Transit

Just as they get their new friendship going, the Doctor and Benny are separated from each other and from the TARDIS in a freak accident in the King's Cross station of the Sol Transit System, somewhere in Earth's future. Benny is blown down the stunnel to a far distant stop across the solar system leaving the Doctor to search for her amid an Earth culture reeling from a recent war against the Ice Warriors. But the true nature of the accident is not random; something is chewing its way through the system, destroying everything in its path; something that has possessed Benny and recognizes the Doctor for the threat he poses to its plans.

This is a brilliant novel. BRILLIANT. Author Ben Aaronovitch previously brought us the cracking script for Remembrance of the Daleks and has summonned even more creative energy to describe an Earth of the future down to such detail that you can smell it on the page. And I am not just talking the people he has populated the story with - even the mysterious Kadiatu Lehtbridge-Stewart - but the whole culture of Earth and the effects technology have had upon human society. I'll put it this way: when the novel actually comes with a glossary you know you're dealing with something different, and when the terms within are not just a collection of glib phrases but an actual lexicon of a future society ... fantastic.

The first time I read Transit I was... well, I was younger and really was aching for escape. The future vision created in the book is not the stuff of utopia - far from it - but it's alive, it's energetic, it's so different and still so the same. Is this a groundbreaking novel? For the series, I would say yes. The term "cyberpunk" got bandied around quite a bit when the book was being reviewed back then (1992 ... "back then"... oh hell...) and it met with the usual kind of decrying of fan snobs who said it was nothing like cyberpunk - but there's always going to be the elitists in any movement who want to be more radical than anyone around them. Is Transit radical? It's certainly different, with its unabashed commentary on sexuality in the future (the joyboys, and the small child prostitute with condoms tied into her dreadlocks by her mother), its insane level of violence (with one character even named Verhoeven after the director of the ultra-violent, and perhaps somewhat inspirational in this sense, movie Total Recall) and for the first use of the word fuck in a Doctor Who novel.

Yes. The f-word! OH MY GOD THE F-WORD. If the DWIN executive ninnies of the time weren't already all squirrelly about the vanilla sexuality in Timewyrm : Genesys you can imagine what this did to them. There was still that element of fandom that refused to grow up, and refused to let the series grow up in case it forced them to, but there it is, right there on page 41: Maybe time travels fucks with your mind, thought Benny. Of course this just opened the floodgates and the dreaded f-word would just fly out of every mouth in the series, until it got to a point a few years later where the word was dumbed down to the less harmful "cruk". Yeah, gee, I wonder what THAT means? Give me strength.

Transit set into motion a new movement of future history in Doctor Who where the new authors would go to play from time to time - most notably Kate Orman and Craig Hinton. Yes, there would still be alien places, and there would be adevntures back in history, but the future would look a bit different now. And so would Doctor Who.

NEXT EPISODES : THE HIGHEST SCIENCE and THE PIT (a double bill because I promised Jay we'd be ready for the 8th Doctor by autumn...)