In this Fourth Doctor adventure, the TARDIS takes the Doctor and Leela to wintry New Hampshire where various parties are interested in something extraterrestial that seems to have a connection with weather, spreading blizzards and ice everywhere. With so many characters and groupings involved, it took me quite a while to remember who was who although I was able to get on with the book in large chunks. Leela didn't get much space to shine - she was in the story someone who was very much out of her element and needed looking after, although she seemed to regain her spirits towards the end. ( )

In brief: Don't waste your time with Drift unless you think you would really enjoy a banal X-Files knock-off mixed with a banal soap opera knock-off.

A real shame, because I was looking forward to this book. Again, I've been stupidly found guilty of judging a book by its cover, but we can't help ourselves sometimes, can we? It's a human mistake, one that everyone seems to make from time to time. I was ensnared by the cover art of Drift, believing I would receive a moody or atmospheric piece intertwined with a fair amount of sci-fi/horror flair. And what did I get instead, besides a headache? A shitty suburban soap opera mixed in with some 'aliens vs. the military' type bologna that wouldn't even cut it in those low budget made-for-TV movies they show on the Sci-Fi Channel every Saturday. The only thing going for Drift, and the only reason I don't give it a zero outright, is that it's readable, so at least the torment will be over soon enough should you make the grave error of picking this book up.

The plot involves the Doctor and Leela landing in contemporary New Hampshire during an epic Thanksgiving blizzard. The Doctor immediately stumbles into a covert search operation being handled by White Shadow, a vaguely Torchwood-type unit that hunts down alien tech and salvages it for study and possible future use by mankind. In this case, White Shadow is seeking the wreckage from a military jet, the contents of which are also of particular interest to a pair of CIA agents in town and some batshit cultists. The Doctor, still using his credentials as UNIT's scientific adviser, attaches himself to White Shadow and joins in on the investigation, believing the snow storm is much more than just aberrant weather.

This all sounds like a really great set-up, but let me backtrack a little first and discuss all the pointless domestic drama. Before this, we're introduced to the local sheriff, a vanilla bumpkin by the name of Mackenzie. We are also introduced to Mackenzie's girlfriend, the completely frigid and unlikeable Martha, her annoying daughter Amber, and Amber's wayward drunk of a father Curt, who is driving back home to see his little girl on Thanksgiving (with all sorts of Thanksgiving 'presents' to give to Amber, because, you know, Americans exchange gifts on Thanksgiving... huhh???). Domestic drama! Martha doesn't want Curt to come anywhere near their daughter, because he's a bad influence, and Mackenzie has been having thoughts about another woman, his policewoman partner, who later goes missing in the snowstorm. Domestic drama! Oh, and we also discover shortly after that Mackenzie just happens to be the brother of Morgan, White Shadow's leader, which leads to... you guessed it, more domestic drama! Nevermind the fact that I've watched much better daytime soaps before, but this romance novel fodder has absolutely no place in a Who novel. It's not even on the same level as Dark Shadows, which I might be able to accept if it was shoehorned into a Doctor Who story. When the idea for original Doctor Who novels was initially proposed, the famous quip of "stories too broad and deep for the small screen" surely didn't include THIS.

The Doctor spends large chunks of the book on the sidelines, and Leela - poor Leela - may as well not even be listed as a character she gets so little time devoted to her (she's paired off with a Native American psychic named Krystal Owl Eye Wildcat, who essentially replaces Leela in the 'noble savage' role for 95% of the novel). This means that part of the story follows the exploits of the one-dimensional military folk, and the other half of the plot is propelled by the two aforementioned secret agents, Mulder and Scully, I mean... Melody Quartararo and Parker Theroux. Yes, I'm serious. Those are really their names. Simon A. Forward comes across as the anti-Douglas Adams in the name game department. Adams would often come up with silly, irreverent, yet memorable names for his characters. And then there's Forward, who will just annoy you with stupid, highly unlikely character names. Irving Pydych? Michaela Zabala?! Dermot Beard?!?!

The absolute worst thing about Drift, the thing that will give you those little uncontrollable urges to chuck the book across the room, burn it, or run it over with a car, is the horrific attempts at Americanization by the author. As I understand it, Simon A. Forward is from Cornwall, and while Cornwall might very well be the English equivalent of the Deep South, hailing from there does not mean you are automatically an expert on how people live in the States. It's like when an American tries to write something set in the UK without having a clue about the place and they force every single character to say "Cheerio!" and "Pip-pip!" whilst twirling their bowler hats on top of double decker buses and drinking cups of tea. Forward's Little Town, USA features many of the tired backwater stereotypes: everyone drives a truck, everyone owns a gun, everyone swears a lot, everyone drinks Jack Daniels and wears sunglasses and hates the rest of the world. Blah, blah, blah. And the effort to include American vernacular in the dialogue is even more jarring than those stereotypes. I feel the author should have either completely forsaken any attempt to make the dialogue 'realistic' (because the half-American/half-English speech just doesn't work), or set the contemporary story in a setting he was intimately familiar with, because the author's version of modern America comes across as a bastard child of Stephen King novels and CNN.

Dire... even by TV tie-in standards. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1014841.html#cutid6

Drift seems to have escaped from the X-Files. Here we have a US special forces military operation in a snowbound New Hampshire village, which the Doctor and Leela get embroiled in. There are also two CIA agents (which is a mistake; they should be FBI) on the case with their own secret. There's some great characterisation of a dysfunctional family (though not really of the Doctor or Leela), and lots of people get killed, yet at the end of the book one feels that not an awful lot has happened. The cold snowbound setting is reminiscent of Kim Newman's Time and Relative, which was apparently published almost simultaneously. ( )