Doctor Who: The Colony Of Lies [Paperback]

COLONY OF LIES is a woefully disappointing novel, not least because there are comparatively so few adventures available with the 2nd Doctor at the helm. Author Brake manages to capture some of the flavor of the Troughton era, and comes as near as he's able to portraying the characters as we knew them; the trouble lies in the feeling of an enormous amount of padding to bring this work in at novel length. The attempts to infuse the tale with a sense of the Old West fail miserably, this tack being used strictly in an effort to come up with a "'Doctor Who' western". Bleh -- "The Gunfighters" was more entertaining and (blessedly) much shorter. I wonder whether David A. McIntee and/or Mark Gatiss could be influence to take further strolls through the 2nd Doctor's era?...

Please believe me when I say I wanted to like COLONY OF LIES. I'm one of the people who thinks that Colin Brake's previous Doctor Who book, ESCAPE VELOCITY, got a lot of unfair criticism because of expectations that the book never really was going to match. Unfortunately, while I thought ESCAPE VELOCITY was a moderately entertaining adventure, I found COLONY to be a couple of notches below that in quality. I slightly enjoyed it while reading, but on reflection it's not easy to see why. There isn't much that stands out; the things that do distinguish themselves are missteps. The book's central premise is absurd and there's really no sense that this adventure is in any way important. You could probably enjoy this book (and I've certainly read reviews of those who have), but you probably couldn't do so while thinking about it too much.

Colin Brake does a decent job of bringing the regular characters (the second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe) to life. Unfortunately, he does tend to fall into a common trap for Doctor Who novelists. The regulars are quite good when interacting with each other: Zoe plays well with Jamie, and the Doctor trying to keep Zoe and Jamie in line is very evocative of their TV personas. But then Blake splits up his characters for long stretches of the novel, and when he does so they become much more generic and much less like the original characters.

There are also a plethora of silly little oddities that have varying degrees of annoyance. For example, near the beginning, an important character is hit somewhere on their person by a ricocheting bullet. But even after long scenes of the character recovering, the audience is never told where on her body this injury occurred. This makes it quite difficult for the reader to assess how injured the person is. We must rely on the narrative telling us, "No, she isn't recovered yet... No, still not recovered... No, maybe next scene, she'll be better... No, still in bed." For lack of any evidence at all, my brain automatically made the juvenile assumption that someone had had a butt cheek blown away, possibly making the subsequent recovery scenes less thrilling for me than possibly the author intended.

But to be serious for a moment, it's this sort of telling-but-not-showing that makes the book somewhat frustrating, because I want to work things out for myself. This is even more apparent when dealing with the book's central conflict. Thankfully, this is revealed on the back cover blurb, so I can complain about it without revealing spoilers. This planet, Axista Four, is home to a single colony (actually one colony and one tiny, breakaway faction, which is only a stone's throw away). They started with a population of a few thousand but have been slowly decreasing over time due to the unexpected hardships. The sword that now hangs over their heads is word of 80,000 new colonists who will arrive and disrupt their back-to-basics lifestyle.

These are not huge numbers of people. Is there really no room on the entire planet for two small towns? To pick an Earth example, Pennsylvania manages to easily encompass Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and an entire Amish community -- and Pennsylvania is substantially smaller than the size of a planet. If the back-to-basics people are worried about catching a glimpse of these new people and their technology, couldn't the arrivals simply build their colony -- oh, I don't know -- on the opposite side of the planet? Nothing is shown to the reader to explain why this is a problem. The only reason this exists as a story conflict is that the characters and the narrative keep insisting that it is without elaborating as to why. It wouldn't have taken much to fix this problem (and the others like it), but it simply isn't done. And it feels more like laziness or rushed work than anything else.

Also, if we're going to criticize stuff from the back cover, I'd like to wager that the aliens are "doglike" purely to give Jamie the lamest pop culture joke in the history of Doctor Who. This also manages to date the book far quicker than any hairstyle or costume choice on the TV series. Oh, and the blurb mentions the appearances of the seventh Doctor and Ace. The seventh Doctor's involvement really weakens the final conflict, and I'm not convinced that this portion of the story makes any sense at all.

I don't wish to be overly negative, and I'd like to reiterate that I did in fact find much to enjoy while doing the actual page turning. The pacing is good. The secondary characters are not thrilling, but nice. Still, even on that level, I kept bumping into little screw-ups that ripped me out of the story. Like the energy weapon that fires bullets (okay, I suppose one could technically call a gunpowder explosion a form of "energy" -- but this is a science fiction novel and the vocabulary of science fiction novels suggests that an energy weapon is a futuristic ray-gun type thing). Couldn't this sort of thing have been fixed at the editing stage?

The prose is workmanlike. Extremely workmanlike. I doubt that there's an original turn of phrase in the entire two hundred, seventy-two pages. This does make for an exceedingly quick read, but not an especially memorable one. The characters say exactly what the plot needs them to say. The words outside the dialog describe the surroundings adequately. There's little introspection and nothing particularly special. While the number of existing Doctor Who books seems to grow exponentially, there is not one thing that manages to distinguish this adventure from its peers.

The cover and the blurb of Colony of Lies are both semi-misleading, which is a shame. The cover makes it look like it's a Wild West novel, though the blurb on the back makes that a falsehood. However, the blurb on the back says that it also stars the 7th Doctor and Ace. That's true in a sense, but only in the broadest of terms. They star in the prologue and epilogue, and the 7th Doctor also does his patented "behind-the-scenes" routine to help the 2nd Doctor out once. This "help," though, pretty much solves the problem once the 2nd Doctor is able to use it, so I guess that means he's pretty important. It does lead to a nice red herring (well, it fooled me, at least), which is also good.

All in all, Colony of Lies is a pretty good book, though it tries a bit too hard to make the 2nd Doctor sound like he does on television. Usually, this is a good thing, but it does come down a little too hard on the cliché side of things to be good. Of course, as Patrick Troughton did on more than one occasion, Brake has the Doctor saying "Oh my giddy aunt!" when something goes wrong. It's not too bad, though.

Colony of Lies is a lot better than Brake's first Dr. Who book, Escape Velocity. Sure, the Old West motif doesn't work and falls apart rather quickly, seeming superfluous and wrong-headed. Yes, the idea of "sleepers" coming to life and threatening a world is as old as the hills. Brake manages to put a nice spin on the idea, though, and the revelation of what really happened when the colony was founded is actually quite interesting. I think others have given this part short shrift, concentrating on the sleepers themselves, but I rather liked it.

The Old West routine, however, is dull, dull, dull. Not only that, it's useless. First, there's no reason for it. Ostensibly, Ransom chose this time period as the time of purity, where technology doesn't run humans' lives. There are mentions of streetlights and other more modern trappings, though. Even without that little continuity hitch, it all just seems rather pointless, more of an excuse to make some of the characters ride on horses. The cover just adds to the problem, emphasizing this bit over everything else. Couldn't they just have shied away from technology in general, rather than picking a specific time period to emulate? None of the scenes would have changed, other than in the background. And don't get me started on calling the main family on this colony "Kartryte." I almost wanted to scream.

The characterizations are pretty good in Colony of Lies, with a couple of exceptions. The Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie come to life, though there are some elements taken from the series in there. I think Brake really captured Troughton's sense of "playing it by ear," where he sometimes acted before he thought. One sequence in particular comes to mind, where he waves a white flag without even thinking if the aliens will understand what it means. Each of the regulars has a meaty role, though at times they are sidelined for no apparent reason. Zoe gets short shrift in this area, being incapacitated twice and disappearing for large sections of the middle. She does have some great scenes at the end, though her last minute rescue turns out not to be needed so I question why it needed to be in there.

As for the other characters, the colonists have some good roles, though they are a bit two-dimensional. This is only bad because some of them are a bit more important to the story than others. Billy Joe really suffers in this area, as he is a large part of the plot but yet I didn't really feel like I knew him at all. He's a disillusioned boy who wants to join the Realists, and then changes his mind after seeing how the Realists live. It didn't make any sense. The other problems in the characterization department are the Tyrenians. We have three individuals, but I didn't get much sense of them. There's a commander, a regular soldier, and a psycho (he didn't wake up correctly). There isn't much to them, however. Finally, there's Federation Administrator Greene. The back cover blurb really talks him up. The first time we see him, he makes somebody's blood run cold, creating an ominous feeling. He seems to be the most ruthless one of the bunch. However, other than badly affecting one character, he doesn't really amount to much. When I got to the end of the book, I found myself saying "So?"

Finally, a note about the structure of the book. The book is divided into six "episodes," each ending with a cliffhanger. This is a conceit straight out of the television show. This works in Colony of Lies because the other chapters do not end in cliffhangers at all, unlike a lot of books. It really makes this book feel like a television story, and it brought a warm, cozy feeling to this fan.

Colony of Lies is not a great book, but it is a very good one. It's certainly accessible to anybody who doesn't really know about Dr. Who, and it's pretty good for the fan as well. Give it a try.

David Roy

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  2.7 out of 5 stars