Drift by: Simon A. Forward

 

Simon A. Forward’s debut novel Drift is a Doctor Who novel that has left me utterly confused as to how I feel about it.  Forward is a writer I was at least familiar with due to his Big Finish contributions with The Sandman which I have a soft spot for and Dreamtime which is one of the weaker entries in the Big Finish catalogue.  Drift as a novel is quite dense, it uses the full 288 page count afforded to the BBC Books line of novels and the size of the font is quite small meaning a larger word count.  The cover is one of the examples of Black Sheep’s better designs, the TARDIS in a snowy landscape is somehow quite evocative in its simplicity and once you begin reading Drift you begin to understand exactly why that cover works.  The harsh New England winter is the aspect of Drift that works to its fullest extent, Forward manages to portray the weather as ever consuming and ever advancing.  The snow is disorienting and Forward sets it up as the main threat of the novel.  Plus, there’s the general isolation of the setting of a snowstorm that manages to work, however a good idea for a villain does not make a particularly good novel.  This is a premise that should work, snowy settings work throughout the work of H.P. Lovecraft and especially in John Carpenter’s The Thing, both pieces of media that it is clear Forward is inspired by.  The revelations about the blizzards indicate it is some sort of a being from outside of the normal dimension, again a great idea for a novel and with the correct writer it could really have worked.  Simon A. Forward as a writer feels often as if he is trying to hard to make this feel like a piece of Doctor Who fiction that he experienced when he was a child.

 

Drift like many of the Past Doctor Adventures uses the TARDIS team of the Fourth Doctor and Leela, with Forward taking the time to pepper in several references to The Face of Evil and The Robots of Death.  This is essentially to establish where in the Fourth Doctor’s timeline the novel is supposed to take place over doing anything to advance the characters of the Fourth Doctor and Leela.  Leela as a character comes out of Drift better than the Doctor, Forward setting certain scenes from her perspective where he is able to engage in essentially a writing exercise for how to write for a character like Leela.  The noble savage hunter archetype is how Forward writes the character, reflective on the events of The Face of Evil especially since this is a novel where the threat is something bigger than her comprehension.  She also gets the usual fish out of water interactions with the supporting cast, largely a crew of Americans written to be over the top in their Americanness.  The Doctor on the other hand is one of those characters that is honestly difficult to get completely right, Tom Baker as an actor is like Patrick Troughton who is difficult to capture.  Troughton largely due to elusiveness, Baker due to the unpredictability of the character even from the era that Forward is writing from.  Forward just grasps on eccentricity and goes to the way Robert Banks Stewart wrote the character for The Seeds of Doom in terms of harshness and tries melding them, but that doesn’t quite work since The Seeds of Doom works because the eccentricity is especially dialed down into seriousness from the outset because of the threat.  Forward uses this as a mesh here and that just doesn’t mesh nicely.

 

Overall, Drift has some nice ideas and Forward is promising as a novelist, whenever he is describing the setting and actually dealing with the extradimensional threat it is interesting but underutilized.  It’s a novel that just never comes together by making some of its characters over the top in a way to make them one-dimensional.  4/10.