44) Venusian Lullaby, by Paul Leonard

I wasn't overwhelmed with the only other Paul Leonard DW book I'd read, but I must say this one really grabbed me. Jon Pertwee's Doctor used to tell us that "Klokleda partha menin klatch" meant "Close your eyes, my darling - well, three of them at least" (see here, at about 1:20 in). Here Paul Leonard has taken that throwaway line and constructed one of the best alien cultures I've ever read around it; reminiscent a little of both the pentagonal creatures of At the Mountains of Madness (though a lot less evil) and David Brin's Alvin the Hoon, but faced with an imminent world-destroying tragedy - this is Venus of several billion years ago, still habitable though steadily deteriorating. It's set immediately after The Dalek Invasion of Earth and before The Rescue, so the Doctor is here with Ian and Barbara but no younger female companion. Leonard, like most writers, cannot write Hartnell's Doctor especially well, but the story and the setting more than compensate. An unexpected pleasure.

8) Doctor Who: Genocide, by Paul Leonard

Picked this up really as an experiment at WorldCon. I never saw the Eighth Doctor TV movie, so this is my first encounter with him; I had no idea if his companion, Sam, was canonical or not though I now learn from Wikipedia that she had an exciting life; but the story also features Jo Grant, and it's not so long since I watched "The Green Death".

Well, it's not bad. The central plot is a set of time paradoxes - will humanity survive, or will we be displaced by humane, environmentally conscious equine quadrupeds who are very reminiscent of Swift's Houyhnhnms? The Doctor has to choose one way or the other, and either way an entire race may be destroyed, hence the genocide of the title. I felt there were one or two problems with the internal chronology of the book which could not be smoothed over by time-travel, and too many cases of a) characters promising not to move from a safe location, then immediately doing so and b) "I'm going to kill you now!" "No you're not." "Okay, I won't kill you now but I might kill you later!" And one plot twist was foreshadowed many years ago by Douglas Adams, but I thought Paul Leonard invested it with a certain dignity (leaving a message in the basalt, surely inspired by the towel in the prehistoric volcano). Overall it was just about worth the £2 I paid for it.

I'm stunned to discover that there are no less than 73 books in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series! Are any of them better than this? If so, I'd be interested in looking at them...

( What I got in Glasgow )

I have a very tolerant wife.

12) Decalog 5 - Wonders edited by Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

With one dull exception ("Negative Space" by Jeanne Cavelos) this collection of ten sf short stories ranges from competent to very good. I bought it because my friend from college Dominic Green contributed one of the better ones, "King's Chamber". I'm not quite sure of the linkage between the stories and the Doctor Who universe - one of the stories features the unofficial companion Bernice Summerfield, heroine of the "Doctor Who without the Doctor" books produced by another old friend from college, Rebecca Levene - and I didn't really feel there was much of an overall unifying theme, but no real complaints on that score. I can't remember where I bought it but it was certainly cheap and good value.