It's strange how as the 'War' trilogy goes on, it seems more and more like the present. Warhead seems like the future, Warlock only just so despite being set further forward, and Warchild, well, it's as if Cartmel forgot that he hadn't set these things in the present. They're all
da mn good though.

I agree with every word you say.

You know, I think that's the first time I've ever said that. It's so dull agreeing with people.

Yes. It is. So how about I start spouting something about feminists? :)

Don't even THINK about it...

It's a small detail, but I've been trying to figure exactly which US Intelligence group employs Creed. It's never referred to as anything as the Agency, so many people probably think it's the CIA. CIA agents, however, never refer to their organization as the Agency; it's always "the Company."

Creed doesn't appear to be a military man (I haven't read the prequel, so I can't confirm this), so that leaves out the DIA and any of the other branches (Army, Navy, AF, Marines) intel. Most of the State departments intel groups are involved in specific areas; e.g., the FBI is involved in federal law enforcement, the Department of the Treasury is involved in matters dealing with currency, and so on. Finally, the National Security Agency deals primarily with code breaking and signal intelligence.

So who does Creed work for? A US-based UNIT offshoot?

Haven't the foggiest. This is about 30 years in our future (at a guess, though you'd never know it from actually reading the thing) and by then paranoid America is bound to have spawned at least 10 more "security" agencies. Or maybe CIA agents finally came to the conclusion that 'the Agency' was a more sensible way to refer to it.

There were a few things that indicated the future--cars with autopilots, weapons with sophisticated voice activation systems. But then there was Wolf, who was straight out of the 1950's!

Who (or what) is Wolf?

Wolf is the nasty kid that keeps bullying Ricky, Justine and Vincent's (or is it Creed's) son.

Like the other two in the trilogy there are some great set pieces looking for a story to tie them together. This succeeds in slightly better fashion than the others but still leaves the impression that another draft would have helped immensely. Cartmel discusses some interesting concepts about behaviour but suffers from the Terry Nation approach of bashing you over the head with it repeatedly so you can't fail to understand it (made me feel a bit like Pangbourne :-) )

Pangbourne...?

The school principal in this story. One of the parents, Francis Leemark, beats him to death with an ashtray.

And where was Buffy when she was really needed...?

Buffy doesn't have a great record where Principals are concerned. Two of hers got eaten.

NB: This isn't off-topic, owing to the fact that Lawrence Miles has just co-written a Buffy guide, Dusted. I would demand everyone rush out and buy a copy immediately, but unfortunately it was published and co-written by Lars Pearson, and should therefore be avoided like the plague.

There's no middle ground for you, is there, Emily?

'"Stay close, Eve," he called. "Yes, daddy"...When he was sure she wasn't about to drift into any kind of trouble he turned away and swam another length' - OK, which part of 'Stay close' are they BOTH failing to comprehend?

'They'd accepted the minimum of hospitality; no drinks, a couple of coffees' - NO DRINKS! One of them is BERNICE SUMMERFIELD!!!! Do you have the FAINTEST IDEA - no, obviously you don't. Given that Benny's role during this entire book can be summarised as 'fiddling around with a water-hose on the Doctor's orders'. (And this just after Just War! If ever a Companion's ordeal should have had SOME sort of follow-up...)

So Justine has three kids and two cars. What exactly happened to her environmental activism? Sure, lots of people mellow (i.e. SELL OUT) as they age, but the Doctor picked her out of ALL THE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD to stick by her planet-saving principles when it mattered...

'Maybe I was overdoing it when I compared it to being press-ganged' - actually it was the 'old bat' who mentioned the phrase 'press-gang', not you, Redmond.

'Because of certain recent events, girls should be very careful about travelling on their own' - sorry, WHAT! The dawgs'll RIP YOU TO PIECES whether you're a) female or male, b) alone or in company, and c) travelling or at home...so what the hell is she TALKING about?

So the dawg rushes downstairs to attack Jessica...yet somehow she gets past it and up the stairs to her bedroom? This being a dawg that •••• near does for a trained Agency assassin?

So Jessica has burglar-proof glass in her windows, but her front door can be effortlessly kicked in by a small woman like Roz?

OK, so an awful lot of dogs are running amok. Do you a) alert everyone as to the fact their furry canine pals may rip their faces off any minute and leave them to take appropriate action, or b) keep everything top-secret, while paying a psychic bag-lady to select random members of the public who you kidnap, shove into tanks, and sent out to slaughter said doggies...?

If Roz is so worried about Benny becoming an old maid (yeah, like ROZ can talk) why isn't she happier when Benny gets engaged to Jason?

'They slammed the front door' - what, the one that Roz kicked in earlier?

'After the statutory two year waiting period she'd signed her divorce papers without a qualm' - what, there's STILL a two-year divorce waiting period in England AND America all those decades in the future...?

Sorry, WHAT! Justine is so upset when a neighbour tells her that her husband was seen talking to his blonde assistant in a carpark (with his daughters in the car!) that she tells her son her husband isn't his real father...and then they both happily laughingly dance round with his friends having water-fights until said husband gets home...? Guess I REALLY don't understand how marriage works.

'Race memories are a load of cobblers' announces Benny. Um...didn't she experience ANYONE having Silurian race-memories while running round in Blood Heat?

Passports in your neck! Cars that can drive themselves, except that everyone always drives themselves without such technological marvels! Holographic stereo national anthems! And...er...that's it! I might forgive a future society so identical to the present if it WASN'T from the bloke who gave us such an utterly screwed-up future in Warhead...

'Despite having been kicked in by Roz earlier, the latch seemed to be solid and intact' - well, at least Cartmel spotted this particular flaw. Even if he couldn't be bothered to EXPLAIN it.

'We're not getting out of here' - you could try...ooh, I don't know...CALLING FOR BACK-UP? Just a thought.

Why does Roz equate the armoured car with safety when she's KNOWS there are filthy homicidal DAWGS in there?

'He looked like the only way he could use a paint-brush was as an offensive weapon, reversed in a thuggish fist and jabbed into his opponent's eye' - *sigh* it's amazing how, even on the rare occasions no one actually loses an eyeball in an NA, they just can't help MENTIONING the scenario...still, mustn't complain, at least we're avoiding the OTHER Who Novel Motif, viz, a murdered cat. Given that Andrew Cartmel dedicated his last 350-page book ENTIRELY to torturing an oochie to death, I'm counting my blessings.

To Be Continued...

'For a moment, when he first saw her she'd reminded him of Anna, an old girlfriend of his on the police-force who had died in the line of duty' - I'm not sure Creed should be so...casual about Anna. One of the few things I clearly remember about Warlock, ASIDE FROM THE CAT-TORTURING, is his utter agony when she was murdered.

If Ricky's moods are so contagious, why do his friends - unlike him - actually like Creed?

'The police and the army. Why can't they deal with this?' [BLOODY GOOD QUESTION.] 'Because the state of emergency has swamped them. They need all the help they can get' - sorry, that would be the state of emergency that London hasn't actually NOTICED, yet?? Boy has Cartmel TOTALLY failed to foresee Twitter.

'Benny sighed. She didn't know that they had a wine cellar' - I seem to remember she spent A YEAR in this house in Warlock alone. How could any self-respecting alcoholic and/or archaeologist NOT have uncovered the wine cellar?

'"I don't get it," said Roz. "D-notices"' - she's been with the (modern-day-Britain-obsessed) Doctor HOW long, by now? She hasn't heard of D-notices??

Creed watches those dawgs mass for an awfully long time before thinking to warn Roz and Redmond. Well, maybe he's as bored with watching these dogs attack/get shot by the same people over and over again as I am.

Sorry, there are HOW many HUNDREDS of troubled/psychically gifted kids in this one town, exactly??

Roz never thinks to just phone the Doc to explain about being press-ganged? Though to be fair, the Doctor and Benny never give a second thought as to the fact she's vanished off the face of the Earth.

Aaaand decades in the future they STILL have milkmen dumping bottles on your doorstep that they can't stop birds drinking from...whatever happened to that MARVELLOUS portrayal of the world going to hell we got in Warhead?

Benny screams her head off on discovering the doggie's dead and the man's alive. Sorry, which part of helping the Doctor transfer the dawg into the bloke's body somehow slipped her attention?

Also, when you've previously described Jack as 'pot-bellied', stop calling him gaunt.

'I was trying to reach you' - by slaughtering loads of innocent humans? By getting dogs to carve footholds into their own flesh? Couldn't you just have taken your waggly-tailed self off to Allen Road and attracted the Doc's attention in person instead? And why wasn't he scared of attracting VINCENT'S attention, after what happened last time?

'But who would go to so much trouble? We're not that important to anyone' says Justine, before leaping to the ridiculous conclusion that only her ex-husband could be interested enough in an alpha male capable of ruling the world to take any action. (As it happens, she's quite right, but it's STILL a ridiculous conclusion to correctly reach.)

I was wondering why the Doctor didn't just phone Creed instead of going to the trouble of hacking the Agency's unhackable computers...when it turned out the Doctor wasn't the one who sent that message. Still, anything that occurred to ME certainly should have occurred to professional paranoiac CREED a lot sooner.

'"When I meet this Vincent fellow I'm going to put a bullet in his head," said Redmond. "He seems to have caused a lot of trouble for everyone."' - Er...why exactly has Redmond decided to forgive JACK for his dog-related genocidal insanities, and decided to blame Vincent for them all, when HE'S guilty of nothing more than studying alpha-male behaviour?

Why exactly does Chris think that telling Justine to keep her daughters at home that day will protect them? Even BEFORE Vincent turned up with a gun I could see the flaws in THAT cunning plan.

Sorry, still not quite seeing why Vincent assumed Ricky would be happy to run the country for his dear old dad after said dear old dad had blown his mum's brains out. AND threatened to blow HIS leg off.

There's not enough plot to fill a book a tenth of this size. (Leaving aside the fact that said 'plot' doesn't actually make any sense.) Though to be fair - unlike Cat's Cradle: Warhead - the padding is fairly entertaining. But...you could remove the Doctor and co from the book without batting an eyelid. And, whilst I've nothing against Doctor-lite stories...like Love & Monsters, Blink and Cabinet of Light, his sacred presence...sorry, absence...should be abundantly clear. He just shouldn't be...eminently disposable.

Bookwyrm:

'Jack, as a dog, has developed a startling knowledge of how auto-targeting systems on armoured cars work, which seems a long way from the knowledge base of the drug-addled idiot we met last time' - fair point, but there's a few lines in Let's Kill Hitler that I always go to in these kind of circumstances:

RORY: Come on!
AMY: Can you ride a motorbike?
RORY: I expect so. It's that sort of day.

'Vincent's dilemma...relies on the fact that Justine took the drug warlock while pregnant with Ricky, thus granting said child superpowers, and that Creed's taking the drug altered his genetic structure, giving powers to all his children...this would imply that everyone who took warlock - which was lots of people - would have superpowered children, which they demonstrably don't, and, more importantly...Justine didn't actually take the drug' - Oh. OK, but Cartmel was probably on fairly-safe grounds if he assumed that a) no one would remember anything about Warlock other than YOU TORTURED AN OOCHIE TO DEATH and b) no one would reread Warlock cos YOU TORTURED AN OOCHIE TO DEATH. (I mean, MOST of the NAs attack a cat, Warlock's just the only one to SPEND 350 PAGES TORTURING AN OOCHIE TO DEATH.)

'We're perhaps supposed to feel sympathy for Justine when Creed dumps her. But then we remember that, 24 hours after her husband was kidnapped...whilst pregnant with his child, she was copulating with Creed on a bed in Buckingham Palace, which rather curtails our attempt' - ah. It turns out I DO remember SOMETHING about Warlock other than POOR DARLING CHICK, and it's that Justine was only shagging Creed because he'd just saved her baby from being forcibly aborted and herself from a lifetime of rape so, hey, she got a bit carried away. So sue her. (Yeah, I found the whole idea of Justine being kidnapped and forced into a brothel utterly ludicrous at the time but since then I've accidentally done a bit of reading-up about modern-day slavery and it seems horrifyingly prescient. Bloody Doctor Who, going round EDUCATING people.)

'Ace doesn't even appear in this book, yet we still manage to get a reference to her being naked' - BLESS!

'The Doctor only learns about Vincent from Jack but has long ago sent Chris out to America to deal with Vincent' - I thought Chris was Ricky's teacher cos he was keeping an eye on, y'know, RICKY?

Creed shacks up with the woman who'd been trying to kidnap his children and 'the writing implies that we are supposed to agree with his decisions, possibly on the grounds that the girl in question is blonde and has large breasts' - I thought it was because his wife betrayed him by doing the whole CREED'S NOT YOUR REAL DAD thing?

'Warhead ended with Vincent amplifying someone's emotions by accident after he and Justine could no longer be a weapon because they'd fallen in love. Warlock ended with a nutter with a gun holding the main characters up and then Vincent amplifying his emotions by accident. Here, Vincent is the nutter with a gun, who gets shot because Creed and Amy have fallen in love and she can no longer be used as a weapon' - ah. Yeah, again, Cartmel was probably relying on no one rereading all three of 'em and he was RIGHT - my poor darling Chick! - he just didn't foresee people getting PAID for putting themselves through the War trilogy again...