When the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are forced to land the TARDIS unexpectedly, they wind up stranded on a mining colony on an ice moon of Saturn during the early days of Earth’s space exploration. The little colony is little more than a slave camp run by the Bootstrap corporation and it’s melomaniac CEO. But while tensions start to rupture between the children of the colony and their oppressors, a new threat emerges. A much older threat. An ancient threat. And it wants to go home.

Alright, let’s talk about what I liked about this story first.

The world building is great, to start with. In fact it maybe the book’s biggest strength. The author not only lays out this futuristic colony and culture extremely well, but he also fills in the past leading up to it’s creation, giving you an idea of how everyone got there and why.

The author also does a good job of providing little character moments to make you care about his original characters while also representing the regulars very well. I especially liked the conflict Zoe had to visiting her near past, where everything was familiar and yet wrong at the same time to her. And of course, the most successful of these new characters is MMAC the Scottish robot, who you wind up feeling for very deeply.

Though this does lead to a minor problem. Some characters are introduced and then not given much of a resolution... like with First and their growing sentience or Harry trying to reconnect with his estrange kids after a divorce. These plot points are introduced and then either dropped or given a measly pay off.

Worse is the villain's arc. The author tries to give her depth and and a tragic backstory, and it just doesn’t work because her past doesn’t logically connect back to her current goals. The Doctor says she’s just out for revenge, but revenge against whom exactly? No one aboard the colony has anything to do with what happened to her in her childhood, and her plan doesn’t stand to gain her anything against those she does blame for her woes.

Which is a shame because I would have gladly accepted her as just a Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos stand in. She doesn’t actually need to be anything more than greedy and stupid.

Which loops me back around to what I do enjoy about the conflict. The classism and socio-economic disparity between the uber rich and the exploited poor is a tale as old as time, but is sadly even more relevant today than when the book was publish only a decade ago. It’s a nice little allegory to real world problems, with interesting socio-political problems born from advance technology reshaping the world; just as all good science fiction should be.

At least the political conflict is interesting, the alien invasion stuff not so much. The Blue Dolls/Soldiers and the ancient being controlling them, are just a little too similar to Autons and the Nestene to really make an impact. And efforts to try and make them more unique, only fail in the end because of the lack of follow through. The idea that they might have minds of their own are dropped in favor of generic base under siege stuff.

There’s also the weird pacing at times. Like the author builds up to something climatic only to cut away and claim it was resolved off screen. Then we get chapters of exposition instead. Or in the case of the runaways subplot, Jamie having to rescue a bunch of teenagers from their own stupidity over and over again.

I mean there’s only so many times I can read about a dumb kid braking his ankle on a scooter for the umpteenth time, before I start to think that maybe the adults had a point in trying to ‘ground’ them, so to speak.

Really the trip to Titan is such pointless filler in the end and is where the book starts to drag a bit. Which is a shame because it would have been the perfect time to give us some more world building/character development and it just doesn’t. It’s also when the more boring alien invasion stuff reaches it’s peak.

Fortunately, once Jamie returns things start to pick back up again, as the book heads towards it’s finale.

All this is to say, I really enjoyed the novel over all, despite its weaknesses. I think it’s a strong contender for the top five slot in the Second Doctor ranking I’ll do later, but it’s never going to beat the likes of The Invasion.