Winner Takes All is a Doctor Who novel by Jacqueline Rayner featuring the 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose Tyler. This review contains spoilers. If you're considering reading the book and don't want to spoil it, then suffice it to say that this is a good one and you ought to read it.
The plot of Winner Takes All is, at least in my world, a time-honoured trope of speculative fiction. It's the uncanny video game. I grew up on stories like Piers Anthony's Killobyte and Ender's Game and Wargames and Tron. Video games affecting reality is top tier trashy fiction for me, so a Doctor Who story to add to the collection is very exciting. And this novel lives up my expectations.
In Winner Takes All, there's a special offer at local shops. With any purchase, you get a stratch card and if the scratch card is a winner then you can go pick up a free video game console. It's not a Playstation or Steam deck or Switch, but it comes with a free game included, so it seems good for a laugh. And a lot of people are winning, so by the time the Doctor and Rose stop in to visit her mum, a console has already found its way into Mickey's apartment.
One evening, an alien comes round and abducts any player with an unusually high score. The game is a test to find people good at specific strategies, because the aliens are embroiled in a war on their home planet, and have decided to use humans as soldiers. Mickey is abducted, and Rose and the Doctor arrange for themselves to be abducted so they can rescue him and also stop the aliens from conscripting gamers.
There's a convoluted thing where once you're abducted, you're hooked into a system that allows another human to control you like a video game. It's weird because you'd think the aliens would have a better way to take advantage of their star gamers than to hook their controls into another less useful human. I didn't entirely understand the logic, or maybe I just missed a nuance of the plan. It didn't seem to matter anyway, because I enjoyed the story.
There's a lot of running around present day Earth, first trying to save humans, and then trying to get abducted. Then there's a lot of running around the alien base, trying to save humans and also outsmart the baddies. It's a lot of fun, and it all felt very Whovian.
The author is the first author of the Doctor Who novels I'm reading that bothers to describe our main characters, which I found sensibly charming. It's arguably a reasonably expectation that anyone reading a Doctor Who book already understands the basic setup, but I thought it was nice of the author not to assume that. She describes the Doctor, Rose, and I think even the TARDIS.
Interestingly, I don't think this novel would translate well into an episode. I think this book wants to be a book, so the silly technology can change in the reader's imagination. As a book, this story is great fun, and is well worth a read.
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