Coldheart by: Trevor Baxendale

 

After two Doctor Who novels that succeed in taking the Eighth Doctor Adventures away into experimental territory, exploring the new relationship between the Doctor, Fitz, and the new human TARDIS version of Compassion and what it means to be on the run from the Time Lords seemed to be what the Eighth Doctor Adventures were going to be until the arc ends.  Then, Coldheart came around.  Coldheart is the second novel from Trevor Baxendale, who’s first effort, The Jupiter Conjunction, which showed strengths in writing conspiracy type stories in the vein of The Ambassadors of Death.  Baxendale does not continue with these strengths in the writing of Coldheart, instead looking at a dying civilization on a planet with a burning surface, but a heart of ice, hence giving the novel the title.  Eskon’s civilians have been slowly mutating into Slimers, genetically inferior creatures with wormlike abilities, and are shunned to the outskirts of the civilization.  The thrust of Coldheart is the mystery of the Slimers and what exactly they are, but the eventual reveal of what’s happening beneath the surface of Eskon is one of those twists that takes out quite a bit of dramatic weight.  The reveal is that there are alien worms that crashed onto Eskon and are secreting a pus that is rewriting the DNA of the citizens who drink from a contaminated water supply a la The Sensorites. While The Sensorites could justify this twist of a poisoned water supply being the cause of the deaths on the planet as it was a story exploring a culture and humanity’s interactions with other species, Coldheart devolves into a standard alien uprising story, except the Doctor actually isn’t on the side of those revolting.

 

Baxendale’s prose is where this book perhaps has its biggest failing.  The prose is full of cliches, including characters saying as you know, and a chapter ending with the shocking revelation that something might be wrong in a Doctor Who book.  It’s moments like these and this commitment to a style that doesn’t have much to distinguish itself above the other books in the range, and when surrounded by books by Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, and Kate Orman, Baxendale doesn’t compete.  It makes some of the genuinely harrowing imagery of characters vomiting snakes and becoming like worms not feel nearly as effective as it easily could have been with a few more drafts and an effort to play up the more disturbing elements of the novel.  As it stands the prose is something that just brings this book down.  Coldheart’s plot is essentially the textbook of a Doctor Who plot, going from story beat to story beat without any interesting characters or connective tissue.  This is a book which perhaps when read in isolation from the rest of the arc could be a lot better, but in the arc it feels like our TARDIS team are barely even characters.  The Doctor is back to being a kind of generic Doctor, not continuing that rather important conflict with Compassion about her rights as a TARDIS, nor including anything that resembles the Eighth Doctor.  It makes this feel like Coldheart might have been meant to be a Past Doctor Adventure which was converted to an Eighth Doctor Adventure.  Compassion fares slightly better, being written with at least an alien and as distant from the Doctor and Fitz.

 

It’s kind of Fitz who is given the biggest character issues here.  Fitz has yet another subplot where he tries to be romantically involved with a woman, and it is at this point where you start to notice just how common a theme that has been, when it is done badly.  The woman in question is Florence, a mute woman who doesn’t even get a name until Fitz actively names her which is something that Baxendale kind of intends to be romantic and humanizing but it just makes the objectification of this woman come into clearer focus.  Fitz’s arc is supposed to be humanizing this woman, but Florence doesn’t ever get any communication skills, and I’m not saying they have to be vocal.  There are ways to make mute characters work and communicate non-verbally, even giving them a deep characterization, but Baxendale doesn’t do that.  Fitz’s plot proves to be an almost pointless diversion and doesn’t actually give us anything new or deep about his character.  Florence could be swapped with any of the other characters to the same effect.  Overall, Coldheart is traditional Doctor Who from an author who originally had a novel which showed promise, but on the whole doesn’t ever rise above being a collection of tropes and cliches executed, rarely with any poise or drama.  It’s an easy book to overlook and ignore in the grand scheme of things and is a disappointment from a genuinely good author.  4/10.