Beautiful Chaos (Gary Russell)

Gary Russell (2008;2013) Beautiful Chaos, 242 pages.

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Who do we want to see on an adventure together? The Tenth Doctor and Donna’s grandfather, Wilfred Mott, of course! This is what we get in Gary Russell‘s Beautiful Chaos where new stars are born on our skies.

Wilfred Mott is going to get an acknowledgment from an astronomical society. He has found a new star. He wants to take Donna and the Doctor to the party, and the woman he is dating, Henrietta Goodheart. Henrietta is a scientist that the Doctor immediately befriends.

The big theme of the story is memory and forgetting. We know that Donna is going to forget the Doctor some day soon when their adventures come to an end. Henrietta is forgetting already since she has a fast advancing type of dementia.

It soon turns out that the star Wilf found is not the only new one. There are a lot of them lighting up all the time. At the same time something is spreading through computers that makes people act like remote-controlled robots.

Donna and the Doctor get separated and they gather groups of people to help them to solve problems at hand. The story has a lot of walking (since the aliens turn off electricity and cars don’t work and the older people like Wilf and Henrietta can’t run all the time). So, a lot of walking.

The aliens behind all this are the Mandagora. They live off energy and now they live in computers on Earth. The Doctor has met them before and has no illusions about them. They can take over the whole planet.

The Mandagora tries to jump from computers to people, and after a lot of plot twists they get into Henrietta. In her the Mandagora also gets the dementia and looses their ability to think clearly. They are not a threat anymore.

The book is divided in one day long parts and that makes it easier to keep track of what is going on. It has a lot of talking and walking and there are a lot of people in the story, too. But it’s a fine Doctor Who adventure all in all.

One thing that kept me thinking was Donna and her realtionship with her mother. Donna’s mother is not a nice person in this story. She is bitter and mean. In the end Donna writes her a long and emotional letter that sounds nothing like Donna and the mother’s soft side is also depicted.