Review: Doctor Who Novels: Ruby Red and Caged

 A new Doctor ... and so BBC Books brings us a couple of new original novels tying into the new series ...

The first two are Ruby Red by Georgia Cook and Caged by Una McCormack. There doesn't seem to be an order to them, but I decided to start with Ruby Red ...

This is Cook's first novel, and it's a slight affair. The Doctor and Ruby answer a distress call and arrive in 1242 Russia, at the time of a conflict on Lake Peipus between the Estonian and Novgorad armies. There they find an alien called Run, who is undertaking a coming of age challenge. It was she who sent the distress call as she wanted out, but instead her two sisters arrived to try and ensure that she completed the challenge.

There is an evil alien creature, the Genetrix, hiding under the ice, and the creature has been creating parasites to take over and control the armies - ultimately it wants to take over the world!  And of course the Doctor and Ruby have to stop it!

Although I have literally just finished reading the book, I'm struggling to actually remember anything about it. There's lots of action, but not much happens, and the book is quite simplistic. The Doctor and Ruby are not described at all - they could be any incarnation/any companion - which is a shame as I would have thought that you'd want to establish them more firmly in the readers' minds. The Doctor does have a couple of turns of phrase which would only suit the fifteenth incarnation though.

The TARDIS groans at one point at the end and so I suspect this establishes the events as taking place prior to the end of Season One ... but there's nothing else in the book to place it in the Doctors' timeline.

Caged is much more enjoyable. Written by experienced author McCormack, it's slightly shorter at 190 pages (Ruby Red has 200 pages) but feels far more complex and adept. Here we have an alien called Chirracharr who lives with her fellows on a planet. The race is completely happy and content and they seem to be living a perfect life. There's also a couple of other aliens called Tixlel and Raxlil who are monitoring some Experiment ... and of course the Doctor and Ruby who arrive on a planet which seems to be uninhabited. How all these characters and their stories intersect is the meat of the book - and I don't want to give it all away as it's well written and evolves nicely with some surprises along the way.

I really liked how McCormack gives you no clues - a very Iain Banks type of writing where you just immerse in the alienness with no explanations - the Doctor and Ruby are as off guard as the reader is, and it worked nicely in this book. The alien Chirracharr is a great character - an innocent who just trusts everyone as no-one has ever shown her any harm.

Interestingly, there's still no descriptions of the Doctor or Ruby, so this might be a deliberate editorial ask on the part of the publishers (or from the Doctor Who office). Space Babies and Ambulances are referenced which places this book after those television adventures, and Ruby also mentions that she 'outran a Shreek' and I'm not certain what that refers to. Maybe an unseen adventure?

Overall I enjoyed the two titles ... a nice introduction to the fifteenth Doctor in print, and two adventures which seem to 'fit' into the overall themes and way that the show has been presented on television. The covers are well done and dramatic, the artist appears to be Lee Binding There's a third novel, Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase, coming later in the year.