Doctor Who: Atom Bomb Blues

Past Doctor Adventures #76

by Andrew Cartmel

Los Alamos, 1944. A World War is being fought. In the American desert, the race is on to build an atomic bomb. The fate of the world is at stake, in more ways than one. The Seventh Doctor arrives, posing as a nuclear scientist; Ace is his driver and research assistant. They are here because someone, or something, is trying to alter the course of history at this most delicate point and destroy the human race. Playing detective among the A-bomb scientists, the Doctor tries to avoid falling under suspicion himself, but the head of Los Alamos security is convinced that something is not quite right about the small, eccentric Scottish research physicist calling himself Dr John Smith. As the minutes tick away to the world's first atom bomb test, the Doctor and Ace find themselves up to their necks in spies, aliens, and some very nasty saboteurs from another dimension.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Doctors, Time Travel, Novels, Historical Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[B Schrodinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doctor Who and the Manhattan Project.

The fantastic team of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, written by that era's script editor, drop in to Los Alamos, 1944. Everything seems to be in order - scientists hard at work trying to make a bomb that could end the war. But there are some secret shenanigans going on with one scientist and a Japanese spy.


I have to say that the Seventh Doctor and Ace team is one of my favourite Doctor/companion teams in the shows history. So when I say they were well-characterised and I could hear their voices, it may just be my love for these two, but I'm sure Cartmel had a good hand in it too. It seems to be set closely following the end of Season 26 and refers back to The Curse of Fenric, and it doesn't draw from any New Adventure material. It seems to be set just before or after the Timewyrm series.

While not a brilliant work, it is a lot of fun, and it is a bit different from the norm. It's on par with the better of the BBC published output that was coming out at the time (10 years ago).

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the standout of the PDA range, the last book to be published in the range.

I just remember that Cartmel really gives a great sense of the stories setting.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

And here we are. Much like he got to be on board when the show was ushered into early retirement (or past-its-prime retirement, depending on your perspective) back in the faraway days of 1989, here former script editor and alleged masterplanner comes back to see the original BBC paperback line of original novels to bed. I don't know if it was planned that way or Cartmel's was just the last one in the desk drawer but there is a certain poetry to it, intentional or otherwise.

Seeing Cartmel's name attached to the last novel, and featuring the Seventh Doctor no less, probably got a lot of people's hopes up that we would see hints of what had once been called "The Cartmel Masterplan", a rumored overarching sensibility that was supposed to have informed the show's last few seasons by making the Doctor a mysterious character again. There's debate as to whether any of this actually made it into the show in a coherent fashion, but the Virgin New Adventure authors took the whatever-the-British-call-a-pigskin and ran with it, culminating in Marc Platt's "Lungbarrow", whose Gothic atmosphere surrounding the enigmatic Seventh Doctor now feels as far removed from this novel as the new series compares to the old, "classic" one. If there ever was a masterplan, so to speak, it seems to have run its course and there's not even a whiff of it here. Instead Cartmel seems interested in telling us a story about the Doctor and Ace from the old days, before she went and got all growed up and the Doctor got all dark and more manipulative than a Borgia convention. There's no hints as to when the story takes place, but it seems to be before "Survival" and probably even earlier given how green Ace seems at this whole thing.

For our last Past Doctor outing, our heroes show up at Los Alamos to help with the research for the atomic bomb, hanging out with all the other wacky scientists who are planning on creating a weapon that will slaughter tons of people in the name of science (this must be before "Remembrance of the Daleks", which means we miss out on the chance to savor the delicious irony). The Doctor has managed to get himself attached to this little coterie and thanks to a super fish-oil, turned Ace into human calculator so she can be useful and not have to sit back in a hut knitting. It doesn't take too long before it becomes clear that something is going on, as the super-hip physics genius Cosmic Ray Morita seems oddly out of place and not because he seems to be calling people "hep-cats" unironically about five years too early, military snoop Major Butcher is constantly looking for saboteurs and, er, the Doctor is hanging out here so it seems that something must be going on.

I've rarely seen any of these novels that coast for so long without there being an immediate threat. It doesn't even become clear until two-thirds of the novel is gone what the stakes even are, who the villains are, or how they even plan on accomplishing anything. In the meantime, the Doctor has enough of a handle on things that we can be assured that something is going to happen but for the most part it seems to be scenes designed purely to kill time or show off the research that Cartmel did on atomic bombs or jazz or Apaches. Ace, surprisingly, comes across as amazingly dumb here, whether she's dressed for the wrong occasion (a joke about her mistaking Los Alamos for the Alamo is stretched out to absurdity, seemingly only to make her seem like a colossal idiot . . . I can't imagine she would dress like that anyway, even if they did go to where she initially thought) or claiming complete ignorance about what a "G-man" is (one of the many occasions where the plot stops so he can patiently explain to her about something that anyone over twelve would probably know). It's refreshing in a way that he didn't go for the old standby of having her blow stuff up but for the most part she's really only here to ask questions and tag along.

Cartmel does have a way of keeping the pages turning, mostly by keeping the mystery just out of focus so that we're wondering what the heck is really going on and even if his Ace suffers by more than a few IQ points, he's version of the Doctor remains the chess-playing hero we all remember without going to the morally grey lengths other writers would take it, he's a mix of humor and alien, the intelligent fellow who gets by via knowing more than anyone else but never quite seeming that way when you face him head-on. Cartmel's other characters also do fairly well, with Major Butcher moving thisclose to the cliche of a bumbling military mind one step behind the Doctor but also being oddly effective in his own way, and sympathetic for being an honorable man doing his job but being way out of his depth. Cosmic Ray pushes the "hip" vibe way too far afield to be comfortable and I'm not sure if Cartmel thought his line of cool patter was funny or he's just highlighting how out of place he is by shooting so the people in the cheap seats can hear. He does get one funny scene where he shocks the staid people of the 1940s by exposing them to the edgy music of the future . . . Duke Ellington, although Cartmel overplays this by making Ace also an old-school jazz fan and then having the characters run into Mr Ellington himself, who apparently has an appetite that could bankrupt a supermarket chain. Between that and the digression with the UFO you get the sense that Cartmel had all these scenes he wanted to write and didn't know where else to put them (and to be fair, the combination we get here would have had no better chance to work anywhere but "Doctor Who", frankly).

But eventually we do get back to the threat at hand and when it does appear the book decides to take a vacation from sanity and go abruptly mental, as a husband and wife cultist team with alternate universe Japanese saboteurs to make a sacrifice that will save valuable jazz recordings and also murder an entire plane of existence. As goofy as all that sounds, it's not all that far off from what actually happens. Fortunately it doesn't take up too much of the book but even considering we spent the last two hundred pages hanging out with physics nerds, aliens and finger-poppin' daddies, it almost pushes the book to the point of "okay, enough of this". The focus once again on alternate universes (right after the last book did, although we don't see it this time) either precognitively predicts the new series Cybermen story or hints at some kind of weird crossover between all the Doctors that we never got to see. The villain's plan, in the time honored tradition of the best "Who" antagonists, makes not a lick of sense (something even the Doctor acknowledges) and while it's probably good that the main evil-doers don't appear until it's almost done to avoid giving them a chance to wear out their welcome, it makes their attempt at a culmination seem less a climax and instead just another thing for the book to overcome. The fact that the Doctor seems to have planned for everything in advance makes you wonder if he doesn't just watch the DVD of his own adventures and take notes. It also resolves pleasantly enough, with all hints of moral complexity pushed to the side and everything neatly explained, just in time for the Doctor and Ace to ride off into the sunset, this time for the final time.

Despite all the flaws in the story, I can't bring myself to despise it and there's really nothing awful in it (unless you count every line of Cosmic Ray's dialogue, and I'm still hoping that's deliberate). It's the kind of story they used to make, not challenging but fun in its way and perhaps that's what was really needed here. There was no reason to break the mold in the last story, just something to give a warm fuzzy feeling before it was tucked away for a little rest. And that's what he accomplished here. With the show beginning to surge again on television, there was no reason to treat this as an end of an era, especially with the new era already in full swing. There would be no more Past Doctor adventures after this, as the line went to a more young adult focus on "current" Doctors and any side adventures would come as big hardcovers written by big SF names. But I'll miss these scrappy books all the time, for giving us adventures that were both comfort food and thoughtful, for teaching us author names to look out for and to avoid, for existing in that vast desert between televised versions and giving people a little spark of "Who" when there was no reason to suspect we'd be seeing anything new again. Chances are we won't see the likes of this for a while but as the youngest old Doctor once said, "Yes, I shall come back." I'm not going to pretend they were all top of the line in quality but in their little ways they were worth it all the same. And for me personally it's the end of a six-plus year attempt to read every one of these and write about them, which to not have any more to look forward to is weird in itself. But it was fun and thanks to anyone who did read them (more people than I realized, sometimes), anyone who ever dropped a note to comment on them and if anyone ever found them at all helpful, bless you, because I'm pretty sure that was an accident.

[David Layton · Rating 2 out of 5]

The final book in the BBC Past Doctor range ends the series on a dull note. Former TV series script editor Andrew Cartmel introduces some ideas with potential, but also introduces too many elements that are just nonsense and leaves too many threads hanging. The book starts with Doctor 7 and Ace posing as British scientists working on the Manhattan Project trying to stop... Well, there's problem number one. We don't ever quite know what they are trying to stop, mainly because Doctor 7 never tells Ace, or never gives her an honest answer. Cartmel writes Doctor 7 as too manipulative, too secretive. He has a plan, and the novel starts when that plan is well under way. Yet, we never really know exactly what that plan is. He also writes Ace as far too much the petulant teenager for my liking. The Doctor continuously hints that they are stopping some plot to disrupt the Manhattan Project, but there is no clear idea of what that plot might be or who is in it. As if realizing this problem, Cartmel manages to drag out a villain in the last 30 pages, a Japanese-American dullard in a zoot suit who wants to destroy the universe because doing so will somehow mean that Japan will win World War II in all possible alternate universes. Cartmel also indulges his taste for turn-of-the-century supernaturalist fiction, making it seem that mathematical equations in one universe are the equivalent of magical incantations in another. There is plenty of 1940s B-movie spy stuff, with tommy-gun weilding henchmen in zoot suits, an Oriental femme fatale, an idiotic military security official, and secret plans sent by encoded jazz records. The biggest problem for me is that by the end, there are too many questions unanswered. How does The Doctor know about this plot against the Manhattan Project in a parallel universe? How does he get himself and Ace into this parallel universe and hide the fact from Ace? How does he just happen to know friendly Apache natives and a visiting alien in a flying saucer in a parallel universe? What happened to the scientist who gets a crush on Ace? Those are just some starting questions. So, the novel reads in a way that suggests that Cartmel had many crazy ideas, threw them all into the novel, and did not put much effort into sorting them all out. It is as if the crazy ideas themselves were enough.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Andrew Cartmel's 7th Doctor/New Adventure novels are many things: preposterous, exciting, pretentious, epic, outrageous, melancholy, witty...sometimes all of these things simultaneously. But they are never boring...and they capture the 7th Doctor perfectly. But reading Mr. Cartmel's BBC Books entry, I can't help feeling someone else is writing under his name...because this isn't the Cartmel I've come to know. I gave up after 60+ pages, utterly bored...and Andrew Cartmel has never been boring. I simply don't understand what happened...but I'll stick with his New Adventure novels.

[david james · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was OK.

I wasn't going to write any more than this, but I will mention that I haven't read any Doctor Who novels for probably 40 years (I'm now 57) and I seem to remember they used to be better.

This was obviously written for a younger audience and although it was well written and the author had a nice flowing style of moving the story along, for me there were too many loose ends and plot holes.

[Reuben Herfindahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't a huge fan of his Virgin Doctor Who Books, but this one is great. Very Curse of Fenric like.

[John Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you submitted something to the BBC Doctor Who book range in the late 90s/early 00s, you could give them any old twaddle if you’d worked on the classic series.

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finishing this book gave me a sense of accomplishment and a sense of sadness. I have been collecting and reading the BBC Books Past Doctor Adventures (PDA) and Eighth Doctor Adventures (EDA) paperback books series for years (at least since 2001 and possibly before that). I've always thought that of the six series (so far) of books based on the BBC television series Doctor Who that the PDAs and EDAs had the best writing and were the closest to the characterizations from the actual TV series. So reaching the last Past Doctor Adventure was sad... but since I've read most of the PDAs, it was also a sense of accomplishment, it is a series of 76 books after all -- that's a lot.

So, getting on to the review of this particular book in the series. Atom Bomb Blues brings Ace and the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy's version, e.g. the 7th Doctor) to New Mexico in 1945 during the development and testing phase of the nuclear bomb. The novel moves very fast at the beginning and introduces some great characters. Later on it gets a bit confusing. However, overall I did really like the book, it was an enjoyable read, and the Doctor and Ace were in character. This is a stand-alone Ace and the Doctor novel and not part of Mike Tucker & Robert Perry's mini-series within the PDA series starring Ace and the Doctor.

One of few things I did find annoying about the PDAs was that every time the series takes the Doctor and his companion to the US there are very basic errors (Dying in the Sun being one of the worst). Unfortunately, Atom Bomb Blues is no exception, with the author continuously mis-spelling "chili" as "chilli". Very distracting. (At the beginning of the novel a Mexican-American cook/housekeeper's chili is an important plot-point of sorts). Minor problem, yes, but annoying anyway. I also think it should have been colder in the New Mexico desert at night, but whatever.

However, I did like the plot and the characters. "Cosmic Ray" seemed a bit out of time (his accent and slang are very 60s) but that gets explained later. Ace was wonderful -- I especially liked how she reacts to the Doctor's withholding information. That was very like the series itself, especially the 7th Doctor Era.

Overall, I recommend this particular book in the BBC Past Doctor Adventures series. This is a nice Swan Song for the series to go out on. The book is an enjoyable, fast read.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2708888.html

this was actually the 76th and last of the Past Doctor Adventures published between 1997 and 2005. It's sort of appropriate that the last book in the series should have been written by the last script editor of Old Who sixteen years earlier, and it's a bit of a callback to earlier times, the Doctor and Ace here being definitely from shortly after The Curse of Fenric (which is similarly set during the second world war) rather from the New Adventures. Views on this from fandom seem to be mixed, but I rather liked it; the Tardis arrives in Los Alamos in 1944, in time for the Doctor and Ace to prevent history from being rewritten by sinister forces attempting to prevent the Manhattan Project, dealing with bone-headed security agents, unwittingly meddling time-travellers and bogus Japanese agents. The settings are decently realised, though I'm sure that people who know the locations could pick holes in them, and the denouement gratifyingly gonzo after the reader spends the first three quarters of the book wondering what is going on. One can imagine the writer mentally seeing this on the screen rather than the page.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is on my to-read list, so I don't have it yet. but I want you all to know I ordered an ACTUAL book, because this one isn't available on kindle and I'm just. that. dedicated. to reading this one.
as you were.


Done, and it was just eh. It could have been a lot better. There were at least three ACTUAL spies at Los Alamos. The one made up for the book is lame and anachronistic and annoying as hell. I mean, I was ready to execute him for crimes against humanity right after he was introduced.

[Jason Towers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars as a standalone novel, four stars if measured against the rest of the Doctor Who production line range. Kind of a low key story, dry even, but Cartmel's prose keeps the pages turning. Interesting to see the 7th Doctor and companion written by the former script editor who guided their characters on TV.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cartmel has a terrific understanding of the characters of Ace and the Doctor which really comes through. The setting is also nicely detailed, though the plot is a bit over-the-top and (ultimately) has some holes in it.

[Yosef Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written by Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel. He really knows the characters of the Doctor and Ace. The overall story is a bit weak and confusing at times. But, a good mix of the historical and sci fi elements that always make for good Doctor Who stories.

[Joseph Teller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A McCoy/Ace doctor who story that involves the Trinity Project. Lots of historical features to the story.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thankfully finally a straightforward book! It has a beginning, a middle and an end! Yay! The plot is well developed, and so are the characters! This was just a breath of fresh air for me.

[Nicholas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Longer than it needed to be, spent too much time on the one-off characters, but mostly, the characterization of The Doctor and Ace seemed not quite right to me.