BETTY'S BOOK REVIEWS

Transit by Ben Aaronovitch is a Doctor Who novel with a decidedly cyberpunk feel to it. Now, I must admit, I've never been all that big on cyberpunk in the first place, but this book did nothing to change that feeling. It had a few good moments... but, I'm afraid, not enough. Parts of it were very confusing, and in the end I still wasn't satisfied that I really had a good concept of what had been going on for the whole book. The characters try to be interesting but just aren't, especially. And the Doctor seems quite out of character in portions of the book. (The first thing he does, for example, is to go out and get stinking drunk.) It's a pity, too, because I expected better things from Aaronovitch, who, after all, wrote the amazingly good novelization of "Remembrance of the Daleks." After reading this one, I decided that if he ever wrote another Who book I would probably read it, but it wouldn't be because of Transit. C

Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis is, like most of the books reviewed in this section, one of the Doctor Who "New Adventures" books. This one takes place on a colony world of the future, where people are mysteriously being replaced with duplicates. OK, the basic idea isn't exactly original. The characterization of the Doctor is great, though. He acts and talks here exactly as we last saw him on the screen. The story itself may be a bit too military-oriented for my personal tastes, and the ending isn't quite 100% satisfactory, but all-in-all it's a reasonably good read, and it definitely captures the feel of Doctor Who. B+

Vanderdecken's Children by Christopher Bulis is a Doctor Who novel featuring the Eighth Doctor and companion Samantha Jones.  (No, Sam isn't a TV companion: she was created specifically for this line of books.)  One of the great things about the Doctor Who novels is they they're free to do a lot of things that are much harder to manage on the screen, particularly when it comes to exploring the characters.  When I started this book, I admit, that's what I was hoping it was going to focus on, and I became a little disappointed when I quickly realized that this was much more of a plot-based book than a character-based one.  Disappointment rapidly turned to enthusiasm, however, as the plot itself began to hook me in.  It involves the exploration of a derelict alien spacecraft, on which (of course!) nothing is quite what it seems.  I'd love to say more about it -- especially the ending, which, despite requiring one particular large dollop of suspense-of-disbelief, I found very satisfying -- but I won't venture into spoiler territory.  The mystery about the ship and its origins is, after all, most of the fun.  But, fortunately, even though the plot is the main focus, the characterization doesn't exactly fall by the wayside.  The supporting characters are well developed, and the interaction between Sam and the Doctor feels very right.  I really like the direction Sam has taken at this particular stage in the book series.   She's become more mature and turned into a very strong character: almost an equal partner to the Doctor, as opposed to the sidekick role usually played by even the strongest of the companions.  And while that relationship isn't at center-stage here, it is nevertheless very much in evidence and quite well handled.  All in all, this is definitely one of the better of the BBC's line of Doctor Who novels I've read to date.  It would have made a great episode, although it'd be hard to do it justice on the usual Doctor Who budget (not that that ever stopped them, of course!).  A

The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping is to Doctor Who what the Nitpicker's Guide books are to Star Trek, as it lovingly points out bloopers, plot holes and, well... discontinuities. The book also highlights the best and worst lines of each episode, makes some genuinely intelligent attempts to make sense of the show's often tortured continuity (such as the three completely different explanations of the fall of Atlantis), and offers unabashedly opinionated comments on the quality of each episode. The whole thing ends up being fairly entertaining. And it's very obvious that the authors A) really love the show and B) probably have way too much time on their hands... A-

Happy Endings by Paul Cornell is the fiftieth book in the Doctor Who "New Adventures" series, and it celebrates by throwing one hell of a party. Well, actually, the party is to celebrate the wedding of long-time New Adventures companion Bernice Summerfield, but scads of characters from the previous novels show up at the wedding, and much of the fun of the book is in meeting old friends. (Not having read more than about half of the earlier books, I didn't recognize everybody, myself, but that was OK. I didn't feel like I needed to, and the ones I was familiar with were delightfully done.) There was also a lot of fun, though, in the setup (imagine a sleepy English town in 2010, before confirmed contact with alien species; now imagine it overrun by Victorians, lizard-people, giant hamsters, Time Lords and people from the future... all of whom are there to party!), not to mention the in-jokes and just plain screwball situations. And, of course, just to make things interesting, you know there's got to be at least one uninvited guest determined to wreak havoc... All-in-all, this was just a lot of fun. It's scarcely the place to start reading the New Adventures books, but if you've read and enjoyed a few of the previous ones, I recommend this one heartily. A

Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon by Terrence Dicks. I've heard Dicks referred to by Who fans as "the Novel-O-Matic" because his Who novelizations (of which there are legions) read like they were churned out in a single day. This one's no exception. It's not really bad writing... but Dicks might as well have just published the script, because nothing's added, taken away, or interestingly described. C

Conundrum by Steve Lyons is another of the New Doctor Who Adventure books. This one's pretty strange (even for Doctor Who), and it's a little bit hard to discuss without spoilers. I started off not liking it very much, since the book is very confusing at the beginning -- it's obvious that something weird is going on, but it's not at all clear what. Still, patience paid off for me. As the story went on, things became much clearer, and I soon began to find the odd narrative style which put me off at the beginning was actually quite clever in a sly, self-referential sort of way. It may not appeal to everyone but, heck, I liked it once I gave it a chance. One comment on characterization here: this book heavily follows on a couple of characterization trends this series has developed. One is that there's a real attempt to give the companions some depth. I approve heartily of that, but unfortunately the way it's been done is by giving them lots of angst and conflicts with one another -- and that gets rather tedious after a while. The other trend is that of making the Doctor more morally ambiguous, which is guaranteed to bother those who prefer their heroes firmly and obviously on the side of Good. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, personally. This book, by the way, is actually the fourth in a loosely-linked sort of sub-series of five books. The previous three (Blood Heat (reviewed below), The Dimension Riders and The Left-Handed Hummingbird) all stand reasonably well on their own. This one does too, more or less, but the reader who's already read the previous volumes is likely to get more out of it. It's also useful to be pretty familiar with the show; this book ends up being a sort of sequel to an old episode, but to tell you which one would be a spoiler, too. A-

The Face of the Enemy by David A. McIntee:  Now, this is an interesting concept: it's a Doctor Who novel in which the Doctor doesn't actually appear.  (Well, not for more than a few pages at the very beginning and the very end, anyway.)  Instead, the Doctor and companion Jo Grant are off somewhere on an adventure of their own, leaving the intrepid lads of UNIT to face the latest world-threatening crisis by themselves... with a little reluctant help from the Master.  I quite liked this premise, actually, in large part because I thought it would provide a nice chance for underused UNIT characters like Mike Yates and Sgt. Benton to get a little more "screen time" for once.  Alas, it didn't quite work out that way: they're relegated to the status of minor players here every bit as much as they ever were in the show.  The focus is much more on the original-character bad guys (one of whom will, I'm sure, seem strangely familiar to my fellow Blake's 7 fans), and on the Master.  But I can't hold that against it too much, because the characterization of the Master is absolutely wonderful: brilliant, ruthless, arrogant, and yet possessed of a certain fascinating charm...  It makes me remember just why he's one of my all-time favorite villains.  The book also features a couple of familiar faces from the past (or, in one case, the future), which was a pleasant surprise.  As for the plot, I have rather mixed feelings about it.  It relies rather too much on flying bullets for my taste.  Not that I have anything against the level of violence per se (although it's unusually high for a Doctor Who story), it's just that after two or three gunfights things start to get a little repetitive.  It also takes a bit long for the plot to begin to make sense and for it to become clear just who the bad guys are and what they're up to.  Still, once it does, the revelation turns out to be clever and interesting.  All in all, this is definitely worth reading just for McIntee's perfect take on the Master alone.  Note: there are some references in here to McIntee's previous book featuring the Master, The Dark Path, and while it's not necessary to have read that one first, it probably wouldn't hurt.  B

White Darkness by David A. McIntee is yet another of the "New Doctor Who Adventures." This time, our heroes land in Haiti in 1915 and get caught up in revolution, voodoo, and considerably less savory things. I enjoyed this one much more than Transit (the last Who novel I'd read), although the writing is a little less professional; this is a fan writer's first novel, and in places it shows. Still, on average, the writing is considerably more than passable, and the story itself is plenty interesting. It's also much more in the spirit of the original TV series, which is definitely a plus in my book. B+

Blood Heat by Jim Mortimore. This one's an odd story about an alternate universe in which Earth has been reclaimed by the Silurians. For those of you who missed that episode, the Silurians were intelligent reptiles who inhabited Earth during the Mesozoic. In order to escape a great catastrophe they predicted was going to occur when a rogue planetoid collided with the Earth, they all went into subterranean hibernation. Turns out, though, that the planetoid didn't hit Earth at all, but instead entered orbit and became the moon. (We won't even get into the astronomical believability of this.) Unfortunately for the Silurians, though, their alarm clock didn't go off, and you can imagine how pissed off they were when they woke up and discovered their planet had been taken over by those pesky mammals they always had such trouble keeping out of the crops. Anyway, the vision of an Earth ruled by Silurians is very creatively done here. There are a few things I would consider flaws in the book. The beginning's a bit too surreal for me, and it's never adequately explained how the Doctor and company actually entered the alternate reality. The characters aren't quite as well-rendered as in the last couple of Who books I've read. I frequently couldn't hear their voices in my head -- the main criterion of characterization for me, at least when it comes to writing for characters from TV shows. (The notable exception, by the way, was the alternate-universe version of the Brigadier, who was very well done.) And the violence was almost a bit too nasty. But all-in-all, though, the story was pretty well done, and it certainly kept me interested and wanting to see what was going to happen next. B

Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore is one of the new line of Who novels published by BBC Books, and features the 4th Doctor and Leela.  The plot -- which takes up after the episode "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and involves Mysterious Things happening on Easter Island -- is pretty standard for that era of the show.  What's very non-standard, though, is the way the book is written: it's told all in first person, from the POV of several different characters (including -- for a couple of chapters, at least -- the Doctor: something that takes guts to even attempt to pull off), but mostly from Leela's.  This actually works a lot better than you might expect.  Mortimore's Leela may not be perfectly executed, but she's very well done.  Heck, she probably has more character development (or at least depth) here than she did in her entire time on the series, although she's still quite consistent with the way she was portrayed on the screen.  What works far less well, though, is the overall structure of the book.  For something over half the book, the chapters alternate between one part of the story set at one time, and another part set several months later.  There doesn't seem to be any good reason for this, and in my opinion it makes the latter parts of the story less effective.  I felt rather as though I were being asked to care about characters to whom I had not yet been properly introduced, and whose motivations I did not yet understand.  In the second part of the book, things get worse as the chapters suddenly start jumping back and forth between a shorter period of time.  This was extremely confusing, and at one point I actually found myself looking back to see if I'd accidentally skipped any pages, as we were suddenly hours or days in the future with no indication of what had happened to get us there.  I'm probably dwelling on that fault too long, though, since overall I quite enjoyed the story.  And, even if he fell down on the structure, my hat's still off to Mortimore for having not only the audacity to pull off the first-person perspective in a Who novel, but the ability to do it well. B+

Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham is another book in the "New Adventures" Doctor Who spinoff series featuring the exploits of Professor Bernice Summerfield.  (I've reviewed an earlier book in this series, The Medusa Effect, immediately below.)  Overall, I've pretty much enjoyed what I've read of this series, but I have to say, Beige Planet Mars is far from the best book in the line.  It's got some very good background and worldbuilding: it presents a history of Mars (where Benny's attending an academic conference that, of course, ultimately ends up as a scene of murder and mayhem) that's quite detailed and interesting.  If only the writers had paid as much attention to the plot...  My suspension of disbelief was severely strained right from the beginning, where we discover that Benny Summerfield, renowned expert in Martian history, appears to know diddley-squat about one of the more important battles ever fought on Mars.  Well, OK, it's not really her period of expertise, as she's more into ancient history than recent, so I was able to accept this with a little effort, even if it made the usually wonderfully competent Benny look rather stupider than I like to see her.  But each story element and plot twist, alas,  proved sillier and harder to swallow than the last, and at some point my suspension of disbelief just went TWANG! and never quite recovered.  It's not just the implausibilities either, especially as those do seem to be quite common in the Benny books (though usually, from what I've seen, they're done much more tongue-in-cheek and are thus easier to roll with).  There's some genuinely sloppy writing here.  For instance, t one point, one character mentions something that she has absolutely no way of knowing.  Important plot point, or just an authorial goof?  The latter, I'm afraid, which proved seriously annoying to me...  I spent far too many pages wondering whether it was supposed to be significant (and, if so, why all the other characters were stupid enough not to pick up on it).  I won't say I didn't enjoy this book at all, because aspects of it were certainly entertaining, but I'm afraid that the plot problems do constitute a flaw that's very hard to overlook.  C

The Medusa Effect by Justin Richards.  This is actually one of a series of books spun off from Virgin Books' now defunct Doctor Who line.  Virgin no longer has the license to publish Doctor Who books, but they do have the rights to all the original characters, settings, etc. that they introduced in their long-running "New Doctor Who Adventures" series.  So they decided to take advantage of this by spinning off former Who companion Professor Bernice "Benny" Summerfield into her own "New Adventures."  The result is a little odd, because the series is set in the Doctor Who universe, but the books aren't allowed to use the names of any of the Who characters, planets, or species.  From what I've little read of the series so far, though, they seem to be pulling it off pretty smoothly.  And Benny herself is a great choice to be given her own adventures: smart and sarcastic, independent and eccentric, and just generally a very interesting and likeable character.  Not at all your ordinary ankle-twisting Doctor Who sidekick!  Anyway, in this one, Benny is recruited for a team that's being sent out to investigate an experimental remote-controlled cruise ship that was launched into space twenty years ago, mysteriously vanished, and now has just as mysteriously reappeared.  Things are not remotely as they seem, however, and the story very quickly takes on a very nifty, very surreal, very Twilight Zone-ish sort of feel.  The creepy atmosphere that pervades most of the book is quite well done, though it doesn't last through the entire thing; towards the end it turns into something more like a standard science-fiction adventure story, which was somewhat less interesting, but still worth reading.  My one complaint is that both parts of the book did seem to drag out a bit, and it might well have been improved by tightening things up by fifty or even a hundred pages.  But that's relatively minor.  B

Sky Pirates! by Dave Stone is one of the novels in the "New Doctor Who Adventure" series. And it's... not quite like anything else in the series, that's for sure. What it is, is weird. Yes, weirder than "The Happiness Patrol." (For those of you who are up on your Who, you'll remember that one as the episode with the "fun guns" and the robot executioner made entirely out of candy, and in which the Doctor manages in one scene to thwart the bad guys by playing the spoons. Trust me, this is weirder.) The book sometimes goes for a Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett type of humor, and occasionally succeeds, but mostly it's just really, really bizarre. The story (such as it is) involves a race of shape-changing cannibalistic junk-collectors, the most improbable excuse for a solar system you're ever likely to come across, and an asteroid full of space pirates most of whose technology seems to be steam-powered. It also features such additional interesting elements as an impromptu song-and-dance number, completely gratuitous (if rather helpful) penguins, the Doctor getting a job playing the harmonium in a House of Ill-Repute, and an evil twisted version of... Well, it may be completely impossible to have spoilers for this book, but I don't think I'll tell you that one, anyway... This is Doctor Who on acid. I'm not even going to try to rate this one. Let's say that it gets points for being imaginative, for occasionally being amusing, and for the fact that there were, somehow, a few scenes which kept me in a sort of horrified fascination, waiting to see what in the universe was going to happen next. Points off for being incoherent and nonsensical, and for the fact that some of the humor was pretty derivative. Grade it yourself; I'm still trying to put my brain back together after reading it!

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