The Wheel of Ice (novel)

The Wheel of Ice
Doctor:	[[doctor::Second Doctor]]
Companion(s):	Jamie McCrimmon Zoe Heriot
Main enemy:	The Blue dolls The Blue Soldiers Florian Hart
Main setting:	The Sol System, 5 billion BC The Mnemosyne Cincture, the 21st century Enceladus, the 21st century Titan, the 21st century London, 1890 London, 14 July 1930 Scotland, 1970 Scotland, the 21st century The Sol System, 50 million BC Earth, 100 million BC
Key crew
Publisher:	[[publisher::BBC Books]]
Writer:	Stephen Baxter
Release details
Release date:	16 August 2012
Format:	Hardback
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-84990-182-6
BBC Past Doctor Adventures
← Previous	Atom Bomb Blues
Next →	none

The Wheel of Ice was the first original Doctor Who novel not to feature the incumbent Doctor since Atom Bomb Blues in December 2005.

Publisher's summary

The Wheel. A ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, and home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth. It's a bad place to grow up.

The colony has been plagued by problems. Maybe it's just gremlins, just bad luck. But the equipment failures and thefts of resources have been increasing, and there have been stories among the children of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. Many of the younger workers refuse to go down the warren-like mines anymore. And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

Aboard the Wheel, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation — and they are suspected by some as the source of the sabotage. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could kill them all.

Characters

• The Doctor
• Jamie McCrimmon
• Zoe Heriot
• Phee Laws
• Sam Laws
• MMAC
• Sinbad Omar
• Florian Hart
• Arkive
• First

References

• The Doctor has heard tales of a sentient race that lived before humanity but has not yet encountered them.
• The Kystra were a race of traders.
• Florian's father invented the T-Mat.
• Arkive tried to lure the Silurians to Saturn but failed when they hid underground as a rogue planet was heading towards Earth.
• The Doctor has a book in the TARDIS called Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Notes

• This story was also released as an ebook available from the Amazon Kindle store.

The Audiobook cover.

• This is the first novel to feature the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe since PROSE: The Indestructible Man in November 2004.

Continuity

• Jamie tells MMAC that the Glaswegians fought on the side of King George II and the English during the Jacobite Rising of 1745. (TV: The Highlanders)
• The pro-Earth extremist group Pull Back to Earth is active by this time. (TV: The Wheel in Space)
• Zoe frequently mentions her native time and her encounter with the Cybermen on Space Station W3. (TV: The Wheel in Space)
• Zoe mentions the Ice Warriors and their use of the T-Mat network in the late 21st century. (TV: The Seeds of Death)
• The Doctor recognises one of the early British probes which was sent to Mars in the 1970s. (TV: The Ambassadors of Death)
• The Doctor tells MMAC that he was an exhibit in a museum himself on one occasion. (TV: The Space Museum)
• The Doctor tells Jamie that Saturn is now the sixth planet in the Sol system, though it was once the seventh (TV: The Tenth Planet) and that, in the far future, Pluto will be made habitable for humans (TV: The Sun Makers).
• Jamie recalls being chased by the Robot Yeti in Tibet in 1935. (TV: The Abominable Snowmen)
• On 14 July 1930, Josephine Laws McRae tells her daughter Josie that the BBC is considering producing a televisor adaptation of Black Orchid by George Cranleigh. (TV: Black Orchid).
• Zoe recalls her Space Station W3 colleagues Leo Ryan and Gemma Corwyn. (TV: The Wheel in Space)
• Upon his arrival on Titan, the bleak landscape reminds Jamie of the Land of Fiction. (TV: The Mind Robber)
• While dissecting one of the Blue Dolls, the Doctor recalls either participating in or observing an alien autopsy in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, which was recorded. The alien in question was presumably one of the victims of the crash of the Nedenah spacecraft in Roswell in June of that year. (PROSE: The Devil Goblins from Neptune) Although another alien spacecraft crashed in the area at approximately the same time, its sole occupant Seruba Velak survived the crash and was held captive by the United States government until being freed by the Tenth Doctor and her husband Rivesh Mantilax in 1958. (TV: Dreamland)
• The Doctor tells Zoe that he was once saw an exhibit on the Kystra in a museum of ancient times (presumably on Gallifrey), though noted that it was overshadowed by numerous exhibits about the Great Vampires. (TV: State of Decay)
• Jamie refers to Bonnie Prince Charlie, with whom he had fought at the Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746. (TV: The Highlanders)
• The Doctor tells Zoe that mirrors can be used in time travel experiments as they reflect light and light is essential to the theory of time travel. He tells her that he witnessed such an experiment in 1866 which was conducted by two Victorian era scientists, "one misguided and the other a greedy fool," and noted that it attracted the attention of the Daleks. (TV: The Evil of the Daleks)
• In order to calm her down, Zoe tells Casey a story about the Karkus, a fictional comic strip hero whose adventures are featured in the Hourly Telepress in her own time. She bases the story in part on her encounter with the Karkus in the Land of Fiction. (TV: The Mind Robber)
• Florian Hart has read reports of the Doctor's involvement with UNIT and the numerous alien incursions from the late 20th century onwards which the organisation covered up. (TV: The Invasion, et. al)
• The Doctor is able to survive in the vacuum of space for half an hour due to his respiratory bypass system. (TV: Pyramids of Mars)
• Zoe tells MMAC that, according to the Doctor, the Daleks used taranium to construct an ultimate weapon known as the Time Destructor, which could accelerate or reverse the flow of time with devastating effect, in the 40th century (TV: The Daleks' Master Plan) and to power their time machines (PROSE: The Chase).

Audio release

• The story was released as an audiobook on 6x CD read by David Troughton.
• The audiobook is also available as a download from the AudioGo website.

External links

to be added