A sub-par effort from a usually reliable Who author
Written: Jun 18 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: the characterizations, as usual
Cons: Sloppiness, not the most exciting story.
The Bottom Line: The bottom line had a Commodore 64 when it was younger!
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| hist's Full Review: |
Blue Box by Kate Orman
A Brief Description of Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a science fiction adventure series about the Doctor and one (or more) of his companions. They travel around in the TARDIS, which looks like an English police box, but is really a time travel machine. It's bigger on the inside then on the outside. The Doctor is a Time Lord, a race of beings who can regenerate when their current body is dying. So far, the Doctor has regenerated seven times, which means he's on his eighth incarnation.
The book series consists of two lines: a line about the Eighth Doctor and his companions, and a line that consists of "past Doctors" (Numbers 1-7). The past Doctors are from the TV series that ended in 1989, while the Eighth has only been seen on television in a movie on the Fox network in 1996.
Blue Box is a novel starring the Sixth Doctor and Peri
Kate Orman is one of the premiere Doctor Who writers today, along with Lance Parkin. When I pick up a book with her name on it, especially a Doctor Who book, I know it's going to be special. She can adapt her style to whatever story she wants to tell. However, she's always written for the "new" Doctor, never a Past Doctor. So when I heard that she was writing a Sixth Doctor book, I was intrigued. When I was finally able to get it, I snapped it up. Blue Box demonstrates once again that Orman has a way with characterization that makes the author-wannabe in me cry. She's captured the regulars almost to a T. The problem is that the book…well, it's a bit dull, actually.
No sooner do the Doctor and Peri land in Washington DC in 1981, then the Doctor just disappears. Peri searches for a while, and then goes to a hotel room to wait for him (thankfully, the Doctor has a seemingly infinite line of credit, something I'm very envious of). When the Doctor finally gets ahold of her, he asks her to track down Bob Salmon, a computer hacker who helped him out. Together with an intrepid computer reporter, the Doctor and friends are trying to track down pieces of a valuable artifact, an alien device that could spell the world's doom if it falls into the wrong hands, hands like those of Sarah Swan. Swan is the ultimate hacker, not caring about world domination, but instead craving the power that computers will have over everybody. To Swan, this will be the ultimate computer, and will allow her to do anything she wants. That's not something the Doctor can allow. Blue Box is the story of the history of computers and hacking, and what one woman almost did to bring it all under one thumb.
Techno-thrillers are all the rage right now, but most of them are on the cutting edge, with fancy gadgets and computer power that makes something the size of a fingernail be able to run the world's computers. Blue Box isn't like that, though. It's the dawn of the computer age and the Internet, when only 200 computers were on the Net. The Doctor and Salmon do their hacking on an Apple II, for goodness sake! Orman has all the lingo down pat, pointing out how bulky the computers are, how slow they were ("Look. It's only uploading itself at 300 baud." "My God. We have only hours."). One of the benefits of setting the book in the past is that you can have the characters make a lot of "predictions" and you get to choose how far off-base they are. Orman seems to have a blast with this, with Salmon talking about how one day people will be ordering pizza online, and how you can't have the general public on the Net or it will go completely down the tubes.
Orman's characterizations are wonderful, especially the Doctor and Peri's. Peri's having a crisis of conscience, wondering what her place with the Doctor really is. She's completely out of her element in this environment, not knowing anything about computers. It gets incredibly boring watching him hack away at the keyboard, and she jumps at any chance to actually do something. The book seems to take place right at the junction between the two television seasons that featured Peri, as they still bicker like a married couple but it's not as harsh as it was in their first season together. The second season seemed to have wiped most of it away, which was too abrupt a change. Here, they have their tiffs but you can see the underlying friendship beneath the whole thing.
The other characterizations are excellent as well. Swan has a lot of facets, and while she's completely amoral, Orman successfully gets inside her head so we can see what makes her tick. She loves power trips, and she'll crush you if you cross her, usually by completely messing with your online identity (phone records, government records, etc). The narrator, a computer journalist who is trying to follow the story, is suitably torn when he starts to realize that there's more to this story then he earlier believed. He still tries to remain impartial, but Swan ends up trying to destroy him as well. I was impressed, as I always am with an Orman book.
There are two major problems with the book, though. The first is the dullness. There's only so much excitement to be had out of people talking to each other on computers, threatening each other on computers, and breaking into people's computers. Orman tries to put some action into it, and there is the usual exciting climax, but much of the book consists of somebody typing away at somebody else. This can be effecting in character studies or books about relationships, but in a Doctor Who book it just falls flat. Orman tries gamely with the characterizations, but I had to plow through the boring parts to get to the good ones.
One other major problem is something I have never seen from Orman before, and that's sloppiness. The book is told as if it's an expose by a journalist. Yet there are scenes that there is no way the narrator could have seen. Perhaps some of it is "fictionalized," but even if that's the case, there are some perspective changes that don't match the style. When Swan is cursing the reporter out in her mind on page 254, he keeps referring to himself in the third person. It was quite strange. Even worse then this, though, is the sloppiness as far as where people are in relation to the story. There's one sequence where the Doctor's supposed to be alone, and we know where Peri and Bob are (back at the reporter's apartment). Yet it then says "Behind the Doctor, Peri and Bob were wincing." While I can't place any other specific incidents of this, I did get that feeling a couple of other times as well. It's almost like she wasn't quite paying attention, or perhaps something changed and she forgot to go back and erase all of the tracks.
The characterizations are what bring this book up to the level that I'm putting it. If they weren't spot-on, this would easily be a 3-star book. Because of them, however, I'm bumping it up to four. It's still one of the weakest books I've seen from Orman, though. Here's hoping her next one will be up to her usual level.
Note: there are two major in-jokes in the book, neither of which you will notice unless you're in Who fandom. The really annoying one is that there is a hacker named Ian Mond, who happens to be one of Orman's friends and a major figure in on-line Who fandom. The cute one is when the reporter makes an observation about being an Australian writer writing an American story for British audiences, which actually fits Orman and this book, she being Australian and everything.
Recommended:
Yes
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