Doctor Who: Blue Box

Past Doctor Adventures #59

by Kate Orman

The Nineteen-Eighties; as we enter the Age of the Personal Computer, the newborn 'Internet' spreads across America, and the computer invasion enters our homes. Across the technological frontier, an incredible war begins between the criminals and their savvy opponents. A brilliant young programmer, a beautiful college student, and a mysterious hacker known only as 'The Doctor' join forces to combat an electronic threat fallen into the hands of a notorious computer outlaw. Respected computer journalist Charles 'Chick' Peters was an eyewitness as these unlikely heroes fought their hi-tech skirmishes across the nation's vunerable capital - and inside the world of the computer. Blue Box is the compelling true story of a secret computer project that could literally change the way you think.

Genres: Doctor Who, Fiction, Science Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 2003

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

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set during the winter of 1981 and narrated through a computer journalist, Charles 'Chick' Peters.

This is a very tech heavy story concerning computer hacking.

One interesting aspect is that Orman decides to switch the Sixth Doctor's black suite - something that Colin Baker wanted in the show.

I found it enjoyable to a point. It held my attention, but the computer jargon was a little too much for me.
Though some of the quips about the Internet did amuse me, like the line about being able to order pizza.

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given the lack of female writers recently on the TV version of Doctor Who, I thought it would be interesting to try out some of the female writers of Doctor Who in other mediums.

And given that The Sixth Doctor’s reign was one of the most troubled eras of the show, featuring The Doctor and his young female companion in an almost abusive relationship, with that companion – if we’re honest – being little more than a leotard-clad scream-monkey there to be lusted after and pawed over by every sleaze-ball in the known galaxy, The Sixth Doctor and Peri seems the most interesting place to start.

Intriguingly one of the first things Oman does with her Sixth Doctor is change his outfit. (Terrence Dicks did exactly the same in his novel ‘The Players’.) This of course rises a wry smile as there is no visual component to books. We can’t actually see the outfit here, and yet that particular multi-coloured coat is deemed so offensive that even when we can’t see it, authors would rather just loose it than their have their lead character parade around in such a garment. The comedy value is increased when it emerges that Peri is only dressing the way she does to emphasise to The Doctor how ridiculous he looks, only he’s so full of himself he hasn’t noticed yet.

Orman has clearly put a lot of thought into their relationship, wondering how these two individuals survive together while bickering constantly. Peri is back on Earth, at around about her own time period, and the temptation swiftly arises for her to leave The Doctor and the Tardis. But as the book goes on, it's suggested that Peri and The Doctor share some kind of survivor syndrome, all the awful things they’ve seen, all the hair-raising adventures they’ve had have welded them together. She feels bonded to him, because they’ve been through so much together, because he went through that regeneration for her. I’m not sure I completely buy those reasons, but at least reasons are offered – which is more than the TV show ever did. That bickering, uncomfortable relationship of theirs isn’t as much on show here though, as they’re never together just the two of them (and how nice it must be for Peri to share a hotel room with two men and have neither of them put the moves on her) that means the unpleasant banter don’t unsettle the story; there isn’t the sense that you’re looking through the glass darkly at some terrible, abusive relationship.

Written in 2003, this is Doctor Who dropped into an early 1980s tech thriller – with hackers and tech language aplenty (I have no idea how accurate this tech language is, it might be frighteningly accurate or ludicrously bad, I just noted that there was a lot of it and went with it). It’s an interesting contrast as this is set in very much the same time frame as this era of Doctor Who, but it’s consciously so different to it. True, the BBC budget wouldn’t have stretched to The Doctor, Peri and a couple of co-conspirators driving like the Scooby gang around Washington DC. But that’s the reason we have the books, to do adventures the TV show hasn’t the largesse to do. No, the biggest contrast is that this is determinedly un-gaudy. The Colin Baker version of the TV show is the most ludicrously gaudy version of Doctor Who there is: brightness and big gestures signifying nothing. Here though everything is muted, from The Doctor and Peri’s outfits to everything around. This is Doctor Who in the aesthetic of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’: lots of grey, anonymous buildings and roadways. And it’s incredible how well The Sixth Doctor fits in here, that Orman can take the biggest and brashest Doctor, put him in this more naturalistic setting and not lose anything in the process.

It’s a race against time as The Doctor and friends try to stop female super hacker, Swan, from making use of an alien technology that may do huge damage to the planet. There’s tension, shifting loyalties and paranoia throughout, and the whole is the kind of adventure you wish Colin Baker’s Doctor had had in 1985.

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Blue Box in December 2023 was an interesting experience. Published more than twenty years before I read it, it was set a further two decades in the past from that. A Past Doctor Adventure then in more ways than one. But an intriguing read, even for someone like myself who wasn’t a fan of the TV era that Kate Orman was tying into. In no small part because this isn’t your ordinary Sixth Doctor story by any means.

Indeed, Blue Box fit neatly into the Sixth Doctor Renaissance that had begun with Craig Hinton in the Virgin Missing Adventures but reached its zenith when Colin Baker returned to the role for the Big Finish audio dramas. The Sixth Doctor and Peri have the traits of their TV counterparts but Orman wisely toned down the aspects that made the pair borderline unwatchable at times. Something that included taking the Doctor out of his multi-colored monstrosity of a coat and putting him into a black business suit (which, incidentally, is closer to what Baker wanted to wear back in the 1980s on TV). His more abrasive edge is dulled and the chemistry between him and Peri, while still having the odd moment of bickering, likewise feels warmer. Peri, in a moment alongside the narrator, even answers that long existing fan question of why on Earth two people who don’t seem to get along are traveling time and space together (and thankfully doesn’t involve a toxic friendship). It’s the Sixth Doctor and Peri not as they were on TV but as they should have been and became in the early 2000s thanks to fans.

Orman further evoked the Sixth Doctor Renaissance by taking the pair somewhere they had never been: early 1980s America. Moving between the nation’s capital and across the nearby state of Maryland, there is a sense of atmosphere that 1980s Doctor Who’s foreign location shoots only rarely managed to capture. A sense of city streets with crowded public places on the one hand and seedier motels and dives on the other. Location can be a character if an author does their prose right and Orman, to her credit, managed that well here.

Even better is that it’s all in service to that most important of things: plot. Setting Blue Box in the early 1980s, Orman is also able to tie into a literary subgenre that took America by storm in that decade: the technothriller. At the novel’s heart is the emerging personal computer, hackers, and how they stood on the cusp of changing the world. Into that moment when the internet was in its infancy arrives a threat that could use it to change our world. A threat that, in Doctor Who tradition, only the Doctor and companion can halt. Along the way, Orman offers what feels a crash course on where computers and hacking stood at the start of the digital revolution, an unlikely education but a fun one. That Orman does that alongside a technothriller plot with SF elements is all the more remarkable and something which makes the novel an engrossing read at times,

To tell her SF thriller, Orman choose a different format, one quite different from the sort of technothriller the plot emulates. Blue Box isn’t written like your standard Doctor Who novel at all but, instead, as a faux non-fiction work. It’s a format that had proven successful in the past with the likes of Who Killed Kennedy, so it comes as a surprise that this was only the second time I’d come across the format being employed. It also means that the novel is anchored by a sole narrator who is sometimes recounting events and other times recreating them, this time in the form of writer Charles "Chick" Peters. Chick is an interesting eyewitness to events, potentially unreliable as the changing of names and details sometimes alludes to. But it’s through the subjective eyes of Chick writing their “factual” account years after the fact that details gradually appear, including their background as readers pick up on non-American terms being used before learning of Chick’s background. Indeed, there’s an eleventh hour twist involving Chick that felt rather timely reading the novel in 2023 but which Orman handled well (or at least as well as possible given the historic setting and the language used as a result of it).



Like Who Killed Kennedy before it, Blue Box makes a good case for exploring the Doctor’s adventures from a subjective and faux non-fiction viewpoint, something that one wishes more writers had taken advantage of. Even with the passage of two decades, it also remains an immensely readable Doctor Who technothriller. One that’s less traditional Doctor Who than the likes of Justin Richards two Shock novels but also improving upon a lesser TV era, capturing the remaking of the Sixth Doctor’s tenure in the early 2000s.

The result? Dare I say it, Blue Box might be the best Sixth Doctor novel I’ve read to date.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, finally, an actual adult. Perhaps sensing that the Past Doctor line was suffering from an affliction that could be termed "a lack of quality", the BBC go and bring in one of their best and most reliable authors, Kate Orman. Typically, any cover sporting her name is more or less a guarantee that you're not only going to get a good novel but a well-thought out one as well, not just coasting on the good feelings we have for the show but with some of the elements that you can find in other, proper novels, things like characterization and dramatic tension and some nice emotional moments.

Unfortunately, I'm starting to suspect the whole line appears to be cursed because not even someone of Orman's powers can save it, turning out a story that is interesting without even being too exciting and not at all achieving the depths which normally seem to come so effortlessly with her.

Squabbling buddies the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrive in the eighties far before the dawn of the Internet, when ARPAnet was just a way to link a bunch of computers together. The Doctor is on the track of some alien technology that got lost and may be able to wreck the planet in the wrong unknowing hands, discovering that all wires seem to lead to computer expert and expert hacker Sarah Swan, who is a bit aggressive and not all that inclined to listen to reason or be told that she's wrong. Meanwhile an Australian reporter is tagging along writing a story on the events that are happening, so that we're not really reading about what's happening but a book based on what's happening.

The whole "article" aspect of this is done so clumsily and inconsistently I have to wonder if the format was imposed on Orman by the BBC, since her heart barely seems to be into it, often discarding it for sections and writing the book in a normal style. This is maybe the third Who book recently that has taken on the aspect of a text, which makes me wonder if the BBC thought it worked wonders once and were determined to try it again and again. But as I said, its inconsistent here. Not only does the narrative have to jump through hoops to keep reporter Chick involved, but he narrates sections that he's not even in. This could lead to a disconnect between what happened and what Chick thinks happened but if Orman was going there, the book gives no sign of it. Which means that the novel basically reads like a regular novel.

This isn't bad in itself, as Orman does know how to write. But a good chunk of the action involves people sitting around on computers attempting to hack other computers. If you've ever seen "Hackers" you can assured that this is not the world's most exciting pastime and the only thing probably less exciting than watching it is reading about it. She does her best with it but when the novel consists of people standing around computers talking and occasionally moving to a different place and a different computer to continue the discussion, it's a high hurdle to overcome. Early scenes where the Doctor is praising the wonders of an early Apple computer and other dated bits of technology make you wonder at first if this whole story is going to be played for irony. For better or for worse, the answer is no.

Which is a shame, because her gift for characters is intact. Hacker Bob Salmon is nerdy without being a cliche and involving his dad in some moments presages how the TV show would go domestic in a few years (and everyone then would think how this is blazing new ground for the series). The reporter has a voice of sorts but can't overcome that he's basically "there" for a separate point of view. A late revelation of an aspect of his personal life is interesting but the novel seems to go out of its way not to make a big deal about it, which makes you wonder why it was even brought up in the first place if everyone is going to be so cool or nonchalant about it. Villain Sarah Swan stays just on the right side of "cackling bad guy", although the book's attempts to make us believe that everyone is afraid of her because she can (gasp!) reroute their telephone numbers doesn't exactly put her in the same class as, say, Mavic Chen. Meanwhile, Peri is useful even when she's out of her depth but just like almost every other novel with Peri it brings up the specter of "will she stay with the Doctor or leave" since they bicker all the time, a false dilemma that we know will end up with her staying.

And that may be the problem with the novel, and maybe with the line in general. The stakes never feel as high as they do in the Eighth Doctor novels, there's less a sense of urgency as much as everyone having a grand old time hanging out and fighting alien menaces. With less incentive to break new ground or innovate, Orman plays it safe and the novel winds up feeling rather toothless, a pale version of what we know she's capable of. Even when the alien artifact starts to get real dangerous, the story is practically over and everyone takes care of it fairly easily so the threat level never becomes more than tepid. Its a shame in a way because you feel the entire time like her usual sharpness has been dulled and its hard to tell if she's having an off day or its the nature of the line itself that trends even the best authors toward mediocre. On the one hand that may absolve the previous authors of the some of the blame but it still doesn't speak well for expectations.

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is right away misleading. Readers are likely to think that "blue box" refers to the TARDIS, but that device is nowhere to be seen in this book. Instead, "blue box" refers to a signal switching device used in telecommunications. That is the kind of bait and switch that Kate Orman is up to throughout this book. Orman has decided on a novel approach by making the book seem not to be a novel. Instead, the book we read is "written by" an Australian independent journalist reporting on events, publishing a non-fiction book about a great computer crime caper. We are supposedly reading that book. So, a blue box that is not the blue box we thought, and a novel that is not quite a novel. There are several other turns of this kind. The story places Doctor 6 and Peri in the Washington, D.C., area in 1982 or thereabouts. Doctor 6 is contacted to track down some alien technology (though our narrator believes throughout the book that it is secret Russian tech) that has gotten lost and is now in the hands of computer mastermind Sarah Swan. Our computer mastermind is not much of villain, being mostly just petty, lonely, and vindictive. The internet is only in its infancy, but Swan uses it and the telecommunications network to make hell out of the lives of people she doesn't like by doing things like planting rumors, changing their utility bills to astronomical figures, and so on. She's a towering figure of terror to the hacks and phreaks, but entirely unknown to the rest of the world. The plot has our heroes mainly hiding from Swan in motels, driving long distances in rented cars, breaking into computer systems, and generally reacting to Swan as if she is far more powerful than she really is. Through most of the novel, there is little sense of any actual danger, and I kept wondering as I read why The Doctor and crew were going to such extraordinary lengths to avoid this woman. Another problematic spot for me was in the novel pretending to be non-fiction premise. This is done regularly enough, and mostly done wrong. The problem is that the resulting book is still too much novel and not enough non-fiction. There are long passages of dialogue, which is novelistic, but not at all in the manner of independent reporting. Whole scenes are described in great detail when there is no way that the reporter-narrator had access to that information. I don't, however, want to give the impression that this novel is all that bad. The writing is crisp, and it is generally well paced. Orman does not stray beyond the bounds she has set for herself in the plot and format. She does a good job of making seemingly insignificant details have a surprising significance. Generally, the book is entertaining despite its flaws.

[Puddle Jumper · Rating 3 out of 5]

the promise of 80s tech lured me to this book :)
It was the first one I read with the 6th Doctor and Peri and was great to read a full length adventure featuring them, the TV stories always seemed too short.

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cool nostalgic romp through 80s hack/phreak culture, but gets a bit stodgy in the middle. Mash up Sneakers, the X Files, and Snow Crash and you get this. But you'd be better off reading/watching those, by a long shot. It started strong with a scene you really want to find more about, but goes in circles for a long while, and then shoots off somewhere completely different out of the blue.

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really didn't enjoy this book at all.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kate Orman was one of the top rank of Who novel writers during the long hiatus. Her books were experimental, original and, to be honest, better than most of the others. It's long baffled me why she didn't manage to parley her Who successes into a successful novel writing career outside Who, as fellow top-tier Who writers Paul Cornell and Ben Aaronovitch did.

This was her final Who book, released after I had kind of given up on the BBC Who books, so I was pleased to run across it in a shop recently and picked it up on impulse. It's an odd one, though.

Featuring the Sixth Doctor and Peri, it feels more like a Seventh Doctor book, in that the Doctor is absent for long stretches, off doing secret things in the shadows. The Doctor even ditches his trademark multicolour coat for a sober dark suit as if to signify that he's, y'know, a bit dark. Peri, meanwhile, has bugger all to do in the story and spends the whole book considering whether to stay with the Doctor or not. She's even more useless here than she was on telly, and that's saying something.

These are odd choices for this team, and make it feel like Orman's not happy writing for them - I wonder whether she was told to adapt a Seventh Doctor pitch for Sixie and reluctantly agreed.

The setting is a compelling one. It takes place in the 80s world of phone hacking, BBSs and pre-usenet communities, when playing with the telcos was cutting edge and the command line was king. Orman nails this convincingly and although the book consists mostly of people in rooms typing, it manages to be surprisingly involving. But the book never really kicks into high gear, despite a moderately exciting car chase finale. The threat is clever and well thought through, but lacks the immediacy of a big snarling monster about to eat our heroes.

Orman's other slightly odd choice is to frame the book as reportage by a transsexual journo who tells the story from his perspective. This being the case, the reveal of his gender towards the end never quite convinces - he spends a lot of the book trying to keep it secret, but his boss finds out so he, um, then writes about this in a book aimed at the public, thus outing himself to the world, something the character as portrayed would seem to find deeply undesirable. Orman's literary conceit trips over itself here.

In all, this is a very experimental Who book, full of clever stuff and well worth the time taken to read it, even if it doesn't come off in the same way that Year of Intelligent Tigers or Left-Handed Hummingbird did.

I think perhaps the book's faults signal that Orman had done all she could with Who and was long past ready to jump into a career writing self-created fiction. After reading Blue Box I'm more baffled than ever as to why she hasn't managed that jump.

[Dave · Rating 1 out of 5]

A transsexual narrator, a gratuitous slam against American law enforcement by having a highway cop come out of nowhere to try and rape Peri only to vanish in about 3-4 lines never to reappear, and a story that moves along at the1200 baud rate of the early computer. I recommend giving this angry scribbler with an agenda a pass even if you're offered this piece of crap for free. I see her projecting herself into the character of Swann. She wants things her way and will ruin the lives of anyone who disagrees with her slightest whim through her use of the phone lines and budding internet to ruin their credit lines, expose their private lives to family and employers, and generally being an overall pos. She a regular poster child of the political left.

Makes me long for the days of Tom Baker as the reigning Doctor when he was willing to sort out the Master (pre-gender bending character assassination by Moffatt's crew of social re-constructionists) by shooting him with the D-Mat gun.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1546301.html

A decent enough novel taking the Sixth Doctor and Peri to the phone phreaking and computer hacking culture of mid-80s America, the story told in first person by a transsexual Australian journalist. Ages ago I read Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier by Suzette Dreyfus which covers some of the same ground from an Australian perspective, which was really all I knew about it; Orman's novel seems a fair reflection of what happens when aliens appear and semi-accidentally start to hack the human race. (The 'Blue Box' of the title is a hacking tool, not the Tardis.) Interesting characterisation of Peri, less so of the Doctor.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 3 out of 5]

It moves along at a nice clip, especially in its second half. It also wallows in some convincing early 80s techno-nostalgia for those of us old enough to remember that seemingly-distant past. However, it's certainly not the best of Kate Orman's "Doctor Who" novel canon. She doesn't have the same love & affection for the 6th Doctor & Peri that she does for the 7th & 8th Doctor; her adoration in those efforts positively glows on each and every page. In all honesty, the novel never really rises above being a pleasant diversion...almost as if she was going through the motions on this occasion. "Vampire Science" and "Year of Intelligent Tigers" it certainly isn't.

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure I'll finish this one - it's very slow going. I never met Peri or the Sixth Doctor before, and I still don't feel like I have. So far, he's made a few phone calls, but otherwise has only been in one scene of the book - and it wasn't with Peri. The POV is an external character who doesn't know them either, and that's hard, too. The plot is interesting - computers and technology set in the 1980s - but I think I'll have to keep this one on the backburner until I see an adventure. Unless someone wants to tell me that this is a super book, if only I keep with it. *g*

[Edward Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful surprise this book was. It's a genuine, grown-up novel in the Doctor Who universe. The portrayal of Peri's character, in particular, was extraordinarily sensitive. Best Who novel I've read, by a long way. Setting the novel back in the 1980's was an inspired choice as well. For one thing, it gives the author an opportunity for profound insights into the evolutionary arc of computer technology and the social transformations it would unleash; but it also acts as a subtle and rather sweet tribute to the era in which the Sixth Doctor debuted. Outstanding.

[Leela42 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Past Doctor Adventure (PDA) with the sixth Doctor and Peri. Reads like a draft was published by mistake. A number of internal inconsistencies, narrative gaps, and a couple of badly-written chapters. If you just want to read a Doctor Who book, sure, go for it. But if you're not much into Doctor Who books, don't bother.

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don't get me wrong, the book was good, but it just didn't have the 'Who' feeling, mostly probably because of the "why are you renting a camper and hiding in the forest and ignoring the fact that the TARDIS would be a much better place to hide away" moments.

[Akiva ꙮ]

One of the (one star) reviews on this book opens with "A transsexual narrator, ..."

Well then. As a 'gender bending, character assassinating' degenerate lefty, consider me sold.

[Val · Rating 5 out of 5]

A humorous but intriguing tie-in novel which while written in 2003 and set in the early 1980s seems strangely prescient about the ways in which computer technology would develop over the next 20 years. One of the best of its range.