| SYNTHESPIANSTM by Craig Hinton |
| Story ? Synopsis: The TARDIS is caught in a temporal effect, and swept along into the future, but lands in what seems to be 1960's London. The Doctor soon realises it is the 11th Millennium, and gets separated from Peri. She finds herself in a huge shopping centre apparently resembling 1980's America. He is stuck in a haunt of jobbing actors, where he meets Marc in a pub.They are on a planetoid called Reef Sector One. The Doctor claims to be a special investigator, and Marc takes him to Entertainment 1. Peri meets a rich daughter called Claudia, who befriends her, takes her to lunch, takes her shopping, and takes her home, where they meet Claudia's mother, who no longer seems so bitchy as she did before. They get dressed up and go out again. Marc takes the Doctor to the cinema, which furthers the Doctor's suspicions. Marc goes on the town, whilst the Doctor goes back to the TARDIS to investigate. Marc meets Peri and Claudia, and they all go back to Claudia's place, to find her mother has stabbed her father. Though taken away by an ambulance, no hospital records taking them. Marc is arrested, but gets Claudia to call the Doctor. He arrives and is mutually glad to find Peri. They begin to examine what's going on. The Doctor suspects someone is manipulating him, but he can't work out who it is. He sends Peri to face Walter J Matheson, to cause a diversion. The Doctor and Claudia wind up in a warehouse where the Doctor finally realises the synthespians (synthetic actors) are Autons. He causes trouble, then retreats from the psychic attack of the Nestene Consciousness. Realising Peri is in danger, he and Claudia go to Matheson, who shows the Doctor that the Nestene home planet, Polymos, was attacked and destroyed by the Time Lords. Matheson wants the Doctor's help, and threatens Peri and Claudia to ensure it. During a diversion, Peri and Claudia get away, but the Doctor falls into another trap. Matheson explains that Polymos is doomed, and he plans to download the Nestene Consciousness, then use it to boost human achievement. The Doctor is forced to help him. Peri and Claudia fetch a mobile phone, which the Doctor uses to contact Marc, or the Auton facsimile of him that he has duped into helping him. The download happens, but Marc breaks the link between the Auton receptacle and the person it was copied from, trapping the Consciousness in a plastic body. Claudia offers Peri a place to stay, but she decides to stick with the Doctor. |
| Review:- One of the more sporadic writers gives us another spin on the Autons, and a vision of a future where plastic power is at its zenith... A story with a long gestation, this presents us with yet another run with the Nestene Consciousness. It had been 7 years since the publication of Business Unusual, and this has the advantage of being set away from Earth. Like Craig's earlier PDA, The Quantum Archangel, this story gives us chapter & verse in terms of continuity, linking with earlier MAs that suggest the Nestenes were the offspring of one of the Great Old Ones, from the universe before ours. Still following? Anyway, here it's the far future, around the same time, funnily enough, as Craig's MA, The Crystal Bucephalus. Standalone, it ain't. Reef Sector One is a human colony which has had a lot of thought gone into it. The delineation between the spoilt rich and the workers is crudely shown through huge walls splitting the place up. The Doctor and Peri are swiftly separated and able to learn the local history through conveniently apposite locals. Marcus and Claudia are the kind of downtrodden-yet-goodnatured people who make good revolution fodder for the travellers, and the background hints about the Synthespians are subtle without being insulting. Once the two teams come together, and the Doctor realises the Autons are in town, the action never lets up. Matheson makes for a compelling bad guy, more so than Dominique Delacroix, who is nominally more important. Presumably the intention is that as with the soap operas which this book wants to satirise and praise, Delacroix should be the more important figure. However, whereas Alexis was more interesting than Blake in Dynasty, this book gives us a figure more engaging like JR Ewing from Dallas. Ah well... There are some fun scenes showing the plastic attacks, which makes pointed commentary on society. However, despite letting Peri & Claudia get some empowering action as they go home for the phones, the resolution rests on the Doctor ringing Marc to tell him which body to release from Auton control, trapping the Nestenes inside Dominique's plastic body. Hmm... It's not unreasonable to believe in a society where people are blocked away with little interaction. It's perhaps less credible that the story rests on the transmission of 8 thousand year old telly programmes, some of which have undergone mirthless renaming. The usage of an old monster from the classic series goes fairly well, but nothing here really makes the reader interested in the furtheration of the Nestene story. They're not really developed, and might as well be bland old rent-a-monsters. Then again, Craig isn't the only writer to make this mistake (see Rose). Overall, it's a readable and often interesting book, but nothing imperative. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |