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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 4 April 2026 |
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| Rating: |   6 |
This NA novel gets much high praise, but I am not sure why. It has some witty dialogue. We get a drawn-out contest of wills between The Doctor and a villain (who turns out not really to be one). We get a fledgling space colony in trouble with The Doctor and team the only ones who can save them. Sleepy has many Doctor Who tropes that I suppose could fuel fan desires. It just does not work as a science-fiction novel. It has too many ideas that just do not fit together. There are many unnecessary side elements, such as the return of Wolsey, just to remind us that there is cat roaming around inside the TARDIS. The Wolsey scenes have no connection to the plot. The plot itself is a variation on Colony in Space, with a fledgling colony beset by troubles, with a big intergalactic corporation sending in troops (why in the future do corporations have their own armies?) to demolish the colony because it is a nuisance, and The Doctor trying to protect the colony against the corporation thugs. Hanging over the retread plot is the "problem" that the colonists have. This time, it is an unexpected burst of ESP in about a quarter of the colonists. This turns out to be caused by an engineered virus. Who engineered it? For what purpose? It is never entirely clear. Attached to this virus is an additional element of fragmented memories. Whose memories? It never becomes entirely clear. There is quite a bit about AIs getting real people personalities and acting like all the one-dimensional side characters in a typical Doctor Who story. It's no wonder that all the colonists are kind of boring and flat as characters, since all the personality traits that would go to them go to the AIs. The supposed science premise for all these viral ESP shenanigans is the idea that memory RNA encodes actual memories. Because this is not at all what is meant by "memory" RNA, the whole idea falls to pieces. The novel does have interesting bits, and the contest of wills between The Doctor and Colonel White provides the most interesting conflict in the novel. However, the various ideas and plot threads do not add up to a coherent solution.
