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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 28 July 2025 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
A 1987 Doctor Who cast of characters in a 1989 Doctor Who plot about sums up Zamper, Gareth Roberts' last novel for the Virgin New Adventures line. In this novel, he brings back the Ultramilitarized Mutant Space Turtles called the Chelonians (not terribly original given that "chelonian" is Greek for turtle). However, he has moved the story forward quite a bit in their history. The Big Mother, presumed supreme ruler of Chelonia, has been usurped. Little Sister is now in power with a reform policy turning the collapsing Chelonian Empire into a cooperative, prosperous, peace-loving society. What is left of Big Mother's loyalists are now desperate to find a means to take back power. They have landed on a scheme to get a gleaming new powerful battle cruiser from the mysterious shipbuilders of Zamper. This Zamper is a planet set up by a mysterious consortium 472 years earlier, impregnably protected, and absolutely neutral with regards to what side of a war its clients are on. Zamper does two things only - build military space ships better than anyone else and run an intergalactic online gambling business on a "duty free" basis. This latter business seems to be beside the point as far as the main plot goes, and is one of the weaknesses of the novel, which is basically a failure to tightly connect all of its pieces. Only five people actually work on Zamper, all of whom have been more or less kidnapped and forced to work on Zamper for the rest of their lives, forced never to mention anything of their identity before Zamper. This is another weakness, as even with future technology, it seems unlikely that an establishment that big would not require a vast number of workers. Zamper is run by the mysterious Management, a computer avatar that appears only on video screens, but has absolute control over everything that happens there. The Chelonians send two delegates to Zamper to collect their space ship. The problem is that Management is failing, systems are breaking down, and something is going on with the genetically modified slimy critters that the consortium originally set up to be the shipbuilders. Into this explosive mix, The Doctor and crew accidentally arrive, separated from the TARDIS. They quickly become embroiled in the unfolding disaster.
Zamper has many features that hearken to Roberts' favorite era of Doctor Who, the Graham Williams period. The warlike despotic ruler kicked out of his home planet reminds one of Graff Vynda-K from The Ribos Operation. As in Williams-era Doctor Who, the dialogue is of two kinds - the overly serious, which is to be laughed at by the reader, and breezy flippancy in reaction to the overly serious. Another such trait is splitting the Doctor from the companions for half or more of the story.
There are some weaknesses. One is that Roz and Chris do not have much of a role in this story. As in the previous New Adventures novel, the writer seems to want to just push them aside for a while until they might prove useful. I suspect, and it is just a suspicion, that Roberts originally had Ace in mind as Roz and Chris seem to be Ace split into two characters, Roz being soldier-Ace and Chris being romantic-Ace. Also, toward the end, Roberts seems to be in a rush to kill off every character but the TARDIS crew. I don't see a good reason for him to do this. The major weakness in the novel I found was, to me, a botched ending. Roberts writes about the basic setup of the failing Zamper quite well, creating a mystery and a problem. However, he pulls a "surprise" in the last few chapters, an indication that the previous part of the novel was just misdirection. The surprise is simply not nearly as interesting as the setup. What seemed to be a theme of "there are no real bad guys here" gets swapped for an "I want to conquer the universe" bad guy. The bad guy is a kind of Cthulhu with an Etonian manner. I found this resolution boring and unimaginative, and I would have much preferred that Roberts had stuck with the logic of his starting points.
The strengths of the novel are quite good. Roberts does very well at giving each character a distinct identity and voice. Characters who appear at first one-dimensional gradually gain depth and aspects. The dialogue moves along quite briskly, and Roberts has a special affinity for Bernice, who seems to me to be fully herself for the first time in a New Adventures novel. I like it that Roberts has gone back to the earlier TV series in giving us a Doctor who just stumbles upon a problem rather than one who has a save-the-universe plan already in place, and just uses everyone as pawns in the plan.
In total, I got more enjoyment than dissatisfaction out of Zamper, but just couldn't take the ending.
