Jim's Reviews > Doctor Who: The Time Travellers

The first Doctor, along with Susan, Ian and Barbara, materialize in London in 2006. (It's London, but not as we know it.) In 1966, Britain came under the domination of the (not well explained) Machine, which controlled people through television and radio. Since that time, British society has steadily fallen apart, the House of Windsor has been eliminated, and the country has become a military dictatorship. (Funny how would-be dictators see the monarchy as an obstacle to the advance of totalitarianism.) What's more, Britain is at war with the South Africans (who had successfully resisted the Machine). Under the stresses of societal breakdown and war, foreigners, vagrants, and people who don't easily fit face swift execution.

When our story begins, London has been largely destroyed by aerial bombardment and awaits imminent invasion. Amidst the carnage, the British army has been experimenting with time travel. They are a bit cack-handed at it; alternate versions of their test-pilots keep showing up from different time streams, only to be executed by the army.

Obviously, under such a regime, things do not go well for our protagonists, who are outsiders in almost every possible way. For Barbara and Ian, who left their own time in 1963, this version of Britain is especially horrific, because it is their future. That, and they're taken prisoner and sentenced to death.

I rate this book somewhere between three and four stars. The first two thirds of the story dragged a bit, with a lot of arrests, escapes, re-arrests, and so on. The Doctor walks around the time experiment facilities, holding his lapels and tutting. Part of the weakness of the book (for me anyway) is down to the Doctor. As someone who judges all Doctors relative to Tom Baker, I was never much of a William Hartnell fan. I always thought he didn't do very much, except stand around being intellectually superior, uttering cryptic statements and expressing displeasure at any messing about with Time. He does a lot of that in this story.

Despite that, it's still the Doctor, and the author could have done more with his character. The first Doctor wasn't a man of action; however, he was a Time Lord, and the humans in the story are mucking about with Time. I figured the Doctor could have been more assertive, I guess.

There was a lot that I liked about this book. The last third of the story, when our heroes go back to the nascent beginnings of the dictatorship, was first-rate. The characters of Barbara and Ian were quite strongly portrayed. I also thought the author did a good job of exploring the ethical dilemmas of trying to change history, without being merely theoretical about it. As I mentioned, Ian and Barbara are brought face to face with the bad turn their own future would take, and this gives that dilemma an added poignency. The Doctor has warned against the perils of meddling with history, but isn't there also a moral imperative to try to build a better future?

Another good thing about this book is the author's ability to create a believably grim setting for his story. I got a strong sense of how such a entropic environment must look and feel, which was hammered home by accounts of destruction of familiar London landmarks.

The author, in conceiving his version of un-cool Britannia, seems to draw on parallels between the alternative future and the current security situation in the West. It's easy to go too far with comparing our own unease with terrorist threats, distrust of outsiders, and questionable actions taken by security forces with the dictatorship in the book (and I might have read too much into it), but it added a compelling aspect to the story.