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The Wheel of Ice was the first Doctor Who novel to feature one of the BBC Television Centre incarnations of the Doctor since Atom Bomb Blues in December 2005. It was also the first since the relatively recent Code of the Krillitanes to centre on a past Doctor, and the first since 2005's World Game to use the Second Doctor.
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
References
- The Kystra were a race of traders.
- The Doctor has a book in the TARDIS called Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
- The TARDIS has only partial records of the Talsiccian language family.
Notes
- This story was also released as an ebook available from the Amazon Kindle store.
- This is the first novel to feature the particular "TARDIS team" of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe since PROSE: The Indestructible Man in November 2004.
- It's easy to believe that this is the first novel with a "past Doctor" since the end of the Past Doctor Adventures line. However, there were a number of "late" Tenth Doctor novels, both in print and audio, that were released between the BBC One premieres of The End of Time and The Eleventh Hour.
Continuity
- The prologue states that all things are named in the libraries of Gallifrey, the planet of the Time Lords. (TV: The Time Warrior, et. all)
- The Doctor has heard tales of a sentient race that lived before humanity but will not encounter them until later. (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians)
- Florian's father invented the T-Mat. (TV: The Seeds of Death.
- Arkive tried to lure the Silurians to Saturn but failed when they hid underground as a rogue planet was heading towards Earth. (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians, Warriors of the Deep, Cold Blood)
- 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 or Image of the Fendahl) 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)
- Josephine Laws wonders if the Allohistorical lure could have been made by Li H'sen Chang. (TV: The Talons of Weng-Chiang)
- 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. (PROSE: First Frontier, The Devil Goblins from Neptune, 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 being 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 from UNIT about the numerous alien incursions 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).
- The German release of the novel incorrectly calls the Doctor "Doktor Who" in the plot summary on the back of the book.
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
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