The novella “The Sontaran Games” by Jacqueline Rayner was published for the first time in 2009.
The Tenth Doctor arrives on Earth, in an academy where gifted young athletes train in hopes of being admitted to the next Globe Games. But something is wrong because some of the young athletes died in mysterious circumstances.
The young people at the academy are under pressure because for them that’s the chance of a lifetime so they haven’t notified the police about the deaths. The Doctor tries to figure out what happened but his investigation is soon interrupted by the arrival of a group of Sontarans. The alien warriors decide to use the academy to evaluate the ability of humans in deadly games.
“The Sontaran Games” is set in the period in which the Tenth Doctor is traveling alone, after the end of the fourth television season. It’s one of the stories written to tell the adventures of the Doctor in the final period of his tenth incarnation, covered on television only a few special episodes.
In this novella, the Doctor arrives on Earth in an unspecified period in a British sports academy where training suddenly takes a dramatic turn. As always, the Doctor discovers that something strange is going on and in this case he must save the young people at the academy.
In “The Sontaran Games”, the Earth has once again become a strategic planet in the war between the Sontarans and their eternal enemies Rutans, one of the many references in the novella to events of various television adventures. In the “Quick Reads” series in particular enemies already appeared on TV are reused to avoid the need for lengthy explanations about them that would be impossible in such a short books.
The Doctor must solve the mystery of the death of some of the young people of the academy when the Sontarans arrives so the two events seem unrelated. He’s forced to seek a way to protect the lives of the kids and at the same time defeat the Sontarans and these tasks are anything but easy.
As the Doctor is alone, the whole plot can be focused on him, without splitting the story into subplots or otherwise devote space to one or more companions. The other characters are almost all functional to the plot but inevitably the reduced length of the book makes it impossible to develop them.
Instead, in “The Sontaran Games” you can find a bit of introspection for the Doctor, who thinks about the people who died in his past adventures. The end of the Tenth Doctor era has dark moments and this story has tones darker than the average, closer to some of the most dramatic television stories.
In this case, one of the problems for the Doctor is that he wants to save every single person because for him every person, in the sense of sentient being, matters but at the same time he’s forced to take into account the bigger picture because there are a lot of kids to save.
Because of these characteristics, “The Sontaran Games” is a story a little out of the ordinary but it has the feel of some of the final stories of the Tenth Doctor. For this reason I think it’s a good novella, within the limits of the “Quick Reads” format.
“The Sontaran Games” is part of the “Quick Reads” series, consisting of very cheap books around 100 pages each. Buying those books connected to “Doctor Who” makes sense for fans who want to have anything related to the saga, for those who want to try to go beyond the television episodes and for those who want to just try to read a book that’s not too challenging.
