Blue Box

Though "Blue Box" doesn't qualify as one of my favorite "Doctor Who" novels, I must admit that it was quite fun to read. Kate Orman does a wonderful job of helping the reader visualize Colin Baker's sixth incarnation of the good Doctor. He was probably the cockiest of the past Doctors. He was definitely a brash character, and Orman has this nailed. Her development of Peri is very good as well. The story plops the Doctor and Peri at the dawning of the Internet. It also lands the alien Eridani and a few of their toys in the early 80's as well. As usual, these toys may prove to be lethal to humanity unless the Doctor can somehow manage to stop them. Of course, the Eridani aren't the enemy here. That role is given to one Sarah Swan. She's a ruthless telephone/computer fanatic who prefers to battle her enemies through modern 80's communications and computers. She happens upon a couple of the Eridani's toys and becomes entranced by them. She just might destroy the world and not even know it. The story rolls along at a brisk pace and while others have complained that the constant hacking and running gets a little dull, I found that Orman did a nice job of pacing these two aspects of the story very well. The ending could have been a tad better, but it suffices. In short, if you enjoyed the Colin Baker years of "Doctor Who" and his companion, Peri, you're sure to enjoy this offering from Kate Orman. Highly recommended.

Kate Orman is one of the premiere Doctor Who writers today, along with Lance Parkin. When I pick up a book with her name on it, especially a Doctor Who book, I know it's going to be special. She can adapt her style to whatever story she wants to tell. However, she's always written for the "new" Doctor, never a Past Doctor. So when I heard that she was writing a Sixth Doctor book, I was intrigued. When I was finally able to get it, I snapped it up. Blue Box demonstrates once again that Orman has a way with characterization that makes the author-wannabe in me cry. She's captured the regulars almost to a T. The problem is that the book...well, it's a bit dull, actually.No sooner do the Doctor and Peri land in Washington DC in 1981, then the Doctor just disappears. Peri searches for a while, and then goes to a hotel room to wait for him (thankfully, the Doctor has a seemingly infinite line of credit, something I'm very envious of). When the Doctor finally gets ahold of her, he asks her to track down Bob Salmon, a computer hacker who helped him out. Together with an intrepid computer reporter, the Doctor and friends are trying to track down pieces of a valuable artifact, an alien device that could spell the world's doom if it falls into the wrong hands, hands like those of Sarah Swan. Swan is the ultimate hacker, not caring about world domination, but instead craving the power that computers will have over everybody. To Swan, this will be the ultimate computer, and will allow her to do anything she wants. That's not something the Doctor can allow. Blue Box is the story of the history of computers and hacking, and what one woman almost did to bring it all under one thumb.Techno-thrillers are all the rage right now, but most of them are on the cutting edge, with fancy gadgets and computer power that makes something the size of a fingernail be able to run the world's computers. Blue Box isn't like that, though. It's the dawn of the computer age and the Internet, when only 200 computers were on the Net. The Doctor and Salmon do their hacking on an Apple II, for goodness sake! Orman has all the lingo down pat, pointing out how bulky the computers are, how slow they were. One of the benefits of setting the book in the past is that you can have the characters make a lot of "predictions" and you get to choose how far off-base they are. Orman seems to have a blast with this, with Salmon talking about how one day people will be ordering pizza online, and how you can't have the general public on the Net or it will go completely down the tubes.Orman's characterizations are wonderful, especially the Doctor and Peri's. Peri's having a crisis of conscience, wondering what her place with the Doctor really is. She's completely out of her element in this environment, not knowing anything about computers. It gets incredibly boring watching him hack away at the keyboard, and she jumps at any chance to actually do something. The book seems to take

This is the second Doctor Who novel I've read that wasn't a novelization of the TV series, the first being "Strange England" by Simon Messingham. I'm not sure how or why, but so far I've found these Doctor Who novels to generate a suspense that other media-tie-ins like Star Trek or Buffy have never been able to give me. In all cases, the reader pretty much knows who will come out all right in the end (no pun intended there, by the way--despite my love of punmanship that's even bad for *me!*), but there's still a great deal of excitement and edge-of-the-seat thrills to be had.This book is a real treat for two categories of people: a) people who grew up in the early-to-mid '80s, and b) people who used computers back then, particularly Apple II. There are all kinds of references in this book, even down to the unnamed cartoon-themed pizza parlor where we first see the Doctor and Peri. (Wonder if Chuck E Cheez bears any resemblance now to how it was back then?)My one complaint about this book is that it almost seems to have been written for the *Fourth* Doctor and Peri. There are allusions made to the fact that the Doctor and Peri bicker constantly, but we never see much of it. Despite things that were said in the narrative, when I heard the Doctor's dialogue in my head, I kept hearing Peter Davisson's voice; the lines seemed like things that Doctor would have said. Still, I'm a fairly new babe in the world of the Doctor, so perhaps I've just not been exposed to enough of the Fifth Doctor. All I know is, he's generally my favorite and I just expected more sparks to fly between Peri and him.