GodEngine by Craig Hinton
In Brief: With the Tardis destroyed (Yeah, right), The Doctor, Roz and Chris are trapped on Mars and must deal with a Deadly Doomsday Weapon of Deadly Doom.
Meanwhile, a group of Ice Warriors work through a love-triangle and other personal problems. A surprise admission of pregnancy is involved.
It was true in reviews from 1996 and it's true now, GodEngine is God-awful. However it's awful in an (almost) amusingly wrong-headed "What was the author *thinking*?!!" sort of way. The biggest problem with the book *isn't* its sub-par prose style, poor plotting or terrible characterisation. IMHO the really big issue, which had me shaking my head bemusedly throughout most of the book, is how Hinton actually manages to write a Doctor Who book which actually isn't a Doctor Who story.
What do I mean by that? I'm loathe to ever say that there is a "right" way to put together a Doctor Who plot since the format of the series is so open format. From a high level a story involving The Doctor & Co. encountering Ice Warriors on Mars and having to stop a big super-weapon should be business-as-usual, if unimaginative. However the problem I had with GodEngine, and it's similar to what I experienced a loooong while back with the horrid Shadowmind, is that the author has decided that they'd rather write a book for a different series and try to shoe-horn it into the Doctor Who lexicon.
Now often this style of genre-melding can work quite well, as great fun is had with landing the Tardis in the middle of a medieval-adventure/space-opera/Agatha Christie-mystery/etc. and watching the result. However the issue with GodEngine is that the book is primarily a Star Trek/Babylon 5 story with a few Doctor Who trappings added.
The biggest clue for me was the treatment of the Ice Warriors. In the series proper they're possibly the dullest of the trope of returning monsters we've had over the years. Other than being well designed (for the 60s) they're possibly the most *generic* villain/monster ever to appear in the series. They're really just there to do a bit of "WE WILL CRUSH YOU PUNY HUMAN!" as they invade The Moon/Future Ice-covered England/Peladon. It's telling that they're the only major "classic" monster that has not appeared in the show post-2005, I suspect mainly since there's really nothing interesting that can be done with them.
Although I would love to be proven wrong. *After* the Zarbi are brought back of course.
Yet suddenly Hinton has turned them into pseudo-Klingons/Narns with a "noble and long" history of warfare and honour. While there's nothing wrong with an author wanting to beef up what was before an extremely underwritten group, but in GodEngine it's just far too obvious that Hinton wants to turn them into a Star Trek: TNG/DS9 style of alien race. Complete with love-triangles and big sword-fights o' honour. In this regard I found the book to be one of the most dated of the range as this type of "sci-fi" is *so* very 90s.
With the Ice Warriors brought into the foreground so it means that The Doctor seems to almost disappear for most of the book, only popping up in the narrative now and again to spew some exposition and perform his deus ex machina duties when everything starts blowing up. And while there have been many books in the series where The Doctor is somewhat in the background the other regulars are too underwritten to liven things up. Without Benny to act as the "audience identification character" we're left with Chris & Roz who as characters most authors struggle with at the best of times. Chris in particular hasn't been able to move past his inital character description of being "naive and enthusiastic" and is rather irritating as a result. While Roz has managed a bit more depth she's still at times lumbered with being "New Ace V2.0".
However again I have to remember that this book came out in 1996, when B5 and the various Star Trek series were the big names in anything sci-fi/fantasy. I can understand the temptation to take either of those shows as a template on how to do Doctor Who. With the way that the show had ended on a whimper back in 1989 there was a lot of "what if..." going as as the fan-sphere tried to figure out what, if the show were ever to come back, form it should take. So it makes sense to take what is popular at the time, but also completely wrong. When the show *did* come back in 2005 its success was down to really going back to basics in being "an adventure in time and space" and not be a Farscape/Andromeda/Star Trek clone.
With Benny being gone as a regular we've entered the last phase of the New Adventures, since there are now only 11 books to go before the series ends. Over the next run of books the impact of the Paul McGann TV-movie will be increasingly felt. With the BBC deciding to bring the range "in-house" from Virgin Publishing as well as the obvious need to finally move away from the 7th-Doctor things begin to ramp up towards this phase of the series. This is a case where knowledge of what came later is impacting how I see GodEngine since it's basically the last Old-Monsters run-around in the range.
Even the covers of the books have begun to reflect the coming changes, with the late 80s Doctor Who logo given less emphasis and a notable lack of actually featuring The Doctor on the covers.
Otherwise there's just not much else to say, although I've managed to type quite a lot around a book I didn't really enjoy very much (how *me*). GodEngine is easily one of the weakest entries in the entirety of the New Adventures and harkens back to the big stumbles from the start of the series. I can't even give it an "at least it tried" since too much effort went into turning Doctor Who into a 90s-style Sci-Fi story. This sort of "Let's make Doctor Who more like X!" thinking is thankfully something we've never really got in the show proper (barring the 1996 TV-movie, one of its many sins). If any positive from this book can be found it's that at least it made me appreciate how very good indeed most of the series has been.
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