Deep Time

A Twelfth Doctor Glamour Chronicles novel by Trevor Baxendale

I've loved all of Baxendale's Doctor Who books and this one was no different. As part of their mission to track down the mysterious Glamour, the Twelfth Doctor and Clara join the crew of the exploratory ship the Alexandria. They crew are following the last Phareon road, a wormhole created by an ancient, mysterious race.

For Doctor Who, this is pretty hard sci-fi. It features dangerous and gritty space travel, time fluctuations, an alien planet and a fair bit of pretty up to date psychics. This may put off some people but I thought it worked really well. For me it felt quite like the Alien-prequel film, Prometheus, with a similar atmosphere and mission, although the crew here are considerably more competent and likable than the crew of Prometheus.

The Doctor and Clara are well portrayed here, especially Clara. Baxendale really manages to get inside her head, something you can't do on TV, and it works wonderfully. What really makes the book are the other members of the crew. There's an element of Firefly about many of the characters, which is definitely no bad thing. Ray Balfour, the billionaire funding the mission, is fairly typical of sci-fi books whereas 'astrogator' Jem is considerably less so. Together the crew feel like real people with real histories and goals. 

In summary, I loved it. There's no way that all Doctor Who should be such hard science-fiction but on occasion it's great. For me, this felt like a high-budget TV episode, which is exactly what you want from a Doctor Who book.