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Past Doctor Adventures #68

Doctor Who: The Algebra of Ice

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Edgar Allen Poe lies dying in a gutter in Baltimore... The Doctor and Ace cannot help him - his death has already happened. Poe will be taken to a hospital, and will die in three days time without ever coming out of his coma. But even as the Doctor explains this, the man in the gutter groans and expires. Bewildered, the Doctor hurries Ace back to the TARDIS. At the door, they look back and see that the gutter is empty. In a moment, Poe staggers around the corner, drops to his knees in the gutter, then gets up and stumbles into another bar... Can the Doctor discover what is causing the time anomaly? Will he be able to prevent the universe itself from unraveling when everyone seems to have turned against him - even the TARDIS? Will he be able to escape the cold hell of absolute order? The answer, it seems, lies in the algebra of ice...

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2004

247 people want to read

About the author

Lloyd Rose

15 books7 followers
Lloyd Rose is an American writer and one of the few female writers of Doctor Who fiction. She also contributed to the reference book Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It. She has also written for the American television series Homicide: Life on the Street and Kingpin.

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5 stars
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48 (39%)
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Brayden Raymond.
563 reviews13 followers
February 15, 2023
4 down to 3.5. I do think the Brigadier and UNIT pieces are fluff that don't really add much. It certainly isn't the Brigadier at his peak. On the flip side I think Ace is quite peak here, emotionally vulnerable, and outright feral at certain moments. I've always been a fan of 7 and Ace so I enjoyed this, it certainly stands as one of the better 7 and Ace novels I've read but not the best either.
Profile Image for Michael Battaglia.
531 reviews64 followers
May 28, 2013
It's nice to imagine that for one brief, shining moment back in the long ago period of the early 2000s, no matter how implausible the Eighth Doctor arcs were, no matter how tediously bad the Past Doctor Adventures might become, you at least had the hope that Lloyd Rose would publish another "Who" novel and everything would be okay. Somehow, more than any of the other authors that emerged during those times when quality was a roll of whatever the British use for dice, the name "Lloyd Rose" became synonymous with a mark of quality. No matter what else was wrong with the world, you had the comfort of knowing she wouldn't steer you wrong.

As you can probably guess, this one was no exception. Switching over to the Seventh Doctor this time out, she does her best to bring back the glory days of the Virgin New Adventures and comes way closer than anyone who wrote for the BBC line ever did. Handling the Seventh Doctor was always a strange task for the writers that came after Virgin losing the license and the Eighth Doctor becoming the "current" Doctor, as half the reading audience wanted to see Seventh Doctor adventures that were in the same vein as that dearly departed line and the other half wanted to see normal "regular" Who stories like the show used to do, without adding all that needless complexity and moral grey areas that the Doctor became known for later. Most of the Seventh Doctor books were written by the same authors, who did an okay job, but it was still a weird experience, as none of the ones who attempted to capture the New Adventures style could do so in a way that didn't seem a child putting on a suit that's too large for him and pretending he's an expert stock trader. But the more "normal" adventures felt watered down to those of us who had read the other stories, since we saw what the character could be capable of in the right hands.

Rose fortunately remembered, and even better is able to evoke the era without specifically referencing it. Noting some weird skips in time (like a broken record) the Doctor decides to investigate with Ace and soon enough it leads to trouble involving what was no doubt her favorite topic at school: maths. Before long they're bringing in UNIT and studying strange markings in fields, along with some bizarre ice that keeps appearing. The local genius maths guy finds himself trying to solve an even more eccentric colleague's seemingly unsolvable problem and before long it seems clear that someone is using maths as a universal language to communicate with someone else. The question is who and how bad is whatever they want (since you can safely assume it's not good).

For a novel where the engine driving the dilemma is based around mathematical ideas that most people can't even grasp without high level college courses, she does manage to craft a page turner without trying to convince us that a shallow pool is really the deepest of oceans (i.e. Dan Brown) or dazzle us with her intelligence and prove that she really is as smart as these concepts require (*cough*NealStephenson*cough*). While she does dial back the delightful strangeness that was a highlight of her first two novels for the line, the threat is more abstract here and fits the slightly more esoterically complex problems that the Seventh Doctor often faced, giving us aliens that are just this side of unfathomable without becoming ridiculously bombastic world-conquerers and requiring the Doctor to both think fast on his feet and plot out twenty steps in advance. Indeed, his portrayal is probably the best thing about the book, effortlessly recreating the air of both mystery and intense emotional weight that hovered over his character, the notion that this Doctor had made some big decisions because he felt that someone had to and he was the only one willing to bear the burden. He's serious and jocular in equal measure but even his humorous moments are colored in a distanced melancholy and she's able to convey both his alienness and the acute aches that drive him, that he can't quite put into words.

The whole book is a minor leap for her in terms of emotional impact, with even the supporting characters coming across as strange but real people, whether it's resident maths genius Ethan Amberglass or the reporter of weird ephemera just trying to find the truth or even the good ol' Brigadier, guest starring in a story that doesn't make a point of trumpeting it. Even the villain comes across as a person, just a high functioning damaged one. There are several conversations that are more revealing emotionally than we've seen in a while, especially with the Doctor as catalyst and pains are taken to depict not just what toll all this takes on the Doctor, but what it does to everyone who comes in contact with the story. And it pays off, not only does it make the novel seem more geared toward adults who are more interested in reading a good SF story featuring their favorite characters than seeing their favorite TV faithfully and bloodlessly recreated on the printed page, but even in the little moments as well. The ending, which makes great use of the maths concepts detailed earlier, wouldn't have worked if not for the context she had painstakingly established earlier.

Ironically, the only person who doesn't fare well in this is Ace. Someone elsewhere commented that Rose noted she didn't know how to "write" Ace and it does show her as Ace seems to be in that awkward period when she was Ace in the TV show but turning into New Adventure Ace, a more adult and grittier version. Rose doesn't seem to know which way to play it and the results have her doing adults things merely to make it seem adult (the New Adventures were guilty of this as well), including sleeping with someone in a rather cliched scene (which is played for laughs, if that makes it better) that even she questions afterward, although Rose gets good mileage out of the emotional connection later. Some others may not be happy that the aliens aren't well defined but I prefer when the Doctor had to be clever versus something more abstract, as opposed to fighting warlords and high commanders. Whatever keeps us off familiar ground.

As usual she never puts a foot wrong and this is probably the most satisfying Past Doctor novel since, oh geez, "Festival of Death" and probably the most satisfying BBC novel since, well, the last Lloyd Rose one. The biggest shame of this is that, coming to the end of my run through all the BBC novels, I don't have any other Rose novels to look forward to. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to have written anything "Who" related after this novel other than a Big Finish production in 2004 (according to a well known Internet encyclopedia) and given she has some television writing experience it's a shame the new show hasn't asked her to write anything for them. But maybe this was all the "Who" stories she wanted to tell, which is fine in itself, and she's gone back to simply being a fan like the rest of us. It makes it kind of a weird legend that she came out of nowhere and wrote three near perfect books before vanishing back into relative obscurity, but it seems to have just the right amount of strangeness and charm, much like her novels. And unlike most legends, at least we have the proofs.
Profile Image for Jean.
198 reviews14 followers
October 15, 2012
Okay, so I'm a little biased as my other two Lloyd Rose books (most notably City of the Dead) have special positions on my bookshelf so I was obviously looking forward to The Algebra of Ice immensely even though the PDA have always been a rather iffy, mixed bag.

I wasn't disappointed.

The story was surprisingly tight, though it had the tendency to shift as all of Rose's books do, rather suddenly. I felt though that it worked here as she was clearer on the plot, very tight on the prose and excellent in characterization. As a matter of fact, it's not the Doctor or Ace who make the book at all, it's an original character, Ethan the mathematician, who really is the heart of the book, though it would be unfair to deny Ace's role as her relationship with Ethan provides a startlingly personal look at the material. Ethan's mysterious illness is wonderfully handled and pays off at the end as one assumes all along that it must be the impending alien invasion that is causing it which turns out, in fact, to be false and once again takes us to a very human place.

I was pretty good in math at school; took an advanced class but believe me when I say I had no intention of understanding this book. And that's brilliant because I can honestly say, I did! Rose makes it very clear, uses Ace, but in a not as obvious way as sometimes is handled, as an unknowledgable to explain, to demonstrate, to show without boring the audience to death or talking down to them.

Brett is a fantastic baddie, in the best sense of the word (and I had this strange image of Toby Stephens playing him, just gnawing at the scenery!). Too often lately, I've found that sci-fi likes to show us the "gray areas", as they call it: why a villain is doing something, how it's really deep and emotional even if disagreeable. Brett is a nihilist; he's doing it because he can. And most of all, because he's bored, because life isn't up to his standards, because every character in this book is in some way avoiding truly living whether it's out of fear (Ethan) or disdain (Brett). As the Doctor observes at the end, Ace really is the only one in the book who ever really was truly alive.

Not to say the book doesn't have its drawbacks, however. It's a complete regression to the NA days, with the Doctor's seventh incarnation having all the fun sucked out of him, showing it for what it supposedly "truly" is: manipulation; I was never crazy about that particular line of thinking. Ace is sometimes shown to be cringingly naive and I suppose we're supposed to be moved by the way she doesn't recognize the way she's being played (I thought we solved most of this in Curse of Fenric and Ghost Light but alas...). Rose claims that she didn't know if she could write Ace, and it shows terribly sometimes.

But all that aside, this was just a fantastic book; I finished it in two sittings!

Why only three stars? Because of the heavy focus on the original characters, as complex and wonderful as they were to read about. (I originally gave it a full five on Amazon; I think I'm somewhere in between now.)
29 reviews1 follower
October 27, 2021
This was fantastic! An original adventure for the Seventh Doctor and Ace, as played on TV by Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, this is one of my very favourite Doctor Who books. It's one of the few books I genuinely did find it hard to put down, the plot is VERY engrossing and it's written with such skill, it's amazing.

I'll not spoil the plot, but I really would like to just highlight the way the book handles sex. Doctor Who books usually have an incredibly immature attitude to the subject, thinking it funny to make it canon that Ace lost her virginity on a spaceship floor, or the like. But this takes what so easily could have been written as tacky erotica and makes it this delicate, beautiful thing. Very well done.

If there's one criticism, it's that the scenes featuring Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart feel somewhat redundant. He doesn't really do much in the novel apart from offer exposition, and one suspects he was present to sell more copies of the book-although his involvement is hardly unique, he also met the Seventh Doctor and Ace in the TV story Battlefield, and its novelisation.

However, this isn't enough to spoil what's a near flawless book! I think it's quite rare now, but if you come across a copy, or even track one down, enjoy it, it's a great read
Profile Image for Mark C.
6 reviews1 follower
May 30, 2010
This book reads like one of the Virgin New Adventures from the early 90s and, to that end, follows the remit of that series which was to produces stories "too broad and too deep for the small screen".

On the one hand it's quite a small-scale story that wouldn't look out of place in the current series: it's primarily set on present day Earth and there's only half a dozen or so characters in the entire book. But the villains of the piece (essentially sentient equations) and their world are definitely something that could only be properly realised in book form.

I can't say that I entirely followed all the mathematical discussions but fortunately that didn't get in the way of enjoying a good story.
190 reviews6 followers
January 4, 2016
The first Doctor Who book I have read in a while, this was the 68th BBC Past Doctor Adventure by Lloyd Rose (a pen name of Sarah Tonyn) and starred the seventh doctor and Ace (two of my favourite characters). The supporting cast was very small including Ethan, a geeky maths boy and love interest of Ace's and Molecross, a Sci-Fi blogger/journalist . Essentially the baddies were mathematical entities looking to reverse, deny or stop entropy, but of course the Doctor outwitted them and everything was okay. This is actually a cracking read, well written and the story skips along. There is a minor (and completely unnecessary) role for UNIT in the story. I do own many of the PDAs and EDAs and will definitely be reading more of them this year, and I hope they are as good as this one.
Profile Image for Daniel Kukwa.
4,744 reviews123 followers
January 24, 2011
A Doctor Who BBC Books novel that is both a hommage to the previous New Adventures range, and a damn fine study of the 7th Doctor & Ace in its own right. Lloyd Rose seems to know these characters as well as her own family. A book that manages to be sensual, thrilling, dark & gripping...all at the same time.
639 reviews10 followers
January 31, 2022
"The Algebra of Ice" is a great title, but sadly not a great novel. The novel perpetually feels like it is just about to take off, but never really does leave the ground. The story, such as it is, goes like this. The Doctor and Ace are watching some events in time rewind and reshape, then smooth out. The investigation to the cause leads them to a bizarre crop circle in 21st-century England. The crop circle is not a circle, but rather sets of incomplete shapes; plus, it's made of ice that apparently takes a very long time (weeks? months?) to melt. The TARDIS lets The Doctor know that a young mathematician named Ethan Amberglass is somehow part of the problem. It seems that the crop patterns are attempts by a race (unnamed throughout the book) from another universe of pure mathematics, who have used up almost all the energy in their universe fighting off entropy so they can live forever, and are now trying to break through into this universe to do the same here. Helping them is a sociopathic rich guy named Brett and another mathematician he knew from University named Unwin. Brett somehow (we never know how) has Unwin completely under his control. Oh, and UNIT have been called in to look into the crop pattern, and they bring the Brigadier out of retirement to help them out. Also, there is a pathetic publisher of an online magazine about conspiracy stuff, named Molecross, who constantly tags along and annoys everyone. The main problem with this book is how underwhelming it all is. There are many very interesting ideas that just click along before fizzling out. We are constantly reminded that the stakes are high, that the UNIVERSE is at stake, yet no one really acts as if it is, and the aliens are repeatedly rather easily frustrated in their efforts to break through. Rose is not very good in giving her villains motivations. Brett is just a sociopath, and that seems to be all we need to know. The aliens just want eternal life. UNIT and the Brigadier are completely wasted in this book. They do practically nothing and get about 10% at most of the pages. Several key aspects of the book are left unexplained. How did Brett meet these aliens? Why is he so keen on helping them? How do these aliens from another universe know about The Doctor? How is it that Brett can so easily overpower everyone when it is just him? What is the connection of the aliens' attempted incursions and the time anomalies apart from providing a convenient moment to move the plot along late in the novel? So, great title, interesting ideas, flawed conception - that sums my impression of this novel.
Profile Image for Nicholas Whyte.
5,343 reviews209 followers
October 7, 2016
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2692931.html

Lloyd Rose is a particularly good Who writer, who has published no other written fiction as far as I can tell (she has a non-fiction piece in a 2013 Sherlock Holmes anthology, and a couple of TV scripts). This is the last of her works that I have come to, having already greatly enjoyed The City of the Dead and Camera Obscura (and her audio play Caerdroia). I'm glad to say that I really enjoyed this as well; it starts with the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and from then on there are a lot of balls in the air: crop circles, weird ice, the Brigadier, the Riemann hypothesis, Ace having a fling with a brilliant mathematician, the Doctor as a partlially successful manipulator; also the flavours of both the last TV seasons and the first New Adventure novels inform the narrative and combine for a very tasty treat. I'm not completely certain that I can really tell you what the book was about, but it satisfied me on a lot of levels.
Profile Image for Jeff Vass.
15 reviews
January 20, 2017
I discovered this book via a 'maths-in-novels' website. I liked the locations on the whole but disappointed in the maths aspect. A lot of the problem-solving in this book took place in 'the equations' but we don't get to know much about exactly what was going on. This side of the problem-solving didn't much illuminate the idea of entities 'breaking through' until our people get sucked into their world. Also why do so many authors use autism without really knowing what it's about?
42 reviews1 follower
December 23, 2013
The episode Hide, from series seven, references this book with the phrase, "There is a sliver of ice in his heart," when the Doctor is spoken of. It was pretty cool to realise that.

The book was good till about page seventy, but then they decided to throw in some smut. I was disappointed.

This was my first seventh Doctor story, and I haven't seen any of his episodes, but I rather liked him.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Nicholas George.
Author 2 books69 followers
September 15, 2016
I've only seen one Dr. Who episode (a very old one), and this book convinced me that it is a story that is best shown and not read. I was hampered by not knowing a lot of the backstory, but there was a lot of science and mathematics--not my strong point--that was distancing as well. I know I would have enjoyed this much more if I were watching it on a TV screen.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

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