When the TARDIS touches down in London, 2006, schoolteachers Ian and Barbara are eager to explore their own future. But they have arrived in the middle of a war, a war that has left London a ruin. Mistaken for vagrants, and with no way of proving otherwise, the Doctor's granddaughter and companions find themselves in the execution block on the Isle of Dogs. The Doctor has no choice but to help the military refine its ultimate weapon. The British Army has discovered time travel. And the consequences are already terrible.
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More About the Author
Simon Guerrier is the author of the Doctor Who novels The Time Travellers, featuring the First Doctor, and The Pirate Loop and The Slitheen Excursion, featuring the Tenth Doctor. He's written numerous Doctor Who short stories and audio plays for Big Finish Productions (including the seventh Doctor's meeting with Oliver Cromwell), as well as original books and audio plays for Blake's 7, Being Human, Primeval, Robin Hood and Sapphire and Steel. He lives in London with a bright wife and a dim cat.
His blog is http://0tralala.blogspot.com
His blog is http://0tralala.blogspot.com
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rewriting history,
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This review is from: Doctor Who: The Time Travellers (Doctor Who (BBC Paperback)) (Paperback)
For a while I thought this First Doctor adventure was a recycled reject from the lengthy Alternative Universe cycle recently concluded over in the Eighth Doctor books. Landing in a war-torn London in June 2006, the First Doctor and his original TV companions stumble across an audacious time-travel experiment that causes its test pilots to materialize in great numbers, each one a slightly different version of the original test pilot from a slightly different timeline (from what one would assume is another "quantum universe"). The Doctor grips his lapels a lot and murmurs about untold damage being done to the timelines. Ian meets an eerie alternate version of himself who does things Ian dares not do. Barbara learns that, in spite of what happened on TV in "The Aztecs" (when the Doctor told her "You can't rewrite history. Not one line!"), sometimes indeed history turns out wrong and does have to be changed.What makes "The Time Travelers" fresh is the as-told-in-1963 approach. It goes beyond obvious to say that, in the reader's world, the London of 2006 has not been at war with a distant foreign power ever since a cataclysm that struck the city in 1966 and crippled humanity's growth. However, for the Ian and Barbara of 1963, whose lone vision of the future was the 28th Century of the TV adventure "The Sensorites", this apocalyptic 2006 is the inexorable future they must one day face. The reader also learns early on that this future history is triggered by events that happened in the much later, post-Ian and Barbara, First Doctor TV adventure "The War Machines". What becomes obvious then is that the Doctor can in fact rewrite history. We know going in that this awful vision of 2006 is not going to be completely resolved at the end of the book -- the Doctor will have to wait for several companion changes to go by until he lands at the Post Office Tower in June 1966 in Episode 1 of "The War Machines". The ending to "The Time Travellers" is destined to be bittersweet rather than happy. The first 200 pages are a bit dull, with several characters named after the author's friends fighting a desperate rearguard, both military and scientific, against the approaching foreign power. Things take a sharp left turn, however, when we learn who the titular "Time Travellers" are. A few big plot twists are revealed all at once. The action doesn't exactly get more interesting after page 200, but the character revelations, primarily about Susan, and Ian & Barbara, are worth the wait. An odd book, then, one that on its surface is very similar to the EDAs of a few years' past, but which in the end proves to be much more imaginative than it may seem at first glance. You'll have to be familiar with a wide range of 1st Doctor TV stories (and catch a tangential reference to the 7th Doctor actioner "Remembrance of the Daleks") in order for all this to hang together in the way the author intended... but there's nothing wrong with any book that begs you to watch more 1st Doctor stories.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Superior.,
By
This review is from: Doctor Who: The Time Travellers (Doctor Who (BBC Paperback)) (Paperback)
One of the better Doctor Who books published in the last couple of years. Newcomer Guerrier writes a good if slightly slow tale of time travel paradoxes.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Its like lemmings,
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This review is from: Doctor Who: The Time Travellers (Doctor Who (BBC Paperback)) (Paperback)
Ever play the video game Lemmings or hear the myth that "Lemmings mindlessly moving into danger en masse?" Well, in this book, the same idea holds true, only with one time traveler in particular that keeps being copied & each copy spawns right into danger. The idea that each copy of the time traveler is a bit different is rather amusing in the book, as there are sometimes 5 or more of the same person, different copy, running around at any given time.The downfall of this book was the story. The paradoxes of time travel can be confusing, which I admire the author for taking on the subject. However, they should at least make some sense, which at times, the story doesn't make sense at all. I'm not sure if it was the actual concepts involved or just the amateur writing skills of the author. In time, Simon Guerrier has the potential to be a great writer, but considering this was his first novel, it did read as such. Coupled with the concepts involved & the fact this was the author's first book, led to this novel being average at best, but very much worth the read. One other final note, I'm also unsure how I actually felt about the author's portrayal of the feelings Ian & Barbara had for each other. In the actual TV series, they are nothing more than friends. Though, it is likely after all they had been through, after they got back home, they had become much more... so perhaps this story is a glimpse into their life after their travels with the Doctor. Its also a glimpse into the Doctor's desire for his grand daughter to begin a normal life. Again, overall its a fun if not confusing read.
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