By Una McCormack

BBC Books, out now

Far below the surface of Adamantine, the crystalline planet is under attack. The seas are are shrinking, the magma is cooling – this sounds like a job for the Doctor and her friends.

Author Una McCormack is not a newcomer to Doctor Who; her Eleventh Doctor adventures with Amy and Rory (The King’s Dragon and The Way Through the Woods) perfectly captured the rapport between the multiple leads, and she’s equally adept at recreating the natural dialogue between the latest Team TARDIS crew members. She also wrote 12th Doctor novel Royal Blood and a whole stack of Big Finish CDs.

There’s a good cliffhanger at the end of the novel’s first chapter and you can almost hear the scream as the episode hits the end credits. Una knows her Who, and there’s a reassuring sense of familiarity about this story. The crew may be new but the epic trek across the alien landscape could very easily be transposed to William Hartnell’s Team TARDIS from The Daleks or The Keys from Marinus. We encounter lavasharks rather than magnedons, but the high adventures of the quest structure are still there. Even the device of naming the indigenous crystalline characters after rock and gem types (Emerald, Basalt, Quartz) is a nice throwback to more traditional allegorical Doctor Who.

Occasionally we get a different perspective from the TARDIS crew, courtesy of Ash, the alien female lead. She’s trying to find her scientist father who has gone to investigate the impending ecological disaster that’s threatening the planet. The Doctor and Ryan pair up, as do Graham and Yaz, each group taking the story to different locations and perils. There’s a lovely moment when Graham and Yaz are incarcerated for a second time and he makes the observation that travelling with Doctor involves a lot of doing time – literally.

Thankfully the Doctor is the voice of reason on this world where power and politics are the drivers for hiding the disaster from the populace, and she discovers a way to get out her message out to the people. Ryan gets to call Graham granddad on a couple of occasions (though once in a derogatory way), Yaz‘ role as a junior police officer is mentioned, and Grace is still in the narrative – in summary, it feels like we’re dealing with the same people we’re watching on Sunday nights.

Verdict: A story that’s very much in step with Series 11’s ‘Often the real monsters are the ones among us, and don’t assume that the outside threat is always warlike’, Una McCormack has spun a pacey, clear tale with clear messages and (most importantly) feels authentic to 2018’s iteration of Doctor Who. 8/10

Nick Joy

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