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The Also People is the Doctor Who novel where Ben Aaronovitch decided he wanted to write an Iain Banks Culture novel and got the rights to a TARDIS to do it. The Doctor takes Bernice Summerfield, Chris, and Roz to a Dyson-sphere society called the People, which is openly modeled on Banks's Culture, complete with Minds in ship form and a relaxed posthuman ethos. There is a murder. There are political maneuvers. There is a Mind named God who is one of the best characters in the entire Virgin New Adventures line.
What Aaronovitch is doing is unusually ambitious for licensed fiction. He is using the Doctor Who format to write something approaching a real Banks-style philosophical SF novel, with the moral tensions Banks always pulled out of a fundamentally utopian society. Most of it works.
Four stars. Recommended even if you are not a Doctor Who reader, as long as you are okay with a few characters you may not recognize. The Banks influence is the draw.
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