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Past Doctor Adventures #56
Doctor Who: The Suns of Caresh
In England a hotel worker has been turned to stone, an ancient lake has vanished, and the inmate of a mental hospital is being terrorised by unseen creatures. In Israel, in the shadow of Masada, an archaeological dig unearths something that should have stayed buried. The Doctor is sure he is dealing with a local and relatively straightforward temporal anomaly. Troy Game, a refugee from the planet Caresh, is not so certain. She believes the impending destruction of her home world is somehow linked to the events on Earth, and she is pinning her hopes on the Doctor to avert the catastrophe. But can the Doctor interfere with a planet's destiny? And should he risk his new-found freedom to do it?
286 pages, Paperback
First published August 5, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 18, 2021
There's something about Earth based stories that seems to much more enjoyable in Doctor Who, that's certainly the case in this PDA featuring The Third Doctor and Jo.
The bulk of the book takes place in West Sussex during the summer of 1999.
Troy Game, a refugee from Caresh is pinning her hopes on the Doctor to avert catastrophe.
Most of the story consists of a runaround in Chichester, which brilliantly includeds observations of contemporary England from both Troy Game and Jo Grant (as the latter has travelled nearly 30 years into the future.)
This was by far my favourite bits.
Where the novel loses interest is during the final third on Caresh.
It's gives such an uneven feel not helped that most of the actual plot consists in those final 80 pages.
The bulk of the book takes place in West Sussex during the summer of 1999.
Troy Game, a refugee from Caresh is pinning her hopes on the Doctor to avert catastrophe.
Most of the story consists of a runaround in Chichester, which brilliantly includeds observations of contemporary England from both Troy Game and Jo Grant (as the latter has travelled nearly 30 years into the future.)
This was by far my favourite bits.
Where the novel loses interest is during the final third on Caresh.
It's gives such an uneven feel not helped that most of the actual plot consists in those final 80 pages.
February 18, 2013
I wonder what Jon Pertwee would think of the cover were he still alive today? Would it be "What the heck did you do to my head?" or would Chris Eccelston show up and say "'ey! Who stole my look?" These are probably the kinds of things I shouldn't worry about.
For once though, I don't have to ponder the cover in the hopes of ignoring the story, as it's not all that bad this time. Taking place in the era right when the Doctor got control of his TARDIS back, he wants to explore without rocking the boat too much and so of course winds up getting involved in Time Lord intrigue. Turns out that Lord Roche is trying to save the planet Caresh and in doing so it might have gone awry, which means he's not on the run from deadly hunters sent by creatures from the vortex. Meanwhile, someone from Caresh is sent to find him and quickly fails at that job. And then there's a time fracture. At some point the Doctor gets involved.
I will say, as much as I liked it, it's more due to all the elements making up the plot than the plot itself, which remains a weirdly unfocused beast. There are times when it seems like the author is just throwing things together in the hopes that it will cohere or the book simply grows bored with the current concept and moves onto the next one. Unfortunately, the most interesting part of the book is the early scenes, where local boy and regular guy Simon finds alien Troy Game and proceeds to show her around Earth as she attempts to acclimate and figure out her mission. Those scenes are both funny and touching as Simon has to deal with a fairly hot alien and the alien tries to make sense of Earth. I'm not the first person to note that I would have liked to have seen more done with this plot, since it touches upon a lot of themes that "Doctor Who" doesn't always address, especially how weird the world really is when you don't see it through a Time Lord's eyes. Amusingly, the ground level view of aliens presages a lot of what the current show does (along with things like aliens who you don't remember until they try to come kill you) and would have made for an interesting working class novel with SF overtones.
But just as it starts to get scary in its reminding how you really can never GET aliens, the plot gets summarily dismissed and Simon, having served his purpose, is dispatched on a narrative level in about two sentences, a rather ignoble and odd end even by "Doctor Who" standards, like the author had just gotten bored with him and had to get him out of the book in the most perfunctory manner possible. But most of the secondary characters seem to suffer that fate . . . a man who due to the time fracture might be aging backwards in time (not in the achingly romantic Benjamin Button fashion, but literally traveling against the grain of time) is brought up, shown how it happened and then mostly ignored for the rest of the novel until the situation is rectified. Same with a group of lads who meet a bad end (or do they?) exploring an old TARDIS . . . they're described in great detail to us and then never seen again. It makes for an odd experience.
And yet, not a bad experience. What works in this book works well enough to overcome that. The plot holds real mystery, the presence of the Third Doctor and Jo feel like a return to that era without becoming a slavish recreation of it or a homage to all the stuff we thought we'd like (I did enjoy the reference to Jo thinking of herself as "Mrs Jo Yates", considering the direction the character went in later). Its maybe the first time in a while where Time Lords are used in a non-annoying fashion and the interactions between the Doctor and the Time Lady are a good example of how Time Lords can be interesting when you get them off Gallifrey and start turning them into characters again. There's a sense of the Doctor existing in a functioning universe filled with moving parts, as opposed to holding all these wonderful toy planets that are just waiting for him to saunter on by and mess up. I like the idea that stuff is going on around him that he isn't even involved in. The plot does get lazy later on in the book, becoming a hodgepodge of elements or people running around and being chased by stuff and once things get to Caresh it becomes oddly linear and run of the mill as the Doctor just plods along to the end intent on wrapping things up. But by that point the book had generated so much goodwill that I was able to let it coast to the finish. For once, someone proves that it isn't that hard to craft a novel that gives you a reason to keep turning the pages and considering the near woeful state of the last few Past Doctor Adventures, this at least is a step in the right direction.
For once though, I don't have to ponder the cover in the hopes of ignoring the story, as it's not all that bad this time. Taking place in the era right when the Doctor got control of his TARDIS back, he wants to explore without rocking the boat too much and so of course winds up getting involved in Time Lord intrigue. Turns out that Lord Roche is trying to save the planet Caresh and in doing so it might have gone awry, which means he's not on the run from deadly hunters sent by creatures from the vortex. Meanwhile, someone from Caresh is sent to find him and quickly fails at that job. And then there's a time fracture. At some point the Doctor gets involved.
I will say, as much as I liked it, it's more due to all the elements making up the plot than the plot itself, which remains a weirdly unfocused beast. There are times when it seems like the author is just throwing things together in the hopes that it will cohere or the book simply grows bored with the current concept and moves onto the next one. Unfortunately, the most interesting part of the book is the early scenes, where local boy and regular guy Simon finds alien Troy Game and proceeds to show her around Earth as she attempts to acclimate and figure out her mission. Those scenes are both funny and touching as Simon has to deal with a fairly hot alien and the alien tries to make sense of Earth. I'm not the first person to note that I would have liked to have seen more done with this plot, since it touches upon a lot of themes that "Doctor Who" doesn't always address, especially how weird the world really is when you don't see it through a Time Lord's eyes. Amusingly, the ground level view of aliens presages a lot of what the current show does (along with things like aliens who you don't remember until they try to come kill you) and would have made for an interesting working class novel with SF overtones.
But just as it starts to get scary in its reminding how you really can never GET aliens, the plot gets summarily dismissed and Simon, having served his purpose, is dispatched on a narrative level in about two sentences, a rather ignoble and odd end even by "Doctor Who" standards, like the author had just gotten bored with him and had to get him out of the book in the most perfunctory manner possible. But most of the secondary characters seem to suffer that fate . . . a man who due to the time fracture might be aging backwards in time (not in the achingly romantic Benjamin Button fashion, but literally traveling against the grain of time) is brought up, shown how it happened and then mostly ignored for the rest of the novel until the situation is rectified. Same with a group of lads who meet a bad end (or do they?) exploring an old TARDIS . . . they're described in great detail to us and then never seen again. It makes for an odd experience.
And yet, not a bad experience. What works in this book works well enough to overcome that. The plot holds real mystery, the presence of the Third Doctor and Jo feel like a return to that era without becoming a slavish recreation of it or a homage to all the stuff we thought we'd like (I did enjoy the reference to Jo thinking of herself as "Mrs Jo Yates", considering the direction the character went in later). Its maybe the first time in a while where Time Lords are used in a non-annoying fashion and the interactions between the Doctor and the Time Lady are a good example of how Time Lords can be interesting when you get them off Gallifrey and start turning them into characters again. There's a sense of the Doctor existing in a functioning universe filled with moving parts, as opposed to holding all these wonderful toy planets that are just waiting for him to saunter on by and mess up. I like the idea that stuff is going on around him that he isn't even involved in. The plot does get lazy later on in the book, becoming a hodgepodge of elements or people running around and being chased by stuff and once things get to Caresh it becomes oddly linear and run of the mill as the Doctor just plods along to the end intent on wrapping things up. But by that point the book had generated so much goodwill that I was able to let it coast to the finish. For once, someone proves that it isn't that hard to craft a novel that gives you a reason to keep turning the pages and considering the near woeful state of the last few Past Doctor Adventures, this at least is a step in the right direction.
November 24, 2025
There’s a curious streak of the Past Doctor Adventures novels to have the occasional debut novel feel like an original science fiction story repurposed into a Doctor Who novel. The Suns of Caresh is one such novel, spending much of its first act setting up an amphibious alien society that develops in reverse to Earth amphibians, becoming more aquatic as they grow. Their planet is at risk of a disruptive orbit and their inhabitants seem to be at least partially time sensitive as a Time Lord called Roche seems to be a dictator. The more front and center protagonist of the novel is Troy Game, a Careshi who escapes to Earth pursued by Roche and the Furies, creatures that inhabit the time vortex as perfect assassins (think Weeping Angels under a different evolutionary route and in a story five years too early for “Blink). For a debut novel, Saint brings a lot to the table, the prose itself really has a handle on the odd imagery and switching between Troy Game’s rather alien perspective and the human perspective of Simon Haldane, a complete nerd who provides shelter for Troy on Earth. Saint is playing with a specific brand of science fiction romance between a human and an alien, but subverting it by making it fairly explicitly one-sided from Simon’s point of view. As a character Simon is quite the insufferable narrator so when you get to his eventual fate it feels more cathartic over anything else, but Troy as a character despite being alien and not understanding Earth and Earth culture is characterized immediately as intelligent and self-assured. The subversion is particularly nice and when Troy eventually makes contact with the Doctor and Jo there is a lot to get through the back half of the novel where Saint goes off the rails.
Saint attempts a time travel story where two other characters take the visage of the Doctor, there is a professor who is living backwards because of Roche, and Roche has his own needs. He is also specifically Israeli and named after the prophet Ezekiel which feels like Saint trying to say something with the character, but for the life of me it isn’t particularly clear. Roche as a character is at least an interesting, almost force of nature throughout the second half of the book, written in a way to be a parallel to the Doctor in exile. This doesn’t quite work as well, Saint makes the decision to set this after Carnival of Monsters and in his introduction to the Doctor is clear that the Doctor is ecstatic to be traveling time again and Jo is almost mystified at traveling more consistently with the Doctor. Roche also takes on the Doctor’s visage at points and there are scenes near the end of the novel with a lot of the vortex inhabitants having sent the Furies after Roche and later the Doctor. The Doctor as a character, however, actually does sing off the page even if Saint uses him and Jo sparingly. They take on the teacher/student relationship that feels very much informed by fandom over many of the actual serials the characters featured in on television, serials that largely would have been available to view on VHS at this time. The Suns of Caresh is almost written with a generic Doctor/companion pairing in mind and retrofitted to the Third Doctor and Jo, especially apparent with the way Jo interacts with the near future of 1999, a near future that works for basically every single Doctor/companion pairing from the series’ original run. There just isn’t quite enough strong characterization from Jo in particular to make this work, Saint possibly working off using Sarah Jane as a companion and setting this during Season 11 or maybe somehow using Liz to accommodate the Doctor’s exile.
Overall, The Suns of Caresh is a very solid debut science fiction novel, even if in terms of Doctor Who it doesn’t feel as consistent with the leads. The supporting characters are excellent and Paul Saint clearly has a grasp on imagery and science fiction ideas. The plot does rattle along quite nice and although the final act becomes murky, it does at the very least end with a high and a particularly optimistic ending which is also nice. 6/10.
Saint attempts a time travel story where two other characters take the visage of the Doctor, there is a professor who is living backwards because of Roche, and Roche has his own needs. He is also specifically Israeli and named after the prophet Ezekiel which feels like Saint trying to say something with the character, but for the life of me it isn’t particularly clear. Roche as a character is at least an interesting, almost force of nature throughout the second half of the book, written in a way to be a parallel to the Doctor in exile. This doesn’t quite work as well, Saint makes the decision to set this after Carnival of Monsters and in his introduction to the Doctor is clear that the Doctor is ecstatic to be traveling time again and Jo is almost mystified at traveling more consistently with the Doctor. Roche also takes on the Doctor’s visage at points and there are scenes near the end of the novel with a lot of the vortex inhabitants having sent the Furies after Roche and later the Doctor. The Doctor as a character, however, actually does sing off the page even if Saint uses him and Jo sparingly. They take on the teacher/student relationship that feels very much informed by fandom over many of the actual serials the characters featured in on television, serials that largely would have been available to view on VHS at this time. The Suns of Caresh is almost written with a generic Doctor/companion pairing in mind and retrofitted to the Third Doctor and Jo, especially apparent with the way Jo interacts with the near future of 1999, a near future that works for basically every single Doctor/companion pairing from the series’ original run. There just isn’t quite enough strong characterization from Jo in particular to make this work, Saint possibly working off using Sarah Jane as a companion and setting this during Season 11 or maybe somehow using Liz to accommodate the Doctor’s exile.
Overall, The Suns of Caresh is a very solid debut science fiction novel, even if in terms of Doctor Who it doesn’t feel as consistent with the leads. The supporting characters are excellent and Paul Saint clearly has a grasp on imagery and science fiction ideas. The plot does rattle along quite nice and although the final act becomes murky, it does at the very least end with a high and a particularly optimistic ending which is also nice. 6/10.
December 26, 2018
The Doctor seemed more 5th than 3rd, but the other characters worked well. There were a lot of plot elements that came and went, but for the most part came together. Not a perfect book, but was enjoyable.
May 4, 2022
"The Suns of Caresh" is a peculiar novel. It reads as though the writer has not decided exactly what his story will be. The story involves some dodgy Time Lords, a crack in time, a binary star system, stellar manipulation, a sci-fi fan who gets his dream girl (sort of), and some giant killer insects. The problem for me was not that the plot is a bit of an all-sorts. It is that the plot moves along from incident to incident, crisis to crisis, without any sense that the characters are getting anywhere, so that by page 230 out of 280, there was no sense that the story was reaching a climax. The first 50 pages or so jump around from character to character and scene to scene confusingly, so that it is hard to keep track of who is who. Another problem was that the author was obviously hiding information (such as whose point of view a particular sequence is in, or delayed explanation of how a particular sequence turned out). This technique built irritation, at least for me, rather than suspense. It does have some things going for it. Jo Grant is portrayed as smart and independent, dependable even, which makes her character more interesting. Saint manages to create an interesting alternative human alien, with different sets of values and social practices. The Careshi are not written as one-dimensional, unlike so many Star Trek aliens. For me, reading this novel was a mixed experience.
October 6, 2013
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2167515.html[return][return]This Past Doctor Adventure, with the Third Doctor and jo Grant, has a number of excellent concepts. Caresh itself is a planet which (slightly implausibly) orbits alternately around one of its two suns, with a threatened civilisation and an interfering Time Lord or two. A Careshi woman turns up in England of 1999, one of a number of symptoms of the chaos caused by her home world's problems, and there are some very good cognitive dissonance passages like the one above. There's some impressive writing of Tardis misbehaviour and body horror. But it didn't quite hang together for me, and I found some of the colourful elements (Israeli archaeological site, for instance) confusing rather than illustrative. Still, worth reading for fans of the era.
September 2, 2011
In some ways, this book is atypical of the 3rd Doctor's era, with its epic SF nature, its stock (make that BONKERS plethora) of sophisticated ideas, and its adult tone -- lightyears away from the controlled camp of that era. Yet it catpures the 3rd Doctor and Jo Grant so perfectly, you'd think that Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning had read the book aloud to you, page by page.
The final quarter of the novel is a bit minimalist compared to the rest of the book, but this remains one of the more sumptuous & surprising Doctor Who novels of the late 1990s/early 2000s.
The final quarter of the novel is a bit minimalist compared to the rest of the book, but this remains one of the more sumptuous & surprising Doctor Who novels of the late 1990s/early 2000s.
February 8, 2016
Great book, close to my heart for two reasons; firstly, it was the first Doctor Who book I ever read that was not an adaptation of a TV story, and opened my eyes to just how good these books could be, and secondly, it is set in Chichester, a short train journey from my own home town.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews