...and now the fun begins

I've just finished reading Frayed and it was damn good. I'm not going to bother going into a full review of it seeing as there probably already are several hundred of them out there, but I will say what I think.

Story? Interesting. It's a planet, one gets the impression that it is desolate and far flung, way in the future. And on this planet a group of humans have set up what they call "the Refuge" where every effort is being made to cleanse children of a telepathic gene which may or may not lead them to futures of violence and crime. Outside the refuge arrives a giant rock out of nowhere, and from it emerges an old man, and his granddaughter, who are immediately separated by an attack by the planet's only native life form; the humans call them foxes. As monsters the foxes do very well; they don't speak in any language the humans can understand, they're powerful, they are hard to kill, and they're horrifying to look at. Scared xenophobic humans are always quick to isolte themselves with others like them, and so the old man is immediately accepted into their numbers, and his requests to help him locate his lost comrade are not questioned; after all, there is another human out there at the mercy (such as it is) of the evil, nasty, smelly foxes.

This is the first time the two travellers encounter humans, and over the course of the adventure they adopt human names; the old man becomes known as "the Doctor" while his granddaughter takes on the name "Susan". Thus their travels begins. And the giant rock? It's their Ship, simply named thus far. But those of us in the know are aware of what it is, and what is coming next.

Frayed is not where a new Doctor Who fan should begin, but rather where a longtime fan should go after a while. I would say they could go back at the end and read it, but as the new episodes are set to debut on 26 March of this year, the end may not be as nigh as people once thought.

Dabbling in Doctor Who history can be a challenge, but going back into prehistory can be even more risky. Tara Samms knew what she was doing when she started this, and although the writing style is far beyond what would materialize on screens in November of 1963 - a full 40 years before Frayed was published - this is undeniably Doctor Who.

NEXT EPISODE : TIME AND RELATIVE