Review: Doctor Who: Shakedown by Terrance Dicks

Trade paperback, 285 pages
Published 2014 (originally 1995)

Acquired May 2019
Read June 2019

Doctor Who: Shakedown: The Monster Collection Edition
by Terrance Dicks

The seventh Doctor, Benny, Chris, and Roz encounter both the Sontarans and the Rutan in a cosmic plan of the Doctor's to make sure their war doesn't spill over into the rest of the galaxy. Like a lot of New Adventures, it follows a number of distinct threads: Chris and Roz chase a deranged serial killer on a noir planet, Benny investigates on a university planet, the crew of a space yacht has to contend with a Rutan stowaway and Sontaran boarding party, and the Doctor lurks at the margins. The best part is Chris and Roz; Dicks has a good handle on their voices, and you can tell he really loves this kind of corrupt city stuff. He did it well in Blood Harvest, and he would return to this same city-planet and some of its characters in Mean Streets. I really enjoyed all the stuff featuring them, from the stabby rat taxi driver to the charming Ogron police chief. On the other hand, I don't think Dicks has ever had a great handle on Benny. Did you know she is a professor and likes to drink? That seems to be about all he has ever figured out.

After a good opening and a decent middle (I didn't love the space yacht stuff, but it worked), it all fizzles out at the end. The Doctor having joined up with Chris and Roz, their plot ends up tying up with Benny's in a mind-boggling coincidence-- the serial killer they are chasing just happens to escape on a cruise liner going to the planet she is on! The planet is important to the plot, so I don't get why Dicks didn't have him just pick his destination. Once everyone converges on the planet, the way the Doctor saves the day is, to be frank, quite silly. I don't think it's meant to be comic, but it plays that way, and as if Dicks had no idea how to wrap it all up in the ten pages he had left.

I like the cover of my "Monster Collection" edition, very swish, but it was a bit incongruous that Dicks kept saying the Sontarans had red eyes and no lips, neither of which was true of the one on the cover!

Next Week: All caught up with my reviews of the New Adventures, so I'm rotating back to another one of my long-running reading projects... the Transformers!

Review: Doctor Who: Toy Soldiers by Paul Leonard

Mass market paperback, 244 pages
Published 1995

Acquired May 2008
Read February 2019

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Toy Soldiers
by Paul Leonard

This was better than I expected based on the book's reputation, but not particularly good. The Doctor and his companions investigate children disappearing in post-Great War Europe, and of course it's aliens fighting an interminable war who need recruits. Nice atmosphere, and Chris and Roz got a lot of interesting stuff to do, but Benny was wasted, and the story went to some pretty banal places.

Next Week: The return of the Sontarans in Shakedown!

Review: Doctor Who: Zamper by Gareth Roberts

Mass market paperback, 250 pages
Published 1995

Acquired May 2008
Read November 2018

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Zamper
by Gareth Roberts

Surely the worst crime a Doctor Who story can commit is to be boring; a premise that allows for any time, place, or genre should never result in tedium. Alas, Zamper is one of the most boring New Adventures I've read, a mediocre runaround with a morally dubious climax. Gareth Roberts can do better.

Next Week: Mysterious teddy bears and war to the death in Toy Soldiers!

Review: Doctor Who: Human Nature by Paul Cornell

This week, I've rotated back to my ongoing reading of selected New Doctor Who Adventures I happen to own, beginning with arguably the greatest VNA of them all:

Trade paperback, 272 pages
Published 2015 (originally 1995)
Previously read January 2004

Acquired April 2018
Reread July 2018

Doctor Who: Human Nature: The History Collection Edition

by Paul Cornell

This is my fourth time experiencing Human Nature, each time in a different medium. The first time was way back in 2004, during the Wilderness Years, when Human Nature was one of the out-of-print novels that BBCi selected for its ebook program. In those pre-Kindle days, I would have read the whole thing on my dorm room computer screen. Then, in 2007, I actually got to watch the story, when an adaptation starring David Tennant was broadcast to the nation. About ten years after that, I listened to the audiobook of the novel, read by Lisa Bowerman (who plays companion Bernice Summerfield on audio) when I reviewed it for Unreality SF. Now, I've actually read in in print for the first time, albeit via the 2015 reprint from BBC Books, not its original 1995 Virgin publication.

I had ambitions of writing an in-depth thematic overview and got about 3,000 words into it before events caught up to me. Hopefully I'll come back to it someday, but somewhere else-- I think I could get it published in some kind of pop-culture general-audience critical venue. So I'll be short here: this is almost certainly the best Doctor Who novel that has been or will be written, with the most depth and nuance and themes, far more than a tie-in work even deserves, honestly-- but then again, it's Doctor Who, and it deserves everything we can give it.

Random Notes:

• This book mentions Ellerycorp as a far-future giant corporation. Jason Haigh-Ellery is the entrepreneur who owns, among other companies, Big Finish Productions. Presumably Ellerycorp is a far-future descendant of Big Finish.
• H. G. Wells is referenced; a suffragette uses him as a touchstone for the concept of free love. 
• The Doctor's human persona, Smith, has memories from a mixture of the Doctor's companions over the years. There's a montage of them on pp. 92-3, most of which I can't identify, but I'm pretty sure the first one is a post-coital Ian and Barbara during The Romans.
• Steven Moffat is in this book; he's a Scotsman who criticizes Sylvester McCoy's accent for being unrealistic.

Next Week: The Doctor, Benny, Chris, and Roz investigate a planet that builds death... Zamper!

Review: Doctor Who: Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks

Mass market paperback, 287 pages
Published 1994

Acquired May 2008
Read September 2017

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Blood Harvest
by Terrance Dicks

The first couple hundred pages of Blood Harvest are hugely enjoyable: Doctor Who does 1920s noir detective fiction. The "Doc" and Ace run a speakeasy in Chicago at the height of Capone's power. There are gunfights galore, Ace shoots people, and occasionally the book is narrated in the first-person by a macho private eye. Like some of the most fun Doctor Who stories, it's a delightful combination of our series and some other genre, and of course Terrance Dicks is always effortlessly readable. In the meanwhile, Bernice is on the vampire planet from State of Decay in E-Space, teaming up with Romana to fight vampires. This isn't terribly well done, but there's not enough of it to be annoying. (Except that Dicks makes it annoyingly easy to get in and out of E-Space.)

It all falls apart in the end, though. I had thought vampires were somehow involved in the Chicago plot: it seems perfect for Prohibition-era Chicago, with maybe a vampire gang running a blood-smuggling operation with vampire speakeasies. However, the plots don't really connect that well: it turns out that a yawnworthy evil from the dawn of time is at work in both Chicago and E-Space, and he's been dispatched by a cabal of evil Time Lords, so all of a sudden the book shifts gears and we're not doing a State of Decay retread, but a The Five Doctors one for some reason. The dull bits of The Five Doctors, that is, the ones that were just there to justify why Jon Pertwee might be arguing with Patrick Troughton. So Blood Harvest switches from complete pleasure to thundering bore and then just putters out. Meh.

Romana and Bernice are both ill-served by this book, but I guess that's what we might expect of the man whose ideal female companion was Jo Grant.

Next Week: A trip back in time: the fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan deal with the fall-out of this story in Goth Opera!

Review: Doctor Who: Revelation by Paul Cornell

Mass market paperback, 220 pages
Published 1991

Acquired March 2010
Read May 2017

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Revelation
by Paul Cornell

The last Timewyrm novel is not only the best of the Timewyrm novels, but one of the best Doctor Who books full stop: Paul Cornell's debut is a thoughtful examination of the characters of the Doctor and Ace, especially the way the Doctor is sometimes forced to sacrifice those around him, a theme Russell T Davies would draw from throughout his television tenure, especially in "The Parting of the Ways" and "Journey's End." There's so so much going on in this book-- for a lesser writer, a sentient church would be the whole point of their novel, but for Cornell it's just one of many elements-- which means it captures in prose what the television programme was doing before it was cancelled. This is the novelistic equivalent of overloaded, ideas-and-character-driven stories like Ghost-Light, Remembrance of the Daleks, Survival, and The Curse of Fenric, and yet it's undeniably a novel; there's no attempt to structure this story like it could have been broadcast on tv, thank God. Cornell captures the voices of the seventh Doctor and Ace with perfection, the other characters feel like real people caught up in extraordinary events (another harbinger of the RTD era), and the climax especially is a thing of beauty. I didn't always understand what was going on, but I didn't mind.

Next Week: The Doctor and Ace encounter vampires plotting a Blood Harvest!

Review: Doctor Who: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson

Mass market paperback, 201 pages
Published 1991

Acquired March 2010
Read February 2017

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Apocalypse
by Nigel Robinson

The third Timewyrm novel is the worst yet. While Genesys was shitty, Apocalypse is just boring, filled with non-characters doing uninteresting things, one of those books you can't even remember what you didn't like about it because your main memory of reading it is your eyes gliding over the pages as you hoped it came to an end soon. Generic and tedious.

Next Week: The final confrontation with the Timewyrm: Revelation!

Review: Doctor Who: Exodus by Terrance Dicks

Speaking of evil alternate universes, UNIT fight that and more in Encounters, which I've reviewed (as always) for USF.

Mass market paperback, 234 pages
Published 1991

Acquired and read October 2016

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Exodus
by Terrance Dicks

Given the lack of quality both in Timewyrm: Genesys and in Terrance Dicks's later writing, I wasn't expecting much out of this... but it turns out that in 1991, Uncle Terrance could still write a cracking Doctor Who adventure like none other. He gloms right onto what makes the seventh Doctor and Ace work, and sends them through a fun adventure: Doctor Who on television probably could never have done the Nazis during its original run, but this takes a lot of those classic tropes of the Doctor infiltrating and bamboozling an occupying force, and inserts them right into the Third Reich. The whole thing is just a blast, as this is the Doctor at his most cunning and also his most clownish, pulling one over on the ultimate bad guys, but also being fairly direct about what makes Nazis the ultimate bad guys. I wouldn't have thought that making Hitler the pawns of two different aliens would work, but Dicks pulls it off, and with style. Trad, but with just enough rad to delight, basically the most you could want out of any New Adventure not written by any of the actual "rad" authors.

Next Week: The Timewyrm returns to bedevil the Doctor and Ace, with an Apocalypse!

Review: Doctor Who: Genesys by John Peel

Mass market paperback, 230 pages
Published 1991

Acquired March 2010
Read June 2016

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Timewyrm: Genesys
by John Peel

This novel, the first of the New Adventures, is somewhere between "not very good" and "terrible." I'm not sure where, but even at 230 pages, it was a slog. The Doctor and Ace wander around slowly for a long time doing things that don't really matter, and the ending is a load of nonsense where the seventh Doctor has to become the third to do some technobabble stuff. That the Doctor could be searching for the Timewyrm and then not know who this mysterious goddess entity in ancient Mesopotamia is beggars belief. Even without the gratuitous nudity (there are two scenes where Ace-- who I am pretty sure is sixteen around this time-- gets naked, and that's just the tip of the iceberg), this wouldn't be a very good book.

Next Week: I'm all caught up on my Doctor Who reviews (still haven't read the next New Adventure, Exodus, yet), so I'll be switching tracks to another reading project: the IDW Transformers Humble Bundle!

Doctor Who at Christmas: Nightshade

Mass market paperback, 231 pages
Published 1992

Acquired and read December 2014

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Nightshade
by Mark Gatiss

This is the fourth year in a row I've read a Christmas-themed Doctor Who book at Christmas, but this one's Christmas ties are perhaps tenuous at best. It does take place in the days leading up to Christmas 1968, but that's about it-- though I suppose the alien presence who feeds on nostalgia here has some prime pickings thanks to Christmas.

It's a very morose and moody book, for reasons not entirely clear; the Doctor is in a snit at the opening, for example, but nothing ever explains why he's so down and focused on the past. The book is very ambling, too; it's one of those Doctor Who novels where it feels like it takes the TARDIS crew at least a quarter of its length to find and interact with the main plot, which is happening to completely different people in a completely different location. And there are a lot of gruesome deaths, but I don't think Gatiss effectively uses them to ratchet up the tension.

There are a lot of good ideas here (not all of them Gatiss's), but they don't really add up to anything interesting. I found this book pretty dull and frustrating in large parts, and I was pretty unexcited when it was announced Big Finish was including it in its line of audio adaptations of novels.

Next Week: Bring us some figgy pudding, K9! Christmas is a great time for human sacrifice in K9 and Company!

Archival Review: The New Doctor Who Adventures: Just War by Lance Parkin

Mass market paperback, 272 pages
Published 1996
Read December 2007

The New Doctor Who Adventures: Just War

by Lance Parkin

I'd heard the Jacqueline Rayner audio drama of this novel, which changes it from a Doctor Who story to a Professor Bernice Summerfield one (in fact, it's literally my current car listen), and I've always found it quite excellent, so I was eager to read the book, both to see if it was as good, and to see just how Rayner turned a story featuring the seventh Doctor, Benny, Chris and Roz into a story featuring Benny and Jason-- with a good deal less "running time"!

It was every bit as good as the audio-- I'd be hard-pressed to pick the better one, because they both do what they set out to do exceedingly well. Parkin captures all four protagonists perfectly, and his story's many subplots (the Doctor scheming, Benny tortured, Chris as action hero, and Roz in love) are all very different yet cohesive. The audio drama leaves Benny's part largely intact (though it gives her some of the Doctor's), and what remains of the Doctor's, Chris's, and Roz's plotlines wind up dumped on Jason. As I said before, I knew I needed more Paul Cornell in my library, and now I'm starting to think the same about Lance Parkin.