There are two positive things I can say about the Wheel of Ice.Author Stephen Baxter is superb at the art of world building and Wheel of Ice is full of great concepts: Pioneers in space, a society where humans are segregated by categories A, B, and C. And a more rigorous pioneer lifestyle for youth. The concept of the Archive, the blue dolls, and the plan to reach the Silurians that failed is intriguing as is the necklace that brought Mayor Laws to the Wheel. The idea of a Scottish robot in space is also fun.The audiobook is read by David Troughton, son of Second Doctor Actor Patrick Troughton and he manages to bring his father as well as Jamie McCrimmon to life on the audiobook. His reading of the story is very talented and proficient throughout.The book's strengths are outweighed by its weaknesses. The book is boring. There are too many characters running around, all of them pretty flat and one dimensional. A few (such as Florian Hart) are irritating. The plot crawls particularly through the last half. We're asked to care about characters and situations we have no reason to. For example, we're asked to care that Sam improves relationship with his Mom's ex-husband with no real reason.The Wheel of Ice is like a fantastic set on which a mind numbingly boring movie is shot. Baxter is so busy describing conferences and meeting, and giving us political speeches that he failed to build a convincing plot, so what we're left with is slow and tiresome. Those of a certain age recall late Saturday nights on your local PBS station (if you were lucky) devoted to a BBC phenomenon. The show was called "Doctor Who", and it has the distinction of being the longest-running TV show ever. (I have no idea if that is an accurate statement or not, but I'm running with it…)I remember loving the show---its cheesy special effects, ridiculous costumes, cheap set designs, and incredibly hammy British acting---even though I more often than not fell asleep before the ending, mainly because PBS aired what was originally four or five 30-minute programs (minus commercial breaks) as one long two-hour episode. It was too much for my feeble human brain to handle.The show is still running today, and it has garnered quite a following. The f/x are far better, and the acting has improved somewhat, but what consistently drew fans to the classic episodes as well as the new ones is great writing. The same can be said for the literally hundreds of paperback tie-in novels that have been published over the decades. Granted, I can't vouch for all of them, as I have not read them all myself.Recently, some well-known British science fiction authors have penned a few Doctor Who novels, to great acclaim. Stephen Baxter, an award-winning engineer/mathematician-turned-novelist, published "The Wheel of Ice" in 2012.Fans of the show will be pleased to know that the Doctor in this book is the Doctor played by Patrick Troughton, the one who bore a striking resemblance to Moe Howard, whose companions were a young Scotsman named Jamie and a girl from our future named Zoe. These shows aired during the mid- to late 60s, and they were trippy.In this "episode", the TARDIS lands on a mining station on a moon of Saturn, where the colonists---especially the children---are practically being used as slave labor by a mega-corporation that is extracting a rare and powerful element. There have been a recent spate of sightings of little blue men in the mines, but the corporate bigwigs dismiss them as mass delusions. The situation escalates when equipment and materials begin to go missing, and the corporation immediately blames the labor force of sabotage in an attempt to stop mining.The Doctor, of course, quickly discovers that an ancient alien presence buried beneath the surface of the moon is the culprit, which is all well and good, but he must also deal with the reprehensible issue of child labor and a megalomaniacal corporate administrator who is solely motivated by profit, at the expense of worker's lives and the safety of the solar system. Rather weighty issues, to be sure."The Wheel of Ice" is as fun and endearing as a classic episode, and it will certainly be a must-read for die-hard Who fans, but it is also a decently-written science fiction story written by someone who knows what he is doing.
What do You think about Doctor Who - Rad Aus Eis (2013)?
It was a really good book, that we read aloud as a family of Whovians.
—vonrichtoven
An okay read, but I found it dragged a bit.
—Mike32998
