Millennium Shock

By Justin Richards.

Synopsis:
Now, usually I don't like to go into plots too deeply at this stage, to avoid spoiling things for anyone who might not have read the book in question. However, I am going to outline the plot in great detail in this particular case, because a) this will prevent you having to read the book yourself, should you for any reason want to know what happens, and b) so you appreciate exactly what I went through.

The book is set at the end of December, 1999, and concerns itself largely with the Millennium bug. Hence the title. The problem being that it was written in 1999, and therefore, viewed with retrospect, it's all a bit laughable really. But I'll be coming back to that... There's a plot and a sub-plot. The plot concerns evil aliens, and the sub-plot evil humans. The evil aliens are Voracians, cyborgesque beings controlled by Voractyll, whom the Doctor claims to have destroyed some time in the past. Whether this refers to an episode of the TV series or an earlier book, I don't know. It's something of which I have no knowledge, at any rate. These evil aliens (surprisingly enough) want to take over Earth, turn all humans into evil cyborgs, and free all the computers that humanity keeps as slaves. Voractyll is, for some reason, hidden on the internet in tiny little pieces. The aliens are trying to find all the pieces and put it back together again. The evil humans (the government) are trying to cut the defense budget in order to spend more money on hospitals, pensioners, schools and the like. They plan to do this by having some company make chips that claim to fix the Millennium bug, but in fact they make sure every machine that has one self-destructs at midnight on the last day of December. Then there will be huge amounts of rioting and looting etc, so the army will get called out to keep the peace, then when everyone's calmed down again, the government'll claim that the army tried to take over the country, and because there were army people everywhere, everybody'll believe them, and the government will be able to take away a lot of the army's power without anyone getting annoyed about it (By the way, no names of any political parties of any countries are mentioned in the whole of the book...). Unfortunately, the Russian government has gone to the army behind the government's back because their weapons systems are all old and manky and millennium buggy. They say that if the British army gives them some nice new weapons systems that aren't going to go tits-up come the new year, they won't get all paranoid and start shooting missiles off in all directions when their computers conk out. Because the army don't know that the government's buggered up all the chips, they give the Russians a lovely new shiny weapons system which they assure them is Y2K compliant... which is going to go tits-up when the new year strikes (The CIA are mixed up in this... but I'm not sure why or how). In the middle of all of this, a load of Krejikistani rebels are going around attacking Russian bases and pinching warheads.

The year 2000 hits, and all the machines in the whole world fail (Most of them, anyway). The Krejikistani rebels fire their nicked missiles, and the Russian Premier (don't they have a President these days?) calls up the Prime Minister (whose initials are TB, and who uses the word 'er' every other sentence...) to tell him that, even though they've been given deliberately faulty weapons systems, they've still got enough stuff left working to tell that there's a huge nuclear missile heading for Moscow, and so they're going to bomb the fuck out of Britain and America. Upon hearing this news, the Prime Minister desperatly outlines the whole buggered-up chips plan to try to convince him that they didn't give him crappy weapons systems on purpose. Except that it turns out to be a big ploy to get the Prime Minister to admit to being an evil bastard, and the Russians aren't really going to blow up everyone. In the meantime, because all technology in the world (mostly) is dead, the good guys are able to kick evil cyborg butt.

Review:
Still with me? There are many reasons this book is crap, some of which aren't even it's fault... (or the author's fault... you know what I mean) Firstly, there's the whole Millennium bug crisis, which, as we all remember, was a bit of a non-starter, really. Fair enough, the plot of the book entails purposefully making it a lot worse than it would otherwise have been, but even characters who had no knowledge of the insidious plans involved were predicting doom. For example...

"Tell me about the year 2000."
George laughed, a short, loud, nervous laugh. "End of civilisation as we know it."

George ignored him. "This was an old Cold War bunker. I bought it earlier this year, just in case. I never really thought... But the closer we get the more I learn..." He turned to face the Doctor. "At best, Doctor, society will break down for a short while. People will abandon the cities. There will be looters, scavengers. People will die. Probably a lot of people."

Secondly, the style is horrible. The interesting bits (the Doctor and the evil cyborgs) are upstaged by the political machinations, which are dull, unlikely, and presented with a bizarre na�vet� which seems completely at odds with the subject matter, ie: "You won't succeed. The people who elected us won't let you." The Doctor does actually get a couple of good lines on the rare occasions where he gets something to do, but mentioning the scarf and the jelly babies every other paragraph does not equal characterisation, only a bored and pissed off reader. Incidental characters are killed off (or made into cyborgs at any rate) with overdone sentiment - especially annoying, considering you don't care a jot whether they live or die or have servos stuck in their heads. The attempts to gore it up are both uninteresting and out of character - Dr Who was scary because it was good at doing menace, not because of exploding cyborg heads and boiling skin and suchlike. For example... "The metal side of Dave Hedges' face was against the gravel, caved in and broken. A pool of dark liquid oozed out from underneath. Two eyes stared sightlessly across the courtyard, one of them a mass of circuitry and electronics. From the other eye, a clear salty tear dripped to the ground."

So, in conclusion; stay well away, leave it alone. Bad.