The Suns of Caresh by: Paul Saint

 

There’s a curious streak of the Past Doctor Adventures novels to have the occasional debut novel feel like an original science fiction story repurposed into a Doctor Who novel.  The Suns of Caresh is one such novel, spending much of its first act setting up an amphibious alien society that develops in reverse to Earth amphibians, becoming more aquatic as they grow.  Their planet is at risk of a disruptive orbit and their inhabitants seem to be at least partially time sensitive as a Time Lord called Roche seems to be a dictator.  The more front and center protagonist of the novel is Troy Game, a Careshi who escapes to Earth pursued by Roche and the Furies, creatures that inhabit the time vortex as perfect assassins (think Weeping Angels under a different evolutionary route and in a story five years too early for “Blink).  For a debut novel, Saint brings a lot to the table, the prose itself really has a handle on the odd imagery and switching between Troy Game’s rather alien perspective and the human perspective of Simon Haldane, a complete nerd who provides shelter for Troy on Earth.  Saint is playing with a specific brand of science fiction romance between a human and an alien, but subverting it by making it fairly explicitly one-sided from Simon’s point of view.  As a character Simon is quite the insufferable narrator so when you get to his eventual fate it feels more cathartic over anything else, but Troy as a character despite being alien and not understanding Earth and Earth culture is characterized immediately as intelligent and self-assured.  The subversion is particularly nice and when Troy eventually makes contact with the Doctor and Jo there is a lot to get through the back half of the novel where Saint goes off the rails.

 

Saint attempts a time travel story where two other characters take the visage of the Doctor, there is a professor who is living backwards because of Roche, and Roche has his own needs.  He is also specifically Israeli and named after the prophet Ezekiel which feels like Saint trying to say something with the character, but for the life of me it isn’t particularly clear.  Roche as a character is at least an interesting, almost force of nature throughout the second half of the book, written in a way to be a parallel to the Doctor in exile.  This doesn’t quite work as well, Saint makes the decision to set this after Carnival of Monsters and in his introduction to the Doctor is clear that the Doctor is ecstatic to be traveling time again and Jo is almost mystified at traveling more consistently with the Doctor.  Roche also takes on the Doctor’s visage at points and there are scenes near the end of the novel with a lot of the vortex inhabitants having sent the Furies after Roche and later the Doctor.  The Doctor as a character, however, actually does sing off the page even if Saint uses him and Jo sparingly.  They take on the teacher/student relationship that feels very much informed by fandom over many of the actual serials the characters featured in on television, serials that largely would have been available to view on VHS at this time.  The Suns of Caresh is almost written with a generic Doctor/companion pairing in mind and retrofitted to the Third Doctor and Jo, especially apparent with the way Jo interacts with the near future of 1999, a near future that works for basically every single Doctor/companion pairing from the series’ original run.  There just isn’t quite enough strong characterization from Jo in particular to make this work, Saint possibly working off using Sarah Jane as a companion and setting this during Season 11 or maybe somehow using Liz to accommodate the Doctor’s exile.

 

Overall, The Suns of Caresh is a very solid debut science fiction novel, even if in terms of Doctor Who it doesn’t feel as consistent with the leads.  The supporting characters are excellent and Paul Saint clearly has a grasp on imagery and science fiction ideas.  The plot does rattle along quite nice and although the final act becomes murky, it does at the very least end with a high and a particularly optimistic ending which is also nice.  6/10.