NA #5 Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible

In brief: Hmm. Ugh. huh? ZZZZzzzz. Oh! Huh? Hmm.



So now I've moved past The Doctor and Ace fighting The Timewyrm and find myself beginning a threesome of novels under the Cat's Cradle umbrella. While not as strongly linked as with the earlier series these books have a common theme that "something is wrong with the TARDIS", as evidenced by the occasional appearance of a mysterious silver cat.

I suspect that author Marc Platt (who also wrote the 1989's televised Ghost Light) desperately wanted to try to move Doctor Who away from being "that silly kid's/family show"(as if that were a bad thing) as it was perceived at the time and instead make it into Serious Science-Fiction. Remember that we're still only in 1992 when the mindset was that Good=Serious in regards to sci-fi (the days of Alien3, Terminator 2 and the adventures of the USS Talkathon in "Star Trek: The Next Generation"). Unfortunately he forgot that the greatest sin is not Silly Doctor Who or even Bad Doctor Who but is in fact Boring Doctor Who ("The Monster of Peladon", "Underworld", "Terminus", etc.). So with little wit or humour this was fairly tough going.

While the first part of the book and subsequent sections set in a Roman-style Ancient Gallifrey are interesting unfortunately the bulk of the story revolves around boring characters in multiple grey ruined time-zones dealing with the terror brought on by a giant hissing time-leech (I'm still not sure of The Process was an alien intruder or a function of the damaged TARDIS). The book is easily about 100 pages too long and needed to be trimmed. As mentioned the worst part is the long middle section revolves around (a rather blandly written) Ace wandering around the grey wasteland that the TARDIS becomes after crashing into another Time Vehicle from Gallifrey's distant past (Couldn't they have just bought Temporal Air-Bags?). Added to the fact that the Doctor is absent or amnesiac for much of the time means that the novel is somewhat of a chore to read.

However I don't want to say that the book was completely a waste of time since at least Platt tried to push Doctor Who in another new direction, even if it doesn't work. I can on that front appreciate this book much more than Genesys or Apocalypse which were nowhere near as adventurous. So I'll mark down Time's Crucible down as a "failed but bold experiment" and move on.

So maybe this is the Warriors Gate of the book range...