BBC Past Doctor Adventures

#077. The Wheel of Ice ~ 9/10

◆ An Introduction

Writers of hard science fiction try exceptionally hard not to break known laws of physics while still telling a compelling story. It’s a category of science fiction characterised by its concern for scientific accuracy and logic; making it antithetical to the majority of Doctor Who.

There is a really interesting discussion on r/Gallifrey about what episodes of the show could be considered as hard science fiction. The only one people can agree on is ‘World Enough and Time’: the entire episode hangs on the mechanics of time dilation and is accurate to our current understanding of physics. The body-horror of the Cybermen is also explored in a great deal of detail.

I’ve been looking for something a bit more grounded ever since I watched ‘The Giggle’ – because Neil Patrick Harris dancing to Spice Up Your Life was a camp extravaganza, and it wont leave my brain – so a Second Doctor novel written by a renowned hard sci-fi author seemed like the obvious choice.

◆ Publisher’s Summary

The Wheel. A ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, and home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth. It's a bad place to live. Worse to grow up.

The colony has been plagued by problems. Maybe it's just gremlins, just bad luck. But the equipment failures and thefts of resources have been increasing, and there have been stories among the children of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. Many of the younger workers refuse to go down the warren-like mines anymore. And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

Aboard the Wheel, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation — and they are suspected by some as the source of the sabotage. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could kill them all.

◆ The Second Doctor

Patrick Troughton was one of the finest actors to play the Doctor, and he brought a great deal of charisma to the role. This incarnation frequently gave the impression that he was a bumbling fool who never knew what he was doing. This was a calculated act to fool his enemies into underestimating his true intellect. He had a tendency to panic when events got out of control, but he always acted valiantly in his desire to help the oppressed.

The Second Doctor’s characterisation is generally excellent throughout the book: he is quick to assist colony personnel with their investigations into both the sabotaged equipment, and the strange blue creatures swarming over Mnemosyne.

He was a small man with a mop of black hair cut to a fringe, and somewhat ragged sideburns. He wore a grubby red cravat, clumsily tied, and loud check trousers. The Doctor might have been in his late forties, had he been human. His rather lined face showed only impatience now, but it was capable, Zoe knew, of looks of deep wisdom, as well as childlike smiles of delight. The Doctor isn’t exactly a connoisseur of spacecraft. But he has found himself on rather a lot of them over the years. Usually locked up on one, or escaping at speed from another, which doesn’t always afford the best of views.

◆ Jamie McCrimmon

I was taken aback when I realised how few Jamie stories I’ve actually reviewed. No other companion travelled with the Second Doctor as long as he did; you could easily describe them as best friends – or lovers, if you’re an incredibly unfunny Twitter user with far too much time on their hands. His Scottish charm was undeniable, and I was looking forward to seeing how that would translate into print.

Chapter Thirteen sees the brawny highlander skiing on the sixth-largest moon of Saturn. Clearly, ‘The Wheel of Ice’ was written by someone who adores the character of Jamie. I had absolutely no trouble imagining his voice reading lines in this book, because all his dialogue has been written in Scots. I’ve got to hand it to Stephen Baxter. The bloke has perfectly captured the voice and mannerisms of our favourite time-travelling Highlander.

James Robert McCrimmon, brawny, strong-featured, wore the kilt and shirt with lace-up throat and cuffs that characterised his own origins in the Scotland of the eighteenth century. The effect was spoiled only a little by the pair of roomy carpet slippers on his feet. Jamie came from a technologically primitive culture, relatively, but he had a lot more experience of the Tardis and her whims than Zoe. He thinks Zoe should take a lesson or two from Scots like him. They haven’t forgotten their history. They revel in it. In Jamie’s days with the Doctor he had flown over many landscapes, on Earth, over the moon, and many alien worlds. But the Titan ground he saw below him now reminded him of nothing so much as his home, of Scotland: crumpled chains of mountains, a long narrow lake with a complicated shoreline, rivers snaking down from the higher ground. It was only the colours that were wrong. The lakes and rivers were jet black, not blue or steel grey, and the ground was a murky orange, not the green of forests or meadows. Jamie was reminded of the Land of Fiction, one of the strangest places he had visited with the Doctor, a place beyond space and time where everything had been jumbled up and reversed, just like this.

◆ Zoe Heriot

One of the few companions who could call themselves the Doctor’s intellectual equal, Zoe has always been an interesting character. Her education consisted of harsh mental and physical conditioning; of having her head pumped with nothing but facts and figures. She was encouraged to think that history didn’t exist at all. As if her own age, of the great Stations in space, was all that there ever was, all that ever had been.

Baxter incorporates Zoe’s upbringing into his novel by introducing her to the concept of culture shock. The events unfolding on the Mnemosyne Cincture happened within her lifetime. This isn’t just history. This is her history. The history that was always hidden from her. Here are these people struggling, and I daresay dying, in order to build the world in which she grew up. Feelings of resentment and guilt are running high for her.

She was a short, compact young woman with her hair cut in a neat bob. She had an open, pixie-like face and, when she was in the mood, an infectious smile. She wore a jumpsuit from her own era, the latter half of the twenty-first century, comfortable but form-fitting, panelled with pastel colours. Zoe had once worked as a librarian, and had fallen in love with books. Since joining the crew of the Tardis she had become fascinated by history – or rather, she had joined the crew to discover history, and the wider universe. And she was intrigued by books like this, speculations about the future by a man who had become a historical figure in his own right. Zoe never gets lost. She has an eidetic memory. Perfect recall.

◆ Welcome To The Wheel!

I would argue that world-building is the most crucial element in making an enjoyable novel. Hard science fiction has always been focused on accuracy over spectacle, so I was expecting some pretty dull environments in this book. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I’m really happy about that. Chapter Five opens with a gorgeous description of the titular Wheel.

The Cincture – a posh word for ‘rim’ – was a bracelet four kilometres across, surrounding the little moon. The core of its structure was a mesh of looped cables. And on that thread was strung a series of spheres and ovals, bubbles blown from ice from the captive moon, some hundreds of metres across. Most sparked with artificial light, but others glowed dimly orange by the light of Saturn. The bubbles were colonised; people lived in there. In some of them you could make out the green of growing things – even what looked like a captive forest. The ice bubbles were a chain of worlds in bottles, like snow globes.

I had absolutely no trouble visualising the Mnemosyne Cincture, and then I realised that you wouldn’t want to drink anything hot there. You’d be constantly panicking that your peppermint infusion would melt the walls and ceiling, causing a hull breach and the deaths of everyone around you! Baxter has done a magnificent job with the world-building and scored himself some brownie points in the process.

◆ Blue Man Group

The interlude on page 211 focuses on the first of the Blue Dolls to be created, simply known as “First”. It begins with his initial moments of consciousness, and coming to terms with his purpose in the universe. However, it soon becomes apparent that he is gaining sentience.

First grapples with the agony of self-knowing; grapples with the knowledge that he may die one day, having witnessed Bootstrap guards mowing down his siblings. To put it simply, he’s experiencing an existential crisis only a matter of weeks after his creation. That sort of experience would mess with anybody’s head, let alone someone with a limited understanding of reality.

◆ Conclusion

“Zoe, I suspect that the rings of Saturn are no more a wonder of nature than the mushroom cloud of a nuclear detonation…”

It’s actually taken me five months to get through this book – due to a medical emergency with a family member, and my computer ceasing to function for the entirety of January – but it was so easy to immerse myself back into the gorgeously detailed setting. A huge amount of effort has been put into making the Mnemosyne Cincture unique, conjuring images of this giant pearl necklace floating through space; each pearl being an ice bubble, where colonists experience the harshness of being right on the human frontier.

Sticking with the theme of world-building for a moment, the majority of the colonists living aboard the Cincture are given their own unique identities. Florian Hart is framed as the main antagonist, so spends most of the story acting like this hard-faced cow. Then she elaborates on her family history; her father grew up in a Parisian slum and built himself up from nothing. He worked hard, but ended up losing his fortune following the Ice Warrior fiasco with T-Mat. Unable to face his family or the shame, he spent what little funds he had left making himself disappear. Florian is a thoroughly awful human being, but those details make her feel a lot more three-dimensional.

‘The Wheel of Ice’ is very nearly perfect. The only thing that stops me giving it full marks is Arkive: the controlling influence behind the Blues. It got trapped inside of Mnemosyne during the forming of the Solar system and started luring people towards the moon, in the hopes that they would build it a time machine. Outside of the prologue, Arkive doesn’t really make an appearance till the very end of the book. For that reason, it feels like something of an afterthought. It’s a relatively small blemish on an otherwise brilliant story, one which happens to feature scenes where Jamie rescues one of the colonists from a giant space shark! If you don’t find that immensely cool, then I’m going to assume you are allergic to fun.

Hard science fiction has always been focused on accuracy over spectacle, so I was expecting a fairly dull read from this book. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I’m really happy about that. The base-under-siege formula is a staple of the Troughton era, and Stephen Baxter has refined it. Put simply: go and purchase this excellent novel.