Customer Reviews

Doctor Who : Coldheart

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'll admit it: I'm a simple guy with simple tastes sometimes, particularly when it comes to Doctor Who books. When I think of the Doctor Who TV show, I remember it as a series of fun, exciting fantasy adventures. At its best, it gave me colorful characters and locales, and twisty, memorable plots. At its worst, it never failed to entertain. I expect the same buzz from the Doctor Who books, and while some impress me more than others, even the worst never fail to entertain me.

Coldheart is one of those books that I find tough to recommend, but not because it isn't good. It just doesn't particularly stand out as a groundbreaking novel. It's sort of like the cliche of Chinese food: I really enjoyed it while I read it, and when I was done, I was hungry an hour later. It satisfied my monthly craving for an entertaining Doctor Who story, but didn't leave the same impact as, say, The Blue Angel or Interference or Shadows of Avalon.

The structure of the story--like Baxendale's previous novel, The Janus Conjunction--will be fairly familiar to regular fans. The Doctor, Fitz, and Compassion arrive on a desert planet that mines water from underground ice reserves. Something has happened to the population, creating a race of slime-covered mutants, unimaginatively called Slimers. Instead of kindness, sympathy and understanding, the Slimers are greeted with prejudice and hatred, and exiled from the city. As usual, it's up to the Doctor to find out what's wrong and fix things.

While Mr. Baxendale gives us a fairly standard story, there's still plenty to like about Coldheart. The nine-year-old fan who still lives inside me who has trouble with "look how smart the author is" science fiction stories was extremely pleased to see a big monster in the later parts of the book. And Compassion gets quite a few nice bits. She's changed a great deal since her first appearance in Interference, and Coldheart helps drive that point home. I'm genuinely curious to see where her story takes her, and this book helped feed that curiousity.

Bottom line: if you're a Doctor Who fan who just wants to be entertained by this month's novel, Coldheart will fill the bill. If you prefer your Doctor Who with a bit more meat on its bones, give this one a pass and pick up Verdigris or Space Age.

Great, traditional Doctor Who monster story. Genetic mutations are occurring within the population of Baktan and the Doctor has found out the cause (see front cover pic - arrrggghh!!!) You'll find the Doctor beaten up a lot more than usual, Compassion is changing slightly, and Fitz, well, it's revolutionary and girl trouble again for him. Baxendale has a great way in describing his planetary landscape, especially conveying the increasing need and survival the people of the desert city Baktan for water. Nice short chapters urge the story on, so it makes it hard to put the book down. RECOMMENDED to all!!!

Trevor Baxendale does a decent job of writing for the Eighth Doctor. He manages to come up with an interesting Plot line, as well as using Fitz and Compassion in a decent manner. The only thing that I would say is that it would be best to read some of the other books, especially Paul Cornell's The Shadows of Avalon, to understand some of the things that are going on in this book. Overall, a well done book, and I look forward to reading more from this author.

Well, I guess we were due for a standard, run of the mill adventure.

After the last few books of crazy happenings, things had to start to settle into the new status quo before the BBC would shake up the line again (that Faction Paradox subplot, while not having been mentioned in some time, really hasn't been resolved quite yet) so we had to have a few novels of the team coasting in perfectly ordinary adventures where nothing amazing occured in any way, shape or form.

Cue this book.

It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination and calling it such does a disservice to the author, who manages to make an extremely predictable story rather entertaining, without dragging. The Doctor and company, now travelling in Compassion, the Living TARDIS, wind up in an ice cave under a planet, thanks to the randomizer that the Doctor installed in Compassion. The ice cave is under a desert planet as it turns out, and the inhabitants are mining it for water, which is rather scarce. So far so good. The people of this fine planet have carved a city out of the rock and are doing quite nicely there. Except for the people who are mutating for no reason, and have been turned into a permanent underclass living in a shantytown at the edge of the city. Oops. Now, we might have a problem.

At worst the author is guilty of the checklist style of "Doctor Who" writing, as the base elements feel borrowed from about a thousand other episodes. Of course, the team gets separated at several points. Of course, the angry guy who hates the "slimers" (the not-nice term for the mutating people) is hiding a bitter secret. Of course the threat is a monster. Of course they get betrayed. And so on. You get the idea.

Where Baxendale does succeed is the smaller touches. His characterization of Fitz is horribly off, unfortunately, regressing him back to the near-coward we met early on. Yes, Fitz is like a B-team version of the Doctor at times, but he's been proved to be remarkably capable in other adventures and have him return to being a smartaleck wiseacre does him or the book no favors. His character has grown since his first appearance, mind you. And pairing him with another girl to rescue and fall in love with is getting tiring, this must be about the fourth book in a row. And of course she's doomed because it's not like they can take her along.

Compassion winds up keeping things interesting by being the most complicated and prickly. She's by far the most powerful person in the story at this point, so the authors have to keep coming up with reasons for her to not save the day in two seconds. The Randomizer helps because it means she just can't teleport around willy-nilly, but she's also nigh-indestructible and like a walking science lab. She's so capable you wonder why she doesn't get out of dodge and leave these losers behind, which Compassion asks herself at several points too. It's nice to have a character who doesn't really need the Doctor, and thus makes the Doctor find reasons for her to stay around.

Meanwhile the Doctor becomes a much more physical character, to the point where he even comments that he's getting into a lot of fights this time out. I don't know if that's suppposed to foreshadow something (Fitz notes that his sudden physicality is strange, which is either meta-commentary or something we'll see brought up later) or just Baxendale's preference, but for a man of science, he winds up rolling around on the ground an awful lot this time out.

But if I give you the bare bones of the plot you can probably connect the dots in about the time it took me to read this. Once you figure out that Something Dire is lurking under the surface and it just may be possibly could be linked to the mutations as well, you probably won't be surprised when armed revolution breaks out and monsters swarm the surface. So, no, it's not gripping edge of your seat reading. Baxendale wisely keeps the chapters short but even the cliffhangers feel rote at times. Still, the setting is well thought out and he manages to handle Compassion well, which is no easy feat these days. It won't make any award lists, even if I'm sure it is someone's favorite, but considering the subpar efforts we've been saddled with before, I can take one that strives for nothing more than passing entertainment.

I found Coldheart to be a relatively good read. It's extremely trad (traditional), which is a good thing, when you see it's surrounded by the continuity-messing blockbusters like Interference and The Ancestor Cell.

I felt that Coldheart was like a rest from the mounting tension with the events of Shadows of Avalon leading to Ancestor Cell (I won't spoil it). Fitz is an excellent character in this novel, and is decidedly Doctorish throughout. Compassion is cold and obtrusive, and is my utter favorite EDA character apart from Fitz. The Doctor is spot-on. The Slimers are the villans (well, apart from the other one) of the piece, but aren't painted as such. They are just despised by the Eskoni, and want to be the same as everyone else.

So I'd recommend this to those readers who want to take a break from the arc which is slowly building. Remember, a change is as good as a rest.

Somehow I enjoyed Trevor Baxendale's COLDHEART and I'm not entirely sure why that happened. As I was reading it, I was mentally groaning at the weakness of the plot, the poor characterization and the obviously hasty rewrites to take the New Compassion into consideration. Yet I kept turning the pages, interested in what was going to happen next. It was derivative and unoriginal at every turn, and still it held my attention for the full two hundred and seventy-seven pages, which is quite a feat bearing in mind how thin the story is stretched.

The book has an annoying tendency to end virtually every chapter on a cliffhanger, and given that there are thirty chapters in the book, it means that the characters can't go for more than about ten pages or so without being shot at or grabbed by monsters. This really puts quite a bit of unneeded padding into the story, though it might have been this quick pace that made the book as entertaining as it is. Even though none of the sudden escapes, macho dialogue or improbable turnarounds ends up making any difference in the big picture, it does distract from the flimsiness of plot by slowing down the speed at which it is revealed.

This was such a visual book, that it's hard not to picture this as a novelisation of a television story that we never got to see. While this does result in some breathtaking visuals, it also provides too many awkward moments. Main portions of the plot are revealed by having two people explaining things to each other that they must surely already know. This sort of exposition is allowable in television or film, but it just seems silly to do this in a novel. In addition, there are far too many fight scenes that just don't work in written form. Between these and the numerous unnecessary descriptions of decaying, mutating flesh and mucus (it's not horror, it's just gross), I could have been happy with a book that had about fifty to a hundred less pages.

I can't really say too much about why I enjoyed this. I was not blind to its many flaws, yet despite them I was entertained by the overall story. It isn't especially thrilling or exciting, but it is an enjoyable, if terribly light, read. Just don't think about too much about the plot or the relationship that Fitz has with a camel. Both will make your head spin.

Coldheart is the worst Doctor Who novel in about a year. The pace is extremely slow. Fitz is back to being an immature, sarcastic imbecile. I thought Mr. Baxendale's previous Doctor Who novel, The Janus Conjunction, was much better. What made the editors at BBC choose this book?