4 Doctor Who Novels: "Beautiful Chaos" by Gary Russell, "The Coming of The Terraphiles" by Michael Moorcock, "Dead of Winter" by James Goss, "The Crawling Terror" by Mike Tucker

Four Doctor Who novels. Three featured boilerplate storylines, though one purportedly had an original idea, only it's author wrote it on a whim, resulting in boilerplate execution. As such, I felt all four books deserved to be written up in a single review..with good quotes for your viewing pleasure, of course. Onward...

Beautiful Chaos by Gary Russell: Among Doctor Who villains, the Mandragora Helix - a malevolent, sentient constellation with mind-controlling abilities - is not unlike the Great Intelligence from "The Snowmen" and "The Bells of St. John", and his/it's scheme has the same m.o. to it. The big difference is the Doctor and companion highlighted. The Tenth Doctor  is more fun to read about than The Eleventh Doctor, but Donna Noble, in retrospect, has nothing interesting to say..I don't think she ever did; her whole "arc" consists of her becoming better-educated/worldly via her travels with the Doctor before receiving a "Flowers For Algernon"-style I.Q. boost that allowed her to save the universe and serve as deux ex machina ( by typing, very fast, nonsensical technobabble onto a random computer keyboard ), before having to give it all up and become "Uneducated Get-To-The-Toe Donna" again ( this is certainly no Clara Oswald )..Thankfully, Gary Russell has her granddad Wilfred play a larger role here. The subplot about Wilfred's girlfriend coping with Alzheimer's is clearly trying too hard to echo Russell T. Davies' faux-TV style sentimentality, and Mandragora has more in common with The Wire from " The Idiot's Lantern " in it's ineffectiveness as a compelling villain, plus I don't recall Donna's mother really regarding the Doctor with contempt onscreen, so that bit seemed phony, but the Tenth Doctor characterization is just right, so it made the book a breeze to read. The book balances between fanfic and potboiler - Average.

The Coming of The Terraphiles by Michael Moorcock: The hype/backstory behind this book is more interesting than what we got...I recall that the original plan was for Moorcock to introduce a new status quo for Captain Jack Harkness as commander of a ship that traveled through a route between alternate universes and have him meet the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond for the first time, but the launch of Torchwood: Miracle Day likely derailed that idea, so he has the Doctor & Amy meet a new incarnation of his character, Jerry Cornelius, instead, and introduce his take on the application of parallel universes in Fantasy-Adventure fiction...sounds intriguing...but what we got was a potted, rambling, shaggy dog mess. Eleven and Amy weren't really complete characters at the time Moorcock was writing this, so they read like complete ciphers, here; he would've been better off using the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, although BBC Books was still shy about relaunching a line of Past Doctor Adventures in the wake of the new series until the novelization of Shada in 2012. The strongest passage in the book has nothing to do with any high-concept stuff: it's a P.G. Wodehouse-esque pastiche with a Bertie Wooster-like character attempting (i.e., failing) to steal a ghastly hat and clumsily take credit when it disappears. Everything else feels like it was just Moorcock typing away unconsciously...lots of incoherent nonsensical descriptions of ships encountering ships and traveling through spatial matter...I do remember THIS book was hyped up just as much as it's faded away into obscurity. - Pure Drivel **

Dead of Winter by James Goss: Of the four books featured in this post, this novel had the strongest character work, featuring character development we didn't get from the show, because the writers became increasingly preoccupied/distracted with hashing out River Song's paradoxical backstory. Her absence from this book allows Goss to offer insight on the relationship between The Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory that confirms suspicions  ( that Rory and Eleven tolerate eachother's presence to keep Amy happy, while Amy sees her husband as consolation for the unattainable and forever enigmatic Doctor, who seems to be trying to recreate the relationship the Tenth Doctor had with Rose Tyler, but frustrated that Amy would have feelings for someone else* ) and plays on expectations with a brief amnesia/role-reversal subplot for the trio. The main story - about a seaside clinic ridded with doppelgangers - is given some snap by Goss's decision to used a mixed 1st-person narrative; most of the characters featured narrate several chapters in rotation. Never dull, though lacking surprise, I was disappointed that the scene depicted on the cover does not occur in the book...an attractive zombie woman wielding the Doctor's sonic screwdriver sounds epic to me. - Not bad

The Crawling Terror by Mike Tucker: The author probably noticed the nod to Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor when Peter Capaldi's initial costume for the Twelfth Doctor was revealed, so he fashioned an adventure fitting the Third for Twelve. Giant bugs are ubiquitous in two of the 3rd Doctor's best-known stories ( The Green Death, Planet of The Spiders ), along with misguided wealthy British meglomaniacs delving into mad science abundant during that era. Technically, I thought this the best-written book of the four in this post - the suspense is genuine, the atmosphere has the right mix horror and sci-fi/adventure, and the Twelfth Doctor & Clara are depicted right, so it felt authentic, and the pace is just right for an adventure about English villagers possessed by colonies of giant aliens resembling Earth insects. It risks bad taste by putting a baby in danger in one scene before coping out. Clara gets her mind swapped with the leader of the alien spider bugs, so we get more "Evil Clara", which is fun. The only drawback is a personal one: giant alien bugs aren't an appealing menace to me; I picked this up because I had already read the other two novels featuring 12, but it is a well-written adventure - I would've preferred alien foxes or mummies..if Paul Magrs can have the Eighth Doctor encounter alien dogs..plus, I liked the passage about wild foxes in the village being regarded like wild raccoons...and then Tucker drops a suggestion/hint about a possible rejected idea that he might recycle someday: UNIT soldiers fighting robots emerging from a volcano in the Canary Islands...a sequel to The Fires of Pompeii ?!! Mike Tucker! - when Moffat finally gets around to answering the question of why The Twelfth Doctor chose to look like the same man his Tenth incarnation met in Pompeii, may we PLEASE see THAT story?
- Okay

*That last bit about 11 wanting his own Rose Tyler for a companion was my pet theory; once Billie Piper left, Tennant's Doctor became increasingly angst-ridden and melancholy, which soured the acting chemistry the actor had with his later co-stars; perhaps Moffat was trying to casually recreate the same dynamic with his launch as showrunner?...

**I'm keeping this one - I'll try it again some other day...it's like they say: "Some books are just for having."

Doctor Who: The Blood Cell by James Goss

Can the best Doctor Who stories be summed up with one question?

Can an impossible man and an ineffectual milquetoast coexist in a backwater prison on an asteroid without driving each other crazy?

Best moment for old-school Who?

Well..if you're a fan of the years when Phillip Hinchcliff and Robert Holmes were running the show, pitting the Doctor against sadistic characters in bleak confrontations, this one is for you. The one twist is that Bentley, the irredeemable head prison guard, is a woman. She remains unlikable all the way through her demise...which might be the one likable thing about her - that she gets some comeuppance in the end.

Best new thing?

A new sonic screwdriver! The Sonic Spoon! That's right - while in prison, The Doctor cobbles together a new sonic built around a spoon. There are Doctor Who utensils modeled after the sonic screwdriver that are available at retail, so it's possible that the author has a set at home and got the idea while eating fish fingers & custard while watching Peter Capaldi swordfighting with a tablespoon in Robot of Sherwood, then gazing at the sonic screwdriver-shaped handle of the spoon and saying, "Why not?"

They'd never have gotten away with that in the 20th century...

The Twelfth Doctor gets beaten up a LOT. This book is essentially a grim prison story, offering no new twists, aside from the lower-ranking guards being robot "caretakers", who reminded me of the Sheriff of Notingham's robots in Sherwood. There are plenty of bright spots - Clara's visits to the prison, the Doctor's ability to easily escape from his cell whenever he feels like it, the Garfield book the Doctor checks out of the prison library - I like that stuff, but I imagine Goss thought Peter Capaldi's tenure would be dour, so he envisioned a dour scenario, when in actuality, The Twelfth Doctor's adventures have felt more like classic Who than any episodes of the Matt Smith era. The darker approach to the series has been there, but at most, it's atypical of a family-friendly adventure series that managed to stay light in the shade.

Hooray for Jackie Tyler - best guest moment?

The Doctor's rapport with Lafcardio, the de facto prison librarian over the assortment of books kept in the library. The moment includes a subtle nod to River Song when the Doctor glances at a copy of Moll Flanders - which Alex Kingston starred in when it was adapted for television!

The 'I love me Nan'...' moment?

I think we're supposed to gain sympathy for the Governor - the warden of the prison - as the book goes on, in part because he's narrating this adventure...but I didn't. I found him too complacent to be interesting..and the build-up to his "redemption" of sorts at the end feels perfunctory than genuine. I found it more likely the Doctor would prefer to have been in far more control than is displayed, particularly after the denouement unveiling the nature of the prison and the role the Governor plays there. Episodes like Time Heist and Flatline show The Twelfth Doctor is a man of action who prefers to hold as many cards as possible; and when he's in over his head, Clara steps up to the plate to show what she has learned, but we don't see that here; that's the downside of writing a tie-in anticipating the execution of a TV series that had not aired yet.

What?!

The twists at the end: The Governor is actually a politician exiled to the asteroid, with all of the prisoners made up of his subservients and Bentley the guard was the true authority figure; the Governor hates the Doctor because he's responsible for his being there; Bentley despises the Doctor even more for having to endure the Governor as her boss - all of this is supposed to be the aftermath of a much larger adventure that's barely told in snippets of conversation in the final third of the novel; if I thought the events of Silhouette - the previous Doctor Who novel I reviewed - pastiched too many familiar twists and turns from episodes of the show..this book tries too hard to pastiche the climaxes of Steven Moffat's scripts, in which things are not as they seem, but play out as if they are, regardless. At the end of the day, this book is about The Doctor trying to persuade a guy to change his mind...in a way that this Doctor would not go along with.

Huh?!

The Judge - the monster responsible for killing the inmates and guards at the prison, is a massive robot that upgrades itself by consuming people and machinery..kind of a morbidly obese Cyberman, I think.

Where was I?

The episodes "Mummy On The Orient Express" and "Flatline" had just aired. Blood Cell had been a quick read - Goss got the dialogue of Twelve and Clara right, so the adventure sounded authentic, but the supporting characters were too opaque to tolerate, and he needed to play off the twists much sooner to keep the book entertaining. Once it's revealed who the players really are, you wonder why was it so hard for the Doctor to persuade them to rebel from it other than for the author to play off a formula? And  what the heck was the Oracle character about? That subplot felt like something that was supposed to have a payoff, but didn't.

Singlemost fabulous thing?

It's hard to top the sonic spoon, especially because it reminded me of the lightsaber spoons that came in boxes of Kellogg's breakfast cereals to tie-in with Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of The Sith...I'll say it's the scene where Clara presents a birthday cake for the Governor to pass along to the Doctor...with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver as the candle.

The Magrs Method of Reviewing Doctor Who Novels: "Doctor Who: Silhouette" by Justin Richards

Can the best Doctor Who stories be summed up in a question?

"Can the Twelfth Doctor and Clara, with help from the Paternoster Gang, solve the puzzling locked-room murders in London committed by...angry paper birds?"

Best moment for old-school Who?

All of the stories featuring Vastra, Jenny & Strax are going to have echoes of "The Talons of Weng-Chiang". And of course, this book, the first 12th Doctor novel, is the one that is deliberately meant to feel like a follow-up/nod to the first 12th Doctor adventure, "Deep Breath".

There are also nods to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt", Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and  maybe a tip of the hat to Hitchcock's "The Birds".

Best new thing?

The origami paper "angry birds". One paper cut is a minor inconvenience, but can you imagine a flock of paper cranes intentionally slicing away at your skin relentlessly with their wings? It's a stirring surreal visual that could work on the TV show, so...only on Who could a paper bird become a Doctor Who monster, but then again, the most popular episode of the current season ( "Flatline") featured an alien invasion lead by 2-dimensional "flat" creatures.

If this book were an old Target novelization, it  would've been titled Doctor Who and The Angry Birds.

They'd never have got away with that in the 20th Century...

I could argue for those angry origami birds, but there was the Chronivore in "The Time Monster"...this is actually an adventure that they could get away with making in the past, though they would probably replace the flock of cranes with one large crane, played by a production assistant wearing sheets of white cardboard.

Hooray for Jackie Tyler! - best guest moment?

In an elaborate ruse, seven of the Doctor's past incarnations appear in brief cameos during one sequence past the halfway mark, in an attempt to lure the Twelfth Doctor into a trap, but he coolly rebuffs them all. Justin Richards shows off his ear for dialogue, as each incarnation is easy to identify without resorting to naming names, which is impossible, since the Doctor and his companions always reffered to the Doctor as The Doctor and the numbering of each was for our own reference.

The " I love me Nan' " moment?

That would be when Silhouette (the title character), Affinity and Empath reform. The three characters are the underlings of the Master-like villain, intergalactic industrialist (that's the Doctor Who equivalent of upgrading an "evil millionaire tycoon" into an "evil billionaire tycoon") Orestes Milton, who plans to detonate a poison cloud on England that will filter out all emotions except anger, creating chaos. Once Justin establishes that Orestes hitmen are controlled by gemstones upon their person...well, all of this stuff was pretty predictable, really. If you've watched the series often, you've seen the Doctor take on the main villain by enabling their toadies to get their revenge for being put-upon once too often..or maybe there haven't been too many stories like that, but it  sounds very familiar.

What?!

Milton is a fugitive wanted by The Shadow Proclamation, the Whoniverse's vaguely-defined equivalent of the Green Lantern Corps - only their enforcers are talking alien rhinoceroses. He believes he can earn leniency for his crimes by offering his research on even nastier things he's been researching. Milton's not just insane, he's a bit stupid, but the plot implies that Richards would love it if Steven Moffat revisited the Shadow Proclamation, only to show them as being horribly corrupt...maybe his copy of Captain America: The Winter Soldier is stuck in his Blu Ray player.

Huh?!

Milton learns the Doctor is a Time Lord by taking analyzing the teacup the Doctor drank from...usually people find that out by taking x-rays of The Doctor, so this was a change of pace.

Where was I?!

The book is ok. Even if I hadn't learned that the book was written at an early stage where the only reference Richards had were a handful of scripts and paparazzi photos taken on the set, it was a good guess as to what The Twelfth Doctor's adventures are like, just lacking the spontaneity Capaldi brought, or the new depths Jenna Coleman brought to Clara, whose character was fleshed out  considerably (the Clara Oswald that appeared alongside Matt Smith's Doctor Who now looks like a random groupie he pulled out from a crowd of autograph hounds compared to who she is now). And the Milton character is clearly playing off early rumors that the Master was going to return (and yes, she did). :)

So, yeah...angry paper birds, easter egg cameos...comfort food while waiting for new episodes of the show to debut. It does the job.

Singlemost fabulous thing?

Twelve alludes to meeting King Arthur...allusions to the Arthur Legend are often attributed to the Seventh Doctor claiming he was Merlin, but can you imagine the Twelfth Doctor visiting his younger incarnation while he's mentoring the once and future king? A spoon-playing jam session will break out on the round table!