doctor who
Three good ones this time, though whether they represent two or three broadcast stories is a matter of opinion!

13) Doctor Who - The Myth Makers, by Donald Cotton )
14) Doctor Who - Mission to the Unknown, by John Peel )
15) Doctor Who - The Mutation of Time, by John Peel )

I'd recommend all three of these. Next for me, since I've already read the Dodo novelisations, is Doctor Who - The Smugglers.

April Books 1) Doctor Who - The Romans

  • Apr. 2nd, 2008 at 5:16 PM
doctor who
1) Doctor Who - The Romans, by Donald Cotton

I had been looking forward to this one, famed as one of the best Doctor Who novelisations, and I was not disappointed. Cotton has recast the narrative of Dennis Spooner's TV script into epistolary/diary form: letters from Ian Chesterton to his headmaster, the Doctor's own diary, letters from Ascalis the assassin and Locusta the poisoner, and contributions also from Barbara, the Emperor Nero, and Nero's wife Poppæa (but not Vicki); the whole thing framed in a covering note by Tacitus (obviously written several decades later). Eye of Heaven, the best of the spinoff novels featuring Leela, also featured multiple first-person viewpoints, and I've read first-person narratives in other First Doctor stories (here, here, and partly here), but this is the only case of the whole thing being ostensibly done from written records (the Doctor having compiled everything and then left it behind in the villa for the archivists to discover).

Admittedly, as an actual story it's no great shakes, and purists will be disappointed that we lose a lot of the funny lines from the TV version and one of its major comic elements (the two pairs of time travellers not actually meeting each other in their wanderings). But the whole thing is done for language and laughs; it's meant to be fun, and it is fun, and that's all you can really ask.
tardis
4) Doctor Who - The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
5) Doctor Who - The Ark, by Paul Erickson
6) Doctor Who - The Celestial Toymaker, by Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman
7) Doctor Who - The Gunfighters, by Donald Cotton
8) Doctor Who - The Savages, by Ian Stuart Black
9) Doctor Who - The War Machines, by Ian Stuart Black

Feeding my unhealthy fascination with the First Doctor's companion Dodo, I borrowed [info]wwhyte's copies of the Target novelisations of her stories and found them pretty easy to get through. They are all between 120 and 150 pages long, and not particularly taxing. I read them in sequence, but in fact there is little real sense of continuity between them; fans will find more to tickle their obsessions in the four spinoff novels featuring Dodo, whose collective pagecount certainly exceeds that of the six discussed here.

Doctor Who-The Massacre )
Doctor Who-The Ark )
Doctor Who-The Celestial Toymaker )
Doctor Who-The Gunfighters )
Doctor Who-The Savages )
Doctor Who-The War Machines )

In conclusion, I found these books a pretty easy read when feeling generally somewhat run down. They do feed into my thoughts on Dodo as a character, but I will save that for another day.

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