Doctor Who: The Highest Science

Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures #11

by Gareth Roberts, Peter Elson (Illustrator)

Sakkrat.
          Many legends speak of this world, home of an ancient empire destroyed by its own greatest achievement: the Highest Science, the pinnacle of technological discovery.
          When the TARDIS alerts the Doctor and Bernice to the presence of an enormous temporal fluctuation on a large, green, unremarkable planet, they are not to know of any connection with the legend.
          But the connection is there, and it will lead them into conflict with the monstrous Chelonians, with their contempt for human parasites; into adventure with a group of youngsters whose musical taste has suddenly become dangerously significant; and will force them to face Sheldukher, the most wanted criminal in the galaxy.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Ebooks, Media Tie In

258 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 1993

About the author

Gareth Roberts has written TV scripts for various soap operas (including Brookeside, Springhill, and Emmerdale), Randall & Hopkirk (deceased), the revival of Doctor Who, the Sarah Jane Adventures, and Wizards vs Aliens.

Also for the Doctor Who universe, he has written the interactive adventure Attack of the Graske, the mobile phone TARDISODEs accompanying the 2006 series, several Big Finish audios, and multiple novels, as well as contributed to Doctor Who Magazine.

Reviews

[Jean-marcel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Originally published on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide in 2010:

I'm not exactly a complete newcomer to Virgin's New Adventures, but I only managed to collect about fifteen of them in the 1990s and have only read a few others since then. Recently, I came by a rather large batch of the series as well as many of the BBC eighth Doctor books (I've read a mere single one of those since their inception!) and thus I have an exciting trove of hitherto untapped Doctor Who tales to lose myself in. Yes, it's very thrilling! What's more, I've always thought that Doctor Who had huge possibilities within the novel form, because this concept that we are so fond of, humbly created so long ago by folks at the BBC, is almost limitless in its scope and potential, and the ability for writers to explore material that is, to paraphrase Virgin's old adage, "too broad and deep for the small screen" is huge. I'm not only talking about epic conflicts and the conflagration of solar systems here, but real character drama, which I feel much more comfortable with in literature than on television, where it seldom really feels like it belongs and often comes off seeming more trite and shallow than it ought to do.

I decided to begin my 2010 Virgin explorations with Gareth Roberts's The Highest Science, since I thought I'd go more or less in chronological order, and this was the earliest novel I'd obtained which I hadn't yet read. No other reason, really, and I knew I wouldn't be bowled over by a complex plot, and didn't really expect stellar writing, either. I'd listened to Gareth Roberts's The One Doctor Big Finish play, as well as something else whose name is currently escaping me, so I also figured I'd be in for considerable doses of humour, and the question in my mind was, would I be able to laugh along, or would this stuff find me wincing and groaning? I have to make a confession here, and that is that these days I like Doctor Who to be played rather straight, without glibness or undue flippancy or postmodern digs. Humorous elements are certainly welcome, but they ought not to drive the narrative or utterly consume the plot and characters with bad repartee and painful witicisms. When I was a youngster, I thought Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the subsequent books were great entertainment, funny and endearing and fine science fiction stories to boot, but these days I think "The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul" is Adams's best book, because the levity just feels more natural and right in a modern-day setting full of people and places that are familiar, and often deserve to be trashed and ridiculed. Comedy science fiction rarely seems to work out for me because it feels too much like a spoof, and while Adams can still make me grin and chuckle, I think his influence has been a little unfortunate, both because of this perceived spoofism and because, to put it simply and bluntly, few people are actually as funny as he was.

The reason for this tangent about Douglas Adams should be obvious by now. The Highest Science feels like sub-Adams. It's no wonder that most of Roberts' other Virgin Who publications have been written to coincide with The fourth Doctor and season 17, since this was the period of the show's run during which Adams was script editor, and it's a period that Roberts clearly loves to death. There are even a couple of direct Hitchhiker's Guide references thrown into the book; the bit where Jinkwa the Chelonian refers to "the cacophanies of Traal" is the one which immediately springs to mind.

Talking of the Chelonians, aren't they more than a little like the Vogons? Stupidly aggressive, shouting a lot, seeming to be the butt of everyone else's jokes even though they're intended to be a deadly menace to all characters, even themselves. Oh, they're supposed to be some kind of military society, but they sure seem inept and I can't imagine these Chelonians actually mounting a successful campaign. They're only on Sakkrat an extra few days and General Fakrid's hormones are already going all out of wack and he's losing his mind and nobody thought to bring along extra supplements or whatever he needs? Military campaigns aren't like walking the dog; they overextend almost all the time; surely this should have been a prepared-for contingency. Nevertheless, the Chelonians are admittedly amusing and the book was somewhat brightened by their presence.

But you see, this book has a special ability, and that is the principal of brain disengagement. If you think too much about the irritating plot holes, the boring characters and the bad quips, you'll tie yourself in knots of frustration and not finish the book. I think the mark of a fan, or a nerd, if you like, is when you get your hands on some bad piece of writing that belongs to your favourite franchise, you read through it, finishing the damn thing, knowing all the while that it's a junky filler and yet wanting to keep going because it's a part of what you love; that being, in this instance, the Doctor Who universe. This is exactly what happened to me, and it's amusing, since in my job and for my own pleasure I come by a huge number of books and skim through many of them, and I usually know within a few pages whether I'll have any interest in actually persevering with a piece of literature. I can't explain why I finished The Highest Science, other than to say that it was a Doctor Who book, and the first one I'd read in probably four years.

It's actually the characters of the Doctor and to a lesser extent Bernice that earned my approval here. As much as Roberts may love Doctor number four, he made the seventh's dialogue seem very true to his screen persona and I could certainly envisage McCoy rapping out all these lines. Bernice was a new companion at this point and doesn't fare as well, but it helped that I was already somewhat familiar with her character and usually think of her as voiced by Lisa Bowerman as in Big Finish's tales. She's suitably sarcastic and a bit breathless; though she's "out of it" for quite a bit of the novel she's certainly more in character than she was in the previous novel, Transit. Unfortunately, while the Doctor's dialogue is mostly spot on, there's some irritating glibness on display in describing him and even delving a little into his thought processes. His reason for not fully endorsing telepathy (because you can't roll words with lots of rs in them off the tongue when you're not actually speaking) is pretty silly and seemed more a jab at Sylv's performance than at the character himself.

Interestingly, in one scene, Roberts encapsulates both the best and the worst of his portrayal of the seventh Doctor. This is when the Doctor is on Sheldukher's ship, and Rosheen is aged decades and weakened by Sheldukher's implant. Instinctively, the Doctor feels solicitous and goes to help her, even though he must know that, since she's on Sheldukher's ship, she can't exactly be a harmless innocent and is likely to be a criminal of some kind. This certainly seems true to his character; though the Doctor may have had moments where he appears aloof and a little indifferent, most of the time he can be counted upon to assist those who are clearly in need without stint or prejudice (unless they're Daleks or Ice Warriors, perhaps!). The two of them start up a conversation and seem quite companionable until Rosheen tells the Doctor her name, at which point he says something along the lines of "Oh no! It's you! You massacred a thousand planets!" and turns his back on her contemptuously. While I can certainly imagine the Doctor acting in such a dismissive fashion, I'm also pretty damn sure that he of all people ought to know that history is written by the victors in any conflict, and since he's never met Sheldukher or any of his partners before, he has no reason to believe everything he's explicitly heard or read about them.

Sheldukher himself isn't very interesting. One of my fellow reviewers here pointed out that it was nice to see a villain who was sinister but free of the usual megalomaniac ranting and was rather calm and collected as opposed to shouting and frothing. All well and good, I say, but when he believes his goal is within reach, Shelduhker is about as manic and feverish as he really ought to be. This isn't a problem for me at all, but he's certainly still a "camp" creation, and I'd argue, one of the worst kind. All this "Rumours of my breath are greatly exaggerated", and "This weapon is very handy for destroying constellations" stuff is so jarring in every sense to this particular, admittedly perhaps finicky reader. What's more, the notion of blowing up whole constellations with some big gun of twenty-fourth century design is ludicrous enough and out of keeping with perceived Terran future history. Roberts simply has a propensity for whipping the reader with extraneous throwaway lines that feel like an author's parody rather than words from the mouth of a legitimate creation given depth and personality. Some gravitas in dealing with the dissolution of entire clusters of stars really isn't too much to ask for!

Someone at the Ratings Guide described Andrew Cartmel's Warhead as possessing a "dreamlike feel", and that was interesting for me to read because that novel feels very realistic and clear to me, whereas The Highest Science actually does bear the hallmarks of a goofy dream about Doctor Who. There's plenty of illogic to go around, and Roberts acknowledges some of this by creating the phenomenon of the fortean flicker to explain away the entire premise of the story. The flicker itself is a pretty rubbish idea, clearly designed to let the writer get away with just about anything he fancies. Actually, I had an entertaining mental picture of Gareth Roberts sitting down to watch Ghost Light one day and grumbling perplexedly about how the story didn't make any sense and was full of "random stuff", and that if this was the kind of thing the fellows at Virgin wanted for a new Doctor Who novel he could just dash one off for a lark. "I'll give 'em random stuff!", Roberts crows, putting a bunch of papers and sundry objects into a big box, shaking it and turning it up-side down! The very nature of the story is that a bunch of things with nothing in common get all mixed together without rhyme or reason. What conceit! It doesn't excuse sloppy writing, though, or the bizarre actions of characters, and the book lacks any real atmosphere that would make lapses of logic (as in a Lucio Fulci film) excusable.

So many things about this book had me throwing up my hands in disgust. Ideas are put forward, seem interesting for a moment, then just fizzle out. Why does a Chelonian drink a can of bubbleshake, and how come the Doctor recognises it so quickly? Why does General Fakrid blame all his problems on the Doctor when he's barely met him? How come the two women from the train come by a laser gun and start blowing away Chelonians, while Mr. Witcher still thinks they're near London after a nuclear catastrophe? Isn't saying "the Cell can outthink all other life forms" a sort of abstract cop-out? It doesn't mean anything. All the thing ever does is complain! And to think, some faceless corporation went through all the trouble to concoct a legend and build some structures only to make them ruins, just to get a hold of that wailing suicide case? By the way, there's no room for a sense of wonder as the characters explore the ruins; they're about the most boring ruins of an ancient civilisation in written history. Why does Roberts describe the depicted figures as "caucasian"? Surely, as they're supposed to be alien though humanoid, the best way to describe them would be "white-skinned"?

I was also pretty disappointed with the three music fans, who served no purpose at all other than to get Bernice to the ruins and then get killed. The author's little attempts at creating backstory for irrelevant characters are flimsy and appear tagged on as an afterthought. That band Zagrat though sounds like just the sort of spacerock extravaganza I could totally get into! I entertained myself briefly by imagining that the band sounded like Hawkwind on a binge of particularly potent hallucinogens, but then wondered if Molassi was really the sort of person who could appreciate that sort of long-winded stuff. Ah well, he was just a follower anyway, and his suicide when he believed that one of his idols had sold out was a cheap shot that still made me chuckle a little.

The Highest Science even lacks a resolution that could inspire anything than a shrug and a sigh. What am I saying? What resolution? There are a few wires pulled, some glittery lights and an "Oh, I suppose that's all I can do for now... maybe I'll think of something else another time," from the Doctor. You think I'm kidding? I wish I were. If there were something untraditional and groundbreaking about The Highest Science, we could possibly excuse it a little more from being a crap story, but as I've already pointed out, the book reads like one of those dreams you have as an exuberant fan of the series during which you imagine you're travelling with the Doctor, or are him yourself. This is the sort of book I'd be embarrassed to talk about with most people, and while there are some fairly positive reviews here on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, I'm willing to bet that most of these people forgot the book pretty quickly. In other words, it's mediocre, even if you like "that sort of thing", and I really don't. To put it into perspective, I've started my next Virgin New Adventure, the often-maligned The Pit, and I can honestly say that I'm far more intrigued by that novel than I was with this one, during which I frequently checked to see just how many pages I still had to read before I could say that I'd finally done with the thing.

[James Barnard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hindsight gives us the chance to see patterns and connections that weren’t obvious at the time. So it proved here. ‘The Highest Science’ was first published in February 1993, and was written by the then unknown Gareth Roberts. The strength of this book led him to be commissioned to write another New Adventure and then, as the Missing Adventures progressed, carve a niche in new stories which recreated the Fourth Doctor – Romana mark 2 – K9 era so faithfully that part of me is still convinced I watched, rather than read, at least one of them.

Such was his impact that Roberts became one of a select group of professional fans to graduate to the revived television series, where he hasn’t lost his touch. But we didn’t know all this when his first book was published. What was clear was that this was streets ahead of the baffling, swearword-ridden and rather soulless ‘Transit’ which preceded it in the running order. ‘Transit’’s author, Ben Aaronovitch, had written for the TV series, and continues to get everything else he’s ever written absolutely right. Yet ‘Transit’ remains one of the the worst-received Doctor Who novels of all. At the time it left many fans with the concerned impression that this may be the route Doctor Who would take from that point on. ‘The Highest Science’ proved everyone wrong, as, with its light, uncomplicated, yet hugely readable style, it harked back to a much more innocent age.

That isn’t to say it’s without its serious parts. Roberts is acutely aware that danger and menace will always seem much more dangerous and menacing when it arrives in unexpected guises. Thus, Sheldukher, the most wanted criminal in the galaxy, resembles a short, portly middle-manager, and the new race of monsters the book bequeaths to Doctor Who, the Chelonians, are a race of bad-tempered tortoises. Both appear harmless, yet both are capable of shocking violence and cruelty, often without any provocation. As with the work of Douglas Adams – an author whose style Roberts evokes so well it really is impossible to ignore – when bad things do happen, it’s sudden, and usually without any pause for breath after a joke or two.

Then there are the regular characters. This was Bernice Summerfield’s third story – or the second if you ignore the deliberate personality transplant inflicted on her in ‘Transit’, and, two decades on (following her starring role throughout the New Adventures and in more than one spin-off series of her own) it’s remarkable how well Roberts captures the character. I suspect that it was his ability to write for her so well that led fans to take her to their hearts – a mishandling at this stage may have caused Virgin Books to reconsider her status as a companion.

And as for the Doctor – yes, this is unquestionably Sylvester McCoy, even without the rather peculiar front cover to this book! Roberts captures McCoy’s speech patterns perfectly, without overdoing it (which isn’t as easy as it seems). In his use of the character, Roberts treads the line between the light-hearted approach of Season 24, the slightly distracted version seen in Season 25 and the more manipulative version of Season 26, with aplomb.

I’m almost tempted to give this five stars except for two things. First, the fate of the 8:12s seems a bit of a cop-out – surely it wouldn’t have hurt to give some closure to that plot strand. In fact, I’m not convinced the book wouldn’t work better without it – I’d remembered their presence as more substantial than this re-reading showed it to be.

Secondly, and most importantly, Roberts’ later books are even better!

I enjoyed re-reading this immensely, and I’m really glad Virgin Book’s policy on taking on promising new authors and not releasing books of a similar tone each month meant that Roberts progressed to the career he richly deserves.

[Chris Wing · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been quite interesting, reading Doctor Who books that I read almost (if not more than!) 20 years ago.
My only real memory of this book involved the image of the Chelonians and a drugged up/Possessed Benny (I admit that such a possession *could* be a memory from another book; time will tell!) wandering about in an underground cave.

So, to re-read this (in anticipation of listening to the Big Finish audio adaptation) has helped to give me refreshed mind's eye view of the tale.
This is (I believe) Gareth Robert's first New Adventure/Doctor Who outing and you can feel a mixture of influences.
Right off the bat, he has the Doctor and Benny's voices coevered perfectly. Only a few books in an Benny is a clear character that authors can find inspiration in.
This may be my own bias of read books recently, but you can also feel that tug of DOuglas Adams' 4th Doctor era (and around that time), that Roberts excels at effortlessly, all-the-while maintaining the seventh Doctor's unique personality.
I like how Roberts' also allows a smidgen of his pratfalling to remain, as well the nuances of his conniving and plotting, that we all love this Doctor for.
I also felt a little bit of Paul Cornell in there, when reading the other human characters.
I must admit that I felt very little for the troupe that Benny ended up with, but that may well be appropriate, since they were all supposed to be addled on Bubbleshake (which made me me smile, remembering how Roberts used this again, as Bubbleshock in the Sarah Jane pilot).
There's a lot of groups of people to keep an eye on that all keep the plot going and they are all distinct and enjoyable, everyone gets a moment of depth (although,again, I found Benny's lot kind of merged together, so I kept mixing up which ones were which), and I particularly liked the depth the CHelonians were given. Comic relief that you have to take seriously, for all their warmongering. Their usage kind of reminds me of the new series Sonatarans, which is fine, but you start to wonder how many Doctor Who baddies are war-mongering jokes (Cheloninans, Sontarans, the Grell, Salachians, etc) - I'm not too bothered, this sort of mindset must be a dime a dozen in Doctor Who world!

All in all, this was a very enjoyable book. ALthough the bleak ending for most characters and the final conclusion to the 'threat', I felt could have been resolved (maybe with a further epilogue perhaps?); or one can easily take it for granted that the Doctor ties up such loose ends when Benny's asleep in bed.

A good book for anyone starting out in Doctor Who prose and one that hasn't really dated, which is good.
I previously gave this three stars, but upon rereading, bumped it up a little.

[Matt Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Obligatory warning that I do go pretty deep into the Doctor Who weeds here. I'd apologize, but that would be dishonest.)

I'm looking back at my old interviews for The New Adventures and the most recent one was from March, and it opens with "I'm trying to get through one of these a month." And here I am now at the end of the year and this is the only one I've read in the intervening time. C'est la.

It's never a good sign when a book that I wanted to blow through takes forever to read. I could reference that back in August my reading fell off an absolute cliff and I've gotten basically nothing done since then, but that doesn't explain the full four months when I could have read this book and barely made it just past the halfway point in that time. The big lesson to learn is the one I took from Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible: It's fine to dip the toes in a bit to get a vibe for a book before plowing forward and falling into the "do not DNR pride" that I have. There's a lot of these and life is too short.

Anyways.

There's stuff to like in Gareth Roberts' The Highest Science. The Chelonians are clever and funny (although their hermaphroditism... well...). Roberts clearly has a deep, deeeeep love for the Williams era and especially the Douglas Adams elements of the Williams era. It's extremely in that vibe. And the ideas are overall good and the characters are funny. And... and... and...

Look. I wanted to read this because I had heard it was good. And very early into this book it was clear that I was not jiving with it or connecting with it. Maybe because I think Douglas Adams is the only one who can Douglas Adams and even then I can only handle so much of him. Maybe because I wasn't really clear on just how everything was going to come together because it was so much thrown at the wall.

But let's be real. That's not the problem here.

The problem is I thought I could ignore Gareth Roberts's anti-trans onerousness enough to make me look past who he was almost thirty years ago when he first wrote this book. I thought it was possible. But all I could think while reading this was about all of the messed up shit he's said, how outspokenly against a Female Doctor he has been, the ways the jokes in his television stories (which I have more or less loved across the board) have aged. And the dude is known for comedy, so like... if you don't have that...

And it's a shame. Because Gareth Roberts is maybe not even in the list of the five most important writers in the Wilderness Era (Cornell, Orman, and Miles all easily EASILY outstrip him) but that doesn't mean he's not important or influential (hell, if I remember my lore correctly he was the one who first defined the "gun v frock" debate (and came down firmly on frock, and frock Who is absolutely the best Who so like... way more disappointing)). That doesn't mean that his work hasn't been one of the main driving forces in a re-evaluation of the Graham Williams era in the 1970s, an era which (while certainly troubled) also produced some of the best Who ever. I've got two Williams stories in my top ten Doctor Who of all time and one of those is in my top three (the other is in the top six, ahead of anything that isn't "Caves", "Heaven Sent", "City of Death", "Pandorica Opens", and "Curse of Fenric") (#6 is "The Ribos Operation", btw). And reading this book you can absolutely see Roberts's love for the era bleed into Doctor Who's vernacular. Anyone who liked this book would like the best of the Williams era at the very least. And Roberts would go on to push and push and push that era, going so far as to write The Romance of Crime, The English Way of Death, and The Well-Mannered War, books that are widely loved and respected explicitly FOR being deeply soaked in the best possible ethos of the Williams era.

All of this is important because it's irresponsible to pretend like the New Adventures happened in a vacuum, and sometimes these Wilderness Era writers had profound impacts on Doctor Who as an institution and fundamentally re-shaped fan conception such that it defined what the show was when it was revived. And Roberts is absolutely one of the bigger cogs of the era. And it kills me. Because I want to read that good good Roberts. And I want to enjoy his work. And I want to experience its being as good as I know it can be.

But that's not what happened, and I'm not quite at a place where I can ignore who the man has turned out to be. Maybe I'll get there someday. Maybe there will be a rehabilitation. Or maybe it won't ever happen, and he'll be just a minor stain on Doctor Who, problematic as people so often are, and just enough that it's pyrrhically difficult to celebrate their virtues. I wish Roberts were one of the good ones, but it's so hard to say that now, and it feels awful to put him in the same category as say Haisman & Lincoln or Toby Whithouse (or really, Chris Chibnall at this point, let's be honest), but that's kinda where I'm at.

Until I can get past this, I think I'm just going to have to leave Roberts here the way he leaves The Doctor at the end. I'm encasing the unsolvable problem in a bubble of stopped time and walking away. Maybe some day there will be a solution and time will heal it and it'll be better, but until then, I'll just have to live in that unfortunate purgatory. It's deeply unsatisfying, but then again, that seems right on brand for this book.

Doctor Who Book Ranking
1) Love and War
2) Timewyrm: Revelation
3) Timewyrm: Exodus
4) Transit
5) Cat’s Cradle: Warhead
6) Timewyrm: Apocalypse
7) The Highest Science
8) Timewyrm: Genesys

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

i wasn't the biggest fan on the initial read, but the farcical way all of the plot threads come together by the end and compare with one another feels fonder in my memory the more time that goes on. i liked the chelonians more than i thought i would too, it's funny that they were created by roberts considering how he turned out.

[Seb Hasi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another one of the very esteemed VNA’s, Highest Science is your usual sci-fi romp, full of aliens, war, mythology, and comedy. A cross between an Andrew Cartmel and a Graham Williams story, Highest Science adds a nice new alien species to the lore of the show and fleshes out the characters that we have grown to know very well by book eleven in this series. Very thin on long term arcs and setting up things to happen later on, it’s a refreshing breath of air from the constant ‘this links to that, and this foreshadows this’ that you get a lot in the New Adventures. Granted I may be wrong and it’ll turn out that something will be linked to the story but it seems on the surface that it’s just a simple Dr Who adventure.

A very notable detracting point from the book is the book that you have about three main plots running concurrently, which obviously do tie together in the end (not really, the Chelonian one just sort of sods about then ends but I’ll get to that in a bit). You have the Doctor and Benny looking for an alien thing, the Chelonians at war for some reason, and this very hard to follow plot about some criminals on a ship in orbit of the planet. Constantly cutting between the plots is not fun, especially when Benny and The Doctor split up and it becomes very much four plots, with the latest addition being by far the most boring. Thankfully the way they tie up in the end is pretty neat, even if one of the plots is a deliberate dead end that foreshadows another. You get a very tidy resolution with all ends sorted out (well bar the Doctor leaving a bunch of humans stranded on an alien desert, but oh well) and it’s quite satisfying to have such a frenetic narrative be so concisely resolved.

The Doctor is absolutely one of the highlights of the book as he has finally stopped his ‘moody git’ phase that started after Witch Mark. Unlike the last few books he isn’t just violently dour and boring, and provides some of the comedic relief whilst also allowing himself more Season 26 seventh Doctor moments to offset the comedy and make the climax of the book a lot more interesting. Benny too is a highlight with her character development continuing, but this time not all about her past. Her interactions with her characters in the side plot she leads adds a new layer to her character; showing her serious side. We get incredibly morose moments and her reactions to them and her ‘next moves’ are something that define her character.

All the side characters in the book are possibly the weakest point, with them doing more to drag the pace and dramatic build down, than building it up. The characters in the side plot with Benny offer almost nothing to the narrative and she could easily have had the same story with Shedulker’s crew and that would’ve proved far less boring. The humans who accidentally get teleported to the planet are far worse as one, they just show up intermittently and do nothing but provide about four pages worth pages worth of drama, and two, don’t really get resolved. I assume the Doctor takes the back to earth after the book ends, but it beggars the question why they are there? It could so easily have just automated sentinels that the Chelonians are fighting.

Chelonians are excellent. Funny, sad, exciting, and absolutely mental. The highlight of the book for me, I was if anything disappointed when we had to go focus on the main plot as they were just so much to follow. A perfect opening sequence is provided by them, and the few twists and turns with dissension in the ranks, and family drama are just a blast to read. If anything this book has just made me want to get ‘Well-Mannered War’ the Fourth Doctor missing adventure, just for more of these loveable turtles.

Overall, a book that starts off with lots going on, and only about half of the stories being told really hit their mark, but as the novel progresses, things start to tie up and make for a clever storyline. Most of the characters are interesting and the last third of the story, as we get to the nub of what the highest science is, is really good. This is probably this first of the highly regarded VNAs that I would genuinely recommend as worth reading.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a lot of fun, this one.

Not all of it works. Rodomonte, Sendei and Molassi never truly come to life and their introduction doesn't really separate them from the Chelonians, making their introduction a bit confusing. The extended subplot where Benny loses her memories doesn't really work either - this is the second book in a row where she's spent most of her time either possessed or amnesic. Given how she's only appeared in three books at this point, it does feel like no-one's actually figured out who she is yet and keeps pushing her to the sidelines. The thing is, when Roberts writes her without the mind manipulation, he really seems to get her - she really comes alive as a character when Roberts allows her to. Instead, the removal of her memories seems to be an attempt to define her character by removing her personality and bringing it back piece by piece. This seems like a silly thing to do when you could've defined the character by... I don't know, just writing her consistently from start to finish. There's just something about the whole Benny/Rodo/Sendei/Molassi plot that never quite gets going.

If you can get past that plot though, there's also Cybernetic War Tortoises, Homocidal Admin Robots, a very enjoyable sadistic bastard in the form of Sheldukher, and a version of the Seventh Doctor whose the closest the New Adventures books have got to the character seen in the TV show. There's a lot to enjoy in this, it's just that you do have to get through the one plot that doesn't quite work to get to them.

An oddity in it, given Robert's now commonly known anti-trans opinions and issues with the LBGT+ community, is just how many genderless and genderswapped characters there are in this book. Apparently he's sullied with age.

Still, it's a very fun book that works much more than it doesn't, and when it does work, it works amazingly well. You can see from this how Roberts would end up eventually writing the new series.

[Adrian Halpert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, folks, here's one of the AWFUL NA books! Like really awful.
I had high hopes for this when I saw the Gareth Roberts had written it. I really enjoyed his novelization of Shada and thought this would be as good if not better. Boy was I wrong. Ugh! I'll be in therapy for years because of this book.
There were WAY, WAY too many characters and something like six plotlines in a 250 page book. The result is that none of the characters, the Doctor, Bernice, the so-called "most wanted criminal in the galaxy", or the Chelonians, are anything more than tissue paper cut outs and none of the plot lines are really developed. This was an utter mess and I can't believe I even read the whole thing. I would only recommend this book to people I hate - or maybe not even them. I'm not that cruel.
It gets a .5 rather than a zero (0) because despite this disaster, the Chelonians were kind of interesting.
.5/5 stars

[Kelly McCubbin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having read this and listened to Roberts' Big Finish audiodrama (coincidentally) very recently, it's pretty clear that he is a fan who got an inexplicable opportunity which he, at least initially, blew.
This is a train wreck of a book, a bunch of lifts from better writers that call to mind your irritating friend in 7th grade showing you his gorey stick figure drawings that he made because he'd read an issue of Heavy Metal once.
I'm trying to crawl chronologically through the New Adventures, as I only read a handful when they came out, and there has already been some truly wonderful stuff, but I may be skipping Roberts' work from now on.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slow start but the book ramps up to an exciting finish. I had hoped the Doctor would have resolved a situation that was left hanging, but perhaps he will in a later book, or perhaps he already has. You know how it is with time travel.

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gareth Roberts' first Doctor Who novel gives readers a good preview of his preferences for Doctor Who. He clearly prefers the intellectually lighter style of Graham Williams and Douglas Adams and so his entry here takes Doctor 7 back the 1987 version with Mel, a bit inept, with pratfalls and offbeat witticisms. As with Doctor Who of 1987 (and the 1988 story "Silver Nemesis"), The Doctor gets pitted against people with strange obsessions. It is a neat ploy that gets the writer out of having to find motivations any deeper than "I really want it." It has that Sylvester McCoy era plot of multiple entities all after the same thing, and multiple people offed one after another as collateral damage.

The plot involves The Doctor on the hunt for the source of "Fortean flickers" (named after Charles Fort, an American writer who chronicled strange and unexplained phenomena in the early 20th century). The search takes him and Bernice to the planet Sakkrat, where supposedly "The Highest Science" is kept in some ancient temple. On the planet are three groups of beings captured by the Fortean flicker. One is a trio of drug-addled misfits who were on their way to the intergalactic version of the Glastonbury Festival. Another is a group of 20th-century train passengers. The third is a force of Chelonian invaders, plucked out of time from their moment of victory. The Chelonians are bionic tortoises whose sole purpose is to wipe "mammalian parasites" off planets. Added to this is the most feared intergalactic criminal of all time - Sheldukher. He has collected a group of lesser intergalactic criminals and press-ganged them into helping him claim The Highest Science for himself.

Basically, this is a journey-to-the-center plot. It's find the lost city and claim the power, at least for some. The Chelonians have no interest in it and know nothing about it, and seem to be in the story mainly to be a major obstacle to the others. The human train travellers are there to be hapless victims needing rescue. The story has many moving parts, and Roberts seems keen to throw in as many ideas as he can come up with. Much of it is very amusing. Roberts has a very good sense of Doctor 7 from 1987. This is also the first novel in which we really see what Benny is like as a companion. For the most part, I could see this story fitting very comfortably within the first season of Sylvester McCoy's run.

I find that the casualness of tone in these kinds of stories leads to a disturbing casualness of ethics. It comes across early in this novel when the people of Vaagon are saved from destruction at the hands of the Chelonians, only to be wiped out in about three casually tossed in sentences 300 years later by another group of Chelonians, with the writer taking a "hey-ho, that's life, what can you do?" attitude toward the whole thing. This casualness about genocide, because hey it is funny that the genocidal maniacs are munching leaves while doing it, is the writer's choice. He did not have to put in this detail. He had already established how homicidal the Chelonians are. The detail adds nothing to the plot, yet there it is. This casualness becomes extremely disturbing to me by the novel's end. Here, having gotten to a point where a group of English commuters, plucked out of their own time and plopped onto a future alien world, are about to be wiped out, and The Doctor's only solution is to freeze them in "slow time." That would be fine, except he simply abandons them all at this point, his only comment being that he will at some point probably, perhaps, maybe, come back and rescue them. And then he and Benny move on happy to have survived the whole catastrophe, with no mention of it again. There they are, all these people, stuck at the point of destruction, and The Doctor and Benny simply forget about them after about half an hour. The reader should keep in mind that one of these forgotten humans is a baby that Roberts went out of his way earlier in the novel to put into danger for the sole purpose of showing how nasty the villain Sheldukher is. For what purpose has Roberts written this ending? If it is to demythologize The Doctor, he had already done that in dozens of ways in this novel, so there is no need to do it yet again. It appears more likely that Roberts had not really thought about it that much. He wanted some kind of nifty idea for an ending and never bothered to consider the ethical implications of his idea. [On a side note, the situation is finally rectified in Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, written years later. Even there, Romana is the one to fix the problem, not The Doctor, who, as far as we know, never went back. This was part of the purpose of Happy Endings, tie up all the loose ends of previous New Adventures novels. So, Roberts had no intention, as far as the evidence goes, of straightening this out and restoring The Doctor's status as a moral hero, and neither did Cornell.] So, what I see is that Roberts created a tangled mess of an ending, and could not see a way out of it, even though the way was obviously staring him in the face. It strikes me as Roberts' casual disregard for the intelligence and sensibilities of the reader.

[Hidekisohma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to be honest, the books in this series have really not been the greatest overall. Books like Timewyrm: revelation and Cat's Cradle: Time's crucible have been inordinately confusing for absolutely no reason, and others have just been dull. I will say though that this was one of the best of the series i've read. not exactly how high praise that is, but it's something.

So this one takes 7 and Bernice to this planet where the TARDIS picks up a "Flicker" which is basically a bunch of temporal coincidences. They end up on this planet where a bunch of war cybernetic turtle people, drug doing hippies, a spaceship with an evil criminal guy, and a bunch of random London train riders to get pulled to. If this sounds like there's too many POV's, you're right. there are too many POV's and they skip between them a lot.

The good thing about Gareth's writing in this book is that his writing is simplistic enough that it's easy to keep track of who's talking and what's going on. The only group i really had any issues with was the hippy people as their parts were a little confusing due to a mixture of their language, the acid trips, and me not caring. And the worst part is, even though Bernice spends some time with them, they turn out to be absolutely pointless to the story as a whole.

Without too many spoilers i'll just say, this is book is a Horror of Fang Rock situation. AKA, the doc ain't saving ANYONE. So don't look for a happy ending on this one.

The Titular "Highest Science" is essentially a scientific secret on this planet that the evil criminal is looking for with this AI brain that was created called "Cell".

This is also one of those stories where Bernice and the Doc are separated for about 75% of the book. they reunite towards the end, but it's very split up for most of the time. I was pretty engaged for the Doc and his adventures during his time on screen, but Bernice's was quite dull and confusing with the aforementioned drug trips and confusing hippies.

Still, that being said, I actually found myself intrigued in this story and wanted to know more of what was going on and how it would resolve. Doc was pretty in character but i will admit that Bernice was INSUFFERABLE at times. She was very know it all, smug, and wasn't even very grateful when a guy literally saved her from being eaten by a mud monster. Not sure i really like Bernice, but hopefully she grows on me. Even if she doesn't, I only have one more book before Ace comes back and then i'll be able to balance her out with Ace and not solely focus on her as the only companion traveling with 7.

All in all though, i enjoyed the book for what it was, wasn't confused 80% of the time, and the evil Turtle people army was a nice change-up from the every day human-like people that doctor who books tend to put in 90% of the time and are boring as all hell.

Story was pretty easy to follow with the "Highest Science" Being a tad confusing at times and the complete erasure of the drug hippies story could have been warranted as it was obvious they were only there for padding and to give Bernice something to do. The villains were interesting and I never said "Ugh, i can't wait for this to end." So that's a plus.

So yeah, not bad. Not great, but not bad. 3.5 out of 5. but of course i can't do 1/2's so... 3 out of 5. but it's really a 3.5.

3.5 out of 5.

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun fact: Gareth Roberts reeeeeally likes Douglas Adams. The Highest Science is intent on flattery by imitation, with a plot revolving around random yet interconnected events, hopelessly obstinate aliens and even a suicidal artificial life-form. I’m surprised the Guide isn’t in it.

Still, it’s frothy and fun. The Chelonians - motherly, murderous space tortoises - are a delightful addition to Who canon, and although the book’s primary villain is a one note bore, Roberts’ plot resolves very satisfyingly in the last stretch. (Not including a huge loose end that would be randomly tied up in Happy Endings.)

The Doctor is very well written, leaning towards his sillier side, and Bernice is worth reading here as well - except that, like Transit, there’s a feeling of “do I have to include her?” She misses out on a lot of the action. Roberts has a knack for her, which makes this even more annoying somehow.

It’s not your typical New Adventure, being light-hearted from the outset. I think there’s room for that.

7/10

[Finlay O'Riordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is exactly the kind of story I'd expect from the televised McCoy era, so it's good to that extent, but the downside to that is it doesn't really match with the "Stories too small for the screen" tagline which the VNAs had.

It's a pretty simple and straightforward Doctor Who story. The cover art itself is sort of a plot hole since it depicts the Chelonians walking on two feet, which they never do in the text itself, and sadly that is quite a bit irritating for me.

Worth a read if you've got time and are just curious about the VNAs, otherwise, you could probably channel your energy into "Blood Heat" or "Timewyrm: Revelation" for a stronger VNA.

[MrColdStream · Rating 4 out of 5]

Verdict: 8/10

The Highest Science is at its best when focused on the Chelonians and Sheldukher, who bring excitement and depth to the story. While some subplots feel underdeveloped and the ending slightly rushed, Roberts’ witty prose and engaging characterisation of the Doctor and Benny make this a memorable read. The novel balances classic Who tropes with fresh ideas, making it a standout in the Virgin New Adventures series.

Full review at https://tardis.guide/reviews/story-th...

[John Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breezy, silly read that you could easily imagine being filmed for the show as a low budget adventure. Could have been better but was ok for what it was.

The idea of the doctor hunting a living coincidence that is causing an increasing number of strange random coincidences, isn't actually used or mentioned that much in the book even tho it's what kicks off the plot. I'd like to see it used more in the future but I'm guessing it won't be

[Peer Lenné · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das war doch wunderbar erfrischend. Zwar merkt man, dass Roberts hier noch nicht so viel Erfahrung im Schreiben hat und die Geschichte ist nicht ganz so wunderbar stimmig wie bei seinen späteren Werken, aber der Schreibstil und die typische Skurrilität sind größtenteils schon vorhanden. Auf jeden Fall ein sehr empfehlenswertes Buch.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5

I just didn't connect with this book in any meaningful way. Not really sure why - the individual elements were interesting enough but they ended up not coming together satisfyingly for me. I think it might've been a case of too many plot elements for one relatively short novel, to be honest.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's kind of a shame that Gareth Roberts has been infected by culture war nonsense in recent years, because this early effort is pretty good and evinces some attitudes which are more progressive than those he expresses today. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...

[Domiron · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's important to remember that, despite the cover, these are tortoises that walk on four legs. So much more entertainingthat way and that is how it really is.
Otherwise, feels a fairly standard Doctor Who story, somehow feels maybe a bit less 7th Doctor than most VNAs so far (particularly around the early stages of the book), though constantly more 7th Doctor than any other incarnation.

[Jayden Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have conflicted feelings about this book. It started really slow and was kind of a slog for me. Later it picked up and I really wanted to know the resolution, but ultimately I didn't feel the ending was very satisfying. I did enjoy the insane alien space turtles though. I think it was worth a read but I don't see myself rereading it.

[Christopher M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a fun romp than some of the other NAs, but the narrative is a bit of a dog's breakfast in which the humans, aliens and ninja tortoises kidnapped to a desert planet during a quest don't ever really join the main plot and just kill time.

[Arcturus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book, not necessarily spectacular or anything but very much not bad either, a breath of fresh air after the previous book in this series.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty entertaining. More in the line of 'like a televised story' than 'treading new ground'.

[Donavon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not really get into for maybe first half. At somepoint the story started to work for me and the depiction of Dr 7 was quite good.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full of Adamsian whimsy but really just a bit dull.

[City Mist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gareth Roberts proves his mettle as a Doctor Who writer right out of the gate as this reads like the best story that Season 24 never had. Then again, being the best story that Season 24 never had does come with its hindrances.

[Colin Hoad · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this is not an awful New Adventures book (think Witchmark...) it is nevertheless pretty mediocre. It suffers from a number of problems, the biggest being the author's apparent inability to concentrate on any one plot thread for more than a couple of paragraphs. Like an attention deficit child, Roberts jumps from one set of characters to another so often that you end up not caring much about any of them. For reasons best known to himself, Roberts chooses to invest his story with a huge number of superfluous characters, develops none of them and then gradually kills them off without any real purpose. Indeed, there are entire threads that could have been cut from the novel and it wouldn't have made any difference to the story: the group of passengers from 20th century Earth were entirely irrelevant to the story and seemed to have been added as an afterthought by Roberts, perhaps because he couldn't concentrate long enough on the character groups he already had.

Then there are the subplots that Roberts tosses into the narrative without much consideration. The addictive soda, prophetic pop music, devastating 'black blob' weaponry and the backstories of Sheldukher's crew are all mildly interesting but none of it really goes anywhere or reaches any resolution. Ultimately the trio of characters Bernice ends up with, as well as Sheldukher's crew, all die off anyway and could just as easily have not been in the story. The supposed twist in the plot regarding the imaginatively named Cell (Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, anyone?) is vaguely surprising but, by this point in the plot, not enough to salvage the story from the dross to which it has descended.

And then there are the Chelonians. Oh dear me. As if the Krang reference wasn't enough, Roberts dreams up an entire species of cybernetically engineered super-fighter tortoises. Their modus operandi is to just kill anything that isn't them, but their personalities are so shallow and dull that they fail to inspire any terror. On the contrary, the almost comical nature of their war rhetoric makes them fit for ridicule.

There are a few good things to enjoy here, however. Roberts' characterisation of the Doctor is good (a far cry from the appalling treatment he received at the hands of Aaronovitch in the preceding 'Transit' novel) and this also feels like a solid story for Bernice in which she actually has a decent role. In fact, the early scene in which Bernice is confronted by a sleazy barfly is perhaps one of the best in the novel. Sheldukher is also a fairly decent villain and adversary; it is a shame Roberts chose to make him play second fiddle to the Chelonians, as the story would have been much better with the Chelonians cut out all together and Sheldukher positioned as the central threat.

One final word on the novel's denouement. Roberts chooses to resolve the story by having the Doctor freeze everyone in a slow time bubble. And then he gets in the TARDIS and leaves. Bernice asks him what he's going to do and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe one day he'll figure it out, come back and free everyone. This is the novel's lowest point, on a par with '...and then he woke up and it was all a dream.' If the Doctor can't be arsed to solve the situation at hand, having taken 200 odd pages to reach this conclusion, what on earth was the point of the entire story? And now that he's armed with that incredible MacGuffin device, why doesn't he just freeze every subsequent encounter he has, so that he can have more time to mull it over and sort it out later? We are left to wonder: what if the Doctor never does figure out what to do? The people inside the time bubble might just as well be dead, in that case. It is such sloppy, lazy, deus ex machina plotting that I am amazed Roberts was allowed to get away with it.

In summary: not terrible, but certainly not great.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1490630.html

This was Gareth Roberts' first Doctor Who book (in the Virgin New Adventures series), laying the groundwork for a subsequent career that has most recently produced The Lodger (though we have a couple more Sarah Jane Smith stories by him coming out towards the end of the year). A small plot element - London commuters whisked through a wormhole in space to encounter an alien menace - was re-used in Planet of the Dead, by Gareth Roberts and RTD. Fannish opinion on this one seems a bit polarised; I thought it was OK but not brilliant, with the best bit being the introduction of the alien Chelonians, a race of militant cybernetic tortoises who crop up in other, later Who novels and who were recently name-checked on screen in The Pandorica Opens. I was less impressed by galactic war criminal Sheldukher who I felt varied between dull and nasty. Poor Benny Summerfield has a hard time of it, with her brain being partially rotted by a spiked soft drink. Various other elements jumbled together, not completely successfully, but a fairly satisfactory Big Reveal at the end. The prelude to the book, published in DWM in 1993, is online at http://www.drwhoguide.com/whona11p.htm

[Drew Perron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gareth Roberts is not a serious writer. He's a Douglas Adams-esque writer, reveling in absurdity, ridiculous setups, and undercutting seriousness while still delivering an interesting message. It's why his adaptation of Adams's Shada worked (where other post-Adams efforts to do Adams, like And Another Thing, didn't).

Unfortunately, this book came out in the early stages of the Doctor Who New Adventures, where they were terribly concerned with being adult, dark, and above all, serious. The result is something that just doesn't work. There's a lot of moments that feel like they're building up to good satire... except that the satire, the deflating of the pompous, the self-absorbed, and the self-important, gets interrupted by the need to show the pompous, self-absorbed and self-important as Real Threats That The Heroes Should Be Threatened By And The Reader Should Feel Tension About.

And the thing is, it really could've worked. I mentioned Shada above, and this one is very Shada-influenced, with a super-space-criminal and ancient secrets and things that turn out not to be what they seem. But Roberts doesn't let himself go with it like he needs to.

Still - he got better about it later. Doctor Who as a whole did, really. I definitely recommend his later works over this; it's not bad, but it's more for completionists.