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A review by beaconatnight
Doctor Who: Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds
3.0
To my mind there is something intriguing about the idea of a renown author writing in the shilling-shocker genre of TV show tie-in. Harvest of Time is part of a series that delivers original stories (as opposed to the numerous novelizations) of classic Doctor Who. The Third Doctor is the only classic run of the show of which I saw every serial, so I was delighted to find that Alastair Reynolds picked (or was commissioned for) the Jon Pertwee era for his novel.
The story takes places shortly before or after "The Sea Devils" when the Doctor was still exiled on Earth and after the Master was taken prisoner by UNIT. Initially, the great adversary is not the focus, though. UNIT sent the Doctor and his companion Jo Grant to investigate strange occurrences around an oil-drilling platform in the North Sea.
Monsters of the Week are the Sild, an alien race that somehow emerges from the end of time. The tiny buggers make their first appearance as swarms of metal crabs, easily fought off in their initial wave of hundreds, but a real threat when they come in the thousands and eventually millions. It soon becomes evident that capturing the Master is their prime directive.
Actually, it was the Master who called them. I think it wasn't them in particular he addressed with his distress call, but of course he was cocksure that some help would pick up his signal. The so-called time fade certainly wasn't part of his plan, though. Only with honest bafflement he learns that he's somehow "unstitched from time". It's quite amusing how it becomes gradually more difficult for people to remember him, and the Master sure is someone who demands to be remembered.
It's great fun when the Master and the Doctor are forced to team up and travel the very very distant future to solve the big mysteries. It's here when easily the story's most defining discovery unfolds. What they find are thousands of incarnations of the Master, the results of all his past and future regenerations. The advantages of storytelling unbound by budget restraints.
I have to admit, I frequently struggle to fully grasp how Doctor Who plot threads come together. Harvest of Time was no exception, especially in respect to the connection to the events in the North Sea. It's clear very early on that a superior from there somehow traveled through time and became a queen ruling for millions of years. The two Time Lords met her ten million years into her reign and them again eight million years earlier. I loved to imagine the time frame and what this would do to a human mind, but the narrative itself and its connection to the Sild threat could have been stronger.
It was great to return to the Third Doctor one last time, especially since I thought Reynold's writing very well captured the personas of this incarnation, Jo, and especially the real star of the show, the Master. The story might have profited from some shortening, but overall it was good fun. In fact, I was surprised by how similar it felt to watching an actual episode.
Rating: 3/5
The story takes places shortly before or after "The Sea Devils" when the Doctor was still exiled on Earth and after the Master was taken prisoner by UNIT. Initially, the great adversary is not the focus, though. UNIT sent the Doctor and his companion Jo Grant to investigate strange occurrences around an oil-drilling platform in the North Sea.
Monsters of the Week are the Sild, an alien race that somehow emerges from the end of time. The tiny buggers make their first appearance as swarms of metal crabs, easily fought off in their initial wave of hundreds, but a real threat when they come in the thousands and eventually millions. It soon becomes evident that capturing the Master is their prime directive.
Actually, it was the Master who called them. I think it wasn't them in particular he addressed with his distress call, but of course he was cocksure that some help would pick up his signal. The so-called time fade certainly wasn't part of his plan, though. Only with honest bafflement he learns that he's somehow "unstitched from time". It's quite amusing how it becomes gradually more difficult for people to remember him, and the Master sure is someone who demands to be remembered.
It's great fun when the Master and the Doctor are forced to team up and travel the very very distant future to solve the big mysteries. It's here when easily the story's most defining discovery unfolds. What they find are thousands of incarnations of the Master, the results of all his past and future regenerations. The advantages of storytelling unbound by budget restraints.
I have to admit, I frequently struggle to fully grasp how Doctor Who plot threads come together. Harvest of Time was no exception, especially in respect to the connection to the events in the North Sea. It's clear very early on that a superior from there somehow traveled through time and became a queen ruling for millions of years. The two Time Lords met her ten million years into her reign and them again eight million years earlier. I loved to imagine the time frame and what this would do to a human mind, but the narrative itself and its connection to the Sild threat could have been stronger.
It was great to return to the Third Doctor one last time, especially since I thought Reynold's writing very well captured the personas of this incarnation, Jo, and especially the real star of the show, the Master. The story might have profited from some shortening, but overall it was good fun. In fact, I was surprised by how similar it felt to watching an actual episode.
Rating: 3/5