Customer Reviews

Doctor Who: Frontier Worlds (Doctor Who (BBC Paperback))

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Peter Anghelides improved himself, to me, since his last book Kursaal. The only problems I had was the fact that the TARDIS crew was in the middle of a melee at the start of the book, but things did catch up about 40 pages later. After that moment, things did pick up to where the story wrapped up nicely.

Compassion seems to have loosened up, but who is to say that it was all an act. I did like the characterization of Compassion and knowing that she can be just as "human" who makes mistakes like the rest of us.

If you liked/loved or disliked Kursaal, you might enjoy this book.

FRONTIER WORLDS is one of the most entertaining EDAs that I've read. It's a fairly standard runaround with a relatively unambitious plot, but it's so well written that we can forgive it that. The characters and their adventures are built up very convincingly, making this book feel above the average output of the BBC line.

This is the first book in which Compassion reads more like a companion than a grumpy, faceless, arc-related plot-device. Fitz also comes across quite well, and the adventures of the two companions separated from the Doctor make for very worthwhile reading. Peter Anghelides has really brought to life two companions who had started to slip into blandness in the preceding books. Their interaction suddenly made the two of them appear like real people, rather than just generic characters hanging out inside the TARDIS. Telling much of the story from Fitz's point of view raised the book from a fairly standard runaround to an interesting story told with a lot of wit.

The Doctor is not present for a significant portion of the adventure, though the scenes he is present for are rather enjoyable. For once, he seems mostly in charge and actually appears to know what's going on around him. This is such a refreshing change after so many of the previous books in which the Doctor is removed from the plot (sometimes by other characters, sometimes by the author) and contributes almost nothing to the story. Although Fitz and Compassion get more on-screen time, the lack of active involvement by the Doctor doesn't diminish the appearances that he does have. He's charming, witty, easily distracted, intelligent and resourceful - everything that the Eighth Doctor has the potential to be.

A lot of what I have praised the book for sounds rather simplistic. It's the execution of these simple ideas that makes the book as delightful as it is. It doesn't shake up the Doctor Who world beyond all recognition, but it is a very fun book that tells an entertaining tale. It's a simple story, but it feels fresh and new. Recommended.

This Doctor Who novel starts off in the manner of a Bond movie - the Doctor performing daredevil stunts whilst pursued by hired grunts on skis. There are even blood-red fisheyes. The only thing missing is the theme music, although the adrenaline of the prose more than makes up for it.

The TARDIS has been drawn to the planet Drebnar, home of the Frontier Worlds Corporation. The Doctor is determined to find out why, and so Compassion and Fitz become employees of Frontier Worlds. Whilst Compassion dedicates her time to spying on the company, Fitz dedicates his to spying on and seducing his female coworkers. But the TARDIS crew are not the only aliens to have landed on Drebnar. Before he knows it, the Doctor has become embroiled within a corporate plot of Frankenstein proportions, which even involves Frank Sinatra, seemingly back from the dead. Unless he succeeds, an entire system could be wiped out by human folly...

Following in the wake of Lawrence Miles' Interference, this is another very topical Doctor Who novel. The debate about what we eat and how it is produced is currently at the heart of our culture. Anghelides has displaced the debate by setting it on an alien planet. However, Drebnar is not exactly unlike Earth, and it could be possible to argue that the author has revealed a great lack of imagination by not bothering to provide much of an alien environment. Possible, but futile. Much of Drebnar's fun derives from the fact that it is so much like Earth. Okay, so this scenario is quite improbable, but since when has that been a handicap to Doctor Who? Especially when the Doctor has foes that delight in such paradoxes...

I suppose the television story which most resembles this is The Seeds of Doom. There's certainly the same amount of vegetation involved, and the Doctor's just as ready with his fists as Tom Baker was in that story (always a surprising scene, but then Seeds was written by Robert Banks Stewart, who later created Bergerac). To his credit, Anghelides makes no reference to The Seeds of Doom, and instead concentrates on telling his own story, which is highly compelling and very witty. This book is a joy to read. The characterisation is superb. Before Frontier Worlds, I've hated the very mention of Fitz Kreiner, because he was so flat and insipid. Why would I want to transport myself into adventure with such a wet blanket? A towel may be crucial to your average intergalactic hitchhiker, but a wet blanket is such a drag. But what Anghelides has managed to do seems impossible: he has breathed life into Fitz, given him new vibrancy. Anghelides does this by having much of the novel narrated by Fitz in the first person, and in doing so performs miracles. It's a device that works incredibly well here, and harks back to the very first Doctor Who book, when David Whitaker presented the Doctor's exciting adventure with the Daleks through the eyes of Ian Chesterton. It also helps that Fitz and Compassion are given jobs with Frontier Worlds: many readers will readily identify with the TARDIS crew's workplace experiences. Peter Anghelides too has developed his style considerably from Kursaal, and I shall be awaiting the next installment from his pen with a great deal of impatience.

It's amazing how far a little craft can take you.

Listen, I'm not looking for every Who novel to be an utterly groundbreaking and transforming experience. That's what literature is for. Yeah, I want them to occasionally push the envelope and try to do something different but most of the time if someone just tells a decent story in an entertaining fashion, that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for transcendence, just entertainment. I don't think that's too much to ask for.

Fortunately, the author here seems to understand that.

Anghelides does nothing absolutely amazing here other than get the job done and in this case he tells it with just enough style and humor to make this a memorable experience. The plot, as it were, is no great shakes, as the Doctor and company are drawn into a situation where a biogenetics company may have bitten off more than they can chew, engaging in experiments that could perhaps threaten the entire solar system. As I said, nothing we haven't seen before in terms of plot.

What helps here are the little things to make it distinctive. We're dropped into the story with the TARDIS crew already investigating, as opposed to them wandering in and things slowly going wrong, which makes them seem more proactive than usual. It also gets us into the story and gives the author a chance to explain the expository parts as we go along but it's strikingly different from the last few adventures that it stands out. We also get to see the Doctor being more action packed and proactive, doing more of the work himself as opposed to him figuring it out offscreen or just being sidelined. Here, he's in the thick of the action, just as much as Compassion and Fitz.

And as for those two, Anghelides gives them quite a bit of screen time, which is useful. He takes the tactic of having Fitz narrate his sections and that goes a long way toward making the novel memorable because he "gets" Fitz's voice, and his sections are much more interesting filtered through his observations, whether it's his rather goofy sense of humor (his and Compassion's code names are Frank and Nancy Sinatra), or his sheer humanity, torn between wanting to be an utter coward and being more like the Doctor and doing the right thing. He's so much a better companion than Sam ever was that it seems absurd that they wasted so much time with her and didn't bring him on earlier. His foibles make him interesting and more realistic, from his weakness for cigarette, or his weakness for women, underscoring the moments when he surprises himself by knowing what the heck he's doing.

Compassion is a different issue and I suspect the writers haven't quite got a handle on her yet. Lawrence Miles had the easy task because he had to do was introduce, now everyone else is stuck developing her character. Anghelides does his best here, keeping her at arm's length but showcasing her cunning and complete detachment from anything resembling sentiment, putting her at odds with the Doctor. She's as effective as he is, without any of those pesky emotional undercurrents. The scenes between her and Fitz are priceless and she gets one good speech about why they keep Fitz around on the TARDIS despite everything. She feels like a character, broken and stubborn but quite convinced that she's perfectly okay and everyone else is crazy.

As for the plot, it's decent but mostly acts as an excuse for everyone to play off each other. The company, of course, is engaged in acts that aren't very wise and once the Doctor figures out the problem, it's just a matter of getting him in the right place so he can fix it. The alien threat isn't much of a threat, just the potential for one, it's the company executives who are the threat, shifting between wanting to stop what they've done and wanting to go forward because the end result could benefit them so much. It delves into the morality of corporations without saying too much new, but again, you're not reading this for the originality of the plot. Rather, you're reading to see all the parts fit together like a well-oiled machine. And they do. The level of consistency throughout is impressive (considering what we've had before) and if the ending isn't absolutely earth-shattering (I feel like they missed an important plot point in there), it'll do for an ending.

So you've got a novel that not only tells a decent story but also progresses the characters down whatever little arc the story is heading toward, which is something these novels should do every time out but seem to rarely make happen. While I don't want to give up the experiments and the sense of trying something new, if the authors could pull out something this solid all the time, I'll take a few more of these easily.