Tony’s heart is melted.
The first three 13th Doctor novels are each impressive in their own way. The first, The Good Doctor by Juno Dawson tackled religion, sexism, #NotMyDoctor thinking, all while delivering a proper, almost Classic-style Doctor Who story with power structures, literal underground rebellions, much crawling through tunnels and Graham taking centre stage.
The third, Combat Majicks by Steve Cole, takes many of the beats of The Witchfinders, but pits the Doctor and her fam against Attila the Hun, in a long, muddy, glorious nod to the pure historicals of the Hartnell, and uses a particular quality of the Doctor’s to save the day from some death-addicted aliens who’ve tagged Attila as a death-magnet.
Molten Heart, by Una McCormack is probably the most vividly imagined of the three, taking us to a subterranean world with a climate change problem, and a society of living rock-people, living in isolation from the outside world, feeling the appalling consequences of the hopeful expansion of a race from Somewhere Else.
So, there’s the sci-fi equivalent of fracking with a Chicken Little inversion here – when you live under the surface of a planet, a big drill coming down at you can make the sky fall in. There’s a clear climate change allegory in the fact that the rock people encountered by the Doctor and fam are split, with all the scientific evidence proving that their world is in imminent danger of catastrophe, but power structures and the people within them being invested in the notion that everything’s just fine – and in crushing or supressing the scientifically obvious truth. There’s the danger of optimistic colonialism on indigenous tribes who happen to live in the place you want to be. And yet, above all, there are all the makings of a solid Doctor Who adventure story – a young innocent, a relative who’s gone missing in peculiar circumstances, a ticking clock and a quest, beset by good old-fashioned political and power-based wrangling. Can the Doctor and her fam find the missing scientist, prove the inherent danger, contact the people behind the danger, potentially topple an empire of ignorance, work out a compromise that can save the underground rock-people and just possibly give them a broader horizon for future generations?
Wellll that would be telling, but what’s certain is that Una McCormack gives us quite enough emotional and social realism to believe entirely in her world and its people. That’s saying something fairly major, given that her rock-people and their jewel-encrusted world would need the CGI budget of a major Marvel movie to do it justice on screen, but McCormack jumps the gulf of the technically achievable and takes us effortlessly into the world of the purely imaginable, where Doctor Who as a storytelling medium can really fly.
Dan Starkey, everyone’s favourite 21st century Sontaran, is on reading duties for this one, and while he’s a master of tone and vocal pitch, he’s possibly not the ideal choice for a Tardis with so strongly northern a crew. Nevertheless, he gives the story energy where it needs it in the ‘let’s go questing’ sections, while giving the characters a quietness when they need it – particularly Yaz and Ryan, giving them the time and space to have moments of growth on their individual quest-strands within the bigger story.
The thing that perhaps stops Molten Heart being quite the success it could be is listening to it after Juno Dawson’s Good Doctor. Where Dawson throws us straight in and delivers arguably a stronger, more clear characterisation of the 13th Doctor than arguably Series 11 managed, in McCormack’s book of rock-people and their underground world, at least initially there’s a level of slightly earnest explanation which reminds listeners of the rubric Terrance Dicks used to put into his Target novelisations, explaining the basic set-ups of Doctor Who – the Tardis, the Doctor, the companions and so on. Arguably of course it’s not too shabby to either do the things that Terrance Dicks does or to be compared to him, and equally arguably, finding the explanations earnest is the complaint of a crusty old fan with – ye gods – nearly forty years behind the time rotor, whereas McCormack’s story covers the ground that would allow young newbies who’ve been living under rocks or too busy counting their toes to come to the book and not at any point feel lost in the technobabble or why these people are doing what they do. So perhaps the thing that stops Molten Heart being quite the success it could be is not listening to The Good Doctor first. Perhaps the thing that stops it being the success it could be is simply Some Fans Being Old And Jaded.
Some fans – particularly the older, more jaded ones - will see this as damning the book with faint praise, but this story would fit in well with Series 11 – there’s a distinct air of familiarity about the characters, the dilemmas, the pulling together through several threads of adventure towards the overall solution. Though it would have to be set after It Takes You Away, because Ryan quite freely calls Graham ‘Grandad’ in this book, which in hindsight seems fine, but given how long before transmission the book was probably written, feels like something of a happy accident.
Overall, there’s something warm and rich and very firmly ‘Doctory’ about Molten Heart – it delivers a cracking adventure, lots of climbing, lots of being chased by forces of suppression, lots of telling truth to power and twiddling with gubbins and being extra-specially clever in a bid to save a world from a danger that resonates with us, while also having the benefit of freshness. You finish the audiobook feeling like you’ve experienced a Series 11 Easter egg episode that could never be made because of the enormous CGI budget – or even, come to that, like you’ve heard at least the basis of a modern, 13th Doctor feature-length movie. Doctor Who, made by Marvel – now there’s a dream to melt many a heart…
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