Imagine The Green Death’s environmental themes mixed with
the scale of Logopolis. Now add in some
extreme tension and some flowing prose and you will have Cat’s Cradle:
Warhead. The novel sees the Doctor and
Ace travelling the globe trying to take down the insidious Butler Institute,
which is extremely reminiscent of International Electromatics and Global
Chemicals. This time their secret is
that they’re looking for people with telekinesis. The story flows nicely from one location to
another, introducing and writing out many characters with time to kill a few of
them off and develop Ace into someone much older. We see the return and death of Ace’s friend
Shreela from Survival who has become a journalist and dies after the Doctor has
her perform one last task. Ace has a
mission in Turkey recovering some items and being, putting it lightly, an all-around
badass. Some of the things Ace does are
great as she goes along with the Doctor willingly.
The supporting characters are so many and have such varying
levels of importance it is a wonder that Andrew Cartmel was able to make all of
them unique. This even includes the
child that befriends the Doctor, only appearing near the beginning and the end
of the novel. You have tech genius Maria
who helps get the plot going before leaving as she has no purpose. Vincent a perverted teenager who has
telekinesis and has been put in suspended animation, also being a plot device
and a well-developed character. Finally
there is Justine who is pretty much a second companion for the Doctor until her
end. It is Justine who has my favorite
section of the book which is her drug trip as she goes along with the Doctor’s
plans. Her arguments with Ace about
magic are also really interesting to listen to.
The things Cartmel do best however are the facts that there
isn’t one real villain of the piece, but there are just people who do different
things. Some of these things are good,
others bad, but all done by human beings.
It creates some fascinating character drama and a compelling story that
isn’t nearly as heavy handed as environmentalist stories often tend to
have. With this there are a few problems
with the novel. First and foremost,
while I praised the characterization, keeping some of the people separate is
very difficult as there is just so many of them to go around. This would be a worse problem if it wasn’t
for the fact that all but maybe two of them are necessary in one way to the
plot. The plot also gets confusing as
you have to track where exactly in the world characters are, but once you
figure that out you get some great pages on pages about them and their
thoughts.
This novel does share a problem with Timewyrm: Apocalypse in
that it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the arc. So far we have no idea what the mysterious
silver cat is and what it has to do with the TARDIS malfunctioning. There also is little of anything to do with
the TARDIS and we start in media res, which shouldn’t be a surprise as Cartmel
only thought the TARDIS should be a means to get to a place and not lingered
on. Also the Butler Institute’s
experiments don’t make much sense and only really come into effect near the end
which has more problems. By the time you
get to the last three chapters you have no idea how it is going to end and
Cartmell does a really quick wrap-up without progressing the story arc. So all in all I give Cat’s Cradle: Warhead an
80/100 for being a genuinely good novel that has a few large problems stopping
it from being as good as Timewyrm: Exodus and Revelation.
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