Sick Building

A novel featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha

Written by Paul Magrs

Polarity Rating: 1.5 out of 5

After the televised series ended in 1989, Doctor Who fans became hungry for more, and the BBC sated their appetites with the release of a series of novels featuring both "new adventures" featuring the Eighth Doctor and "missing adventures" featuring the other seven. Many of the books were well-written, mature, and blasted some of the televised stories out of the water for their sheer imagination, characterization, and plotting.

After the BBC revived the television show in 2005, they began churning out books again, this time featuring the Doctor's ninth and tenth incarnations. BBC Books plans on issuing its 40th release of this series in September, 2009. The books themselves are sleek, eye-catching, and hardbacked. Sick Building is only the second I have read in the series and, although it will not be my last, it seems that BBC Books has sacrificed plot, characterization, and theme for some books that will look impressive on a collector's shelf.

The story's MacGuffin is the Voracious Craw, an unbelievably gigantic creature, not unlike those huge sand worms in Dune, that consumes all life on a planet by simply sucking up hordes of plant and animal life into its maw with some sort of tremendous sucking tornado. The Doctor is concerned that the Craw is decimating Tiermann's World, a small wilderness planet literally owned by the eccentric but brilliant Professor Tiermann and inhabited exclusively by the Professor, his wife, and their teenage son. The Doctor pays the Tiermanns a visit in their luxurious Dreamhome, which is swarming with the Professor's robotic inventions that serve the humans in every capacity imaginable: there is a quirky robot whose sole purpose is to serve cocktails, and there's another who exists simply to dispense medication to Tiermann's wife. The family is all too aware that in a day and half's time the Craw will destroy their Dreamhome, but it becomes increasingly apparent that Professor Tiermann is far too proud to leave behind his home and what amounts to his life's work. As the tension between the Doctor and Tiermann rises, the impending visitation of the Craw causes the Dreamhome and its robotic inhabitants to malfunction. Soon it's obvious that the Dreamhome itself, possessed by a computer consciousness gone mad, will stop at nothing to prevent the humans from leaving.

The premise here is actually quite thrilling; the Doctor and his allies find themselves assailed by such threats as fanged flying vacuums and a hungry horned bear-creature that finds its way into the mansion after the protective shields go down. All these elements are obstacles which get in the way of the party escaping the Dreamhome, while all this time the hours are counting down to the inevitable visit of the Voracious Craw and the destruction of everything within miles. This should have been a thrilling adventure, where the reader can never guess which characters will make it out alive. Unfortunately, the author injects several elements into the story that force it to fall flat on its face.

The idea of a mansion filled with artificial intelligence is intriguing, but how can one possibly visualize a tanning bed with legs and which can speak and form friendships? Or a presumably "female" vending machine named Barbara who develops a crush on the Doctor? Mind you, these are not simply incidental quirks in the story, but major characters that participate in much of the action. Fiction is supposed to ignite one's imagination, but I simply could not grasp the physical concept of a four-legged tanning bed running for it's life down a staircase with its human counterparts. All of this is not helped at all by the Doctor: you see, we know that robots, no matter how complex, do not have feelings. But the Doctor, with all of his wisdom, seems to sympathize with these creatures, and goes far out of his way to ensure their survival. This seemed to work rather well in the televised adventure "Robot," in which the titular creature was conflicted between its feelings of friendship with Sarah Jane and its programming to destroy, but the robots in Sick Building were created merely to serve in menial capacities, and it just spirals into downright silliness.

Aside from the Doctor and Martha, the remaining three characters have little redeeming value; Professor Tiermann is obviously insane and unsympathetic, his wife Amanda serves no other purpose than to cry and become a burden to the escapees, and his son Solin is a two-dimensional teenager who develops an annoying crush on Martha. How are we supposed to care about these people?

And then there's the conclusion, in which the Doctor tries stop the Voracious Craw with a plan involving soda pop. It's tempting to simply describe this right here to show how ridiculous it is, but for the sake of spoiling it for anyone wanting to read this book, I will stop here.

There are, I admit, some good points. There's a clever little plot twist involving a secret harbored by one of the characters, and an amusing scene where the Doctor distracts a carnivorous scavenger by singing Queen's "Bohemian Rapsody." Unfortunately, these highlights are not enough to save an insipid and contrived storyline.

If the other entries in this series of novels are anything like this, it's clear that BBC Books is targeting younger, pre-teen fans of the show. The whole thing seems to have the same prose as a Choose Your Own Adventure storybook, albeit without the reader making any choices. I'm all for appealing to young readers, but what happened to the descriptive and darker stories we saw with the BBC Books' missing adventures and those with the Eighth Doctor?

I will definitely shelve Sick Building among my collection, but I doubt I will ever read it again. I cannot say the same for the televised series, which wisely steers away from lovesick vending machines. Yes, there are some things that simply cannot be realized seriously on screen, and I am more than willing to turn off some of my logical thinking while reading a story, but Sick Building seems to take that for granted for much more than its worth.