A great adventure featuring the 2nd Doctor, Jamie & Zoe, one of my favorite grouping of Doctor and companions.

Brought to The Wheel of Ice in orbit around Saturn by a stubborn TARDIS, which has detected a time anomaly, the Doctor and his friends find themselves drawn into a situation which is quickly deteriorating.

In the moon Mnemosyne is the rare element Bernalium which is being mined by the company Bootstrap. The miners who work to mine Bernalium and their families are housed on the Wheel which is ringed around the moon and the Wheel is, in essence, a company town, with everyone expected to contribute to the future of the colony. Much to Zoe's horror, this includes children as young as seven who are expected to become acclimated to the idea of spending their lives mining.

The inhabitants of the Wheel have done what humans tend to do in any situation and have tried to organize themselves into a sense of order around the rules of the company they work for. As a result, people are classified as As, Bs, and Cs which dictates where and how they live and the expectations of the company.

This set-up is especially aggravating to the teenagers of the colony, as not only does the Bootstrap representative, Florian Hart, tend to point to them when the first vandalism cases begin to appear, but also because their future options are limited. In other words, they have no opportunities to choose their own course in life and this grates. What's more, no one is willing to believe the younger children who've seen the little blue creatures seen stealing parts of machines and computers until it's nearly too late.

It's up to the Doctor to get down to the core of the problem and sort not only the blue beings out, but keep Florian Hart from making bad decisions and creating a situation which could cause a Solar System wide catastrophe.

The basic story is fast moving and highly enjoyable. Baxter is one of those people who can take complex science and explain it to someone like me in understandable and entertaining ways. The only problem I had with this book was when Baxter tried to get into the mind of the alien around which this story is built. I know he was trying to give us the background for the alien but it just threw me out of the story. Otherwise, I liked all of the characters in this book.*

Baxter has a good grasp on Who history and continuity, and places this story in an era slightly before Zoe's own. I almost got the sense that Baxter was trying to recall the best of the MAs and PDAs. I think he succeeds quite well.

This is my first Stephen Baxter book, but now I think I'll hunt up another.


*Well, except Florian Hart - whose character could have been better developed, since she came across as a two-d villain. ( )

An interesting third doctor story, slow (but interesting) at first the themes and scenario really seem to tie into the companions (Zoe and Jamie) and the Doctor. An interesting conglomeration of the two companions, it's effectively a Scottish space station that rotates around an old alien intelligence gone senile mourning the loss of it's planet.

It's more complicated than that... but a good read in the end. ( )

Dragged a bit in places..
( )

An okay read, but I found it dragged a bit. ( )

Media-tie in books are not known consistency in quality. They are typically written by aspiring or struggling authors.

This book is the exception. It was written by the award-winning author Stephen Baxter, author of books such as [The Time Ships].

Baxter writes this tale of the second doctor in the mines of one of Saturn's moons. It is a cinematic tale where all the characters and settings feel real and authentic as a story can get.

If it were not set in the Doctor Who universe, but existed rather as a stand alone story, it would be heralded as a great book in its own right. That being said, the collective weight of the garbage books out there unfortunately bring it down.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves science fiction. ( )