sales dwindling to near-breadline levels, in December 2005 BBC Books quietly decided to give classic Doctor Who novels a “rest” – words that, quite rightly, sent a chill down the spine of every savvy Who reader. Fortunately, through their countless series of audio dramas and, later, audio books, the inexhaustible Big Finish Productions were able to keep the classic series’ flame burning hot during this literary hiatus, but if you were hard of hearing or just a lover of good old-fashioned words and paper, your access to new old Who fiction had been blocked. In August last year though, BBC Books began its ‘Past Doctor’ reboot, and I’m very happy to report that, despite its break being less than half as long as that the television series had to endure, the range has returned every bit as renewed, and I dare say every bit as vendible, as the show itself did in 2005.
A hardback tome clad in the handsome dust jacket of a certain bestseller, The Wheel of Ice is a completely different animal to Andrew Cartmel’s half-hearted paperback, Atom Bomb Blues – the last Doctor Who book to follow the exploits of a pre-2005 Doctor. In the mould of Michael Moorcock’s convention-busting eleventh Doctor novel, The Coming of the Terraphiles, author Stephen Baxter’s name takes up as much room on the pale and icy cover as the ashen Doctor Who logo does – and rightly so, for it is every bit as at home amongst its illustrious author’s esteemed canon of works as it is between The Seeds of Death and The War Games. But unlike Moorcock, who very deliberately had his own private universe literally open up and swallow the TARDIS, Baxter firmly grounds his tale in the monochrome world of the late Patrick Troughton era. From its almost-farcically metropolitan cast of characters all the way up to its redolent title, The Wheel of Ice is as Who as Who can ever be; at times, it feels like Baxter’s a lone Li H’sen Chang or Black Orchid reference away from descending into the realms of pure fanwank. But after seven years in the wilderness, this is exactly what I was looking for from this title – and I’d wager that I’m not the only one.
What impresses the most about this book though is that Baxter doesn’t let his evident ardour for the series limit his scope. Whilst it’s evocative of a second Doctor serial almost to a fault, the story feels contemporary and complex; eminent, even. It may be peppered with moments of horror that evoke Auton-like terror through prose that Stephen King would envy, but at heart it’s a personal and political soap opera that calls to mind J K Rowling’s Casual Vacancy, which was published just six weeks after it. Both use a young heroine as a window into a world of human folly; a world of “hard work and regulations” where, behind closed doors, the overburdened youths are every bit as powerful as their parents, and perhaps even more capable. This isn’t a tale carried by the sleeping alien Arkive and its flesh-metamorphosing Blue Doll creations – it’s carried by a daughter whose transmat-inventing father’s disgrace has driven her to greed and aggression; an affable robot “fae Glasgae” who grew up dreaming that he’d play for Celtic, only to hit puberty and be told that he hasn’t got any feet; a mayor and a mother whose uneasy relationship with her son captures absolutely the war that’s raging within the colony in microcosm. Such carefully-considered and delectably-delivered character flourishes are the perfect complement to the author’s Power of the Daleks-league world-building, the two combining to refashion the archetypal Troughton “base under siege” story into perhaps its most enthralling form to date. 
I must also applaud Baxter’s magnificent structure, which sees a 368-page hardback divided into dozens of bite-size chapters and interludes, imbuing it with a sense of pace that a television four-parter would struggle to match, let alone a near-ten-hour epic (roughly the length of the novel when read by David Troughton). The (mostly) flashback interludes are a particular treat as each is presented almost as a stand-alone piece of short fiction – a couple of them completely so. MMAC’s life story is as compelling as any one-off that you’ll find in a science fiction anthology, and the story of Mayor Laws’ family’s “allohistorical lure” is dripping with such vivid detail that when its narrative (which begins in the 19th century) overtook the present day and fact became fiction, I scarcely noticed. Baxter doesn’t drop prosaic bombs like “She got into her flying car…”, for instance – he refers to that car by its manufacturer’s name, as we might a BMW or a Volvo. It’s only once it takes off that the penny drops and the reader is left trying to work out when then segued into the day after tomorrow.
Even where The Wheel of Ice couldn’t expect to compete with a second Doctor television story, it acquits itself commensurately. Baxter’s dialogue captures Troughton’s rambling rhythm flawlessly, and his prose paints the perfect picture of an outward ‘cosmic hobo’ with a steely darkness sleeping in his soul. His Jamie is, in many respects, even more remarkable – Baxter is one of the few Doctor Who scribes who’s had the gall to dispense with any semblance of the English language and simply set out the Highlander’s dialect exactly as it sounds, in a flurry of missing consonant-apostrophes and extraneous Scots vowels (as opposed to simply throwing in the occasional “Och aye”, as is the temptation for many writers). It’s like reading Irvine Welsh without the profanity – unless, of course, you count “cudgie”. Even hard-to-write-for brainbox Zoe is taken somewhere new as Baxter mischievously inverts convention, sending Jamie out to build the Doctor’s neutrino device (which he does, believe it or not!), while Zoe has to put her genius-level IQ to work babysitting for the mayor’s daughter and playing makeshift peacemaker.The story concludes exactly as it should, with a cliffhanger befitting the era that inspired it, and that I hope will, one day, lead into another hardbound adventure for this TARDIS team with Stephen Baxter’s emblazoned on its dust jacket. After seven years without an original classic Doctor Who novel, The Wheel of Ice seamlessly fuses old with new and niche with mainstream to create a ‘Past Doctor’ adventure that has set a new standard for Who fiction, and will hopefully serve as a launching pad for a whole new range of books with a welcome focus on quality, not quantity.
The Wheel of Ice is currently available in hardback (best price online today: £10.86 at The Book Depository) and digital formats (£9.49 from Amazon’s Kindle Store or £9.99 from iTunes), and is due to be released in paperback on 1st August 2013.
The Doctor, his companion Jo Grant and the Brigadier face their strangest case yet – a Saturday night TV show that has been invaded by aliens that look like puppets!
The Scorchies want to take over the world. They want to kill the Doctor. And they want to perform some outstanding showtunes. Though not necessarily in that order…
With Jo caught inside The Scorchies Show, can she save the day before the planet Earth falls victim to the dark side of light entertainment?
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