Frayed
By Tara Samms

      The Doctor and his assistant, Susan, arrive on a bleak planet where a war rages between the human scientists and strange alien beings known as “foxes.” Their bizarre powers enable them to be destroyed and reform, a faculty that the humans do not possess. The community houses many children who have extra talents, the wrong sort that might mean that they mature into twisted geniuses so they are being treated, but one of them at least has other ideas.

     Akin to The Eye of the Tyger by Paul McAuley, this novella could be imagined as part of an actual television series, because it resembles the sort of story that I and countless others used to sit glued to during those long-ago Saturday teatimes. The sparkling spirit of the original series is alive and well and updated for a modern and more adult audience.

      The first Doctor (William Hartnell) is the incarnation featured in this taut thriller, as the foxes pick off the survivors in competition with something else and the missing Susan must be found. He is beautifully portrayed here, so well realised down to the last mannerism that I think this novel gets the prize for best depiction of any of his guises.

      This is another enjoyable and exciting story that ought to appeal to anybody who loved the show and wants to read something akin to the type of plot it sometimes featured. Told in the third person and also by one of the planet’s dwindling number of inhabitants, this is a tale with quite a few surprises and lots of action, in short the sort of story that might well have been watched behind the sofa. More, please.