Doctor Who: Millennium Shock

Past Doctor Adventures #22

by Justin Richards

In Britain, panic has set in as the government realises the full implications of Year 2000. In the race against time, one company seems to promise all the technological answers... but what exactly are the methods and motives behind the operation?

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

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Justin Richards is a British writer. He has written many spin off novels based on the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who, and he is Creative Director for the BBC Books range. He has also written for television, contributing to Five's soap opera Family Affairs. He is also the author of a series of crime novels for children about the Invisible Detective, and novels for older children. His Doctor Who novel The Burning was placed sixth in the Top 10 of SFX magazine's "Best SF/Fantasy novelisation or TV tie-in novel" category of 2000.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

I brought so many BBC Doctor Who books during the shows revival in 2005 that there's a few titles I'm not entirely sure if I've previously read - this being one of them.

I know for a fact that I've not read the VMA System Shock, which this is a direct sequel too.
So it's really helpful that the prologue fills the reader in to them events.

Reading through the PDA's feels slightly nostalgic and the plot revolving around the fears of the Millennium Bug seems so long ago too!

Being Doctor Who it's obvious that an alien meance is behind the Y2K threat, its what the series does best when incorporating a real life scenario.

It's a fun techno thriller with the Fourth Doctor and an older Harry Sullivan.
Easy to enjoy as a standalone and makes me wish that we got these Past Doctor books now.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 2 out of 5]

A sequel to one of my least favourite Doctor Who novels...and the end result isn't a huge improvement on the first book, but it's a bit more tolerable (thanks to the inclusion of Harry Sullivan). Justin Richards' DW output swings from once fence to the other...thankfully he has written much better novels, so we'll treat this as an aberration.

[Jacqueline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second time I've read Millennium Shock. The first time I realized it was a sequel, but read it anyway because I knew the first book in the series, System Shock was part of the long out-of-print Doctor Who Missing Adventures series of books published by Virgin Publishing, and I would be unlikely to find a copy.
Now that I've read an e-book version of System Shock I did find that Millennium Shock made more sense. There's a lot of detail from System Shock that's used in this book - and not really explained.
Anyway, Millennium Shock is in the BBC Past Doctor Adventures series. It stars the Fourth Doctor (played on the television series by Tom Baker) and Dr. Harry Sullivan (played by Ian Marter on the TV series) who is now working for MI5. Sarah Jane Smith makes a brief appearance at the beginning, then we don't see her again.
The plot involves the Millennium Bug, and a two-part plan - a corrupt British politician who wants to use the Bug to his own advantage; and aliens who are manipulating the politician for their own ends. The aliens are mechanical and computer Cyborgs - combined with the reptile snake-like appearance of their original ancestors. However, they hide their forms to look more human. And they intend, again, to take over the world using Voractyll, an alien computer that can infiltrate computer networks. The original code had been split apart, so during most of the book the aliens are attempting to re-assemble the code.
The Doctor, of course, manages to divert the aliens - mostly by appealing to the emotions they thought they no longer had, and by turning their tricks against them.
Overall, the book made more sense the second time around. However, System Shock had more humor. Still, an excellent Doctor Who novel. I recommend it.

[Gareth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a few weeks to fill a gap in the schedule, this sequel to the author’s earlier System Shock is a rollicking spy thriller with aliens and the millennium bug. It’s a fair bit like System Shock, obviously, but it would have been reasonable to assume that some readers hadn’t read that one (as it was already out of print by then). I had a good time with it.

3.5

[Christian Petrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I found out this was a sequel to System Shock, I was curious to see how it would continue. Out of the Extended Universe this was the first sequel within it. As with the Future Shock, this was a mixed result.

For part of the Doctor's history, the time between The Deadly Assassin and The Face of Evil allows room for additional stories with the Fourth Doctor as he has no companions during this time. Here the Doctor arrives in 1999 and teams up again with Harry Sullivan to investigate some mysterious things going on a year after System Shock.

What it turns out is the Voracians are back and picking up where they left off. In System Shock Justin Richards did a great job of setting up the Voracians. The background to them was interesting and they had potential. Unfortunately that potential was not used here. They appeared to be almost carbon copies from the last book. At times I lost track of who was who. This was a let down.

On the flip side, there was one sub-plot involving Harry's housekeeper. This part of Harry's life was expanded and played part of the whole plot. Without giving anything away, this caught my attention more than anything else.

As with System Shock, one of the biggest problems with the story, is aged technology. This one was worst. Just a bit of background, this does take place in 1999. For those who were not aware of the Y2K bug, this was a key year due to what was not known about it. Richards does a good job of building up the fear of the unknown. Part of the fear was not knowing what would happen. The problem is for storytelling he decides to go with things stopping because equipment thinks it is 1900.

Living during that time, never thought planes would fall out of the sky at midnight. So with the Doctor "knowing" how things turned out, this was completely wrong. If he had used the worst case scenario of Y2K due to the alien computer virus, it could have worked. He did not. I understand this book was working before we saw the affects. It is because of that it makes the last part of the book very unbelievable.

As a whole, I did enjoy this book. It was smartly written and well paced for the most part. The biggest failing is the technology in the book. There is great detail about it, but just falls flat because of what we know now. You can give this book a chance, but keep in mind you will be reading a relic from the 90s.

[David Layton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Justin Richards makes the mistake of writing a sequel that is little different from the original. This creates the "why bother" effect. Picking up where he left off in System Shock, Richards has a new bunch of Voracians (get it, they're voracious) who are no different from the old bunch of Voracians try to resurrect the Voractyl virus the first bunch of Voracians failed to activate in System Shock to do exactly the same thing that the old bunch of Voracians wanted to do. The new bunch of Voracians are again modeled on corporate executives obsessed by "efficiency" and have again replaced key figures in government and business. There is once more a big showdown at the end in a government-owned mansion. The only differences are moderate: the plan this time involves hijacking the "millennium virus" of 2000 (when all the computers would supposedly stop working), there is a side plot involving ex-Soviet separatists trying to seize a nuclear missile, and no significant role for Sarah Jane. It's not different enough and not enough of an improvement to warrant having written it.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read this book since it was published, and in reading the missing adventures in story order including Virgin and BBC books, the links between this and System Shock were much clearer. I had to look up Ashley Chapel, although I remembered the name, in a link to a 6th Doctor story by Craig Hinton.

This tale was a kind of re-tread of System Shock, with a more political bent and the fun of the Y2K issue. I remember all the fears at the time, and how it seemed in the end to have very little impact. Hey ho, maybe climate change will go the same way?

Richards is one of my favourite Whoniverse authors, but this is lower on the list than most of his output.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harry gets involved with some corporate espionage involving the Millenium bug. The Doctor turns up and suspects alien involvement. This is very much an action, thriller spy type story. Both Harry and the Doctor have equal parts in the plot. This older Harry is interesting, with experience as a spy. It is a sequel but I don't think you need to have read the other one to enjoy and understand this. A good read.

[Dan J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever little sequel to the Virgin Missing Adventure title "System Shock", you dont have to had read it to understand whats going on, but it helps with background.

Also, this book is one of those that doesnt age well, as it was written about Y2K before Y2k happened, and well..we know how that worked out

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much better story then it's prequel 'System Shock. This features the fourth Doctor and Harry Sulivan ( another of my many favorite companions) dealing with the aliens from the first book, who are trying once again to rule the world!
Nice interaction between the Doctor and Harry.

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1995, System Shock by Justin Richards was published. Written for the Virgin Missing Adventures range, it was a Fourth Doctor thriller in the vein of Robot or The Seeds of Dooms for the mid-1990s age of the technothriller. It was also a splendid read for those who are fans of such things (as this reviewer happens to be and their review of that novel will attest). It’s no surprise then that a few years and a change of publishers later, when a hole needed to be filled in the schedule in a mere three weeks, Richards would create a sequel with a whole new “shock” for Tom Baker’s Doctor to face. And all in time for the turn of the millennium.

But does it hold up nearly a quarter-century after Y2K turned out not to be the end of the world as we know it?

As a writer and now novelist myself, I’ll start by tipping my hat towards Richards for writing this in three weeks because when it works, it works. Like with System Shock before it, Millennium Shock works best when it’s in thriller and action mode. This is an Earthbound tale in familiar (British) settings, including a climax set around a single location in the country. In being so, it also captures their spirit with sizable action sequences and set pieces that help to give the novel an international flavor as action shifts to post-Cold War Russia for a few brief sequences. The influence of then recently revived James Bond films with Pierce Brosnan is apparent as well, from break-ins into high-tech facilities calling to mind 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies. Yet the biggest Bond influence comes as the Doctor takes a cue from the iconic sequence of 1995’s Goldeneye, commandeering a tank and driving it through the cold streets of London (and not St. Petersburg in 007’s case). It’s something that helps to make the novel a page-turner in its best moments, which is all the more remarkable given the speed at which it was written.

Like with its predecessor, Richards leans heavily into recreating the characters and chemistry from the TV series. The Fourth Doctor and Harry Sullivan are the stars of the novel, which adds to that “boys own adventure” atmosphere of the thriller plot. Both the Doctor and Harry are present and correct, albeit with the Doctor in Season 14 mode and Harry very much his older but recognizable self working for MI5. The Doctor has more of a sense of wit than he did in System Shock, in keeping with where the Doctor was going on television. Harry, meanwhile, is the wry late middle-aged man of action with a touch of sarcasm. Older, a little wiser, less of an imbecile, but still recognizably Harry. Indeed, having just come off recently listening to an older Harry in Big Finish’s Two’s Company episode from the Once and Future anniversary audios not long before embarking upon my read of the novel, the two visions of an older Harry written two decades apart matched up quite well. Add in a brief but welcome cameo from Sarah Jane Smith (partly recreating the final scene of System Shock) and you get a natural continuation of these characters from who they were to who they’ve become in the then-present.

Which is a way of saying that the novel has its pros, but also that it has its cons. While it’s surprising that Millennium Shock is as good of a thriller as it is given the speed at which it was written, it’s by no means as solid as System Shock was. Something owed to the plot which alternately involves a new group of Voracians attempting to resurrect the digital creature from System Shock, the decaying former Soviet military establishment (how topical that feels now with how the War in Ukraine has gone!), and shenanigans involving the British military and Prime Minister. Any of which, or a combination of one or two, would have sufficed. Here, however, the sheer amount of moving parts in it, from subplots to supporting characters, gets to feeling a bit much at times. Not necessarily because of how much there is but how Richards attempts to connect them together. “Attempts” because the end result, when the big reveals occur in the closing third or so, comes across as rather convoluted in places. To the point that the plot feels like a mildly revised first draft, the one place where the speed at which it was written shows all too well.

So, too, does the novel’s tie into that greatest “threat” at the turn of the Millennium: Y2K, the Millennium Bug. Given when the novel was written and published, one can’t fault Richards for penning a Doctor Who take on what at least some thought was likely to happen as 1999 turned to 2000. Indeed, the series in the early Wilderness Era had a minor obsession with the turn of the Millennium from it being central to the plot of the 1996 TV Movie to the novel Millennial Rites and even some comic stories. The problem, of course, is nothing dates worse than visions of the future. While Richards was depicting a (very) near future that felt plausible to readers in 1999, it’s even more dated than System Shock was in its reliance on the technology and fears of the moment. Whereas System Shock (and any number of non-Doctor Who thrillers) can create tension out of moments in history (or thereabouts) that have passed, Millennium Shock instead feels like a rather alarmist time capsule of fears on the edge of 2000. One that, because of just how much it ties into them, is undermined by them with the passage of time.

The result? Dated, convoluted, but a fun read all the same. Especially if you’re a fan of the subgenre of the Doctor Who technothriller.

And where else will get Tom Baker’s Doctor driving a tank through London?

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

A nice little time capsule of a PDA. Four is decently well-written for a period in his run where he is particularly eldritch and impish. Near the end, the author's obvious fascination with military technology slows the prose down a little, and the absolute idiocy of the Prime Minister makes the final payoff a bit disappointing. All told, a moderate Doctor Who novel.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2324801.html[return][return]A decent enough story of the Fourth Doctor meeting up with an older Harry Sullivan at the end of 1999, to prevent aliens exploiting fears of the Millennium Bug to Conquer The Earth. The Fourth Doctor does need a female companion, though, it's not quite the same just with Harry (who misses Sarah; don't we all).

[Melenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read

[Simon Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my book Justin Richards can do no wrong.