Time for another book! We are going to read together Transit
Please discuss below - no need to finish it first, discuss as you go along but please add spoiler tags for anything that could be considered a spoiler!
If you’ve previously read the book and want to join in the discussion, that’s great too!
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Oh sweet deity of your choice, we’ve reached this one…
Honestly, I don’t understand the hate this novel gets. The infamous scene about eating nuts is just a throwaway line. It’s Doctor Who meets 90s cyberpunk, so of course sex workers are featured. And like all “let’s smash Doctor Who into another genre” stories, it starts by emulating that genre before it slowly gets deformed by the Doctor’s presence, so it has to start off being edgy. It’s not great, but it’s wild to me that this novel gets dumped on while the very first one gets more of a pass by fandom.
EDIT: Seems I misremember some rather large chunks of this novel, so I’m going to leave this here as a mark of my shame, but otherwise retract most of this.
I totally get not liking this book. The sex scenes are way too explicit and feels like they are there to just see how much Ben Aaronvitch could get away with, they add absolutely nothing to the narrative. Hearing how Kadiatu inserts a guy’s… appendage while on top of him, having a scene where we hear about how a prostitute cleans her… parts in a crowded bubble bath, and learning which nuts to eat to get the taste of semen out of your mouth. Plus the Doctor getting blind drunk on Ouzo and waking up in bed next to Kadiatu with next to no clothes on, it just doesn’t fit with everything we know about the Doctor.
And I have seen a lot more dislike for Timewyrm: Genesys over the years than I have Transit. A lot of which I don’t really agree with, apart from the Doctor sending Ace on a trip with a guy she tells that Doctor that she is afraid will rape her - again this just flies against what there is established about the Doctor
I am going to begin reading this today.
One thing I dislike about being so active in the fandom is that I will unavoidably run into “perceived wisdom” about certain stories (and have been doing so for years in different spaces, even before I started watching Classic Who for the first time)—Genesis of the Daleks or Pyramids of Mars being masterpieces and Love & Monsters or Fear Her being pieces of trash, for instance. Or Robert Shearman being the God of Big Finish stories while Nekroamnteia (which I will be listening to today) is supposedly the worst thing they’ve ever put out. Similarly with these VNA’s, Timewyrm: Genesys is like the worst book ever, while Love & War or Human Nature are undisputed gems.
And then there’s Transit, which I’ve only heard overly negative things about.
This means that I will go into this book expecting it to be a big turd; even I would like to go into everything with an open mind. And that annoys me, because I feel that I’m judging something already before I’ve given it a fair chance! But that’s nobody’s fault, and I have to accept the facts and hope that Transit turns out to be better than everyone says.
I have not read this one but it is utterly infamous. One day I will read it and see if it really is as bad as people would have you believe
I read the Prelude to Transit. It’s a pretty simple little scene of a man riding to his death on a white horse, and I don’t exactly know the significance of it, if any. Other than the Bambera mention at the end.
Was it implying the old man was the Brigadier?
I read Transit a couple of years ago. I remember liking bits of it– there’s this moment the Doctor makes tangliatelle in his house in Kent which is adorable, and there are some really interesting sci-fi ideas in there. But the book didn’t impress me that much. I found it really hard to connect to the characters, and the plot was spread far too thin across so many plot lines. I definitely ended up powering through the last third.
I think it might be because Kadiatu is his descendant, somehow or other.
I just remembered that I made a review of this one (much as I don’t want to think about this story 
)
I read this a while ago now and don’t particularly remember it.
But what I do remember isn’t even nearly as bad as people say.
Basically one scene and one line feel particularly vulgar, the rest is just a kind of bland cyberpunk story with some fun characters.
Maybe I’ve just wildly misremembered it but it really doesn’t seem like the heinous, blasphemous and sex-crazed trash fire I see it often described as.
Ooh… good timing that i see this post now since i was just thinking about this book again.
I also don’t get why people talk about this book like it kicked their dog. I don’t think it’s good really but it definitely ranks above other VNAs I’ve read. the plot is a big mushy mess and i think the villains are pretty weak (and a bit boring in comparison to the rest of the book), but i really enjoy how lived-in the setting feels. It feels very well thought-out, while still being fairly unique and interesting, and the setting has lots of fun little quirks. The public transit sub-space trains on their own would have won me over, but I love the post-Martian-war stuff too, and the feeling of the politics and economy of earth having shifted wildly, but still being recognizably built off the old world. I was so happy reading SLEEPY further on down the line and realizing it was building off the lore established here. I think this is really great as, like, a load-bearing piece of the VNA’s human history timeline. Aaronovitch is a SCIFI scifi writer. which is a different thing from a writer who happens to write scifi. No matter how good a writer they are.
It does also have the issue of shoving Benny aside in her second ever book, but I can’t be all the mad at Aaronovitch for it, since it seems like he didn’t have much time to put her in. Kadiatu is really intriguing coming into the story, but I think she’s a little under characterized here. And also maybe in every subsequent story she’s in. Unforch.
I kind of don’t get the objections to the sexual content here either. It is pretty present in the story, and it’s a little out-there at times, but I find it a lot less unpleasant or objectionable than how some of the other writers on this series have treated sexual content before or since. Like, this book is horny, but it’s not horny in a way that makes me feel like I wouldn’t want to hang out with Ben Aaronovitch, which I can’t say for certain other books/authors. You can probably name a couple off the top of your head. It doesn’t particularly feel predatory or misogynistic about it. Sex and prostitution are just things that happen around here, as in real life.
There’s plenty of other over the top edginess going on, of course, but I’m also a known fan of hammy, Shadow the Hedgehog-type black-and-red-color-scheme edgelord content under the right circumstances, and this managed to hit the spot.
It all falls apart in the final act, and I still wouldn’t qualify this as one of my high-ranking books, it was a fun enough read. I enjoyed the images it put in my head. From the VNAs alone I’ve read better written stories that were more irritating, and boring, and harder to read.
5/10, I had fun !!!
But they weren’t things that happened in Doctor Who. And that’s why fandom reacted negatively towards it.
(Not saying they should have but there was enough furore over the kiss in the TV Movie and that was years later so actual sex was always going to cause ripples of dissent.)
this is true, and i absolutely see it being a way bigger deal when the book came out, but it’s also not like there wasn’t any sex in the previous VNAs either. I suppose it is a bit more than the “fade to black” in Love and War, but we already had uh… all of Timewyrm: Genesys before this. And I don’t see why all the scandal and horror around this book still exists 50 VNAs, 70 EDAs, 3 decades, and a Torchwood later…
The first time I tried to read Transit I just could not get through it, but than last year I actually quite enjoyed it on my second attempt. I’d forgotten I’d left a review actually! I’d definitely choose to reread this over Timewyrm: Genesis or Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible, but it’s still not as good as a lot of the other previous VNA’s, and I’m in no hurry to reread this, if ever I will again. But it has it’s moments. Introducing Kadiatu, Benny’s first TARDIS trip, some of the visuals have stuck with me. But thinking back it does feel a bit cluttered in terms of characters and I’m sure it could have been shortened a bit.
in defense of the bubblebath thing i am fairly certain shes actually saying she was washing her underwear under the soapy water so it just looked indecent 
felt the need to bring that up cuz I’ve seen a bunch of people talk about it
I (somewhat reluctantly ) found the passage, and yes it mentions her delicates. Why anyone would pay to share a bubble bath with two prostitutes and then pay so little attention to what’s going on that one of them could take their underwear into said bubble bath and do laundry is beyond me… And why the author thought that this was a perfectly reasonable scene to include in this story I can’t begin to guess…
There’s next to no plot in this story, could easily have been a short story instead, and all the sex scenes are unnecessarily graphic and frankly just unnecessary for the narrative. All of the sex scenes detracts from the plot as it messes with the pacing of the book to it’s detriment. If the sex scenes served any sort of purpose in the book I could understand their inclusion, but they don’t do that in the slightest.
If I wanted to read Doctor Who erotica fanfic (which I really don’t) I would look for it elsewhere…
Timewyrm: Genesys also got it’s fair amount of backlash (and the ‘adult’ stuff didn’t go down particularly well here in Book Club).
Doctor Who fans are just prudes…
I’m of Scandinavian Viking descent! I’m as far from prude as you can get! I’m from a culture where men and women, old and young, sit completely naked in a hot room and sweat together once or twice a week!