Doctor Who: Drift by Simon A. Forward

Doctor Who: Drift Reviews

• 
  Ken

  Another of the Past Doctor Adventures that I can only just about recall reading due the cover - 'The One With All The Snow'.
  Admittedly I blitzed through all these during 2005/06 and only the best ones really stand out.
  
  Re-reading at a more leisurely spaced out pace had made me enjoy this one even more, there's a real slowly ominous build as a military group are searching for missing alien technology from a crash jet in Southern New Hampshire.
  The novels strength is the American setting that has a real X-Files meets Stephen King vibe, the downside is the introduction of way to many characters that only real purpose is to keep the tension building at a slow (but effective) pace.
  
  The Fourth Doctor is brilliantly captured here alongside Leela (who doesn't feature quite as prominently) as this story is a perfect fit for this TARDIS team.
  
  An enjoyable addition for the range.
• 
  Branwen Sedai *of the Brown Ajah*

  "That's the nature of uncovering the truth. It's like condensation on a mirror. Wipe it away, and you're struck with your reflection whether you like it or not."
  
  I am a bit disappointed in this Doctor Who novel, unfortunately. :/
  
  Usually in most Doctor Who books I have encountered, the Doctor and his companion meet up with 1-3 secondary characters, and they solve whatever mystery is occurring. In this one however, the Doctor and Leela took a backseat and instead a whole crapload of characters were introduced. There were actually so many of them that they not only overshadowed the Doctor, but it made it rather difficult to keep track of everybody. Which sort of sucked, because I wanted to read about the Doctor, not a host of new people to learn about.
  
  Other than that, the writing and storyline was pretty good. It just didn't really have the same 'feel' that I expect out of Doctor Who books.
• 
  Tom Jones

  What a shame. One underwhelming disappointment. :(
  
  It's not a terrible book. Nothing compared to Timewyrm: Genesys, Synthespians or Nekromanteia by Big Finish by any means. Drift to me, never hit the level I was expecting it to achieve.
  
  I see a lot of people say good things about this book. I have to disagree with that. This book is really overrated.
  
  Simon A. Forward always has fantastic ideas. The Sandman is my favourite idea by him with a alien civilisation seeing the Doctor as not a Savior nor a hero; but a monster and a tyrant. But the biggest issue I have with his writing is how his stories play out. This might just be me but I am not a fan of his writing style and execution.
  
  Drift, does have a nice idea of an alien ship that crash landed and strange events are transpiring and this Special Forces group called 'The White Shadow' are investigating the incident. They don't seem to have a good relationship with UNIT and seems to be a little bit of tension between the two organisations on how they do things which opens up interesting dialogue with The 4th Doctor and the characters within 'White Shadow.'
  
  The biggest problem with Drift is the heavy focus on developing the supporting characters. White Shadow are more connected to the stories events than the main characters. Whhh what!?
  
  The character development and 'White Shadow' is heavily focused on in the page 50-150 area. Heavy development doesn't mean good development at all. It's very mediocre. They feel all the same. Clones. No striking personalities and the only way to differentiate them is their rank and role in 'White Shadow.' To me that's a very lackadaisical way to differentiate characters and it should be their personalities to do that. Seems a little lazy to me. Just overstretched mediocre development.
  
  The 4th Doctor and Leela seemed well done characterised. I had one problem with Leela but that was about it. However, they were sidelined. They needed to get more involved.
  
  The plot seems to go to point A, then B, then C without much reason to me. Has a really weird flow and I questioned a lot of stuff that happened in this book. Did it really need to happen? Leela on a snowmobile and going somewhere that wasn't discussed prior? Why was she going there? I never found the reason why.
  
  Some stuff in the book felt inconsequential. Truthfully, I found the stories flow confusing and hard to follow because it seems to do stuff without referencing it well prior. Not a fan of it.
  
  One thing I do not get is this praise for its "Atmosphere." It was pretty contrived the way Simon tried to get it out to the reader. But compared to the brilliance of 'Nighshade.' That book put's this right in the trash. It's not even comparable when on the topic of atmosphere. I honestly found 'Grave Matter' way stronger to and I didn't expect that.
  
  The books takes far too long to raise the stakes. It does which is a saviour from the book getting a 3/10 but it should of got the wheels rolling far quicker. Nightshade and Drift have very similar story elements. Everything is just on a stronger level in Nightshade. As I said, not even comparable with the fact Nightshade is a 10/10 for me now and I rate 10/10 very rarely.
  
  Overall, 'sigh' I think it's a under par read. I think I am just not a fan of his writing. He absolutely develops great ideas in his head. When his ideas go on paper, he can't make a story out of it. The stories flow and execution is his major drawback in my opinion. This goes with Dreamtime and The Sandman from Big Finish. The Sandman is something I rate good but his other stories are under average.
  
  Drift get's a 4/10. This was my most anticipated book out of the entire PDA range. But it did not hit its promises. Oh well.
• 
  Phil

  Have to admit this one was a big if a slog. On paper this should be a really mysterious and interesting story; you've got your little out of the way American town, you've got the sereneness of a dead, snowy winter, an elemental alien creature that uses the snow, and you've got the Doctor in all his odd magnificence with the curious and instinctive Leela facing this creature off with US Military and local police authority. Sound like fun, right?
  
  And to begin with, it was. The start of this story held a lot of potential, even if you weren't expecting much from the story. But somehow as it passed through the middle....it lost something. Don't know it was just me but my started.....well drifting. For most of it, the Doctor seemed to be just hanging around for no apparent - or unapparent - reason and Leela was rather literally packed off with another section of the platoon. Still it was nice to see Leela making her own connections with other characters, and to see the softer side of this Doctor when he cheers up Amber, the chief's daughter.
  
  Thankfully the story really picked up towards the end. The sense of urgency ramped up and the whole feeling of all the characters finally coming together made it almost feel worth the journey through the middle section.
  
  I might leave it a while and try and read it again in the future, just to check it wasn't just me. I hate giving bad reviews.
• 
  James Barnard

  Doctor Who writers seem to be a bit reticent about using the Fourth Doctor-Leela combination. I can understand why – because of her unique background (having grown up as part of a warrior tribe on an alien planet controlled by a deranged computer) she doesn’t react in expected ways to the situations the Doctor puts her in, and the cultural references we’re used to simply don’t apply. And yet, she’s fiercely intelligent, taking in her stride all sorts of things that the rest of us would be overwhelmed by. Those writers who do decide to use her reap the rewards in doing so – and Simon A Forward, who allows us to understand Leela’s first reaction to snow, writes for her brilliantly.
  
  Sometimes, writers for the Past Doctor range would write a story with one Doctor – companion combination in mind, only to be told to change it completely. This clearly isn’t the case here. Who else but Leela could have reacted in the same way to the folklore on display here? And she’s also – of all companions – best-placed to deal with the ephemeral nature of the threat she and the Doctor face. Yes, the alien race, and their motivation, could have proved irritating in their lack of definition; in Forward’s hands, by allowing us to see things through Leela’s eyes, they work well.
  
  Of course, as always, the real “villain” is simple human greed and lust for power. The Fourth Doctor, here at his coldest, reflects the unedifying surroundings remarkably well and offers a typically astute outsider’s view on the situation he becomes part of. One can almost hear Tom Baker’s voice speaking the lines – a sure sign that Forward has nailed the characterisation. The supporting characters are very good too.
  
  Forward has continued to be a mainstay of Doctor Who fiction, something he richly deserves. In terms of plot, setting, characterisation and ability to convey the scale of the environment, this is work of a very high standard.
• 
  Steve

  Really quite enjoyable story. An unusual setting for the Fourth Doctor & Leela (America, snow, present day). Some great action set-pieces. The characterisation of the two leads shines, it feels very true to their TV selves.
  
  The monster is quite high-concept and wouldn't feel out of place in the new series. It's slightly let down by the over-abundance of side characters, who seem a bit inter-changeable, especially the red-shirt soldiers.
• 
  Clare Jackson-Bramwell

  Another tale of humanity hating each other, misunderstanding each other and often doing the wrong thing, yet managing to come together at the end and finding hope. A shame one of the best characters gets killed off quite pointlessly, especially as Leela had found a kindred spirit. I'm still not entirely sure what the alien menace was.
• 
  Jacob Licklider

  Simon A. Forward’s debut novel Drift is a Doctor Who novel that has left me utterly confused as to how I feel about it. Forward is a writer I was at least familiar with due to his Big Finish contributions with The Sandman which I have a soft spot for and Dreamtime which is one of the weaker entries in the Big Finish catalogue. Drift as a novel is quite dense, it uses the full 288 page count afforded to the BBC Books line of novels and the size of the font is quite small meaning a larger word count. The cover is one of the examples of Black Sheep’s better designs, the TARDIS in a snowy landscape is somehow quite evocative in its simplicity and once you begin reading Drift you begin to understand exactly why that cover works. The harsh New England winter is the aspect of Drift that works to its fullest extent, Forward manages to portray the weather as ever consuming and ever advancing. The snow is disorienting and Forward sets it up as the main threat of the novel. Plus, there’s the general isolation of the setting of a snowstorm that manages to work, however a good idea for a villain does not make a particularly good novel. This is a premise that should work, snowy settings work throughout the work of H.P. Lovecraft and especially in John Carpenter’s The Thing, both pieces of media that it is clear Forward is inspired by. The revelations about the blizzards indicate it is some sort of a being from outside of the normal dimension, again a great idea for a novel and with the correct writer it could really have worked. Simon A. Forward as a writer feels often as if he is trying to hard to make this feel like a piece of Doctor Who fiction that he experienced when he was a child.
  
  Drift like many of the Past Doctor Adventures uses the TARDIS team of the Fourth Doctor and Leela, with Forward taking the time to pepper in several references to The Face of Evil and The Robots of Death. This is essentially to establish where in the Fourth Doctor’s timeline the novel is supposed to take place over doing anything to advance the characters of the Fourth Doctor and Leela. Leela as a character comes out of Drift better than the Doctor, Forward setting certain scenes from her perspective where he is able to engage in essentially a writing exercise for how to write for a character like Leela. The noble savage hunter archetype is how Forward writes the character, reflective on the events of The Face of Evil especially since this is a novel where the threat is something bigger than her comprehension. She also gets the usual fish out of water interactions with the supporting cast, largely a crew of Americans written to be over the top in their Americanness. The Doctor on the other hand is one of those characters that is honestly difficult to get completely right, Tom Baker as an actor is like Patrick Troughton who is difficult to capture. Troughton largely due to elusiveness, Baker due to the unpredictability of the character even from the era that Forward is writing from. Forward just grasps on eccentricity and goes to the way Robert Banks Stewart wrote the character for The Seeds of Doom in terms of harshness and tries melding them, but that doesn’t quite work since The Seeds of Doom works because the eccentricity is especially dialed down into seriousness from the outset because of the threat. Forward uses this as a mesh here and that just doesn’t mesh nicely.
  
  Overall, Drift has some nice ideas and Forward is promising as a novelist, whenever he is describing the setting and actually dealing with the extradimensional threat it is interesting but underutilized. It’s a novel that just never comes together by making some of its characters over the top in a way to make them one-dimensional. 4/10.
  
• 
  Glenn

  I quite enjoyed this story. It’s a very intense action/thriller with many of the trappings expected from a Doctor Who novel. Simon A Forward does a really good job capturing both the voice and mannerisms of the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela. Unfortunately, both characters spend a lot of the first half of the book in the background.
  
  CIA agents Melody Quartararo and Parker Theroux are a real treat and their story gets real interesting as the story unfolds.
  
  One of the only problems with the book is that it is filled with too many characters, each one having something to do, and I would sometimes struggle to remember who any of them were.
  
  I would, however, recommend this novel to even the casual fan just based on the enjoyment of the story and the writing.
• 
  Anne

  This was probably closer to a 2.5 but I rounded up. The plot of the story was an interesting one, but I don't think the author pulled it off very well. The problem was there were so many pov's, not just Leela and the Doctor but it felt like everyone and their mother had a turn and it got tiresome. Also, so many of the side characters were deeply unpleasant so spending time in their pov was a chore. What I did like about the story was the atmosphere and tension that the author builds the further along in the story you get. It is not until the last 25% does the story really get good. Before that, the story just drags along.
  
• 
  Brett

  So many characters it often felt like the Doctor and Leela were superfluous.
• 
  Daniel Kukwa

  It just manages to reach three stars, thanks to a final quarter of the novel that suddenly gears up into over-drive, and races quite enjoyably to its climax. Otherwise, this is a novel where I simply couldn't care about the supporting cast; all their personal problems and relationships left me as cold as the snowy environment. The Doctor is the best thing on offer here -- an excellent use of his season 15 characterization -- but Leela is shoved to the sidelines. The pseudo-Mulder/Scully from the CIA arrive hiding an interesting twist from the other characters...but even they don't become vibrant until everyone is caught up in the novel's conclusion. The early, blunt, and somewhat crude attempt to establish that this is set in the USA I found to be especially unappealing. This book contains all the elements for something special, but it's lacking a certain magic to pull all those elements together.
• 
  Jamie Revell

  One of the things that's obvious reading this in 2014 is that the main group of characters are essentially the US equivalent of Torchwood - in mission, if not in modus operandi. They're investigating something in New Hampshire in the dead of winter when the Doctor wanders in, and, from there on, there's quite a lot of action, people get killed off at an alarming rate, and a generally fast pace to things.
  
  On the plus side, the enemy is quite a good one and the setting is quite atmospheric in an X-Files/Supernatural/etc. sort of way. The Doctor and Leela are also well-written and believable. On the downside, Leela doesn't get to do a lot (though what she does do works well), and few of the guest stars are really likeable. But, still it hangs together well enough, and is an enjoyable quick read.
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  
  http://nhw.livejournal.com/1014841.html#cutid6[return][return]Drift seems to have escaped from the X-Files. Here we have a US special forces military operation in a snowbound New Hampshire village, which the Doctor and Leela get embroiled in. There are also two CIA agents (which is a mistake; they should be FBI) on the case with their own secret. There's some great characterisation of a dysfunctional family (though not really of the Doctor or Leela), and lots of people get killed, yet at the end of the book one feels that not an awful lot has happened. The cold snowbound setting is reminiscent of Kim Newman's Time and Relative, which was apparently published almost simultaneously.
• 
  Danny Welch

  So I've accidentally deleted my original review on this so I'll write a quick summary of my thoughts on it again:
  
  Drift is a Doctor Who novel that promises so much but fails to bring its ideas to fruition and is generally a slow-paced novel with some terribly dull characters but for some reason, I still managed to enjoy this read. 4 and Leela were characterized well and it does have a wonderful grip on atmosphere, it's just a shame for a story that could have been so much more, has such an uninspiring execution, but as I said I still managed to enjoy it somewhat. 4/10
• 
  Leela42

  Past Doctor Adventure (PDA) with the fourth Doctor and Leela. Effective story, hauntingly atmospheric, but the author has an oblique way of never getting to a point that's rather annoying, and there are several characters you wish would learn a lesson so they'd stop being so unrelentingly contemptible.
• 
  Michael Taylor

  A rare Doctor Who story that didn't hold my attention. There were moments where I thought the story was going to take off and grab me, but they were fleeting and short-lived. I had high hope for a book set in the U.S., but was disappointed.