Well, it's not a bad book if you want to read about Ruby Duvall going on a cruise. If, however, you were hoping for much of The Eccentric Wanderer in Space and Time Known As The Doctor, then forget it.

Not to mention the author's really bad habit of spending pages and pages introducing characters, only to have them disappear 3/4 of the way through. What was the point of Gen'l Pam Cutler? She contributed absolutely nothing to the plot. And that awful Leslie and Diane!

Since Ruby is based on the author's daughter (at least that's what I assume from the dedication), I found it somewhat creepy reading all the descriptions of her naked, toned body. Some sort of literary child molestation going on.

How exactly (or why, even) did the Doctor create the temporary TARDIS? And why did it take on the look of a jade pagoda? Was it because the author had just purchased a copy of "The Way of Tao" and was feeling particularly pretentious.

I have to say, as a big Wizard of Oz fan, that I found the whole bunch of references awful in the extreme. The only time it worked, and the only time I sympathised with Ruby, is when she had to watch the TARDIS leave without her. I'd be pretty upset, too.

Mike, you've read Birthright, I always assumed it had some kind of explanation for the Doc having the Pagoda while Benny and Ace were elsewhere with the TARDIS, because Iceberg certainly doesn't.

Gen'l Pam Cutler served many purposes in the plot. She got the FLIPback device working, thus ensuring the Doctor could maintain his unbroken record of planet-saving without undue bother. She spent much time listening to other people having sex, thus demonstrating what an 'adult' book this is. And she proved once and for all that having a mad father definitely screws you up.

I didn't notice any Wizard of Oz stuff (and before you shout 'Philistine!' yes I have seen it. Once. A long time ago.)

Ruby's abandonment was heartbreaking, of course, if only because you can't help picturing yourself in that position, but I've found consolation in the fact that a) she really should have known that popping off for her notebook or whatever it was was asking for trouble, b) she later shacked up with that bloke who spent weeks torturing the Doctor in Left-Handed Hummingbird (OK, he was a Kate Orman character, I suppose he couldn't help himself), and c) when she asked him to take him with her in Happy Endings and he refused she didn't seem unduly upset - she didn't even camp outside the TARDIS night and day to sneak in when he opened it/whip out a knife and threaten to cut his throat if he didn't take her with him/sob, beg, plead, bribe, blackmail, threaten suicide, etc. All of which I'd have tried like a shot.

There's no explanation for the TARDIS's disappearance in 'Iceberg' because it came out *after* 'Birthright', which, yes, already had the explanation.

The Wizard of Oz references--most of the chapter titles are from the song "Over the Rainbow"; Cybermen=Tin Man; the Doctor=the Wizard, his TARDIS=the balloon that was supposed to take Dorothy home, Ruby/Dorothy is magically transported to a far-off land with strange creatures.

Guess I'll have to go back and re-read "Birthright."

Wasn't the Wizard a con-man? The cheek of it!

Well, to quote the Wizard, "No, I'm a very good man, I'm just a very bad wizard." ;-)

Hm...of course, I've never met the Doctor's Merlin incarnation (apparently that's the one in Birthright, I really must read it sometime. Oh, and he appeared in Happy Endings only I don't remember anything about it so it doesn't count) but I bet the Doctor makes a damned good wizard as well as a very good man.

A brave if sadly mistaken guess at the future (well, the author's future. OUR past) of 2006:

Environmental destruction: overestimated. Famine, drought, plague, dying seas, ozone depletion, falling population, EVERY country in the world suffering war, terrorism, privation...I don't doubt for one moment that it'll happen, but it's not happening to the NA's schedule.

Multiculturalism: underestimated. Everyone assumes that Ruby was born abroad just because she has dark skin?

Technology: mostly underestimated. On the cruise, no one gets any news until they 'copter in some old newspapers when passing the Falkland Islands? No TV, no Internet? But, of course, the inevitable virtual reality, in the inevitable (for NAs of this era) venture into 'the magical kingdom of cyberspace'.

Economy: 'ecu' my ****.

Astronomy: so the 'real' Tenth Planet is called 'Cassius'? Well, no one could have foreseen anything as stupid as 'Sedna'.

Everyone was asleep from 8.30am to 2.35pm during The Invasion? I thought it was all day. Of course, it's been eons since I had the misfortune of watching The Invasion.

There's no CCTV in central London in 2006?

On one page Colonel Hilliard is thinking that 'Pamela Cutler had looked ideal...Just what they need to sort out the messs they were in.' On the following page 'He had had misgivings about a woman taking command of the base. He was chauvinist about such things.' Likewise, on one page he's horrified by her discipline - 'But he was not expecting such formality.' - whereas on the following page it seems he was terrified she wouldn't be disciplinary enough: 'With a woman in charge he had thought that discipline was bound to suffer further.'

Cutler's son became a born-again Christian? I'm TOTALLY with those Tenth Planet why-are-you-bothering-to-save-him Cybermen...

'Stupid for thinking she might need [her gun] at the ends of the earth' - er...you HAVE noticed you've just SERIOUSLY pissed off half your men?

'Oh dear, she thought. She had an uneasy feeling that her job was going to be a little more complicated than she had imagined.' - Cutler on hearing her colleagues having sex. Didn't she already KNOW this?! Which bit of them being unable to keep their hands off each other in front of their commanding officer did she somehow miss?

'In his mind he translated the characters' - the Doctor can't automatically read Chinese characters, even when inside the TARDIS?

'She was Ruby Duvall, so what? Who on this ship would even turn a hair?' thinks Ruby, ONE PAGE after 'All activity had ceased in the indoor pool. Ruby could feel a hundred eyes, sharp with curiosity, bearing down on her swimsuited body...She had to get out of there. People were nudging their neighbours and whispering.' So, no turning of hairs on discovering her identity, then.

Make up your mind whether it was a policeman or policewoman who knocked on Ruby's door when her father got run over.

'I don't give a flying trapezoid what you get up to in the privacy of your own rooms, as long as it doesn't keep the rest of us up all night' - General Cutler. So why are the love-birds later claiming that 'the new regime had knocked on the head the nocturnal hot flings'. Are they THAT incapable of a) having sex quietly, or b) finding more isolated areas to have sex in?

Since when has the Doc EVER thought of Hartnell as his 'first enfleshment'?

Ruby's two friends in the dodgy entertainment business can SERIOUSLY afford to buy her a RUBY-AND-GOLD-NECKLACE??

Terrorist? WHAT terrorist??

'One's physical body might regenerate, as his had, several times, but his memories remained the same spinning vortex, growing ever larger and deeper' - really? Cos I think regeneration DRASTICALLY affects what you remember. Plus, didn't he reorganise 'em all recently in Timewyrm: Genesis?

Having trapped the TARDIS with a piston due to his inexplicable desire to press a button...why doesn't the Doctor press a button again to get the piston to move away?

Why does the Doctor think it's 1959, exactly? Sure, the engine room's old-fashioned but it hardly screams a specific year. And, OK, Ruby's in retro-fancy-dress but surely her behaviour, not to mention skin-colour, should have tipped him off a BIT?

Though speaking of which, is the Doctor a racist? Mistaking Ruby for Katiatu just because they both happen to be black? (Though quite how black Ruby can BE, given a white-British father and an Algerian mother, I don't know.)

Why does the Doctor a) decide he's permanently trapped, b) tap out an SOS and c) go snoringly to sleep instead of d) EXPLORING THE ROOM AND DISCOVERING THAT THERE'S A LADDER OUT OF THERE?

Riiiight. So the Cyber-Co-ordinator became the Cyber Controller due to a 'mobility experiment'. You heard it here first. (Or second, if you've actually read Banks' Cyber-non-fiction-book.)

'They thought I was a willing subject so they didn't even bother to secure me in the humaform' - yeah, cos the Cybermen as SO STUPID they'd OF COURSE take THE DOCTOR'S word for it when he assured them he'd JUST LOVE to become a Cyberman.

How does the Doctor know about all that 'Tin Man's Big Brother' stuff that he wasn't there for?

Look, Andew Cartmel just about gets away with saying 'Screw the Doctor, here are my own fascinating original characters!' David Banks...really doesn't.

FRANCOIS in Audios: War Doctor: Only the Monstrous: Earth's magnetic field goes through a pole reversal every 450,000 years on average, at which times it disappears completely for some centuries

It WHAAAT!

But...but...in Iceberg the magnetic field inverts and the FLIPback machine reverses its polarity back to normal! Or, um, actually I think FLIPback's activated early to deal with Cybermen and then the natural inversion flips it back...Either way, how would THAT work if the magnetic field bloody well DISAPPEARS for a few centuries?! Did people KNOW about this in 1993?

Yes they did.

Ah well. I suppose it's not the most egregious crime-against-science a Cyberman story has ever committed.

You could say that whatever technology was used here upset a natural equilibrium and the magnetic field reverted back to it as soon as the FLIPback was turned off.

But the entire POINT of FLIPback (insofar as one can remember it having ANY POINT WHATSOEVER) is that it would PERMANENTLY switch back the Earth's magnetic core with one flick of a, well, switch.

David Banks in DWM: 'Iceberg had a long history, starting life as a Make Your Own Adventure with Doctor Who, and also a story which I'd spoken to Eric Saward about scripting' - how can you POSSIBLY think something is suitable for Own Adventure-ing AND TV episode-ing?

'Peter [Darvill-Evans] pointed out that fans probably wouldn't be interested in literary experimentation like that' - of writing the book in the first person! That's hardly literary experimentation! (Leaving aside the fact that the best - and, coincidentally, the most popular - NA, Dead Romance, was written in the first person.)

'I don't know how many people picked it up, but the story was sort of based on The Wizard of Oz' - congratulations, Mike! 'As Dorothy is left behind by the balloon at the end of Oz...Ruby is left behind by the TARDIS because she goes to collect a jacket or something' - there's a DRASTIC difference between fetching a PET (even a dawg) and fetching a jacket.

'A sequel to Iceberg may appear at some time in the future' - or...not.

Oh, and by the way, his Cyberman book is regarded as a kind of bible. You heard it here first.

We've yet to have any religious wars over the correct dating of 'The Invasion', though its only a matter of time.

Bookwyrm:

'The first appearance of a recurring monster from the TV series in the NAs...we're almost two entire years into the run by this point...because Virgin misunderstood the terms of their licencing agreement and, until this point, didn't realise they could use monsters from the series' - ha ha ha ha!

'Central characters, like Ruby and Bono, aren't white, yet we're also not force-fed his information. Instead, we're told enough detail at appropriate junctures so that it's clear, but it's no more a big deal than it is with any of the white characters...Unfortunately, the Doctor, coming out of a daze, mistakes Ruby for Kadiatu' - *sigh*

'This novel was originally going to star Terry Cutler, the son we see in The Tenth Planet, until Banks was informed that Terry died during that story. Consequently, he reworked the story to star Cutler's hitherto-unmentioned daughter Pam. Later, however, he discovered that Terry Cutler actually survived the original story' - *more sighing*

'And, fabulously, the Cybermen are defeated in part because they don't understand jokes' - Oh, is THAT what happened? Cute.

'The first appearance of a recurring monster from the TV series in the NAs...we're almost two entire years into the run by this point...because Virgin misunderstood the terms of their licencing agreement and, until this point, didn't realise they could use monsters from the series' - ha ha ha ha!

Well, I'd fire their legal department.

Yeah, Bookwyrm valiantly attempts to argue that it's a GOOD thing, allowing the NAs to forge their own identity but how stupid do you have to BE...?

It's a terrible thing when one can only view fascinating scientific discoveries through the prism of 'But how does that fit in with Iceberg?'

Especially when one is just too •••• tired to work out the answer...

RIP Neanderthals. (Give or take Faction Paradox: The City of the Saved...)

Did Legend of the Sea Devils just nick its plot (or what passes for its plot) from THIS? Cos that would be embarrassing.