| GODENGINE by Craig Hinton |
| Story 51 Synopsis: The TARDIS is inexplicably destroyed. The Doctor and Roz find themselves on Mars, 2157AD. Chris lands on Charon, and realises it's shortly to be destroyed by the Daleks. The Doctor and Roz rescue a party from their ships, and set off for the North Pole, using underground passages. They meet a party of Martian pilgrims and join forces, though there is distrust on both sides. Chris persuades the scientists on Charon that the Daleks are coming, and they create a subspace tunnel which takes them to the North Pole on Mars, where they find a Sphinx, and are captured on examination by Ice Warriors. They have been working on a huge device culled from Osirian technology, called the GodEngine. When the Doctor's party arrives, his suspicions about the Ice Warriors seem to be confirmed, but when Roz mentions seeing ghostly TARDISes floating about, he realises how to use the machine to his advantage. Goaded into demonstrating its power, the Ice Warriors are briefly bamboozled, allowing the Doctor to step in and use it to reconstruct his TARDIS. With the peaceful Ice Warriors getting the upper hand, the Doctor ushers Roz and Chris back inside, and they take off. There, he explains that the people they met and thought they had saved, will still end up dead. |
| Review:- With typical irony, Bernice's exit coincides with the reappearance of her favourite Martians... but with the TARDIS gone, and Chris missing, the Doctor does not want to be stranded on Mars of all places... It might be thought after the continuity-fest of Happy Endings that a break was needed. That doesn't come, as this is one of the most ambitious efforts of continuity ever tried. It serves as a sequel to The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, Pyramids Of Mars, Transit and The Seeds Of Death. The suggestion on the back cover that this is an original novel is sadly inaccurate. Or rather, to borrow the old cliche, the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. Cleaving Chris away to solve his way off Charon makes a good mission for him, and a chance to show that he isn't the dumb heavy that might often have seemed the case. Even if his worries over the web of time prove to be painfully unnecessary in the long run. Roz, meanwhile, finds herself facing her past when Santacosta turns out to not be a whiny singer, but actually a cold-hearted Adjudicator out to seize the GodEngine for the good of the human race. Whilst Roz would presumably welcome the idea, the knowledge that it never happened, and the threat of the destruction of Earth are enough to weigh against her offering support. It's amusing that the Doctor never at any stage lets on that he will be the one to thwart the Daleks anyway, albeit not for many years. His curious vendetta against the Ice Warriors is a funny way to handle what is quite a heavy book for Martian backstory, with the two survivors of the legendary Eight-Point Table (!), a pregnant Martian whose betrothed to someone she hates, not to mention the tiresome pilgrims/warriors struggle between Sstaal and Cleece. The latter's xenophobia becomes unintentionally funny when mirrored exactly by the human, Antony McGuire. But whereas McGuire comes to learn that his hatred has been misplaced, and his family were killed by the Martian Axis terrorists, Cleece remains wedded to his dreams of glory, causing a rift between Falaxyr and Draan, and then dying in agony at the idea that his whole life had been something of a lie. Soap opera barely begins to cover it. Not to mention the dodgy notion that whereas a human can change its spots, the Martian can't. Of course, the Doctor is far from spotless on that score, too. Presumably he just can't get over The Monster Of Peladon, perhaps it's a basic rage at evil forces who turn good and then relapse. Whatever, it does neither his character nor this book any favours. No amount of 'alien perspective' will cover for the fact that the ostensible hero is quite sure that a race of aliens are irredeemable, and is wrong to do so. Still, the Ice Warriors do at least get the bulk of the action (though I struggled to imagine any of them saying any of their reams of dialogue), which is better than the Osirians, who have their technology plundered and misused, and fought over by two equally power-mad groups (luckily, the Adjudicators never get to grips with it). The usage of the Sphinx does provide some interest and value, but when The Sands Of Time was published the previous month and handles the themes and habits so much better, this book cannot fail to pale by comparison. The book fails in too many respects. It begins with the TARDIS destroyed, which merely leaves the reader waiting for its inevitable return, rather than worried about the Doctor's future. It tries to paint depth into the human/Martian relationship in the Solar system during the Dalek invasion, and thus suggests the future will be incredibly boring. It makes clever-clever continuity references that distract and ultimately insult the reader. And it largely fails to create tension, wonder or fear. Even the cover's mediocre. On the plus side, it's short. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy of this book. |