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JULY 2010

I’m following the career of the up-and-coming Oli Smith with interest. There are not that many new authors breaking into the BBC Doctor Who range these days, so it’s satisfying to see someone clearly talented coming forward. Following a couple of short stories and a fun, if flimsy, audio book, here we have the first full-length Doctor Who novel from the young Mr Smith, Nuclear Time.

Smith clearly has a soft spot for American movies. His first Who story, Blue Moon, which was published on the BBCi site, took us on a NASA trip to the Moon, while The Runaway Train was an old-fashioned bit of Western fun. Nuclear Time is something of a love letter to Americana - uniform suburban communities, rampant Cold War paranoia, brusque GIs, cherry-lipped, apple-pie blondes, Star Wars T-shirts and classic rock. Taking place in a fa-bricated town in 1981 Colorado, the story evokes late Cold War-era America beautifully, or at least, the British perception of it; after all, most of us are basing all this on the movies that we’ve seen over the years. The storyline is nothing terribly original. Dr Albert Gilroy creates revolutionary computer technology that he develops into androids indistinguishable from human beings. The US military takes him on, funding his research, naturally on the understanding that the weapons potential of these robots is fulfilled. In the end, the droids are so dangerous that they’re all slated for destruction. So far, so straightforward.

It’s less so for the Doctor, Amy and Rory, arriving in Appletown, unaware that it’s anything other than an ordinary American com-munity. With a hint of The Stepford Wives, the perfect community with it’s perfect women in perfect marriages hides deadly machines. They’re harmless, as long as you don’t let on that know that they’re machines. The nature of the Appletown androids is no mystery for the reader, illustrated blatantly on the cover, but it’s fun reading the Doctor and his friends gradually come to the realisation.

It could all have unfolded with great predictability from there, but Smith takes a somewhat different direction. With a nuclear bomb (!) headed for the town (being the only way to wipe out these androids, you see), the Doctor desperately uses the TARDIS to halt the explosive energies in a sort of time field, the unforeseen consequence of which is that his timeline is knocked into reverse, leaving him living backwards through time. It’s during these scenes that the book really works, as the Doctor desperately tries to communicate with the US forces and work out what has led to the nuclear strike. The logic of the Doctor’s backwards actions are rigidly adhered to, to start with, with effect preceding cause, but then Smith introduces the concept of his reversed viewpoint allowing him to alter events slightly. If he changes things enough, time takes a moment to shift things, and he has a short period of moving forwards. Of course, any alteration has consequences, and can put things askew from the Doctor’s point of view. It’s the first novel of the eleventh Doctor’s era that really  embraces the “timey-wimey” stylings of Moffat’s series.

There’s also some fine character work here, with the regular characters each reproduced accurately, while Albert has interesting relationships with his associates - both the surpris-ingly tender friendship with project leader Colonel Geoffrey Redvers, and the touching, if rather creepy, affection he has for his very first creation, the feminine android Isley.

Taking an anti-war stance and playing it as a frantic race against time - in both directions - Nuclear Time is a smashing read with a great rock soundtrack. It even has a fashionable rendition of Don’t Stop Believing - although thankfully not the Glee version.