Books: Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett (2011)

 

“For centuries the Maintainers have worked. With no help from other worlds, they subsist on the food they can grow and that's little enough. But their purpose, their whole life is to maintain the machines that will one day make their world as habitable as old Earth. Life used to be hard. Now as their crops fail, livestock sickens, and the temperature drops, it's becoming impossible. This year's Winter Season Feast won't be the usual celebration. It's not a time for optimism or hope - and it's not a time to welcome unexpected guests. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory find a society breaking apart under the strain. Tensions are mounting, old rivalries are coming to the fore, people are dying...and then the Doctor's old enemies, the Ice Warriors, make their move. With the cold-hearted threat of invasion, the real battle for survival begins. Or does it? The Doctor begins to suspect that behind everything lies a deadlier, and even more chilling danger.”

The Silent Stars Go By is a fine, often fun tale involving the 11^th Doctor, with Amy and Rory Williams Pond. Abnett is a prolific writer of comics (for both Marvel and DC) and novels set in the Warhammer universe, but this is not his first dealings with Doctor Who universe. He wrote a Torchwood novel in 2007 and contributed the framing device to the 2011 anthology novel, The Story of Martha.

The first half is a bit soft, with ill attempts at humor that often make Amy look dumb, but the book does pickup after a bit to become an exciting and well-thought tale about terraforming, and (harking back to the Classic Doctor Who serial The Face of Evil) use of the way language, words, and ideas morph over the generations. So the world building and this well thought out language drift make up for the slow and predictable start. While the reader knows the Ice Warriors (or Martians) are involved with the plot, it takes way too long for them to become useful –and maybe that was done because what happens (including then the startling original Transhumans) would’ve shaved a lot of pages off the book, so Abnett added a lot of the unnecessary running around. Still, as has happened before, the Ice Warriors are not really proper villains.