Doctor Who The Silent Stars Go By – Dan Abnett review

This latest Doctor Who blockbuster novel is rather a festive affair, as the Doctor is under strict instructions to take Amy and Rory back to Leadworth in time for Christmas. Unfortunately, the TARDIS has other ideas, and plunks our heroes down on the planet Hereafter in the far future. However, to defend the TARDIS, Hereafter is very snowy, and thus is the epitome of the traditional Victorian image of Christmas. Having written that, Hereafter’s inhabitants, the Morphans, aren’t as advanced as the Victorians, and are quite rustic. In this way, the Morphans are quite similar to the villagers from the 1980 Classic Doctor Who adventure State of Decay, who were also humans in the far future whose society had regressed to a feudal state. Also like the villagers in State of Decay, the Morphans’ language has become corrupted, with names misremembered over the 27 generations that people have been on the planet, which the Doctor ascribes to “Neologism” in this book, and to “consonant shifting” in State of Decay.
The Silent Stars Go By does take a long time to really get going. The banter between our heroes in the beginning also grates a bit, as it’s a bit inacurratesque and more than a little tiresome. Also, for a long time, The Silent Stars Go By doesn’t really hit the high notes achieved by Naomi Alderman, Jonathan Morris, and James Goss in the current Doctor Who books range, with the tone of this book being a lot more childish (although the action does pick up more later). Indeed, I suspect The Silent Stars Go By, being so redolent in seasonal imagery and references, could have worked better as an actual Doctor Who Christmas Special, as it would have been great to see the Ice Warriors back on-screen. And, much as I love Steven Moffat’s work, he does have a habit of getting too schmaltzy in his Christmas episodes (if the details leaking out about the 2011 one are to believed), and maybe too ‘Christian’ (since the 2010 special, A Christmas Carol, featured the “Christ the Saviour is Born” line from Silent Night, while the title of this book comes from O Little Town of Bethlehem). Indeed, since The Silent Stars Go By is so seasonal, it really begs the question of whether we really need 2 Christmas Specials this year?
Unfortunately, like the Morphans, it would seem that Ice Warrior culture is also in a state of decay, because although The Silent Stars Go By depicts them far in the future of any of their Classic Doctor Who adventures, they haven’t progressed at all. Since they’ve yet to appear on the revived series, the Ice Warriors haven’t been redesigned in either the prose or via Lee Binding’s cover illustration. Instead, they are mostly Klingon clones in this book, with Dan Abnett not daring (or maybe not being allowed) to even get to the bottom of what the Ice Warriors actually call themselves. Also, the Ice Warriors talk in the same hissing voice in this book that they utilised in the Classic Doctor Who adventures, which would be quite tedious if they are ever to appear in the revived series, as it was never all that audible. However, Dan Abnett does invent some new mythology, as the Ice Warriors call the Doctor Belot’ssar (which means “cold blue star” in their language) – yet, since this nickname derives from the far future, it’s unlikely to appear in any other adventures. Having written that, Dan Abnett does come up with a couple of nifty new facets for the psychic paper, neither of which (on the surface) actually helps the Doctor. Although the Ice Warriors are suitably menacing, their brain cells are revealed to be as thick as their hides in The Silent Stars Go By, and their thought processes are just as lumbering as their strides. Throughout The Silent Stars Go By, the Doctor states that the Ice Warriors are very pragmatic by nature, a notion that is somewhat dispelled by an ending that reveals that the Martians hadn’t spotted a very Mars-like planet nearby which could have saved them all the bother of attacking Hereafter.