I’m not going to be finished with the next audio review in time to post it today, so instead, here’s Tuesday’s novel review a day early, and we’ll get to the audios tomorrow.
We’re back, with another Doctor Who novel review! This week, we continue the Virgin New Adventures (VNAs) with Transit, by Ben Aaronovitch. Published 3 December 1992, this novel features the Seventh Doctor and Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, accompanied by guest companion Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, and is set in the year 2109. Let’s get started!
Spoilers ahead for anyone who has not read this novel!
In the year 2109, the Earth’s colonies throughout the solar system are connected by the Sol Transit System, or STS, a system of train “tunnels” through the fabric of reality itself. Travel is fast, nearly instantaneous; and the ambitious human race is about to open its first interstellar addition to the system. The first Star Tunnel, or “Stunnel” for short, will go to the colony at Arcturus, 26 light years away. Something goes drastically wrong, however, when something unknown pushes its way out of the stunnel and into the body of the system itself, vaporizing everyone on the platforms for the opening ceremony.
Lunar University (or “Lunarversity”) student Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart—a distant descendant of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart from an illicit relationship in his early military days in Africa—gets briefly involved with a group of special maintenance workers on the Stunnel project, and develops a hasty but passionate relationship with Zak, or Blondie as he prefers to be called, the youngest member of the crew. Related events lead her to be at King’s Cross station when the entity from the stunnel passes through, destroying everyone; but she is saved by the sudden appearance of the Seventh Doctor and the TARDIS. The TARDIS itself, with Bernice Summerfield still inside, are hurled to the end of the line, somewhere in another station. Stuck with few options, the Doctor falls in with Kadiatu, who connects him to a family friend, a woman named Francine, who is—famously—a completely blind veteran of the war on Mars between the humans and the Ice Warriors some twenty years earlier, and also an accomplished underworld boss. Unknown to the Doctor, Kadiatu knows exactly who he is.
Benny finds herself in a slum near the last station in the solar system, on Pluto, and falls in with two prostitutes, Roberta and Zamina. (By coincidence, Blondie is also from this slum, and is well known to both girls.) Benny quickly uses the girls, as well as a local gang, to seize power and then spark a riot that sends destruction careening through the slum. Roberta is killed in the fighting, and Benny escapes. Meanwhile, the Doctor knows a thing or two about Kadiatu, as well—he realizes that she has been genetically engineered, probably as a soldier. He discovers her rather complete files on him, and learns that she is very close to discovering time travel, a few centuries early for humanity. He considers deleting the files, but decides against it, fearing the repercussions. He also realizes—though she didn’t tell him—that she is a descendant of his old friend. When she awakens, he helps her solve a minor problem she is dealing with, and in return, recruits her to help him recover Benny and put an end to the crisis in the STS.
Blondie’s crew, led by a former—and highly augmented—soldier called Old Sam, begins to search the now-closed system for the source of the problem, using a modified maintenance train they call Fat Mama. They are assaulted by a group of mutated individuals, and barely escape with their lives and heavy damage to the train, though one crewmember—Dogface—is critically wounded and whisked off to a hospital. They report in to their supervisor, the System’s manager, Ming, often called “Ming the Merciless”. Meanwhile the Doctor and Kadiatu make their way to the slum on Pluto, where the fighting has ended and the relief workers have arrived. There they find the TARDIS; it struck the wall of the station with enough force to embed it deeply in the wall, with the door unfortunately facing the wrong way. Benny arrives at the station, and tries to kill the Doctor; it becomes clear that she is possessed by the transit system entity. He is saved by Old Sam and Blondie; Benny flees, collecting Zamina as she does, and joins a refugee group headed for Mars. During the fight, Kadiatu discovers—and is disturbed by—her own preternatural fighting skills, which she does not understand; a flashback shows that she herself is not her parents’ natural child, but was found by her father on a military mission, organized by Francine. She was genetically engineered by the Imogen corporation as a supersoldier of incalculable ability; however her father couldn’t bring himself to kill the infant warrior, and adopted her instead, vowing to overcome her creation with a good upbringing and psychology. She knows none of this, however.
The Doctor takes Blondie and Kadiatu to his house in Kent, where the couple’s relationship deepens. The Doctor realizes that the STS hasn’t been invaded by an outside intelligence; rather, because it is structured in the form of a complex neural network, it has evolved its own intelligence. He builds a device to communicate with the system, and finds that while he is correct, he only has part of the story. The system, though certainly intelligent, was invaded by a competing intelligence—a virus of sorts—from another dimension, which breached the system where reality was thin along the Stunnel’s path. The Doctor decides to help the system expunge the virus. He contacts Ming and her fellow executives and offers to help—and none too soon, because something in the system is preparing to open the Stunnel again.
Benny and Zamina are placed with a family on Mars, but Benny quickly kills them. She heads out, intending to get to STS control and advance the virus’s plan—but she manages to resist the virus’s control long enough to send Zamina away with a warning for the Doctor. The Doctor gets the message, and takes Kadiatu to Mars via the tunnels, finding that Benny has fled in a vehicle out onto the wilder parts of the surface. She leads them to a dormant Ice Warrior nest, where she tries to shoot the Doctor; Kadiatu kills her. The Doctor is furious, until he realizes it’s not the real Benny; it’s a mutant made to look and sound like her. She was a decoy; they are forced to race back, having lost time on this distraction—and moreover, the Ice Warriors asleep in the nest will eventually awaken, not knowing their war with Earth is over.
Waiting to be picked up, Kadiatu compares notes with the Doctor about her family history, and then reveals something disturbing—she has dreams about an old woman, whom the Doctor identifies as the Pythia of Gallifrey’s past, giving a curse against childbirth. Francine arrives in a modified jet and picks them up, but is shot down by an automated system that misinterprets her intentions. She lands safely somehow, though the plane is destroyed. A chance encounter with one of the rescue crew that collects them makes the Doctor realize that he may be far too well known to humans now, and he considers deleting knowledge of himself from human records.
Benny makes her way to STS control and sets the reactors to overload, pouring power into the Stunnel’s grid, preparing to open the gates on both ends. The Doctor and Kadiatu arrive, but find that it’s another false Benny. The Doctor sends the maintenance crew’s drones to build a machine to draw power from the TARDIS, and then he heads to the Stunnel station by freesurfing the tunnels—that is, traveling them on a board, without a train. Inside the tunnels, he picks up an unidentified, disembodied hitchhiker, telepathically entering his mind. At the other end, he finds a battle in progress, between the entity’s mutants and the human security forces, with Blondie and Old Sam there holding the line as well. Blondie dies in the process, horrifying Kadiatu. Benny—the real Benny this time—is there as well. As the Doctor arrives, the gateway opens, and the full entity emerges, possessing Benny; it seems the version that was already inhabiting her was only an agent of sorts. As it claims no name, the Doctor calls it “Fred”. However, before it can act, the machine connected to the TARDIS fires a powerful burst of artron energy through the tunnel, channeled through the Doctor, striking Fred and driving it back into the tunnels and into its own dimension, taking Benny with it. As the Stunnel starts to collapse, the Doctor follows it in, trying to rescue Benny; Kadiatu follows him.
The Doctor finds himself in a world of subjective reality, malleable to the wills of those inside it. He shapes reality into a form he can navigate, and leaves messages for Kadiatu to follow. He also finds that the artron energy—representing the TARDIS itself—takes the form of two cats, one green, one silver. He battles his way through to a confrontation with Fred. Fred admits that it has concealed its true purpose until now; it can’t act with impunity in the real world, but here, it has more power; and it saw the potential in the Doctor, and wanted to take him to augment its own power. To that end, it kidnapped Benny, planning to lure the Doctor here so it could acquire his mind. Kadiatu arrives manifesting as a leopard, and attacks Fred; the Doctor transfers the hitchhiker from his own mind to Benny’s, forcing Fred out, and Kadiatu devours Fred. The hitchhiker then vacates Benny’s mind and takes form—it is the Transit entity, and now, without any opposition, it feels comfortable vacating the system and remaining here in this dimension, where it can reach its full potential. The Doctor, Benny, and Kadiatu return to reality just as the gateway collapses..
The crisis is resolved; but before leaving Earth again, the Doctor visits the Stone Mountain data repository on the moon, which contains the sum total of human knowledge. He has deduced that its AI management software has become sentient, and threatens to expose it to humanity—who are paranoid about such things—if it doesn’t accommodate him. He persuades it to delete all records of his own existence on Earth, and he personally destroys what hard copies are available; and in return, he gives it pointers on how to live with humanity. It names itself FLORANCE, and immediately begins establishing a presence on Earth, before revealing itself. The Doctor returns to the station on Pluto, and has the maintenance crew cut the TARDIS free of the wall, and takes a very shaken Benny with him when he leaves. He sends Old Sam to make peace with the newly awakened Ice Warriors, and sees that Kadiatu gets a job with STS. He offers her a chance to come with him, but she refuses—but warns him that she’ll give him a head start, then come after him. Later, she completes her time machine, and then destroys all her research, before setting off after the Doctor—but where her allegiance lies, remains to be seen.
I had been looking forward to this book for some time, chiefly because of the character of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart; I knew that she was a descendant of the Brigadier, but that was all I knew. While Kadiatu is a fascinating character, I still had trouble getting into this book. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and honestly I’m still not sure. It’s certainly a good read, and once I was able to get started, I finished it quickly, in about a day and a half of scattered reading. I think perhaps I had trouble because the book feels—to borrow one of its own words—interstitial, like it’s between greater things. (Not that I know if what follows is better—I haven’t started the next book at the time of this writing…) It spends a fair amount of time referring back to the events of the last book, Love and War, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in this case it gives the feeling of mooning over a lost love, especially with Ace having left in that book. Ace is fantastic, I agree completely with that—but these books, I think, have serious difficulty with moving on. To that end, there’s a scene where the Doctor finds a stash of Nitro-9 in the house on Allen Road, and mourns over Ace a bit; and at the end, when he needs guardians in the virtual dimension occupied by the Transit entity, he manifests them as a horde of Aces, all with cans of Nitro-9. It’s clever, but it feels awkward. In addition, Benny is relegated to a background character here; she spends most of the story—all of it, really—possessed by the Transit entity (or not, actually—to explain would be a major spoiler, so just bear with me), and gets little dialog or screen time on her own. This is her first adventure traveling with the Doctor, and she leaves it with the conviction that she is essentially a pet to him—not a good way to get things rolling, Doctor.
Enough negatives; on to the positives! Kadiatu IS a fascinating character, and well worth the read. She has secrets layered upon secrets, and I am certain we don’t yet have them all. She reminds me of Jenny from The Doctor’s Daughter, in that she is born for military action, but also has secrets in her upbringing; and her exit scene at the end is almost a perfect match for Jenny’s, with the added bonus that we know from her later appearances that she doesn’t immediately crash into a moon and die. I look forward to further appearances. She is surrounded by a great supporting cast, with almost everyone getting at least a better-than-average amount of character development, even the throwaway villains (that is, the mutated hit squads created by the major villain). Junior maintenance worker and Kadiatu love interest Zak, aka Blondie, is a bit of a Mary Sue (or whatever the male equivalent is) without really needing to be, as he isn’t the main character and only rarely serves as the viewpoint character, and yet he’s endearing anyway, and I was truly upset at the way his arc ends. Old Sam, a maintenance worker with a serious military background, quickly became my favorite supporting character; and he gets one of the final scenes in the book, a moment of great import, pertaining to the Ice Warriors. Those classic-series adversaries (I won’t say villains, because they usually aren’t villainous) don’t appear at all, but they have a tangential bearing on the story, and their presence is felt in the background. The Transit system manager, Mind “the Merciless”, is nothing like she appears at first, and gets a surprisingly good backstory which doesn’t directly change anything, but makes her a much better character.
I left this story feeling that it’s planting seeds for the future. Often that’s a dangerous prospect—you as the author don’t know if you will have the opportunity to go back and harvest what you’ve planted, and you don’t know if any other author will continue with what you’ve done. We don’t know those things here, either; but Ben Aaronovitch certainly planted a lot of seeds for future use. He gave us the Human-Ice Warrior war on Mars, also known as the Thousand Day War, which ended with human control of Mars, and which will be expanded on in later stories such as GodEngine. He created the Sol Transit System (STS) , which, though not mentioned in any other works to date, is clearly instrumental in the expansion phase of human history. He created an early form of human time travel. He created an offshoot of the Brigadier’s family, and of course he gave us the recurring character of Kadiatu. He gave Benny a book that even she cannot read, and then doesn’t really go back to that thread; possibly something for the future? Some of these, of course, have been picked up in other works; some have not. Still, it will be interesting to see how these connections play out.
The Doctor is certainly more decisive here than he has been in recent stories. He does, as I mentioned, brood over Ace a few times, but never for long, and never in a way that would interfere with his activities. We do see something very rare early in the book: We see the Doctor get drunk. It’s not a pretty sight, but at least there is no singing…no, wait, that’s not true; he sings Happy Birthday…to the universe. It has to be seen to be believed.
There’s a definite cyberpunk theme to this novel which is curiously rare in Doctor Who. Despite the fact that the story depends on it, it doesn’t take over the story, but manages to fit casually into the story’s world without being too intrusive—a rare feat indeed, as cyberpunk elements usually tend to define their stories. I wouldn’t want this to be a common thing in Doctor Who, but I’m glad to see it happen occasionally; when the series began, no one had any inkling of such a thing, but if it wants to stay relevant to modern audiences (not to mention modern technology), this sort of thing almost has to be acknowledged sometimes.
Continuity References: The House on Allen Road last appeared in Cat’s Cradle: Warhead. The Doctor makes multiple references to Survival and The Curse of Fenric, especially in connection with Ace. He mentions building a boom-box (Silver Nemesis) and having visited “all three Atlantises” (The Underwater Menace, The Daemons, The Time Monster, which famously gave three different explanations for the destruction of Atlantis). Battlefield is referenced in the form of an opera based on the events of that serial, though it’s not a very clear reference. (The TARDIS wiki states that “[t]he unknown future incarnation of the Doctor that first appeared in Marc Platt’s novelisation of Battlefield reappears here in a cyberspace encounter with a supporting character”, but I don’t recall this happening in the book; I only recall the operatic reference to that story, and have not read the novelization of Battlefield so as to know what I’m looking for there. The wiki page for the novelization was singularly unhelpful in that regard.) The Doctor calls the entity “Fred”; this references his intended nickname for Romana in The Ribos Operation, as well as a Robot Yeti in The Web of Fear. The intelligent computer FLORANCE will appear again in Sleepy and Seeing I. Kadiatu will appear next in Set Piece, and several other stories thereafter. The TARDIS’s infection appears again, having begun in Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark, though with very little explanation given in either story; here it manifests as a green cat to match the TARDIS’s silver cat. That thread has yet to be resolved. Benny mentions the Silurians (Doctor Who and the Silurians, et al), who in her time are a known and accepted species with a bit of a lingering grudge against humans. She (or rather, a duplicate of her) mentions the Hoothi (Love and War). The Doctor mentions the events of Earthshock, if only tangentially. He remembers an Australian beach (The Enemy of the World). He mentions the Panopticon and the great seal of Rassilon (The Deadly Assassin, et al). He mentions various stories from his third-Doctor era with UNIT, including Planet of the Spiders; the flashback about Kadiatu’s ancestors also mentions a few, including Robot. Kadiatu dreams of the Pythia (Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible) despite having no direct connection to Gallifrey. Benny references the Butler Institute and the environmental crisis (Cat’s Cradle: Warhead).
Overall: After a slow start for me personally, the book turned out pretty good in the end. It’s not, I think, one of the pivotal stories of the series; but it’s getting us there. It was by no means perfect, but it’s a fair, mostly solid entry, and I enjoyed it.
Next time: We’ll be reading The Highest Science, by Gareth Roberts, another novel adapted later into audio form by Big Finish Productions! See you there.
The Time Lord Archives 