13 - Deceit

Welcome to Deceit: VNA editor Peter Darvill-Evans’ attempt to tie up as many loose ends as possible from the previous twelve novels.  This story, which features the return of Ace after several adventures with Benny, is far better than The Pit before it, but I still didn’t particularly enjoy it.

Let’s start with Ace, who is the most compelling character in this story by far.  After leaving the Doctor in Love and War, Ace has spent three years traveling the galaxy and fighting the Daleks with Spacefleet, and reunites with the Doctor as a more mature version of the character.  There is a particularly good passage early in the book in which Ace finally confronts the Doctor for his manipulation, and she doesn’t even get angry at his spiteful response: she laughs.  For a brief moment, the Doctor is the juvenile one, and “New Ace” has been tricked for the last time.

Unfortunately, while the return of Ace should merit an introspective character-focused book like Nightshade or Love and War, Deceit moves its focus to the sci-fi plot, which leaves much to be desired.  On the colony planet Arcadia, owned by the Spinward Corporation, the settlers live medieval lifestyles and are seemingly ignorant of their past, while Spinward operatives Britta and Lacuna monitor the planet from orbit.  An Earth ship heads to Arcadia; aboard is Ace, an agent named Defries, and the cryogenically frozen “Dalek Killer” Abslom Daak.  The Doctor and Benny organize a rendezvous with Ace on Arcadia, where the group discover that the settlers’ brains are being harvested to build an organic supercomputer called Pool.  Using the block transfer computation from Logopolis, Pool hopes to build a universe of thought for himself, but the Doctor traps him in the Zero Room and jettisons him into space.  This plot may seem somewhat simple, but it suffers from severe pacing issues, with a good portion of the book taken up by dull action scenes.  I also found that it wrapped up the infected TARDIS plot thread from Witch Mark far too easily, but a new series like this is bound to experience growing pains, so it didn’t bother me too much.  Deceit does have some good moments, but it would be very skippable without the importance of Ace’s return.

Even if you skip this book, I do recommend reading the afterword by Peter Darvill-Evans, where he lays out, in very broad strokes, what would constitute part of a series bible were the show still on TV.  There are some interesting tidbits in there about Gallifrey, the rules of time travel, parallel universes, and the possibility of a Missing Adventures range (imagine that!)  As the New Adventures editor, Darvill-Evans was the closest thing Doctor Who had to a showrunner in the early nineties, and it’s interesting to read about his philosophy for the future of the franchise.