HalfLife is a good book and looks even better just after Sometime Never...—like a cozy ranch house one lot over from a dilapidated quonset hut. So it's unfair to Mark Michelowski that I'm about to use it as an excuse to rant about something that isn't his fault.
It's the amnesia. I've never liked the amnesia. It's an awkward thing; the writers can't get any good stories out of it, or even any bad ones. It just sits there, a completely useless piece of bric-a-brac squatting over the series like a demented Precious Moments figurine... and Michelowski bravely wrote his novel around it. HalfLife is about forgetting and its consequences. It examines what it means to lose one's memory from all angles, and insanely concludes that, wow, it's neat.
I don't for a moment believe Michelowski enjoys memory loss, but in dealing with the Doctor's amnesia he'd painted himself into a corner. Like I said, there aren't all that many stories you can tell about it—really only two: the one where it ends, or the one where it doesn't. Normally, the Doctor would want his memories back, so if you want to keep him amnesiac you either condemn him to perpetual failure, a Gilligan's Island nightmare of clockwork-predictable subplots... or give him a reason to stop trying.
And there just aren't many reasons not to try. You can't declare that the memories are just gone, because inevitably some other editor or producer will reverse or ignore the development—and, it now appears, probably very soon. You can't put technical limitations in the way, because with his TARDIS working the Doctor has access to an entire universe of medical technology, a lot of it indistinguishable from magic. You have make sure the Doctor doesn't want his memories back. There can't possibly be any good reason for this, so Michelowski has to settle for one which is merely not a total non-sequitur.
The Doctor is afraid, see. Afraid of what he doesn't remember; afraid that something awful lurks in the bowels of his ganglia. Afraid that it might make his friends not like him anymore. This is childishly naive angst, more appropriate to a five-year-old than a grown man—but I don't blame Michelowski at all, because it might be the least worst thing anyone could have come up with. Explaining why having a great bloody chunk of your past excised from your mind is a good thing would tax the promotional skills of P. T. Barnum. Asking a DW writer—even a good one—to do it is like asking a priest to transubstantiate a Pop Tart.
The Doctor's pathological avoidance just doesn't make sense. Even if we accept his reasons, it's impractical—if there's some scandal in his past, forgetting it won't keep his friends from learning of it from other sources. It's irresponsible—the Doctor leads a dangerous life, and some fact he can't remember might mean the difference between life and death for himself or his friends. Most of all, it's out of character. One idea the Doctor always stood for throughout the series in all its incarnations is that knowledge is better than ignorance. That he now argues the opposite is, I think, symptomatic of a wider shift in the series's philosophy—one that doesn't thrill me.
Anyway, I seem to recall saying before I got off on that screed that HalfLife is good. And it is, I promise—as much for the things it doesn't do as for what it does. There's a traditional plot for BBC books set on other planets: a society divided into two factions squabbles about something while something evil lurks in the background. The TARDIS crew spends the whole damn book getting captured and escaping from various sides, who refuse to believe the Doctor's warnings and get in the way while he fights the real threat. HalfLife has all the elements necessary for a Squabbling Space Colony book, but never stoops to cliche.
For once, the guy running the planet isn't stupid or insane. And when the Doctor shows up and warns of impending danger, the autorities actually take the few minutes necessary to check his story. Party this is because they're smarter than usual, but it's also because the Doctor is smarter than usual. He first tells someone who already has reason to trust him and who knows something weird is going on, and advises her to say something that doesn't sound insane when she relays the message to everyone else. Normally there would be dozens of tedious, predictable pages on which stupid borderline-sociopathic bureaucrats ignored his warnings and he'd make everything worse by acting like a complete goddamn loon.
(On the other hand, he is stupid enough to forget to tell her about the impending danger for several minutes, a goof which could well have cost innocent lives... but it is the congenital idiot Doctor we're dealing with here, and you can't have everything.)
And for once we have a planet that isn't populated entirely by contemporary middle-class Anglo-Saxons. The last time we saw a colony that hadn't apparently vacuumed up its entire population straight from 20th or 21st century suburban London was... hell, I think it might have been Seeing I. A lot of Who writers are amazingly provincial. The Doctor visits future civilizations, even supposedly alien worlds, and over and over again they're just like England or the U.S. in the present or recent past, with maybe some ray guns and spaceships. It's like the writers unconciously assume that the culture they grew up with is universal and bound to continue forever.
(The prologue, though, is a great example of the mistakes the rest of the book avoids, and almost seems pasted on from a different book. It's depression-era Alabama, right down to the speech patterns and gender roles—except that the kid is doing his homework on a computer, because, dude, it's the future!)
And then there's the planet, which is actually, for once, a planet. Normally these things have maybe one city, and if you can find a citizen who isn't a bureaucrat, a rebel, a mad scientist or an alien invader you're lucky. HalfLife focuses on a few characters, but suggests a fully-populated world.
And the ending: instead of an explosion, or a chapter of incomprehensible techno-mystic-babble, we get conversations. People talk, think, and make crucial decisions in climactic scenes more interesting than any we've had in a while. (Not to mention more comprehensible... at times during the last couple of arcs I was convinced that even the writers didn't have any clear idea what was going on.)
I hope this review doesn't come off as faint praise. I spent half of it on my problems with the amnesia, and the other half just talking about how Mark Michelowski didn't screw up. But honestly, after reading the botched alternate universe arc, I loved the not screwing up. The not screwing up was my favorite part. But there are plenty of other good things about HalfLife. For one thing, this was the first book to give Trix a personality. If anyone has fallen behind reading the EDAs, I'd recommend skipping directly from Camera Obscura to HalfLife. The sanity you save may be your own.