Reviewed: The Beast of Babylon Audiobook

Josh Maxton is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Though I’m a bit late to the audiobook game (The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage being my first ever), I do quite enjoy them. While I wouldn’t favor listening to a novel over reading it (call me old-fashioned), I still have a love for audiobooks.

In 2013, Puffin Books released a series of 11 books for each of the (then) 11 Doctors (one book per month), each written by a famous name including Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl), Neil Gaiman (The Doctor’s Wife), and Patrick Ness (The Chaos Trilogy). A year later after the series originally ended, Puffin released Lights Out, to commemorate the Twelfth Doctor. Originally an ebook series, the initial series celebrated the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and these short stories also got a print and audio-download treatment. The Beast of Babylon is the story for the Ninth Doctor. You’ll see rulers from the past, aliens from the present, and the wonders of the Doctor himself. It’s a really solid book. Let me tell you more about it!

Pain cripples the Doctor. Not too long ago, the Time War was still raging on. As far as he knows, he destroyed his planet, his race, everything. He has nothing left to live for. Alerted about a deep and terrible threat, the Doctor rushes to the planet Karkinos. After saving the planet, desperate to retrieve a mysterious silver orb, the Doctor is forced to take a girl called Ali with him to ancient Babylon, where more trouble awaits. When a man figures out who he is to the universe, a girl gets her deepest wishes granted, and a friendship that will last several lifetimes gets planted, the Starmen – the trouble makers of the universe – will return.

With this Puffin 50th anniversary series, most of the stories are full of great ideas, but are slightly under cooked because they all qualify as “short stories.” The Beast of Babylon is certainly one of the better ones; in short, the book is not “crack in time/silence will fall” level of complex, but it’s got enough meat to make it interesting. Props to author, Charlie Higson (The Fast Show) for delivering such a good tale within such a limited word count.

Out of all the stories in this series, this one is the easiest to fit into Who canon. I don’t want to spoil where it fits in. But I’ll leave you with two teasers:

1. Think of how a few moments for us could be a whole new adventure for Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor.

2. The story takes place within an actual TV episode.

This story is very well done, and respect must go to Higson for bringing such a deliciously awesome tale to the table. In fact, I don’t have there’s much wrong with the story at all. However, Higson himself is right when he says that The Beast of Babylon would never ever work as an episode. Not only because the Starmen (the above mentioned “trouble makers of the universe) would take some serious CGI to look even half-decent, but also because there’s a revelation about who Ali is that happens about halfway through the book. Keeping it a secret wouldn’t be possible on the small screen. Excluding those two things, it’s easy to picture the tale onscreen. My complaints are few…

There’s a decent plot hole concerning the mysterious silver orb the Doctor’s keen to get his hands on (I can hear some people saying “of course”), or at the very least something unexplained, more than open to interpretation. But that issue isn’t restricted to off-screen adventures, is it?

Higson, meanwhile, nails the Ninth Doctor’s character for the most part – but not entirely. In some parts of the book, it seems you could replace the Ninth Doctor with the Tenth or Eleventh and still get away with it. Admittedly, those moments are rare.

In the end, The Beast of Babylon feels like Who, running to just over an hour as an audio. It has its issues, and not everything is explained in the story, but anything that isn’t is open to speculation. The book translates into audio very well, because the reader of the audio book (Higson himself) does a marvelous job. I would certainly recommend this, as well as the entire series from Puffin, to any Whovian.

The Beast of Babylon (download and print) is available on Amazon, as is the full 12 Doctors, 12 Stories set.

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