The Wheel of Ice

Stephen Baxter

2012

Featuring the Second Doctor along with Jamie and Zoe, this is the first book in quite a while to feature a Doctor other than the current Doctor.
We find ourselves in the future where the TARDIS has decided to bring the travellers when it detects an anomaly in the time stream. We’re about a hundred years before Zoe’s own time and things are just similar enough for her to feel uncomfortable in a time that isn’t quite as familiar as it looks.

A group of contract workers are employed by a mining concern to extract the rare minerals to be found in the Saturnian moon their station surrounds. As usual for the Doctor and his companions, their arrival coincides with an outbreak of vandalism and they’re blamed by the tyrannical boss of the mining company along with the teens who are more interested in bunking off work than fulfilling quotas.

Baxter manages to pull in references to quite a few stories set in earlier times but he does rather overdo the Highlander rebellion stuff – it wasn’t a straight anti English fight that saw Jamie take flight with the Doctor.

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