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Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures #44
Doctor Who: The Also People
'Just how technologically advanced are they?' The Doctor frowned. 'Let me put it this way: they have a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords.'
The Doctor has taken his companions to paradise, or at least the closest thing he can find. A sun enclosed by an artificial sphere where there is no want, poverty or violence.
While Chris learns to surf, meets a girl and falls in love with a biplane, Roz suspects an alien plot and Bernice considers that a Dyson Sphere needs an archaeologist like a fish needs a five-speed gear box.
Then the peace is shattered by murder. As the suspects proliferate, Bernice realises that even an artificial world has its buried secrets and Roz discovers what she's always suspected -- that every paradise has its snake.
The Doctor has taken his companions to paradise, or at least the closest thing he can find. A sun enclosed by an artificial sphere where there is no want, poverty or violence.
While Chris learns to surf, meets a girl and falls in love with a biplane, Roz suspects an alien plot and Bernice considers that a Dyson Sphere needs an archaeologist like a fish needs a five-speed gear box.
Then the peace is shattered by murder. As the suspects proliferate, Bernice realises that even an artificial world has its buried secrets and Roz discovers what she's always suspected -- that every paradise has its snake.
272 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1995
About the author
Ben Aaronovitch
169 books13.8k followersBen Aaronovitch's career started with a bang writing for Doctor Who, subsided in the middle and then, as is traditional, a third act resurgence with the bestselling Rivers of London series.
Born and raised in London he says that he'll leave his home when they prise his city out of his cold dead fingers.
Born and raised in London he says that he'll leave his home when they prise his city out of his cold dead fingers.
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September 30, 2026
‘Ladies, gentlemen and machine intelligences,’ he said, ‘I am the Doctor, righter of wrongs, defeater of the dastardly and foe of the phantasmagoric.’ He produced the cards, shuffling them as he continued his spiel. ‘I am here tonight, all the way from the Hackney Empire in the heart of the scenic East End to render to you such a display of prodigious prestidigitation that you shall doubt the very verisimilitude of your sensory apparatus.’
Pick a card, he says! ... Any card you like! ... and prepare to be entertained by the Time Lord.
Would you believe it? I call myself a science-fiction geek and I have never picked a Doctor Who TV episode or book until now, in my seventh decade. It’s only the most successful and the longest running entertainment franchise, according to its wiki page (fans of Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter might beg to differ).
Why did I wait so long? The very size of the offer is daunting, to say the least: more than 800 episodes for the longest running TV show on record, one that is one year older than me. Also the fact that I’m a completist, and I would have preferred to start with season 1, the tapes of which are mostly lost at the BBC.
What to do? When in doubt, pick the card with the name recognition value, especially for genre fan fiction. I liked Peter Grant of the Metropolitan Police a lot, so I picked my card from the middle of the packet held out by the Seventh out of fifteen Doctors. I did feel lost in the first chapters, wondering loudly Who are these people? , where do they come from?, what do they want from me? why should I care about their insider jokes and battle scars?
‘Silly me, forgetting my manners,’ said the Doctor. ‘God, this is Professor Bernice Summerfield, Adjudicator Secular Roslyn Inyathi Forrester and her Squire Christopher Cwej.’
Wait a moment here? When did we stray into a John Denver song? ( ‘Talk to God and listen to the casual reply’ ).
Jokes aside, the confusion clears up fast, once the role of each player is established. The good news is that the book can be read as a stand-alone adventure, albeit one set in a well established fictional universe. The bad news is that the Doctor’s vacation on an all-inclusive alien resort turns into a murder investigation.
‘Oh well, it was a nice holiday while it lasted.’
Apparently, the TARDIS team is recuperating after traumatic events that happened in a previous episode, also penned by Ben Aaronovitch for Virgin New Adventures imprint. A renegade Time Lord (the Doctor), an archaeologist (Benny) and a couple of police enforcers (Roz and Chris) head to a galaxy far, far away from our Earth and our timeline, where an advanced civilization has built a Dyson Sphere around its star. Known as the WorldSphere and home to about 2 trillion ‘people’ ** , this post-scarcity civilization is so evolved it has a non-aggression treaty with the Time Lords of Gallifrey ( ‘Time travel is a form of power and power without responsibility is very dangerous.’ )
** the concept of ‘people’ on the Worldsphere is so wide open, the visitors need to be very careful about what they say and do in order to avoid stepping on any person’s toes, and that includes organic and cybernetic intelligences, the most sensitive of which might be the entity known as God, the super-intelligent AI that has total control over the biosphere of the Dyson Sphere. The ‘people’ that might answer the questions of the investigative team, or just drop in for a drink and a little gossip include, but are not limited to : God, a table, a fish, a parachute, a spaceship the size of a big city, a drone with existential dread, a symbiotic dress at a party, various other bugs and household implements.
‘You could always ask God. I’m sure it knows.’
‘I’m trying to avoid religion at the moment,’ said Bernice.
‘May you be struck down by a thunderbolt,’ said God. ‘Oops, sorry, bad taste remark there.’
‘A stealth drone – I haven’s seen it? Didn’t anyone get it?’ asked God.
‘Everyone got it,’ said SaRa!qava, ‘they just didn’t think it was funny.’
‘So you’re happy being a parachute then?’
‘It feels good to be needed,’ said the parachute. ‘Watch out, ground coming up.’
‘Hey,’ said the table smugly. ‘You name it we’ve got it.’
‘In that case,’ said Bernice, ‘I’ll have an exaggerated sexual innuendo with a dash of patriot’s spirit and extra mushrooms. Roz?’
‘I’ll have the same,’ said Roz, ‘but with an umbrella in it’
They stepped back, amazed at what they had done, triumphant. The fish thrashed on its side, gasping in the air, an eye like a wet pebble stared up at them.
‘What do we do now?’ asked feLixi, panting for breath.
‘I think we’re supposed to bash it on the head,’ said Chris.
‘Well,’ said the fish, ‘ excuse me! ’
The Doctor started banging his spoons between the table and his hand. His face had an expression of dreamy single-minded determination. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he shouted over the racket, ‘that I once broke the Galactic record for continuous spoon-playing. Sixty-seven hours it was. I would have broken the Universal record but a Garthanian telekinetic kept on bending my instruments.’
‘I wonder why.’
I’m jumping all over the plot a little with these extensive quotes, not a bad idea when dealing with time travel and sensitive artificial intelligences, but this kind of silly but smart sitcom dialogue is a big part of my enjoyment with the book. It’s a sort of signature move for Aaronovitch, his tongue-in-cheek delivery, coupled with many pop culture references and a true passion for technology. These were also the main selling points of his more recent series about the Rivers of London.
What I missed in background information on the Doctor Who universe is compensated by the easy identification of the true sources of inspiration in classic SF tropes deployed here, including but not limited to:
- Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Iain Banks – the Culture series ( Bernice wondered how you could go shopping in a culture without money. )
- Isaac Asimov – the Robot series (the three Laws of Robotics)
- Larry Niven – the Ringworld series
- Arthur C Clarke – 2001 A Space Odyssey ( ‘Don’t be silly. You wouldn’t want a sentient machine running a house.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it would get bored,’ said the Doctor. )
- Phillip K Dick’s androids and electric sheep ( ‘ For Goddess’ sake,’ she shouted, ‘stand still so I can kill you.’ )
- Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (the WorldSphere has just finished a war against a hive mind insect civilization: They knew something that had seemingly escaped the notice of the High Priests of the Great Hive Mind of the Universe. Namely that God really was on the side of the big battalions. )
- Franz Kafka ( Someone the size of a man and the shape of a cockroach sauntered over and thanked them for a wonderful party last night. )
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery ( ‘What kind of trees?’
‘I’m designing one that will grow on an asteroid.’ )
- Steven Spielberg ( “I think you’re going to need a bigger set of handcuffs,’ said Bernice. )
The long list of references might give the idea the author has thrown everything but the sink at the plot in the hope something will stick, but that’s not the case: the homage is discreet and well integrated into the main plot: an indestructible war drone is thunderstruck / terminated during a powerful storm at sea while the ‘people’ of the resort were attending a costume ball in honor of the Tardis visitors. While the drone in question was a very annoying customer, both for organics and for fellow machines, ( ‘You get antisocial machines the same way you get antisocial organics.’ ) and there is no shortage of suspects, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the case pose real challenges, in particular given God’s omniscience (which it denies, while ubiquitously listening in to every conversation)
—«»—«»—«»—
‘They’re very practical,’ said saRa!qava.
‘What are?’
‘Skin jackets. Sort of comforting. I had one made from my mother.’
also, ‘What kind of game is long-distance brownian motion?’
‘It’s a guessing game that the machines play,’ said the Doctor. ‘They tag a molecule and try to predict where it will end up after a set period of time. At the easiest level you use a liquid, the next level you use a gas and the hardest is tracking a molecule through a superheated plasma.’
Part of the novel feels like reading the script for a sitcom that is missing its laugh track, but I was genuinely laughing out loud by myself at some of the exchanges and alien situations or instances of culture shock, like nose kissing, square nipples, leather jackets made of ‘people’ skin, suspensor pools (a kind of jacuzzi floating free in the air, the water bubble being held in place by force fields), a sex scene described from the POV of microgametes and enzimes, conversational parachutes or philosophical fishes, and something called ‘metasyntaxic variables’, a useful tool for describing advanced technology in future societies as a thingamywhatsit doodad .
The rest of the novel is quite serious and thought provoking. I took particular notice of the use of artificial intelligence in war, with autonomic combat platforms acting independently of their creators. The ethical questions accompany the control issues implied by technologies that can destroy not only ‘people’ but the actual fabric of the time-space continuum.
A very important distinction to be drawn here is the difference between ‘smart’ and ‘sentient’ , a topic that is widely misinterpreted in our real world with LLC technology. A home appliance that can order drinks, search through a database or regulate the shower water is not the same thing as an awakened warship with a personality issue.
‘What if God lies?’ asked Roz.
‘Are you saying that a large proportion of your war fleet is barking mad?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Bad ship,’ said God. ‘Killed a lot of people for no good reason.’
‘As opposed to killing them for the right reasons,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve always wondered if the victims appreciate the difference.’
‘So you never actually attacked anyone,’ said Roz. ‘You just defended yourselves in an aggressive manner.’
‘Towards the end of the war we did have to pre-emptively defend ourselves because our enemies got a bit wary about attacking us.’
There’s an important subplot that plays to the same morality issues and involves another of the Doctor’s companions ( or is it an adversary?), a genetically programmed psychopathic killing machine named Kadiatu with the similar abilities for time travel as a Time Lord, but I can’t get into details here for fear of spoilers.
I did save for last the most important passage, the one I consider the key to taking the novel seriously and ignore the sitcom buzzing. I think it has bearing on the whole franchise, couched in the terms of a battle between chaos and civilization. It is delivered by Roz, the cynical yet self-sacrificing adjudicator. She is one of the reasons I think I would like to continue with the books and eventually, Time Lords permitting, start on the original TV material.
People don’t live alone, never have, never will and when you live together you need rules – call them laws, tradition, ukuzila , taboos, whatever you like – because sometimes right for you is wrong for me and we’ve got to live together because chaos is always waiting just beyond the light of the fire and the darkness doesn’t knock politely on the door of your hut. [...]
‘Yeah, that’s right, on my own planet too, a hierarchy of contempt based on melanin production. Is that stupid or what? What it comes down to in the end is that someone’s got to walk the line between order and chaos because we all want to live in the light of the fire.
January 21, 2014
The Also People (TAP) by Ben Aaronovich is a sort of rebuttal against the angst 'n' gloom trap that many NA's tend to fall into (especially the two preceding books). It is an easygoing, fun story told with great sensitivity and humor, made even more enjoyable by Aaronovich's effortlessly beautiful prose and one of the most classic settings of all time.
As much fun as it is to read, however, a raging thriller TAP is not. The story itself is more about exploring relationships, large and small, and defining values than it is about running down corridors and saving the universe. There is a plot -- there are several, in fact -- developed just enough to make the book juicy, but keep the character moments possible.
The characters, both regulars and guests, are spot-on. Roz Forrester is, for the first time, a central figure in the story, and even allowed to interact with the Doctor. It's about time, too, because Roz is an interesting person in her own right. However, Aaronovich's real triumph is his handling of the Seventh Doctor. In TAP, the Doctor is not too harsh, not too gushy, but done just right. The Doctor's likability and accessibility are restored, as is his fundamental goodness -- reminding both the Doctor and the reader what he's all about.
There are many more wonderful things about this book: Aaronovich's visual style and ability to create scenes that simply beg to be filmed; his crafting of words, too, supplies no small number of passages that are meant to be savoured. There is also here a sense of family among the TARDIS crew that has been missing for some time: like any family they have their rows, but they also laugh together and appreciate one another. TAP is devilishly funny -- the kind of humor that stems from genuine situations and real people rather than parody or forced silliness. The People and the Also People are some of the best science-fiction ideas to come out of the New Adventures.
Basically, Aaronovich has provided an all-around laugh-and-cry feel-good read.
As befitting the quasi-vacation our heroes find themselves in, TAP is a time to relax, to catch your breath amidst death-defying adventures; although the job of saving the universe can never completely be put on the back burner.
SUMMARY
The Good: A book to which you can go back and re-read your favorite parts.
The Bad: Gratuitous Companion Romance -- how original. Unpredictable, even.
The Ugly: The implications of the Epilogue.
As much fun as it is to read, however, a raging thriller TAP is not. The story itself is more about exploring relationships, large and small, and defining values than it is about running down corridors and saving the universe. There is a plot -- there are several, in fact -- developed just enough to make the book juicy, but keep the character moments possible.
The characters, both regulars and guests, are spot-on. Roz Forrester is, for the first time, a central figure in the story, and even allowed to interact with the Doctor. It's about time, too, because Roz is an interesting person in her own right. However, Aaronovich's real triumph is his handling of the Seventh Doctor. In TAP, the Doctor is not too harsh, not too gushy, but done just right. The Doctor's likability and accessibility are restored, as is his fundamental goodness -- reminding both the Doctor and the reader what he's all about.
There are many more wonderful things about this book: Aaronovich's visual style and ability to create scenes that simply beg to be filmed; his crafting of words, too, supplies no small number of passages that are meant to be savoured. There is also here a sense of family among the TARDIS crew that has been missing for some time: like any family they have their rows, but they also laugh together and appreciate one another. TAP is devilishly funny -- the kind of humor that stems from genuine situations and real people rather than parody or forced silliness. The People and the Also People are some of the best science-fiction ideas to come out of the New Adventures.
Basically, Aaronovich has provided an all-around laugh-and-cry feel-good read.
As befitting the quasi-vacation our heroes find themselves in, TAP is a time to relax, to catch your breath amidst death-defying adventures; although the job of saving the universe can never completely be put on the back burner.
SUMMARY
The Good: A book to which you can go back and re-read your favorite parts.
The Bad: Gratuitous Companion Romance -- how original. Unpredictable, even.
The Ugly: The implications of the Epilogue.
April 5, 2021
One of my favourite Seventh Doctor adventures. Bernice Summerfield, Chris and Roz, a typically plate-spinning and furtive spymaster of a Doctor, and a ram-raid on the Culture universe of Iain M Banks. You really cannot go wrong. There's fan-service aplenty to both Culture and Who, references galore (including Kaldor), and a utopian Dyson Sphere civilisation so over the top that Aaronovitch can literally get away with anything as he makes the Tardis Team chase down a murderer while Benny weighs the life of a woman who is far more than she appears to be...
There are serious points made within on the nature of crime in a utopia and how such a place, devoid of official police forces, might deal with a murderer. And while the stakes don't necessarily encompass the whole universe, The People are still presented as the sort of danger it would be prudent to avoid antagonising.
If you can find a copy of this anywhere, I absolutely recommend it.
There are serious points made within on the nature of crime in a utopia and how such a place, devoid of official police forces, might deal with a murderer. And while the stakes don't necessarily encompass the whole universe, The People are still presented as the sort of danger it would be prudent to avoid antagonising.
If you can find a copy of this anywhere, I absolutely recommend it.
November 23, 2017
I came to this one with high expectations. I was so disappointed.
I class myself as a "big fan" of both Iain M Banks and Doctor Who, so this crossover with a Culture-inspired society (actually ripped wholesale with a few minor changes to the names) seemed appealing to me. Sadly, it failed to hold my interest. The Doctor, Bernice, Roz and Chris wander about a Dyson Sphere, meet some people at a party, have sex, get angsty about past adventures and generally faff about. About halfway through the plot starts up as they get involved in a murder-mystery, but sadly it's all solved with a bit of sci-fi flim-flam.
There are other problems, basically you've got little chance of following this one unless you've read the previous 9 or 10 books, because the focus is on the characters having a bit of down-time.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
There's also a girl on a beach who is a mindless huntress - turns out this is Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, first introduced in Transit. She apparently became a time-travelling, mega-death causing ultra-being in a previous novel, but here she's catching fish. For reasons I couldn't follow she starts to get her memories back and everyone worries she's about to start on a hyper rampage and destroy all of time n'space, but fortunately she dances on a beach instead.
The Doctor stops a war between some Ships (hyper-intelligent spaceships) by talking to them in a scene we don't see. Also, he causes one of them to explode by doing something we don't see. He has set up Kadiatu on this planet by doing something we don't see. Roz somehow solves the mystery of the murdered drone using information we're not privvy to. One of the characters gets pregnant with Chris Cwej's baby but this doesn't seem to be resolved or have an impact on the characters.
It's like the important parts of the story have been deleted and replaced with long boring bits about a baker and her flying bread. There are so many sections that seem to be coming to a point or a climax, then they just stop and are never revisited. I don't find that to be clever writing, it's more confusing.
Also confusing were the character names. Top marks for giving us properly alien-seeming names, but take all those marks away again because the characters weren't strong enough to allow me to differentiate them. If they had (for example) been paired up with the main characters it would have been easier, you could have said "Ah this is a scene with Roz and Am!Xt!s'Qarvi!!" but they all wander about and bump into each other at random.
I didn't like the philosophical Just So story at the start and end of the book. I found it very Pretentious Hancock.
Iain M Banks tends to set his books on the edge of the Culture, or focus on a character from outside the Culture, because a story set on the inside with only Culture characters would be inherently dull. I guess we've got the regular TARDIS team here, but it just didn't kick into life for me.
There is a great bit where Benny and the Doctor get attacked by little sandworms on the beach. There's real threat to the characters and a clever solution that we can understand. If the rest of the novel had given us a bit more adventure and spice like that, I think I would have enjoyed it.
I class myself as a "big fan" of both Iain M Banks and Doctor Who, so this crossover with a Culture-inspired society (actually ripped wholesale with a few minor changes to the names) seemed appealing to me. Sadly, it failed to hold my interest. The Doctor, Bernice, Roz and Chris wander about a Dyson Sphere, meet some people at a party, have sex, get angsty about past adventures and generally faff about. About halfway through the plot starts up as they get involved in a murder-mystery, but sadly it's all solved with a bit of sci-fi flim-flam.
There are other problems, basically you've got little chance of following this one unless you've read the previous 9 or 10 books, because the focus is on the characters having a bit of down-time.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
There's also a girl on a beach who is a mindless huntress - turns out this is Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, first introduced in Transit. She apparently became a time-travelling, mega-death causing ultra-being in a previous novel, but here she's catching fish. For reasons I couldn't follow she starts to get her memories back and everyone worries she's about to start on a hyper rampage and destroy all of time n'space, but fortunately she dances on a beach instead.
The Doctor stops a war between some Ships (hyper-intelligent spaceships) by talking to them in a scene we don't see. Also, he causes one of them to explode by doing something we don't see. He has set up Kadiatu on this planet by doing something we don't see. Roz somehow solves the mystery of the murdered drone using information we're not privvy to. One of the characters gets pregnant with Chris Cwej's baby but this doesn't seem to be resolved or have an impact on the characters.
It's like the important parts of the story have been deleted and replaced with long boring bits about a baker and her flying bread. There are so many sections that seem to be coming to a point or a climax, then they just stop and are never revisited. I don't find that to be clever writing, it's more confusing.
Also confusing were the character names. Top marks for giving us properly alien-seeming names, but take all those marks away again because the characters weren't strong enough to allow me to differentiate them. If they had (for example) been paired up with the main characters it would have been easier, you could have said "Ah this is a scene with Roz and Am!Xt!s'Qarvi!!" but they all wander about and bump into each other at random.
I didn't like the philosophical Just So story at the start and end of the book. I found it very Pretentious Hancock.
Iain M Banks tends to set his books on the edge of the Culture, or focus on a character from outside the Culture, because a story set on the inside with only Culture characters would be inherently dull. I guess we've got the regular TARDIS team here, but it just didn't kick into life for me.
There is a great bit where Benny and the Doctor get attacked by little sandworms on the beach. There's real threat to the characters and a clever solution that we can understand. If the rest of the novel had given us a bit more adventure and spice like that, I think I would have enjoyed it.
February 9, 2021
It was okay.
The story is more or less solid, but occasionally too complex. Who needs unpronouncable names and interest groups cluttering up the pages... I sure don't but okay, that's what it is.
For the most part it's a whodunnit story where the suspects can be both humanoid and/or machine, with a side story of having a character from another story running around untamed.
The story is more or less solid, but occasionally too complex. Who needs unpronouncable names and interest groups cluttering up the pages... I sure don't but okay, that's what it is.
For the most part it's a whodunnit story where the suspects can be both humanoid and/or machine, with a side story of having a character from another story running around untamed.
September 15, 2024
Ben Aaronovitch is no stranger to Doctor Who, after all, he wrote Remembrance of The Daleks and the underrated epic Battlefield. Transit was his first Doctor Who novel and unfortunately it was a disastrous mess of a story that was clunky, poorly put together, and didn't fit with the overall vibe of the range, it was one of the few stories that tried too hard at being adult and mature. The Also People on the other hand is a popular novel that people often regard as one of the best Doctor Who novels ever written. Fingers crossed this works out for me.
After their recent adventures, The Doctor decides to take his companions on vacation to The Worldsphere where the populace has a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords. But The Doctor has an agenda of his own for Kadiatu is here and she is in desperate need of help. This society is populated by many species and sentient machines that collectively call themselves 'The People'. It's a very relaxed society overlooked by a sentient machine called 'God', so when a murder is committed, the people and the intelligent machines are terrified and tensions begin to rise. This is going to be a holiday to remember.
Ben Aaronovitch has written a brilliant novel that was much needed in the Virgin New Adventures. Unlike Transit this is a fast-paced, easy-going novel that is fun, energetic, wholesome, and charming, but most of all imaginative. This book has fascinating world-building and a terrific cast of bizarre characters. The plot is thin in this story so the novel can focus on its characters and creative world-building.
This novel gives all the characters something to do. Roz Forrester gets some much-needed character development while giving us a better idea of who she is, what she stands for, and why.
Overall: This is a terrific book that is admittedly a tiny bit overrated because of how thin the plot is, but it's a creative novel that is wonderfully charming and hilarious. 9/10
After their recent adventures, The Doctor decides to take his companions on vacation to The Worldsphere where the populace has a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords. But The Doctor has an agenda of his own for Kadiatu is here and she is in desperate need of help. This society is populated by many species and sentient machines that collectively call themselves 'The People'. It's a very relaxed society overlooked by a sentient machine called 'God', so when a murder is committed, the people and the intelligent machines are terrified and tensions begin to rise. This is going to be a holiday to remember.
Ben Aaronovitch has written a brilliant novel that was much needed in the Virgin New Adventures. Unlike Transit this is a fast-paced, easy-going novel that is fun, energetic, wholesome, and charming, but most of all imaginative. This book has fascinating world-building and a terrific cast of bizarre characters. The plot is thin in this story so the novel can focus on its characters and creative world-building.
This novel gives all the characters something to do. Roz Forrester gets some much-needed character development while giving us a better idea of who she is, what she stands for, and why.
Overall: This is a terrific book that is admittedly a tiny bit overrated because of how thin the plot is, but it's a creative novel that is wonderfully charming and hilarious. 9/10
February 5, 2020
This was a reread of a book I have read many times. In fact, I have read it so many times that my copy is falling apart, and page 65/66 has departed for a better place. This was my first time rereading this since my early 20s, and I have to say it was both what I remembered and not that.
The bad: Some of the stuff around the African women was a little weird (not really racist but kinda not cool by modern standards). The dialog in the scene where Roz confronts Feli!xi was like an old noir novel. The book fulfills several (bad) NA cliches, including "Chris sleeps with someone," "Benny gets drunk," "The Doctor is accused of manipulating people" (even though I didn't see it). There's also Dep, who decides she wants to have Chris's baby without consulting him about it. Which...what? And I have like half a dozen other petty complaints.
The good: I have rarely met an alien civilization that I quite so wanted to just wrap myself up and live in. And even with my eyes open to the novel's faults, I still feel that way. I like the Dyson sphere, I like the language with its weird pops and clicks, I like the technology, I like God, I like all the sentient machines... I like everything. Oh, and Kadiatu. Of all the characters from the NAs that I have been wanting to see in the new series, Kadiatu is the top of the list. Unfortunately, I think they "adapted" her into River Song, so that will probably not happen...but if the powers that be want to bring the Worldsphere to the screen, I am totally there for that.
The bad: Some of the stuff around the African women was a little weird (not really racist but kinda not cool by modern standards). The dialog in the scene where Roz confronts Feli!xi was like an old noir novel. The book fulfills several (bad) NA cliches, including "Chris sleeps with someone," "Benny gets drunk," "The Doctor is accused of manipulating people" (even though I didn't see it). There's also Dep, who decides she wants to have Chris's baby without consulting him about it. Which...what? And I have like half a dozen other petty complaints.
The good: I have rarely met an alien civilization that I quite so wanted to just wrap myself up and live in. And even with my eyes open to the novel's faults, I still feel that way. I like the Dyson sphere, I like the language with its weird pops and clicks, I like the technology, I like God, I like all the sentient machines... I like everything. Oh, and Kadiatu. Of all the characters from the NAs that I have been wanting to see in the new series, Kadiatu is the top of the list. Unfortunately, I think they "adapted" her into River Song, so that will probably not happen...but if the powers that be want to bring the Worldsphere to the screen, I am totally there for that.
November 24, 2012
After reading the two new Big Finish Benny books on holiday I wanted to carry on with my slow but determined reading of the Doctor Who New Adventures which introduced Benny back in the 90's. Also People is known to be one of the better ones and it didn't disappoint. Benny was superb in it but so were Chris and Roz and of course, the Doctor. I really liked what they did with Kadiatu as well. She would have made a cracking companion. It's nice to see her and Benny reconnecting as she is also in one of the Benny audios set years later. I still haven't finished my re-read of the New Adventure Toy Soldiers as it didn't flow that well for me and I also skipped out Head Games although having just seen Mel in action with the 6th Doctor again I might go back to it.
March 25, 2021
This is one of those books where the world-building is better than the storyline. The story takes place in an idealistic society where humans co-exist peacefully (for the most part) alongside sentient machines which include anything from surveillance drones to food/drink dispensers, travel capsules, space-ships and sentient living spaces.
A vacation for the Doctor and his companions turns into a murder investigation. There seems to be no sense of urgency in tracking down the culprit. Indeed, the Doctor's companions spend a great deal of their time making friends and becoming intimate with them.
Even when the culprit is revealed, it's somewhat of an anti-climax. No, I didn't work out who it was in advance, but I didn't care enough to be bothered with working it out.
A vacation for the Doctor and his companions turns into a murder investigation. There seems to be no sense of urgency in tracking down the culprit. Indeed, the Doctor's companions spend a great deal of their time making friends and becoming intimate with them.
Even when the culprit is revealed, it's somewhat of an anti-climax. No, I didn't work out who it was in advance, but I didn't care enough to be bothered with working it out.
February 19, 2008
It's like Doctor Who meets Iain Banks's Culture. Definitely a must for any fan of both. Well-plotted, and gives us some great character moments for all of the TARDIS crew. It has a flaw common to many stories about the 7th Doctor in his master-manipulator guise - when the great climactic confrontation is over, I'm still not sure I understand really what the Doctor's great plan was. Still, this is up there with the best of the New Adventures range.
January 13, 2011
A book in love with Doctor Who, its characters, and its joyous view of the universe. This novel is a Mozart-worthy opera to an era that seems so long ago, now...but was amazing while it lasted.
February 12, 2026
After all the ultraviolence and emotional upheavals of the New Adventures series up to this point, Ben Aaronovitch gives the reader a sedate rest. The plot runs thus: The Doctor takes his companions to the outer edges of time and/or space to an advanced culture living inside a Dyson Sphere. Here, they can have a seaside holiday seemingly free from the chaos of the rest of the universe. It is not that there are no controversies or problems, but they all seem slowed-down and less urgent than the crew's life has been up to this point. It takes about 70 pages to get to the "problem" of the plot, the murder that gets this cozy sci-fi English cottage mystery going. To that point, the novel reads more like a slice of life piece as the reader gets to know the culture of this environment. The murder is of an intelligent, autonomous drone. The Doctor maneuvers to take over the investigation (in a society that does not have any police or official political structure, merely interest groups), and thus gives each of his companions something to do. This action has the effect of making each of the TARDIS crew think hard about who they are and what relationship they have to The Doctor, including The Doctor himself. This top-level plot, however, is really the front window display for a subplot that turns out to be the main reason The Doctor went to the Dyson sphere: what to do about Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart. The Doctor had some time before hidden away this bio-engineered potential super killer on the Dyson sphere, and set a drone to monitor her as her mind is broken to the point that she is more animal than person. Now she is apparently regaining her memories and personality, so The Doctor must decide whether to think of her as an imminent danger to many thousands of people, and so must act pre-emptively, or whether he should allow her the freedom to become whatever she will become.
The book has some interesting ideas that needed to be worked out a little more. In this culture, nearly every being and every thing is intelligent, i.e. a "person." It works because consciousness is transportable for both organic and machine intelligences. Thus, fish are people, birds are people, and so are houses, tables, drones, and the giant ships, the space ships that fought in protracted space wars now matters of the past. The machines are "also" people. The situation could lead, and should lead, to several interesting philosophical debates about individuality, free will, personhood, intelligence, and so on. However, Aaronovitch often sidesteps these matters in favor of Douglas Adams-style jokes. He does not go full Adams, which I suppose was tempting, but the spirit ever lingers, and in several cases works to the disadvantage of the story. There are also some intrusive winks and nods to the fans. I think the solution to the Kadiatu problem is too convenient, sidestepping several important considerations that Aaronovitch raises to get to the solution.
Thus, for me The Also People is one of the better and certainly more readable of the NA novels. I was disappointed in seeing several potentially interesting avenues closed off in favor of some less interesting and safer ones. Really a 3.5 stars from me.
The book has some interesting ideas that needed to be worked out a little more. In this culture, nearly every being and every thing is intelligent, i.e. a "person." It works because consciousness is transportable for both organic and machine intelligences. Thus, fish are people, birds are people, and so are houses, tables, drones, and the giant ships, the space ships that fought in protracted space wars now matters of the past. The machines are "also" people. The situation could lead, and should lead, to several interesting philosophical debates about individuality, free will, personhood, intelligence, and so on. However, Aaronovitch often sidesteps these matters in favor of Douglas Adams-style jokes. He does not go full Adams, which I suppose was tempting, but the spirit ever lingers, and in several cases works to the disadvantage of the story. There are also some intrusive winks and nods to the fans. I think the solution to the Kadiatu problem is too convenient, sidestepping several important considerations that Aaronovitch raises to get to the solution.
Thus, for me The Also People is one of the better and certainly more readable of the NA novels. I was disappointed in seeing several potentially interesting avenues closed off in favor of some less interesting and safer ones. Really a 3.5 stars from me.
May 10, 2023
I'd give this book 3.5 stars if I could. The setting is fascinating, and the Seventh Doctor is written well. There isn't much of a plot, but I'm actually fine with science fiction and fantasy travelogue stories, usually. What bugged me about this is that all three companions with the Doctor on this adventure are from the future, and therefore are not that impressed or even surprised by all the alien tech on display here. Bernice and Roz seem to spend the whole book almost competing to see who can act the most blasé and jaded about this amazing place the Doctor has brought them to; and while Chris at least has the decency to think it's all pretty cool, he still treats it like a bunch of new toys rather than as anything inherently startling. What the story desperately needs is a contemporary (or earlier) Earth person to just occasionally be gobsmacked by all this amazing stuff; even if they were to react negatively to it, at least such a character wouldn't act jaded.
Midway through the book, we are (re)introduced to a character who had appeared previously in the novel series, apparently in a book I had not read, and Aaronovich never bothers with the necessary few sentences to tell the unitiated who the heck she is, how Bernice knows her, etc., despite the fact that much of the novel ends up revolving around this person.
So, it's one of those novels I'm glad I read for the ideas in it, but getting through it was kind of a slog for me because there's very little plot, and I just didn't find these particular characters in this setting to be engaging enough to sustain my interest without a strong plot.
Midway through the book, we are (re)introduced to a character who had appeared previously in the novel series, apparently in a book I had not read, and Aaronovich never bothers with the necessary few sentences to tell the unitiated who the heck she is, how Bernice knows her, etc., despite the fact that much of the novel ends up revolving around this person.
So, it's one of those novels I'm glad I read for the ideas in it, but getting through it was kind of a slog for me because there's very little plot, and I just didn't find these particular characters in this setting to be engaging enough to sustain my interest without a strong plot.
May 13, 2026
This book seemed to thrive on being complicated. Ben Aaronovitch is clearly a very talented author (kind of ironic to say because I didn't enjoy his novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks at all, another irony considering the story itself was written by him for TV in the first place) and I could tell a lot of time and work went into writing The Also People. Complicated names, complicated settings, complicated society, complicated hyperludes; it very much struck me as someone trying to appear clever but falling head first into pretention. There's seeds of a talented writer there, but it's overwhelmed by all the unnecessary padding and tangents to nowhere.
All that pales in comparison to the reproductive coercion that occurs in the latter half of the book. It was totally unnecessary and contributed nothing to the story besides the fact Dep was doing to Chris what her mother did to her father. Okay, and? We don't get enough inside into Dep or her reasoning for wanting a child or why the hell shes following in her mother's footsteps to get one. Am I supposed to be content that Chris left without ever knowing he's a father? Because I bloody well am not. Why did it go into so much detail about Dep's insides changing and making the baby, too? Didn't need that at all, wish I hadn't read it. That singular moment docked at least a star and a half for me.
By the time I reached the end, I was just glad it was over. Wasn't even satisfied by who the killer was. I had one half guessed but not the other, and even then I just felt a dull sort of "oh" when it was revealed.
Sorry, this one wasn't for me.
All that pales in comparison to the reproductive coercion that occurs in the latter half of the book. It was totally unnecessary and contributed nothing to the story besides the fact Dep was doing to Chris what her mother did to her father. Okay, and? We don't get enough inside into Dep or her reasoning for wanting a child or why the hell shes following in her mother's footsteps to get one. Am I supposed to be content that Chris left without ever knowing he's a father? Because I bloody well am not. Why did it go into so much detail about Dep's insides changing and making the baby, too? Didn't need that at all, wish I hadn't read it. That singular moment docked at least a star and a half for me.
By the time I reached the end, I was just glad it was over. Wasn't even satisfied by who the killer was. I had one half guessed but not the other, and even then I just felt a dull sort of "oh" when it was revealed.
Sorry, this one wasn't for me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 23, 2020
A really nice change of pace for the New Adventures - things take a bit more of a leisurely approach as the Doctor + Co. take a holiday. At the same time, we get introduced to a really alien and interesting culture with the People, which I think so far just beats the Artifact from Parasite as the most out there and alien concept we’ve had in the New Adventures so far.
Character-wise it’s lovely to have a chance to take a breather and have some great stuff for all four regulars, especially giving some great well-needed focus to Roz. (Though the emphasis on her being a bit of a bigot to aliens is something that I hope gets properly moved away from sooner rather than later.). Chris’s subplot veers a bit off somewhere but he still gets some nice scenes throughout. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Benny are both on top form here, with some really great moments both separately and together where their relationship and thoughts about one another are really nicely explored.
There’s another returning face in here as part of the Doctor’s plans, but it’s here that I do feel that plot gets a bit lost, while the focus on the murder of vi!Cari is a lot more engaging with how it unravels.
Character-wise it’s lovely to have a chance to take a breather and have some great stuff for all four regulars, especially giving some great well-needed focus to Roz. (Though the emphasis on her being a bit of a bigot to aliens is something that I hope gets properly moved away from sooner rather than later.). Chris’s subplot veers a bit off somewhere but he still gets some nice scenes throughout. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Benny are both on top form here, with some really great moments both separately and together where their relationship and thoughts about one another are really nicely explored.
There’s another returning face in here as part of the Doctor’s plans, but it’s here that I do feel that plot gets a bit lost, while the focus on the murder of vi!Cari is a lot more engaging with how it unravels.
July 15, 2025
Absolutely brilliant, provided you are open to the idea of a Doctor Who story which sets asides the tropes of adventure fiction more or less entirely in favour of telling a sort of sci-fi slice of life story with some weightier events gradually playing out over the span of the novel. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
September 29, 2021
Probably some of the best world-building there's been in this series so far - the setting felt vivid and autonomous, and I love that; some of my favourite DW stories are similarly memorable. Not much else to say except I'm intrigued about the implications of the epilogue. Hopefully the series will remain up to standard as this plotline develops.
November 12, 2024
As a writer for Doctor Who proper, Ben Aaronovitch penned some of the most exciting stories of the Classic Series' late era renaissance, but his New Adventures always seem to be burdened by technobabble and leaden world building.
January 23, 2025
Another story in dire need of an editor to trim a couple of story elements and rein in the writer's tendency to just add every little weird thing.
February 21, 2012
Doctor Who and the Dyson Sphere
20 February 2012
Question, what is the easiest way to double the price of a pretty ordinary book written in the 90s and turn it into a collectors edition? Do a limited print run. This is basically what they did with the Virgin New Doctor Who books. This book is now over 15 years old and when it was first released you could purchase it for $10.00 Australian dollars (and that was when the Aussie was worth 0.75 US cents) but I just checked the price of this book out on Amazon and for a brand new copy you will be forking out $30.00 US. Used copies start at $23.00 US, and this is not the most expensive. If you want a brand new copy of Just War, expect to be paying upwards of $60.00 US. Now, I don't mind paying top dollar of an antique book in good condition, but a pulp novel, I don't think so.
Anyway, this is one of the stranger Doctor Who books. They land up in what is called a Dyson Sphere. A Dyson Sphere is a sphere that surrounds a star and the inside of the sphere is inhabited by the population. I am not entirely sure how the theory is supposed to work since there will be no night and day within the sphere, and as I understand it, the night and day cycle is important because it keeps the planet cooled down. I believe Mercury is set in a fixed rotation so that one side is always facing the sun and the other side is always facing away from the sun, which means one side is blistering hot, while the other side is freezing cold. It is only a narrow patch between the two sides which is theoretically habitable (ignoring the fact that it is Mercury). Therefore one of the flaws that I see in the Dyson sphere is that the surface of the sphere is always facing the sun therefore there is no way for it to cool down and thus the entire surface is likely to end up burning out.
I first heard of the Dyson Sphere in one of the Rigby-Osbourne books on the future. These books were for children, and they were exploring some of the wonderful scientific postulations that could come about. No doubt the development of a Dyson Sphere would be thousands of years into the future and the race that develops it would by highly advance. This is the case in the Also People, particularly when we consider the blurb which suggests that they have a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords.
Now that is pretty much all I can remember from the book, with the exception of the funny names that they used (they attempted to create names using exclamation marks and the like, which in Kalahari, denotes a clicking sound – a friend from Zimbabwe told me that – gee, I know lots of people from lots of places). While the author may have found it clever, I did not, I found it somewhat confusing and annoying to reading, and in the end I simply skipped over the names, denoting them as this one or that one. Other than that, I can't say much more, and if you haven't read it yet and want to, well, it goes for $30.00 US on Amazon.
20 February 2012
Question, what is the easiest way to double the price of a pretty ordinary book written in the 90s and turn it into a collectors edition? Do a limited print run. This is basically what they did with the Virgin New Doctor Who books. This book is now over 15 years old and when it was first released you could purchase it for $10.00 Australian dollars (and that was when the Aussie was worth 0.75 US cents) but I just checked the price of this book out on Amazon and for a brand new copy you will be forking out $30.00 US. Used copies start at $23.00 US, and this is not the most expensive. If you want a brand new copy of Just War, expect to be paying upwards of $60.00 US. Now, I don't mind paying top dollar of an antique book in good condition, but a pulp novel, I don't think so.
Anyway, this is one of the stranger Doctor Who books. They land up in what is called a Dyson Sphere. A Dyson Sphere is a sphere that surrounds a star and the inside of the sphere is inhabited by the population. I am not entirely sure how the theory is supposed to work since there will be no night and day within the sphere, and as I understand it, the night and day cycle is important because it keeps the planet cooled down. I believe Mercury is set in a fixed rotation so that one side is always facing the sun and the other side is always facing away from the sun, which means one side is blistering hot, while the other side is freezing cold. It is only a narrow patch between the two sides which is theoretically habitable (ignoring the fact that it is Mercury). Therefore one of the flaws that I see in the Dyson sphere is that the surface of the sphere is always facing the sun therefore there is no way for it to cool down and thus the entire surface is likely to end up burning out.
I first heard of the Dyson Sphere in one of the Rigby-Osbourne books on the future. These books were for children, and they were exploring some of the wonderful scientific postulations that could come about. No doubt the development of a Dyson Sphere would be thousands of years into the future and the race that develops it would by highly advance. This is the case in the Also People, particularly when we consider the blurb which suggests that they have a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords.
Now that is pretty much all I can remember from the book, with the exception of the funny names that they used (they attempted to create names using exclamation marks and the like, which in Kalahari, denotes a clicking sound – a friend from Zimbabwe told me that – gee, I know lots of people from lots of places). While the author may have found it clever, I did not, I found it somewhat confusing and annoying to reading, and in the end I simply skipped over the names, denoting them as this one or that one. Other than that, I can't say much more, and if you haven't read it yet and want to, well, it goes for $30.00 US on Amazon.
April 8, 2009
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2144332.html[return][return]This New Adventure is an obvious tribute to Iain M. Banks: the People of the title are very similar to the Culture, a post-scarcity interstellar society with intelligent drone robots and spaceships. Banks himself had mixed feelings about the show. In 2008 he wrote that "some of the Doctor Who episodes over the last few years have been amongst the best SF ever to appear on TV or film and may well prove much more influential than anything I've ever written", but by the time of his last interview he had "fallen out of love" with it. Banks fans who are at least vaguely acquainted with Who will enjoy Aaronovitch's adaptation of the Culture to the Whoniverse; for Who fans, who are of course the primary audience, it's one more well-realised alien culture, with a bit more depth to it than is the norm. [return][return]Apart from the audacity of the setting, it's quite a good story. The Doctor and friends (two of his current companions being their time's equivalent of police officers) are asked to investigate the mysterious murder of a drone, and work through the suspects despite various distractions. Roz in particular gets some very good character development time, which she hadn't really had much in her previous five books. I was less happy about the sub-plot involving the Brigadier's descendant Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart and Bernice; the Seventh Doctor as manipulator doesn't always work for me. But it's a small element of an enjoyable whole.
January 24, 2015
‘Just how technologically advanced are they?’ The Doctor frowned. ‘Let me put it this way: they have a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords.’
The Doctor has taken his companions to paradise, or at least the clocest thing he can find. A sun enclosed by an artificial sphere where there is no want, poverty or violence.
While Chris learns to surf, meets a girl and falls in love with a biplane, Roz suspects an alien plot and Bernice considers that a Dyson Sphere needs an archaeologist like a fish needs a five-speed gear box.
Then the peace is shattered by murder. As the suspects proliferate, Bernice realises that even an artifical world has its buried secrets and Roz discovers what she’s always suspected -- that every paradise has its snake.
January 6, 2014
Everything is here; an intriguing alien world, a compelling murder mystery. Yet there seems to be something missing between the lines. Other than the usual Time Team, the characters appear two-dimensional, but for the fact that many of them are fascinating sentient machines. The pieces have all been set up on the chess board perfectly (ha ha), but the resulting game loses it's glimmer after 150 pages. I stopped caring about the sentient ships or Chris' love affair. Instead, I found myself confused by the author's "epic" descriptions of places and beings that seemed too big for the plot. Much style, albeit some very good style (he knows how to write quite well, particularly for Benny), but not enough substance for this reader. And, for the record, it may have been because I saw the solution for the whodunit a mile away.
June 29, 2013
A rather wonderful Virgin New Adventure, which for me marks the point where the Chris and Roz era finally comes into its own.
This works as a kind of inverse cabin scenario. Rather putting our team in a confined space under constant threat to allow us to explore their relationships, this gives them a massive open post-scarcity world with only occasional threats in order to allow them to explore themselves and let us into who they really are.
Yes parts of it are liberally cribbed from Banks culture novels but Doctor Who has always borrowed from the best and so this works well.
This works as a kind of inverse cabin scenario. Rather putting our team in a confined space under constant threat to allow us to explore their relationships, this gives them a massive open post-scarcity world with only occasional threats in order to allow them to explore themselves and let us into who they really are.
Yes parts of it are liberally cribbed from Banks culture novels but Doctor Who has always borrowed from the best and so this works well.
January 3, 2014
Probably the best New Adventure in the entire series. Great (and consistent!) character development and a vaguely entertaining plot which takes place on a fully realized world. Was it kind of an odd world? Yes. Did it make sense? Not always. But it was consistent within itself, and that was enough to suspend my disbelief. There are so few New Adventures authors who are able to do Roz any justice, and Ben Aaronovitch is definitely one of them. Overall, I've recommend this, along with all the other NA written by Aaronovitch.
December 24, 2012
The story was good, and the world-building interesting (although it sounds like Aaronovitch borrowed heavily from Ian Banks, whose work I haven't read), but I found this one tough to get into and some of the plot lines didn't seem to lead anywhere at all.
August 7, 2011
The acronyms nearly killed me but I survived. Will need to re-read after reading previous novels in the series - it does stand alone but I want to read more of Roz and Chris and Kaidatu's back story.
February 17, 2013
Great characters and a great setting are the extremely solid core of this book. The murder mystery is almost superfluous compared to the Doc's other big problem on the planet ...
September 26, 2022
Even better the second time, particularly after having read the Culture novels proper.
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