DOCTOR WHO: ANACHROPHOBIA

You'll never look at a clock the same way again...

By Tony Whitt     June 01, 2002

A serious malfunction lands the TARDIS on a ravaged planet where the Plutocrats and the Defaulters have fought a war using temporal weapons for the past four centuries, leaving the battlefield pockmarked with areas of accelerated and decelerated time. At Isolation Station Forty, the plutocrat scientists have come up with a possible solution to the long-standing stalemate in the war: a way to send soldiers back through time to stop the war before it can begin. But when the test subjects are returned to the present, both men are suffering from anachrophobia and something else: a force which can destroy the timelines of human beings and transform them into something most unexpected...

Jonathan Morris revisits the two themes that made his first book, last year's Fourth Doctor novel FESTIVAL OF DEATH, such a success: mortality (naturally) and the consequences of temporal paradox. Unlike his earlier effort, however, ANACHROPHOBIA has none of that freewheeling Season 18-Graham Williams-Douglas Adams humor. To some degree, that absence strengthens the novel, making a concept that might seem incredibly silly coming from another author-humans literally turning into clocks-deadly serious. It is something of a letdown to see the humorous sides of the Doctor and Fitz (and even Anji) played down so completely, especially when Morris has proven he can balance humor and horror with such deftness. You may also become slightly annoyed when the villains of the piece start manipulating time and making it repeat, so that we get to read the same scenes more than once. (Luckily they're as well-written the second and third time through as they were the first time.) There's also very little to differentiate the characters at Isolation Station Forty-until they start changing into the monstrous beings that haunt this novel, of course. Apart from that, the only other gripe I have with the novel is the revelation at the end-but I can't very well go and tell you about that, can I?

Even with all that, ANACHROPHOBIA is one of the better books the BBC line has published this year. Morris takes the old "base under siege" conceit and gives it fresh life here, making the plight of the Doctor and his companions one of the most nail-biting experiences we've read in a while. If FESTIVAL OF DEATH recalled the wit and occasional brilliance of Season 18, ANACHROPHOBIA manages to recreate the downright terror of the so-called "Gothic" Season 13. There's even a subtle tip of the hat to "The Android Invasion," one of the least successful stories of that season, in the final chapters of the novel, when the Doctor and company finally reach the plutocrats' base. And as with FESTIVAL OF DEATH, there are moments of genuine horror in this novel-the "clockmen" themselves have got to be one of the creepiest monsters created for the series.

Conceptually, the novel takes a little bit of work to wrap your head around, but in the long run the effort is worth it. Morris does a far better job of handling the idea of accelerated and decelerated time zones than Michael Collier did in THE LONGEST DAY, which did far too little with such an intriguing idea. And while the plutocracy that the scientists represent isn't given quite enough exposure here, Morris still manages to reveal enough about this money-driven culture to make us realize that, as corrupt as Western capitalism can sometimes get, things could be one hell of a lot worse.

ANACHROPHOBIA also takes up a theme introduced in the previous book, HOPE by Mark Clapham, and runs with it like a child with a pair of scissors. The book asks the dangerous question, "If you were given the opportunity to make amends for something you did in the past, would you do it?" There are echoes of THE FIVE DOCTORS in the Doctor's answer, that the person you are now is the sum of those past experiences, both good and bad-but as a man who has lost most of his past, he's for once out of his depth. Morris also continues Clapham's exploration of this newly humanized, one-hearted Doctor, a character more given to shifts of emotion, more vulnerable to pain, and more capable of error than ever before. Not since the Fifth Doctor have we seen a Doctor so close to us - and as Morris ably points out, that's both a blessing and a curse. But as long as writers like Morris are writing him, it's a Doctor you'll enjoy getting to know.