| SPEED OF FLIGHT by Paul Leonard |
| Story ? Synopsis: The planet of Nooma is in the midst of great upheaval, with a war against nature. The Doctor brings Jo and Mike Yates there by mistake, instead of Karfel. The Doctor and Mike become separated from Jo and the TARDIS, meeting scientist Epreto, who plans to upset the ecosystem and lead his people to a new world. Jo falls under the influence of the Dead, and finds Mike, who fell out of Epreto's ship. During a search of an underground chamber, Mike is killed by a crazed native. The Doctor learns that the world was built by the Aapex Corporation, but they went bust millennia before. He tries to convince Epreto that his efforts will lead to disaster, and they should all try to live in harmony. Jo finds the Doctor, and tries to convince him to join with the Dead, but he resists their influence. Epreto tries to destroy the starship his people call a Sun, but finally succumbs to his own nature, transforming into a winged naieen, at which point he sees things differently. Mike and Jo are under the influence of Aapex, and plan to destroy all life to prevent business secrets being stolen. But when the Doctor is able to prove Aapex no longer exist, the orders are cancelled. Mike and Jo are restored to normal, and the Doctor warns Epreto that he must be more responsible now for the planet. |
| Review:- Leonard is one of a few novelists who really make the effort to depict alien worlds, and handle weighty sci-fi topics. Here there is a delicate environment that presents a tricky challenge for the Doctor, whose friends turn against him... Nooma is beset by a sort of class system. Children grow in the forest, become men, and reach a stage where they must fight each other, the winners mutating into winged naieen, and the losers joining the Dead. When men object to the rule of naieen, and try to prove their biology is not the only way, then conflict swiftly follows. On a world of low gravity, the ability to fly is an added separation from the life of men on the ground, and the dissent between Land and Sky leads to a desperate quest for supremacy and escape... Epreto makes a good focusing villain, for villain he surely is. As a challenger to the natural order, his aims are not peaceful co-existence, but revolution. Yet, in many other adventures, a character like this would seem to be the hero that the Doctor would side with. Yet the naieen are not harsh overlords, and they are threatened unfairly by the advance of men like Epreto. So it becomes a case of stopping him before it's too late. As with Leonard's other 3rd Doctor Missing Adventure, Dancing The Code, the reader is treated to regular characters being shockingly killed off. It works less well here for being so clumsily reset at the end (Mike is restored to normal despite his rather visceral death at the hands of Omonu). Also, there is too much confusion about terms like Dead, Land and Sky for a reader to make sense of. If the trees are so big, and if Land and Sky are so far apart, how come travel between the two seems to occur with such great speed (rather like the England to Kebiria moments in that other book, come to think of it). A final similarity between the books is the ludicrously late resolutions, with the Doctor making the save not just at the eleventh hour, but pretty much on the stroke of the twelfth. Now, I suppose it might be said that these traits are deliberately included to be synonymous with the 3rd Doctor's on-screen adventures. But when so little else present has the same resonance, that seems like a desperate excuse. Jo and Mike come across as bland and unlikeable (though to be fair, they spend a lot of time under the influence), whilst the Doctor is a craggy old peacemaker whose authority means little. The author's included tribute to Jon Pertwee, who died a few months before publication, is kind, but the book hardly matches up to his words (to be fair, it probably wasn't intended to be so seen). On the whole, then, it's a chore to read, badly under-written, contains almost no sympathetic characters (save Xaai, perhaps, who unfortunately has to survive several near-deaths before finally copping it) and doesn't seem to possess any guiding plot motive. And the title, which I recently learned is a pun (?!), is irrelevant. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |