Deceit

Summary: 6/10 Three years have passed for Ace since she left the Doctor in the twenty-fifth century. She's still blowing things up, and goes to Arcadia with an expedition of those used to fighting Daleks, including the Dalek Killer Abslom Daak. Of course, Terry Nation's agent means they won't be fighting Daleks, so why are they there?

Peter Darvill-Evans' Deceit reveals the "vision" of the editor early New Doctor Who Adventures. First of all, it takes place on an Earth colony in the twenty-fifth century [and one that has an "Eden"-like name]. It makes some deal about the NA's theory of time travel, and why the Doctor can't "change" the past. Both explicitly [in the afterword] and in the story, Deceit makes more explicit some of what is going on in the New Adventures.

However, despite that insight, Deceit isn't particularly spectacular, and while it's a reasonably fun read, it isn't one of the better NA's. One problem I found with the book is that it's more dependent on previous NA's than many should be, being a sequel of sorts to Warhead [which I haven't read], and the Doctor's erratic behavior at the beginning of the book didn't make much sense to me. And the one book that this refers to that I have read, Love and War was cheapened somewhat by the revelation that Ace didn't really "willingly" leave the Doctor at the end of the book.

I think all of these extra scenes in the first half of the book or so made the book a little longer than it perhaps should be. Ironically, what this book could have best used is an editor.

There are a number of good things here - the asteriods modeled into human faces, all lined up in space not only serves as one of the more effective covers of a New Adventure, also works as a nice scene in the book. However, I'm not sure if the scene ties in with the rest of the book, and the potential of it wasn't used as well as perhaps it could be.

Of course, one of the interesting things is the inclusion of Abslom Daak, and the elevation of some of the comics to the "pseudo-Canon" of the New Adventures. He worked well with Ace, I thought, and I thought her belief that she had to keep Daak alive for the future was particularly well-played. It's interesting to see how she warmed up to Daak compared to Gilgamesh in Timewyrm: Genesis.

The primary opponent in this story, the super-biological computer Pool. The Doctor's desire to keep it alive was interesting [since it shares some characteristics with Gallifrey's own Matrix/APC Net], as Darvill-Evans clearly thinks there is some significance to Gallifreyan's resemblence to humans. [I don't, as much, since we've regularly had in the series definite non-Terrans resembling human beings, going all the way back to Thals in the second story.] The general idea worked fairly well, I thought.

Of course, as a computer scientist, I'd be remiss if I ignored the Doctor's description of NP-Complete problems in the book. I was amused, and actually rather impressed. [at least it wasn't Zoe causing a computer to blow it up by giving an insoluable problem in Algol]

Not a whole lot more to say. Unfortunately, this book might be one that a newer reader (like myself) might pick up because it re-introduces Ace (and the guest star appearence of Absolm Daak, I suppose, if you were a fan of his). I don't this book is particularly appropriate to a newer reader, however, because it assumes a little bit more about the troubles with the TARDIS that happened earlier on, and also because this is somewhat of a sequel to Warhead Not a failure, but not as good as it could have been, I'm afraid. 6/10