Lay away book special: A perspective on Baxter's world building

I'm really digging The Wheel of Ice. Not only do you have the second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe, but even the incidental characters have great potential. Characters like Phee, her older brother Sam, younger sister Casey; their mother Jo; and this Luis Reyes person apparently on the wheel as a kind of moral police. Even aside from the whole mining colony on a fragmented moon in Saturn's ring setting, Baxter has created quite a vivid world in characters alone.

In particular, the different classes ranging from "A" to "D" are downright curious. As far as I can figure they're not related to family - since Phee is an "A", Sam is a "C" and their mother is a "B." There's definitely some sort of merit system involved, but what exactly it's based on hasn't come up yet. The intrigue around the "Blue Dolls" that are apparently sabotaging the wheel also goes a long way to breathing life into this imagined colony. Nothing breathes life into something quite like a potentially imagined crisis, after all.

However, I find Baxter's treatment of perspective to be a little bit jarring. We're given different characters' perspectives throughout the novel, but they're quite entrenched in those characters' own viewpoints. It's not entirely a matter of just reporting things from a set character's perspective because they're there to see them happen (as it often felt was the case in Shada).

Instead, there's a lot more fluid internal monologue going on, though perspectives regularly shift mid-chapter. So, for example, we'll begin a chapter in Zoe's perspective, but then the Doctor will come in and Zoe will leave, and we'll jump into the Doctor's head. Maybe reading A Song of Ice and Fire has made me used to a one character/chapter form, but jumping between characters in the same chapter will definitely take some getting used to.

Lay away book special: The wheel begins to turn

There's a marked difference in the style and voice of Gareth Roberts' Shada and Stephen Baxter's The Wheel of Ice. Both are Doctor Who novels, one being a novelization of a serial that never aired, and the other an original second Doctor story. This difference alone could be enough to explain the difference in styles, but I don't think it goes quite far enough.

Baxter's style is much colder, for starters. Not only does this suit the subject of The Wheel of Ice, it's also closer to the tone of many second Doctor stories. The second Doctor himself (as played by Patrick Troughton), is anything but cold, but more often than not the stories he finds himself embroiled in political intrigue, plots that have huge repercussions and futuristic societies that have a tinge of dystopia about them. The Wheel of Ice is already looking like this sort of story, though I've only read four of the book's 47 chapters. Shada on the other hand, is a story simply immersed in all of the zany science fiction (with a helping of comedy) that is Tom Baker's era as the Doctor.

The difference is very refreshing, particularly because Stephen Baxter's writing style is closer to my own. Also, the book's opening promises many more interesting characters than those found in Shada, which ought to make for a more rapturous read.

Lay away book special: Closing Shada down

Because, in the Doctor Who universe, Rassilon's got a hand in everything, there's even an insult named after him. Well, an insulting gesture, anyway.

This revelation might  be the highest point in the novelized Shada's wrap-up. That's not to say the ending is disappointing,  it's just a little generic.

Clare's role ends up being quite interesting, though. Throughout the novel she's aware of herself taking subservient roles when with the Doctor or the Professor, though she can never really explain why. Ultimately, though, she winds up as a kind of human Romana, a circumstance which undercuts the kind of variety having so many companions about brings. All the more so because Clare gets close to being what Liz Shaw was: as near the Doctor's scientific equal as a human can be.

Jumping to the book's actual ending, once more the afterword would have made a better foreword. In it, Roberts puts his version of Shada into the context of contemporary Doctor Who and Douglas Adams own body of work. This context brings the whole story into perspective, particularly the fact that Adams wasn't pleased with it.

In fact, when asked to do the six episode season seventeen finale, Adams wanted to write a story about the Doctor going into retirement, re-discovering himself, and then going back to planet saving by serial's end. That such a story is almost what we've recently seen play out with the eleventh Doctor shows just how  much of a visionary Adams could be.

As per Gareth Roberts' novelization of Shada, it is a thumping 70s sci-fi read.

Lay away book special: Shada's slang

Being written originally by a Brit and being novelized by a Brit, Gareth Roberts' Shada is full of slang.

For instance there's the Doctor's reference to "bung[ing] in peace across the universe" (on page 261). Translated into North American English, this simply means to casually throw away or give (http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/b.htm). Though that doesn't fully spell out the Doctor's meaning of casually travelling the cosmos.

Much more curious is the labelling of prisoners' rooms on Shada. Instead of being cells and blocks, the prisoners are in "chambers" and "cabinets" (page 286). These two words carry a lot of political weight in any English, but the second is also associated with storage.

Considering that Shada's a prison locked out of the regular flow of time, such an association seems appropriate. All the more so since the prison was designed to be a holding facility while the death penalty's legality was debated on Gallifrey. Nonetheless, referring to cells as cabinets is eerie.

Doing so implies a strong desire to see those imprisoned within as merely objects. It's a subtextual meaning of "cabinet" that dehumanizes what is within; effectively turning whatever is into "contents."

On the one hand, such dehumanization of Shada's inmates suggests that Gallifrey was truly torn on the matter of the death penalty. Those who were headed for it could only be officially recognized as objects.

On the other hand, the rhetorical flourish implies a dehumanization of the politicians embroiled in the debate (at least from a human perspective). Though their dehimanization would be to a more positive end: the coming together of many to rationally decide the best course of action for the group.

The way that the Doctor and Romana speak of the ancient Time Lords, though, suggests that their politicians were anything but coolly rational. All of which points to the strange pointedness of the two contexts of "cabinet" found here.

Lay away book special: Going swimmingly

The adventures of The Doctor and co. as they struggle with Skagra remain unchanged. Not that I expected them to change, but Shada's written just like any other novelization. If Douglas Adams ever did any novelizations.

That said, Roberts manages the book's pace well, leaving me with one quibble.

Every chapter takes the perspective of a different character (or group of characters). Roberts keeps these perspectives in rotation, but, one has been under-used so far. This is the perspective of Clare Keightley, Chris' colleague.

My sense of this matter is that Claire will play a major role in the story's conclusion. Hopefully though, she doesn't just confess her feelings for Chris or vice versa at the end of her arc.

Lay away book special: Further notes on the reconstruction

The most interesting thing about Gareth Roberts' Shada is its frequently short chapters.

Such two to three page chapters, sometimes referred to as attention span-sized, give a sense of a plot in motion. It's a style choice that makes the novel's TV script origins clear. It also makes the book feel like it has Douglas Adams' own sense of wackiness, the sense that he got across with his breaks for entries from the Hitchhiker's Guide itself.

So far, none of this takes away from the story, or the way it's told. In fact, heading into the book's second third, the novelization continues to be a strong imitation of Adams' style, and a compelling reconstruction of a Doctor Who serial that almost wasn't.