We've known for quite a while that award-winning hard SF author Stephen Baxter would be penning a Doctor Who novel, as part of BBC Books's ongoing quest to get big-name writers working for the Who range. Now we know more, as the synopsis has been released.
Doctor Who: The Wheel Of Ice will be published on 16 August. The first Who book since 2005 to feature a past Doctor, it involves the Second Doctor and companions Jamie and Zoe. Here's what their adventure will entail:
Resilience. Remembrance. Resolution. Whatever the cost.
She had no name. She had only her mission - she would return Home. And bathe in the light of a long-dead sun... Even if it meant the sacrifice of this pointless little moon to do it.
The Wheel of Ice: a ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, home to a colony mining minerals for a resource-hungry future Earth. A bad place to grow up.
The Wheel has been plagued by problems. Maybe it's just gremlins, just bad luck. But what's the truth of the children's stories of 'Blue Dolls' glimpsed aboard the gigantic facility? And why won't the children go down the warren-like mines? And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.
Aboard the Wheel, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation - and three strangers who have just turned up out of nowhere look like prime candidates to be accused of sabotage ... The Doctor finds himself caught up in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. But it's a mystery that could have dire repercussions for the people on the Wheel. It's a mystery that could kill them all.
