The Colony of Lies by: Colin Brake

 

There’s a part of me that believes The Colony of Lies only came about because Colin Brake realized that every time Doctor Who attempted a space western it utterly failed.  The Space Pirates is a mostly missing serial that couches itself in western imagery and tropes while dealing with mining.  The Colony of Lies boasts a cover of the Second Doctor overlooking a town from the Wild West, right in front of a crashed spaceship.  Westerns as a genre come out of America’s manifest destiny, an aspect of colonialism and imperialism creating the imperative of expansion across the country by force.  The history is an inherently bloody one, something the genre has been reckoning with since the 1970s.  The Colony of Lies proposes that humanity’s expansion into space is going to follow the same path of bloody conquest.  This is a novel where the title gives away the twist, the colony setting that does in fact take nostalgic inspiration from the western genre for its level of technology and aesthetic and as such is built on lies.  While the colonists’ story is that they were invaded, reality is that humanity are of course the invaders and displacers of the native population.

 

This twist is nestled; the aliens turn out to not actually be aliens but another group of humans who have been genetically engineered away from humanity.  It’s this secondary twist that undercuts Brake’s major themes examining imperialism.  It cuts out half of the imperialism from the text itself in favor of bioengineering ideas.  Perhaps this is something that was fitting for commentary in the early 2000s, there’s even an argument to be made that in the present.  This is a post-9/11 novel after all, and the bioengineering is for creating super soldiers just as in reality the United States is invading Iraq.  The way The Colony of Lies reads, however, is as if Brake pivoted when the world changed.  It’s certainly not the worst potential pivot, there is a story to be told there, but Brake does not give enough material nor enough characterization to the supporting characters to make it all.

 

Brake is one of the few novelists to characterize the Second Doctor particularly well.  This incarnation of the Doctor in the novel feels as if he is on the run with a unique morality.  The Enemy of the World feels particularly important for Brake’s characterization of the Doctor, throughout the novel he positions himself as the outsider who isn’t going to immediately side with one person.  That’s how Brake facilitates the nestled twist, the Doctor not committing to one side being necessarily good or bad.  This is also technically a novel featuring the Seventh Doctor, he and Ace appearing in the prologue and epilogue, but the best scene is this brief interaction between the Second and Seventh Doctors.  The Doctor is referred to as the Stranger giving the reader the idea that the Doctor has become something completely different by his seventh incarnation, while his second is too terrified to act for fear the Time Lords may finally catch up with him.  It does not stop him of course, but it does enough to make him terrified.  Brake is also quite good at exploring Jamie and Zoe as both highly insecure.  Jamie is particularly well served as there are scenes from his perspective where the reader really understands just how intelligent he is despite his leaps in logic.  He is insecure about if he ever will go back and is slightly horrified on how technology and weapons of war in particular will evolve.  Zoe is paralleled with him as the always logical one but equally insecure in expanding her horizons because this is forward in history for her, she is terrified at the threats the universe face (Brake references several Dalek stories in particular).

 

Overall, The Colony of Lies has fantastic commentary at its center, however Colin Brake’s prose is unable to focus on exactly one commentary to make.  Paralleling itself with Colony in Space, the ideas are there and they are fantastic, even if the secondary twist goes one step too far to weaken the entire story.  The regulars are characterized well even if the supporting characters are almost entirely bland, though the alien race is a cool concept if executed poorly.  It’s actually at its best when it is being a space western, proving that Doctor Who actually can do space westerns in the right circumstances.   6/10.