So Vile a Sin by: Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman: Death at the House of Forrester

1996 brought the Eighth Doctor Paul McGann to Doctor Who, but as the plans for a television series fell through, the BBC decided to take back the license to the Doctor Who range of novels from Virgin books.  Virgin finished publishing stories with The Dying Days, a New Adventure to feature the Eighth Doctor and introduce the Bernice Summerfield range of novels, but that wasn’t the last one published.  So Vile a Sin by Ben Aaronovitch sadly had publishing delays after a hard drive crash lost much of the original manuscript.  The novel was handed over to Kate Orman to finish as she and Aaronovitch were good friends.  Off the bat this does cause problems with the novel as some of it feels like an Orman novel and some of it feels like an Aaronovitch novel.  This was always going to happen and it interferes much less than you might think as the two writers have very similar visions for the novel.  The actual plot is very convoluted through the two writers, but from what can be gathered the N-Forms are being used through psychic powers by the Brotherhood to show all the alternate futures that are possible.  It makes sections of the novel feel very surreal to read which is done really well throughout the book.

 

So Vile a Sin is a novel about war.  It presents just how horrible the Brotherhood are, how they are connected to the Forrester family, and how Roz Forrester loses her life saving the universe.  Yes this is the end of Roz and much like the end of Earthshock, we don’t see Roz actually die.  There’s the final charge and you know, she is gone and the Doctor cannot get her back.  The final fifty pages or so of the novel deal with the aftermath unlike Time-Flight.  Benny is called in and we get diary entries about what happened.  Chris loses it as he’s lost his best friend and the Doctor doesn’t know how to react to everything going on around him, going so far into depression that Kadiatu Lethebridge-Stewart has to snap him out of it.  Benny tries to cope while Jason is there to help her through it.  Roz’s family is an interesting beast as they of course are sad, but had her genetic material cloned into a sort of niece who in the story serves as sort of a legacy to the dead companion.

 

The novel is a very serious affair, but Aaronovitch and Orman bring in characters from SLEEPY and Transit to lighten the mood somewhat which is at least humorous, if it really doesn’t serve much of a purpose except to give some light onto those characters.  Really this story is about Roz growing up completely to face the consequences of her actions and her family which is done really well as Orman is excellent at writing character drama.  The conflict is caused by the Empress of the Earth Empire who is a slave to a computer and a puppet to the Brotherhood.  The war has just as many instances of horror as Just War.  We are introduced to Leabie Forrester, Roz’s sister whom she doesn’t get along well with.  Roz has always been presented as a rebel but in the novel we see just how much of a rebel she actually is with her family as they wished her to become a priestess, but she became an Adjudicator instead.  It’s an interesting way of doing a character arc as you have Roz who is a strong character, but her sister is even more interesting.  Leabie is just as difficult as the Doctor when it comes to master plans as she has her own ambitions as she is an aristocrat.

 

To summarize, So Vile a Sin is a very good book with most of its problems coming down to the fact there are two very different writers attempting to write the same story.  The plot is very scattered and the arc really doesn’t get a conclusion, but we do get to say goodbye to a great companion.  I’m still very glad this novel was able to be published and I can recommend it for these reasons but it is only worth 70/100.