Doctor Who: Quantum Archangel [Paperback]

The Quantum Archangel is a sequel to the television story The Time Monster and sees the return of several of the characters from that story. The Master is dying, with the Traken source nearly exhausted, he is searching for a way to extend his lifeforce and that is where the experiments of Professor Kairos come in, for he has adapted the TOMTIT technology of the Time Monster into the more powerful TITAN array which has the power to penetrate Calabi-Yau Space - the domain where the Chronovores subsist.

The Quantum Archangel is an excellent entry into the Past Doctors series. It starts off wonderfully reminisent of Millennial Rites with some of the locations being simillar and being only a few years after the events of that novel. The Master finally gets to be really nasty to the 6th Doctor on his own right without the Rani or the Valeyard around to spoil it for him. Like Millennial Rites, the book is split into two sections, although the split is not as drastic as it was that one.

The Quantum Archangel is well written, with an ingenious reworking and expansion of the Time Monster's plot. The book becomes a little confused at one point towards the end when the Chronovores strike, but aside from that it's a really good book.

Shame about the awful cover though.

The book has come in for criticism on newsgroup rec.arts.drwho for having an overabundance of continuity references to past stories, including ones from TV and other novels, but I think this is a bit unfair. 'The Quantum Archangel' is a sequel to a TV story, with two recurring villains and featuring the destruction of Atlantis (which has three possible explanations on TV alone) as part of its back-story. Of *course* it's going to have a lot of continuity references in it. I think Craig Hinton pulls the 'let's play with continuity' card far more convincingly than, say, fellow 'Who' author Gary Russell ever could.

Anyway, onto the story. The Sixth Doctor follows a mysterious temporal trace to Earth in the year 2003 and finds that the protege of old acquaintance Professor Stuart Hyde has created the TITAN Array, a machine capable of breaching the barrier that leads to the Lux Aeterna, the feeding grounds of the Chronovores - creatures that survive by eating time itself. The Doctor realises that this is a Bad Thing, because the scientist is, in effect, knocking on the Chronovores' front door and asking them to pay Earth a visit.

As if this isn't bad enough, the Doctor's old enemy the Master, finally tracked down by the Chronovores for enslaving Kronos, one of their fellows, turns up on Earth, hoping to find a way of ridding himself of the Chronovores once and for all. And the TITAN Array might just be the key to his future survival...

The novel tends to lose its way towards the end as the main characters begin to find themselves trapped in alternative timelines and the like, but despite this it's still a very entertaining novel.

Many fans of the Doctor may have felt a bit betrayed that his Sixth incarnation never got a decent send-off on TV, that he didn't lose his life in one last, mighty battle to save the multiverse from destruction.

I think Craig Hinton has just given us that story. If the Sixth Doctor had regenerated at the climax of this titanic struggle of good versus evil, I think there would be a lot of happy people out there.