Cat's Cradle: Warhead (or just Warhead) is a novel written by Andrew Cartmel. Published in 1992, it is the sixth novel in Virgin Publishing's Doctor Who New Adventures series. Warhead is also the second part of the Cat's Cradle trilogy and (retroactively) the first part of Cartmel's Warhead trilogy. Warhead sees the Doctor facing off against corporations in a dystopian, cyberpunk future.
Characters[]
- Seventh Doctor
- Ace
- Justine - a young environmentalist
- Vincent Wheaton - a young psychic
- Tessa Anne Mancuso
- James Haines McIlveen
- Matthew O'Hara
- Lewis Christian
- Mulwray
- Stephanie
- Patrick O'Hara
- Breen
- Maria Chavez
- Lewis Christian
- Bobby Prescott
- Calvin
- Massoud
- Miss David
- Dfewar
- Brodie
- Shreela Govinda
- Mr. Pegram
Publisher's Summary[]
The place is Earth. The time is the near future — all too near.
Industrial development has accelerated out of all control, spawning dangerous new technologies and laying the planet to waste. While the inner cities collapse in guerrilla warfare, a dark age of superstition dawns.
As destruction of the environment reaches the point of no return, multinational corporations and super-rich individuals unite in a last desperate effort — not to save humankind, but to buy themselves immortality in a poisoned world.
If Earth is to survive, somebody has to stop them.
From London to New York to Turkey, Ace follows the Doctor as he prepares, finally, to strike back.
Full Summary[]
Prologue[]
The Doctor helps a small boy named Brodie who lives near a construction site build a slingshot to smash cameras.
Part One: Assembly[]
Chapter 1[]
Presumably on or around the same day, the Doctor visits a dying Shreela Govinda and gives her an article on telekinesis that he wrote to publish in her own name.
Chapter 2[]
The same day. Matthew O'Hara (a major mover and shaker within the Butler Institute) discovers Shreela's article.
In New York City, two cops (Mancuso and McIlveen) are eating in a diner, unaware that they are being watched by snipers on Matthew O'Hara's payroll.
O'Hara holds a conference call with several other influential figures on the construction of a bunker and mysterious tests.
McIlveen is shot by the snipers and put into an ambulance. Unfortunately, said ambulance is being driven by the snipers.
Chapter 3[]
Within the King Building, an old, dying cleaner named Maria Chavez finds the Doctor accessing confidential files. Instead of reporting him to building security, Maria helps the Doctor access the files and escape. After this, she dies in her car.
Chapter 4[]
Using the help of a gang of children, the Doctor captures a child killer named Bobby Prescott and uses him to gain information on a mysterious weapon being held in Turkey. Once he gains the information, the Doctor leaves Bobby to be killed by the gang.
Chapter 5[]
After showing Matthew O'Hara's son around the King Building, a high-ranking employee named Stephanie tries to access confidential files from O'Hara's computer. She is caught by Mulwray (one of the snipers hired by the Butler Institute). Mulwray brings Stephanie into his office and reveals that he also broke into O'Hara's computer. He also reveals that he is going to personally deliver Stephanie to O'Hara for "organ harvesting".
Chapter 6[]
Stephanie and Mulwray arrive at O'Hara's house. Instead of harvesting Stephanie's organs, O'Hara uses his young son (Patrick) to explain a secret plot that the Butler Institute has formulated - they intend on escaping the pollution-ridden world by becoming consciousnesses inside of machines. Though Stephanie and Mulwray somewhat doubt O'Hara's sanity, they decide to go along with him. Unbeknownst to anyone in the room, they are being watched by the Doctor.
Chapter 7[]
In Turkey (on the Mediterranean coast), Ace meets with Kurdish mercenaries after being introduced by an older woman named Miss David. While she seemingly gets along with them, one mercenary (Massoud) doesn't get along with Ace. After Ace leaves, she leaves a decoy in a hotel room by Massoud. Ace returns to the hotel room the next morning to find it has been shot up in the night.
Chapter 8[]
Ace travels to the coastal town of Marmaris with the mercenaries to board a boat. While on the boat, Ace forces Massoud to jump into the ocean and tests out some weaponry (accidentally breaking a blink-activated gun-headset combo while testing it out).
The purpose of Ace's mission is to raid a compound on an island and take the weapon that Bobby Prescott described. This is made easy by the fact that the guards (oddly) are teenagers. The mercenaries capture two of the guards and then hijack a virtual reality game to capture the other guards.
Chapter 9[]
While interogatting the guards, Ace discovers that they're teenagers who decided to guard the island of their own volition. Despite this, they are attacked (with some of the guards being nearly killed) by an unknown force right before the mercenaries reclaim the weapon - a mysterious object held in a barrel.
After Ace returns the Marmaris, she is attacked by Massoud. While Massoud nearly kills her, Ace is able to kill him with the broken gun-headset combo.
Chapter 10[]
After a lenghty stay at a Turkish airport, Ace boards a plane and meets with the Doctor in the first class cabin. It is here that the Doctor reveals that Miss David is "an old friend" and that the weapon is travelling inside of their plane.
Chapter 11[]
A young woman named Justine watches the Doctor's house from her settlement in the forest, influenced by magazines. Even though it is filled with toxins, she drinks artificial rainwater.
Chapter 12[]
The Doctor and Ace return to England. After hailing motorcycle taxis, they examine a McDonalds destroyed by Witchkids. After this, the Doctor brings Ace to an abandoned car.
Chapter 13[]
Using the abandoned car, the duo returns to the Doctor's house on Allen Road. Also inside is the weapon from Turkey - a barrel filled with anaesthetic gel used to keep its occupant in suspended animation, which the Doctor opens. Unbeknownst to the Doctor and Ace, Justine was in the house shortly before they arrived.
Chapter 14[]
Inside the barrel is a teenager named Vincent Wheaton. The Doctor has Ace run a bath for Vincent to get the anaesthetic gel off of his body. While in the bath, Vincent dreams about how he ended up in the barrel.
Vincent is a psychic amplifier for emotions, able to channel other peoples emotions and unleash them in physical form. Shortly before he ended up in the barrel, Vincent and a friend named Calvin were ambushed by Bobby Prescott and three of his disciples. Vincent used his powers to kill Prescott's disciples. Afterwards, Calvin (along with several other teenagers) drugged Vincent, stuffed him in the barrel, and placed him in the Turkish island - staying on it as guards.
Once this is finished, Vincent (assuming the bath is another dream) begins to drown himself.
Chapter 15[]
After Ace stops Vincent from drowning, the Doctor reveals that he (along with Ace) are going to visit New York City. He also reveals that he wrote the magazines that influenced Justine as a sort of advertisement. Inside of the bathroom, Justine and Vincent meet for the first time and the combination of Vincent's powers and Justine's emotions lead to several cars being destroyed.
Chapter 16[]
Vincent lays in bed, his breathing ragged. He is watched over by Ace and Justine. The Doctor pops in for a brief moment to explain Vincent's powers. After he leaves, Ace and Justine argue over their views of the world. This ends with the two briefly fighting.
Chapter 17[]
Once Vincent finishes recouperating, the Doctor makes him breakfast. Once he finishes eating, the Doctor gives Ace, Justine, and Vincent wine and bittersweet cookies, then burns the paper that the cookies came with while telling Ace to "make a wish".
Part Two: Detonation[]
Chapter 18[]
In New York City, Justine and Vincent visit a park. They are noticed by a gang of skinheads, with the duo using their combined powers to incapacitate them. Afterwards, Justine drugs Vincent and leaves him to be collected by the Butler Institute.
While in a drugstore, Ace asks the Doctor about his plan. The Doctor reveals that Vincent is to be used as a weapon against the Butler Institute's plan to transmute human minds into computers as a kneejerk reaction against the dying Earth. The plan also involves the (now dead) McIlveen, with the Doctor routing calls to make sure that they meet with McIlveen's partner, Mancuso. The plan reaches a snag when Justine seemingly kills herself with poison.
Chapter 19[]
Mancuso and her new partner (Breen) arrive at the drugstore, responding to a call about a robbery. They find the Doctor and Ace - with Breen placing her under arrest while the Doctor escapes. Mancuso soon finds the robber's hovercraft and sabotages it - flying it into a tunnel. Mancuso and Breen then engage the robbers, with one of the robbers being shot by Mancuso's new gun (which seemingly has a mind of its own) while the others fail to escape due to their getaway hovercraft being lodged in a tunnel. Mancuso and Breen leave, bringing Ace with them.
Chapter 20[]
Stephanie and Mulwray visit a Butler Institute compound and watch as Vincent Wheaton is brought to the compound. After this, Stephanie calls O'Hara.
O'Hara misses the call, as he is sitting on the lawn of his house with his wife. He monologues about his plan (revealing that McIlveen and his son are early test subjects) before closing his dead wife's eyes (presumably having poisoned her with a drink).
Inside the compound, Stephanie watches as Patrick is knocked out by gas before leaving with Mulwray for the King Building.
Chapter 21[]
Ace is placed into a holding cell but is immediately found by Stephanie, who tries to effectively buy Ace for her organs. This is stopped by Breen.
As this happens, Mancuso and a tech named Petersen investigate the new gun. They are interrupted, first by the Doctor (who hooks the gun up to a computer), then by Ace. They find that the gun holds the cloned consciousness of McIlveen inside of it - the first successful transfer of a human mind into technology by the Butler Institute.
Chapter 22[]
After some hallucinations, Justine awakens from her tetrodotoxin-induced "death" inside the King Building to find Ace standing over her. While Justine's fake death was a part of the Doctor's plan, she took the pill way too early. As such, Ace and Justine have to leave the King Building immediately - boarding a helicopter piloted by McIlveen's consciousness.
Chapter 23[]
The gang arrives at O'Hara's compound. An armoured figure (whom is initially assumed to be Mancuso) brings Vincent out. Justine runs after him, but finds that it is actually Stephanie, who shot Mancuso. O'Hara and Mulwray then emerge from the compound. This seems to be the demise of the Doctor's plan, until Mulwray beats O'Hara out of the way and allows Vincent and Justine to touch. Unfortunately, Vincent and Justine's love for each other neutralizes Vincent's conduit effects. This allows O'Hara to shoot Mulwray and touch Vincent.
Due to O'Hara extreme emotional coldness, a storm of pure cold is unleashed upon the compound - killing O'Hara (whose corpse is reduced to a husk) and Stephanie. As the dust settles, Mancuso is left to heal in Patrick O'Hara's old bed, the corporations that formerly backed O'Hara's plan instead decide to invest their efforts into actually cleaning the planet, and (as Brodie meets the Doctor once more) the Doctor muses on how Vincent's abilities have "broken".
Worldbuilding[]
- By the time of Warhead, industrial pollution has become so bad that even being outside without protective gear is extremely dangerous.
- Due to the extreme pollution, organ replacements are extremely common among with the wealthy, with the organs of the less fortunate being harvested after they are killed.
- Advanced (to both the 1990s and 2020s) holographic and virtual reality technology is showcased. Despite this, much of the computer interfaces are shown through the lens of the early 1990s.
- Violent gangs of children (such as the Crows and the Witchkids) are a somewhat common occurence.
- Within Bobby Prescott's city, riots broke out. These riots led to the destruction of a library and the young-ish Bobby gaining a murderous edge.
rest to be added
In-series continuity[]
- Lingering plot threads of the Cat's Cradle trilogy (such as the silver cat, seen on the cover and in a single sentence in Chapter 6) are shown. Most notably, the Doctor's TARDIS is shown healing from the damage it encurred in the previous novel.
- In a more metatextual sense, the themes of "fantasy vs. science fiction/magic vs. logic" shown in Time's Crucible are showcased in Chapter Sixteen.
- The Doctor's house on Allen Road is shown in Chapter Six. This house was first seen in the Doctor Who Magazine comic Fellow Travellers (also written by Cartmel and released two years previously) and is featured again in Ben Aaronovitch's novel Transit.
- Ace's friend Shreela Govindia (first seen in the serial Survival) in shown here, dying due to the effects of industrial pollution. This does not mesh with Jim Mortimore's novel Blood Heat, which states that Manisha died in a fire first described in the serial Ghost Light.
- While the exact time period of this novel is never stated (though it is implied to be around the 2000s), Lawrence Miles' Interference: Shock Tactic implies that it is set around 2004 through a reference to Jim Mortimore's Eternity Weeps.
- In Peter Darvill-Evans' Deceit, it is shown that the Doctor's interference with the Butler Institute might not have caused purely altruistic effects.
- Miss David is supposed to be one of the Doctor's previous companions, most likely Miss Young from the TV Comic The Sea Devil (who served as a standin for Leela).
- Justine takes a tetrodotoxin pill to appear dead. This drug also appears in David A. McIntee's novel White Darkness.
See Also[]
| Title | Author | Release date | Signifigance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transit | Ben Aaronovitch | 1992 | A similarly cyberpunk-themed Doctor Who novel written and released around the same time |
| Doctor Who and the Green Death | Malcolm Hulke | 1975 | An environmentalist Doctor Who story |
| Virtual Light | William Gibson | 1993 | A cyberpunk novel released around the same time |
| Golgotha Run | Dave Stone | 2005 | A dystopian novel dealing with corporate in-fighting |
| The Dandelion Insurrection | Rivera Sun | 2013 | A novel about a near-future dystopia |
| Eternity Weeps | Jim Mortimore | 1997 | A Doctor Who novel with scenes in a near-future Turkey |
| Trading Futures | Lance Parkin | 2002 | A Doctor Who novel set in the near-future |
Sources[]
- Goodreads
| The New Adventures | ||
|
1991 and 1992 | ||