Having read Set Piece, I decided to jump back to this earlier book in the New Adventures series that introduces the character of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart. The author, Ben Aaronovitch, previously wrote the teleplays for the classic Seventh Doctor serials Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield. This novel was controversial at the time of its release because in response to the adult audience of the New Adventures novels, Aaronovitch depicted scenes with profanity, drug use, and sex for the first time in a Doctor Who story.

The main plot involves a transit system that connects the Solar System through "tunnels" which are actually transmat systems that carry "trains" over long distances at faster-than-light speeds. An entity from another dimension enters the transit system like a virus causing power surges and killing people. The TARDIS gets caught in one of the surges separating the Doctor and Benny. This is the first novel in which Benny is traveling with the Doctor and she ends up possessed by the virus, which is an interesting choice when her character hasn't even been fully established yet.

Like other New Adventures I've read, this is a complex novel with dozens of characters and an entire fictional universe in the cyberpunk style without anything really for the reader to latch on to be introduced to the characters and their world. I shouldn't complain so much about the novels' complexity, but I did major in English and read complex novels (heck, I even read Ulysses for fun!), so it's frustrating to struggle with sci-fi tv spinoff novels from the 1990s. Still, there are some great details, such as allusions to the Ice Warriors (here called "Greenies") and a great war. The final showdown between the Doctor and the entity is also well-written. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1444240.html

There was one pedantic point that really annoyed me about this book: Arcturus is spelt incorrectly throughout, missing the first 'r'. A good defemce lawyer would plead that we are not talking about α Boötis but about some other celestial body with the similar name of 'Acturus', but I'm unconvinced.

Apart from that point, I actually rather enjoyed this book, which is a fairly huge admission for me as I am very definitely not a fan of Aaronovitch's two broadcast stories (Remembrance of the Daleks and Battlefield). I found it reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which was pubished two months earlier - so can hardly have been a direct influence; must have both absorbed the Zeitgeist. The Doctor and friends are caught up in a peculiar problem involving AIs and an interplanetary mass transmat system, but also involving grizzled war veterans and various other factions. There is a cracking pace to it.

Besides the mangling of Arcturus, I have one other minor gripe about the book. The previous volume in the series, Love and War, invested much time in introducing new companion Benny Summerfield; but here she (and to an extent the Doctor) blend into background scenery, with much more action going to the Brigadier's genetically engineered warrior descendent, Kadiatu Lethbridge Stewart. She turns out to be a super character in her own right, but it does give the book a mild air of being Kadiatu's adventure in which the Doctor appears trying to rescue Benny, which is not what one expects from a Who book.

Still, very enjoyable. ( )

Did not enjoy this one at all and it thoroughly deserves its bad reputation. there was nothing to latch onto for this reader - no characters that i especially liked, and the concepts were a little mindbending. ( )