Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
For context: Transit was published in 1992, when the Doctor Who television show had been cancelled and the novel range was where the franchise lived and got strange. Aaronovitch (who later wrote Rivers of London) wrote a Seventh Doctor novel that reads less like a tie-in and more like the cyberpunk SF he clearly wanted to be writing, with the Doctor and Bernice Summerfield in cameo positions.
The transit system of the title is a solar-wide network of teleport hubs, and something is loose inside it. The plot is dense, the prose is denser, and the futurism is the kind of mid-90s neon noir that has aged into a recognizable subgenre. It feels closer to William Gibson than to a Saturday teatime adventure.
Whether that is a recommendation depends entirely on what you want from a Doctor Who book. If you want the Doctor solving things with kindness and a screwdriver, look elsewhere. If you want to see how far a smart writer could push the format when nobody was watching, this is fascinating. Three stars on its own terms, four if you grade on the curve of mid-90s spinoff fiction.
Related reads
If you liked Transit
Remembrance of the Daleks
by Ben Aaronovitch
Aaronovitch novelizing his own Doctor Who script from 1988. Rare case where the novel outperforms the broadcast.
So Vile a Sin
by Ben Aaronovitch
A 1997 Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures novel co-written by Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman. Operatic, dense, the end of a long arc.
The Also People
by Ben Aaronovitch
Aaronovitch's 1995 Doctor Who novel, riffing on Iain Banks's Culture. Better than tie-in fiction has any right to be.
11/22/63
by Stephen King
11/22/63 by Stephen King 2011 review. An English teacher discovers a portal to 1958 and decides to stop the Kennedy assassination. The single best late-King novel and the rare time-travel book that earns its 849 pages.
Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 2021 review. Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the children passing by the storefront and waits to be chosen. Late-career Ishiguro at his most patient and most strange.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 review. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, a special English boarding school. As adults, they begin to understand what Hailsham was for. The novel that defined the contemporary literary-SF register.
More by this author