Doctor Who: Sleepy

Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures #48

by Kate Orman

Nothing unusual ever happens on Yemaya 4. Pe ople simply go about their everyday business farming, buildi ng homes and raising families. But the arrival of an alien v irus soon changes all that. '

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 1996

About the author

Kate Orman studied biology at Sydney University and worked in science before becoming a professional author. Orman is known for her sci-fi work, and especially her frequent collaborations in the "Doctor Who" universe. For Virgin Publishing and BBC, she wrote more than a dozen full-length novels, as well as numerous short stories and non-fiction pieces related to "Doctor Who". She was the only woman and only Australian to write for the initial range of novels, the Virgin New Adventures.

As of 2022, Orman lives in Sydney and is married to fellow author Jonathan Blum.

Reviews

[Danny Welch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kate Orman is a favourite Doctor Who writer among those who read the novels throughout the wilderness years and it isn't hard to see why. It's no wonder fans have been ecstatic ever since Big Finish have brought her back on board to write for their audio novel range. I wasn't a fan of "The Left-handed Hummingbird" admittedly, but I've enjoyed everything else I've read from her so far!

Yemaya 4, an Earth Colony, seems like an ordinary place on first glance, but it quickly becomes apparent something has gone wrong. The inhabitants are displaying psi-powers, they don't know why or how it came about, but one thing is for certain: if someone doesn't bring a stop to it soon a terrible catastrophe will take place. Arriving to investigate, the Doctor and his companions find something far more sinister is going on underneath the surface. The Dione-Kisumu company has deployed troopers to tackle the problem, but can they be trusted? Time is running out, and the answer lies with sleepy. But who is sleepy and what is their purpose?

Kate Orman has written a really fun and fast-paced Doctor Who novel that essentially begins the Psi-Powers arc. It's a story that gives all our regulars something to do and even puts them against one another as their fears and paranoia come to the surface. The story explores how people react to those who develop psychic abilities and the fear that comes with it.

This tense story thankfully reduces the darkness typical of the series, focusing instead on a fun, if somewhat standard, Doctor Who adventure with interesting twists. After "Just War" and "Warchild," a story like this was necessary, so seeing Kate Orman deliver something more fun and exciting was very refreshing.

Overall: It's a very fun novel, the side characters aren't anything to write home about but it's a solid read. 8/10

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Upon rereading this is a better book that I remember it being. The plot itself isn't much but the writing, the humour, the imagery and turn of phrase is wonderful. Also, whilst it doesn't do that much with them, it deals with Chris and Roz better than most of the novels before this. It would probably be better if it wasn't so much part of the rubbish Psy-Powers arc.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

It doesn't have to be AMAZING, but it at least should be INTERESTING, and Orman always gives you that. More than I can say for a lot of the NA stories.

[Gary Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doctor Who: Sleepy
By Kate Orman / Virgin /March 1996

‘Stay the hell out of my mind,’ hissed Forrester. ‘Just stay away from me.’ She turned and stalked out of the room. Chris put his head in his hands.

The Earth colony on Yemaya 4 is a very ordinary place. The colonists spend their time farming, building homes, raising families.

But when the Doctor and his companions arrive they find a virus sweeping through the population, unleashing the colonists’ latent psychic powers. The Doctor and Chris fall prey to the infection, and discover telepathy is not the only symptom. Chris is unable to resist the call of an ancient place of sacrifice, while Roz and Benny travel back in time to the origin of the virus, and uncover a desperate bid for immortality.

And all the while the Doctor is playing a dangerous game with troopers of the Dione-Kisumu company, who have come either to reclaim the stolen biotechnology -- or to sterilize the planet.

Kate Orman is still the only New Adventures author who is not male and not British. Whether or not it makes her a great writer, I can't say, but Sleepy was an enjoyable read, perhaps because it had a simpler plot than her previous Who novels, The Left-Handed Hummingbird and Set Piece (which I heartily recommend).

The Doctor and his companions arrive on an Earth colony where the colonists are coping with the emergence of latent psychic abilities. For once, the Doctor knows little in advance about what's going on, but is committed to helping the colonists. He and Chris fall prey to the virus unleashing the colonists' psychic abilities, while Benny and Roz go back in time to find answers.

The situation is further complicated by the arrival of armed forces sent by the company that sponsored the colonization, and may have in fact planned the disaster as an experiment.

So far, this doesn't seem like the most original plot line, but Orman throws in enough twists to make it a worthwhile read while also writing the Doctor and his companions the way they should be written.

Benny has got to be the greatest companion to date, despite the fact she's never appeared on-screen. Roz and Chris don't have major roles in the story, but at the same time it doesn't seem as if they were plugged into the novel as an afterthought. Some fans have complained the Doctor has become a very dark, manipulative character in The New Adventures, but Orman keeps him balanced, throwing in humor reminiscent of the television series, but giving him depth by keeping him the most reflective, pensive Doctor to date.

All in all, Sleepy is one of the best New Adventures for 1996, and Orman fans won't be disappointed.

 

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This New Adventure gets a rough ride from many people...a seemingly forgotten Kate Orman story, between a collection of epics. I found it utterly delightful, creepy, fascinating, and suitably engrossing. Perhaps I'm just easy to please, but it's one of those rare books where you are dropped into the heart of the story, forced to work out what's going on...and loving every minute of the journey.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite on the level of Orman's previous Who novels, but that just means this is "very good" rather than "excellent". Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Doctor and his companions travel to Yemaya 4 in the year 2257 to investigate a virus that is sweeping through the population of human colonists, unleashing their latent psychic powers. The Doctor and Chris fall prey to the infection, and discover that memories, and perhaps even a personality, are carried by the virus, too.

Chris is unable to resist the call that he perceives as coming from an ancient alien place of sacrifice, while Roz and Benny travel back in time 30 years to the origin of the virus, and uncover a desperate bid for survival by a psychic AI called GRUMPY.

The Dione-Kisumu Company, creators of GRUMPY and (unwittingly) the virus, send a team of troopers, lead by five telepaths, to find out what's happening on Yemaya. Colonel White merely wants to impose order and report home, but he soon becomes obsessed with the memories of the alien Doctor. Meanwhile, the AI called SLEEPY starts to collect memories from the infected colonists, to remember who it once was.

Sleepy ... might just be the crowning achievement of the New Adventures as a project.

This is not something I thought I'd find myself thinking when I decided to re-read it.

When I read the novels originally, I preferred the louder ones. Novels like The Left-Handed Hummingbird or Transit . I also preferred a certain level of assuredness to the writing, and I could see the seams on Sleepy.

I was in the thrall of Alan Moore — as were we all, even if we didn't know it, even when we hadn't read him. He would later avow that these works were the result of him being in a 'bad mood', but with Marvelman, Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen, Alan Moore took popular culture by storm. Andrew Cartmel's crew openly worshipped him. And the New Adventures took Moore's stories as a model. Revisionist, adolescent, mythic, totalising. Trying to put themselves at the centre of everything.

And don't think I'm saying any of that as a criticism. These qualities not only attracted my attention then, but also created much that I still value today. With another seventeen years of living, however, I'm able to apprehend other qualities that I find even more important.

Elizabeth Sandifer (though she mistakenly believes Sleepy to be a lesser work) said it well when talking about another Orman novel:

And it gets at what's really the impressive thing about the New Adventures when they're at their best: not their ability to execute big, dark, and epic stories, but their ability to make searingly emotional and harrowing stories out of basic human dignity and decency.

Yes.

And to that end I would say, if you didn't want to read the entire range, there are four essential New Adventures:

1. Love and War by Paul Cornell.
2. Set Piece by Kate Orman.
3. Human Nature by Paul Cornell.
4. Sleepy by Kate Orman.

These four trace the evolution of a working out, a moving beyond Alan Moore. We move from secret roots and loss of innocence, to the determination that no one deserves to be sacrificed, to the struggle to find a better way, to the realisation that, sometimes, the things we think we're being asked to do, they aren't what we think they are.

It is not easy to move beyond the template of Moore. Even a writer of the calibre of Grant Morrison, after all these years, still leans on the structure of dark revisionism to give himself something to critique and to provide a contrast with his own alleged preferred direction. I am not going to outline the struggles of the first three essential New Adventures. Instead, I want to look at the new thing, at Sleepy. By this last novel, we've discarded all the apparatus of the earlier stories except for one tiny piece, which remains only to dismantle itself.

The Doctor has a very short dream sequence in which he deals with Death, a god the Doctor himself created, who has already promised to take both the life of a companion and his own life. This time, instead of gifts or threats, Death offers a koan. The Doctor declares that no one will die in this story. Death says, if she wins, if someone dies, she will take all the angst she can eat from the Doctor. And if he wins, she will take all the angst she can eat from the Doctor. What does this mean?

Lest the reader worry that his bet with Death might somehow result in a tragic end to the story, a colonist dies a few pages later. The Doctor loses before he barely awakes from the dream. But he also doesn't know about the death. The tension is defused, and the dramatic irony allows us to see with clear eyes the process of the Doctor trying to save everyone. It is the most difficult thing. For the Doctor, for the author, and for the reader. Death is handy and familiar. Death is easy. To work around it (or Her) is a great imaginative feat. It can also be very uncomfortable.

The author has to struggle with her influences and received ideas. Luckily, this is still an adventure story. Even without deaths, there are still threats, shootings, psychic attacks, and explosions. But the consequences of these events need to be much more carefully thought out. Even more, the reasons for these events need to be thought about. This adventure is also a novel about thinking, the great psychological novel of the New Adventures.

Telepaths are usually the enemy of psychological depth. They provide a shortcut to the soul, the thought direct, and are often conceived as a superior form of being. Here it is not so. White is little more than a tourist in the Doctor's mind, while the telepathic colonists misunderstand SLEEPY's call from the jungle. It is for more than just refreshing diversity that a deaf character features here. Dot Smith-Smith disputes the hierarchy of perception. Her (telepathically projected) childhood memories of being physically coerced to learn speech are an important key to the novel:

She was four years old. She was being punished.

She didn’t know what she had done. She was always being punished, for hours and hours every day, no matter how good she tried to be.

[...]

Her parents hovered in the background while the stranger did all of this. They made no move to intervene. Sometimes, afterwards, her mother would inexplicably give her a lollipop.

The motivations of others are often a mystery to us. Telepathy is no panacea: often our motivations are a mystery to ourselves as well.

In the end, White wants to die. He tries to psychically pry open the Doctor's memories so that he can see them all for himself, an alien experience that would almost certainly kill him. Why does he want to do this? We expect the villain of an adventure story to make a final, suicidal attack on the hero. But what's in it for him? There are answers here: to be written into history; to assert control; to avoid seeming weak; to finally escape the rat race; and more, perhaps. The Doctor begs White not to be part of the killing machine. Every soldier signs up to potential sacrifice. One aspect of the death drive is the urge to be sacrificed.

The sacrifices line up in this novel, one after another. It eventually becomes apparent that the most difficult thing about trying to save everyone is trying to save those who would happily sacrifice themselves. There's barely a character who doesn't try to walk into the fire. Because of despair, exhaustion, pain, desperation, guilt, fairness, and love. Yes, you read that right.

I can't believe that, back in 1996, reading the sub-plot of Chris and the colonists walking toward what they thought was the voice of the alien goddess called the Turtle, I thought this thread was a red herring. Apart from being part of the dynamism of speculation and discovery that drives the plot, it's also central to the themes of the novel. It's not just cultural bias that drives Chris into the jungle, it's a genuine misunderstanding, and it's a desire to be sacrificed.

'What did I do wrong?' he said, trying to force the sound of his voice down, choke the crying so that they wouldn't hear it in the other room. 'I went there, I went there, I followed the voice and nothing happened! I was just ignored. What did I do wrong?'

Dot didn't move from her seat. You didn't do anything wrong. You weren't being punished. It wasn't what you thought it was.

Meanwhile, when captured by GRUMPY's creator, Roz prays for the Goddess to take her jaded life so that Benny might live. Later, she risks death at the hands of SLEEPY's followers when she throws a grenade at the machine to save them from its thrall.

(Benny, of course, already surrendered herself into the hands of the Nazis, two novels prior.)

Even the Doctor risks sacrificing himself to save White. It would be trivial for him to ward off psychic attack, as he did with the colonist Dot Smith-Smith, or, more to the point, the spaceship/AI R-Vene (in The Also People). Not defending himself while not leaving himself open is much harder, a source of physical pain — and emotional angst.

And so we can perhaps guess at the meaning of Death's koan.

The seventh Doctor portrayed here is, at last, human. A human with the ability to cast off the engineered virus, to stay active after a point-blank stun blast, to fend off psychic intrusion, to travel in time and even change history, and, if all else fails, to whisk away from destruction all those who will follow. But although he has all those powers, his special abilities — and the special abilities of those who would follow his path — are sensitivity, decency, and perseverance.

Sensitivity to detect people's unconscious or unarticulated motivations. Decency to treat everyone as a person worth being saved. Perseverance to keep struggling against the easy options — and to keep living.

It's easy to imagine a Sleepy that takes the easy option and conforms more to expectations. The action could take place just before history's deadline for the colony's demise. The Doctor could bargain with Death for the threatened life of his companion. Dot Smith-Smith could remain mad after telepathically scanning the Doctor's mind. White could be more of the psychic vampire. The Doctor could be connected with the DKC AI's creation. Gjovaag — who dies in the fire — could instead die near the end, at the hands of Lieutenant Yellow. It's easy to imagine. There'd be nothing sleepy about such a novel. You could call it Grumpy. A bad mood that Kate Orman thankfully escaped to show us a better way.

[Mikey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kate Orman never disappoints! After the fairly bleak and bloated Warchild, SLEEPY is a massive improvement and back in line with the quality of other recent New Adventures. We get thrown in at the deep end with the Doctor and co. already settled in and investigating - a setup that’s been fairly common since Chris and Roz joined the TARDIS line-up. It’s a set-up that I’ve quite appreciated so far, and it works well again here, especially as things start (in true Orman fashion) with the Doctor being tortured.

Plot-wise, it’s a fun mystery, and while it ends up having a slight detour into timey-wimeyness it never ventures into the realm of being overly convoluted. Meanwhile, it gives us plenty of opportunity for each of the TARDIS team to get time to shine, and we get a chance to have more focus on Chris again beyond the default ‘friendly, enthusiastic, slightly dim golden retriever’ portrayal a lot of other books have went for with him.

Best of all, character-wise here is the amount of great Doctor moments we get. Orman never fails to capture the perfect balance of comical and whimsical, and outright terrifying and powerful aspects of the Doctor, and it’s always a treat to get more of Orman’s characterisation for him, especially this particular incarnation.

The only part I feel SLEEPY lags on a bit is the other characters. While some of them, like Dot Smith-Smith and the AIs are interesting characters, a lot of the Yemayans and the Dione-Kisumu Company troopers tend to blend together.

All in all though, SLEEPY is still another hit for Orman and for the New Adventures as a whole, and seemingly with a tease of potential future events as well that I’ll be interested to see get picked up on in the books to come.

[James Bowman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Seventh Doctor, Roz, and Chris confront an outbreak of psychic powers on a colony world, before the story swerves into unexpected territory during the investigation into the outbreak's source. It's hard to say if the mix of sci-fi tropes quite works out, but it's certainly an intriguing combination. The novel might run on a little too long and try to do too much - various early subplots with the colonists run out of steam by the end, for example - but the resulting tale remains solidly entertaining. (B+)

[City Mist · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cyberpunk adjacent retread of Colony in Space, a story that most fans seem to agree is one of Classic Doctor Who's most chronically middle of the road. I don't think I'm very fond of the Psi-Powers Arc. The emphasis on young people with various degrees of telepathy in these past few New Adventures has really left me wanting a gothic horror story, a base under siege, something other than this flashy futurism, at least as a one off.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

I don't think this one will stand out too much when I look back on this series, but it's a decent time, and I am always a fan of sentient robots in media.

[Robert Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll assume that if you found this book, you're at least a passing Dr. Who fan. I've never encountered someone reading a media tie-in otherwise.

That out of the way, this 48th entry in the New Adventures series has its moments.

The pluses: with this and other NA novels, you have the potential for a bigger scope and an unlimited effects budget. You also have the chance to explore more complex science fiction ideas and more mature themes. In particular, the AI angle here and the psychic virus are handled in an interesting way.

The minuses: Sometimes the pacing feels like one of those old 6-parters that could have easily been done better in 3 or 4. There's just a feeling of wheel-spinning too often here. Also, I've yet to warm up to Roz and Chris as companions, despite this being the 10th novel to feature them.

The sum: For those that feel, like myself, that the 7th Doctor's on-screen tenure was too brief, the NA line provides more tales to enjoy. It's a mixed bag, and this one is likeable with some memorable moments. Not the best, but certainly not the worst of the lot so far.

[Xanxa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this was published in 1996, the topics surrounding viruses and vaccines have become disturbingly relevant in light of the past year's events.

This book had a bit of a shaky start and it took me a chapter or so to work out what was going on, because it dumped the reader in the midst of a dream sequence.

The story itself was intriguing and the guest characters had sufficient depth to be relatable. The usual format of presenting a problem and searching for a solution works well for these kinds of adventures.

I did find it ran out of momentum around two-thirds of the way through. The solution had been found but it seemed to take ages for the Doctor, his companions and the guest characters to actually get around to implementing it.

It finished off with a satisfying conclusion, which helped mitigate the overly drawn out section.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2208583.html[return][return]A New Adventure novel featuring the Seventh Doctor with Roz, Chris and Benny as companions, landing on a planet where there are various human colonists in distress and conflicting AIs trying to restore the status quo, of which the key AI is called SLEEPY. Unfortunately the AI characters, though not physically anthropomorphic, rather pushed my "I hate cute robots" button and I couldn't really get to grips with it.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as brilliant as the previous Orman books in the series, but this is still an enjoyable, fast-reading book that has some great elements of transhumanism (before it was cool!) and terrific character looks at some of the characters of the series. The exploration of psychic powers is also well considered and hopefully sets up the rest of the psychic powers pseudo-series.

[Mae R · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is unique in the NA for the sole reason that it attempted to use Chris as something more than a comic relief buffoon. At least I think it's unique in that respect -- I'm reading these out of order, I feel the Doctor would approve. I'd recommend this book, just because it explains the origin of the sentient computer minds who help our heroes a few books down the line.