NA2 Timewyrm: Exodus (Terrance Dicks)

'In an authoritarian society, people tend to obey the voice of authority. It can be very useful at times.'
I'm liking these Timewyrm books- two hits so far. Terrance Dicks obviously agrees that the Timewyrm herself is of frankly negligible interest: she is lazily tacked on here to what is actually a really good, entertaining, perverting-the-course-of-history World War II romp.
Dicks gets to animate all the Nazi bad guys (though occasionally in ways that make you feel that the war had a touch of the Carry Ons about it- and that is perhaps not as it should be), and he also gets to bring back the War Lords. Yes really! 'The War Games' and all that malarkey! He's having great fun here, and a lot of that fun is infectious.
The best stuff comes early on though, before we meet Himmler, Goering and co, and well before there's any mention of SIDRATS- the Doctor and Ace land at the Festival of Britain, but in an alternate timelines, and it's hugely satisfactory seeing the Doctor get the upperhand over the Nazis here. You kind of imagine Sylvester McCoy performing this stuff, but an idealised Sylvester McCoy, where he really was the greatest Doctor there ever was. Just as he should have been. But that's a whole other spiel. In as much as the Doctor behaves exactly as you would always wish the Doctor to behave, this is really top stuff, and it makes my frustration that I can't locate a copy of 'Vampire Science' for under a tenner easier to deal with.
'Adolf Hitler in person. The lad's done well, hasn't he?'

NA1 Timewyrm: Genesys (John Peel)

Catch people off-guard, give them something out of the ordinary to consider, and then be terribly polite- it usually worked wonders.
I don't recall any of the Timewyrm books, the initial batch of NAs, being particularly highly regarded, but this is top stuff. Easily the best historical adventure since Hartnell. Not saying much? Well perhaps. We have a bickering Doctor and Ace in Mesopotamia, assisting Gilgamesh to battle the seemingly invincible Timewyrm, respelendent in the guise of the goddess Ishtar. Sophie Aldred goes to great lengths in the book's forward to emphasise her familiarity with Gilgamesh and Enkidu from her schooldays, but they were new ones on me. When Sophie Aldred makes you feel like an ignorant oaf you've got problems. There's a cracking energy to this, and Peel adds layers to the Doctor-Ace relationship that were hinted at but never really explored on screen. You can tell there are fireworks down the line, and again that's the author doing his job well, setting up things to come.
The weak link here is Ishtar / Timewyrm. She's just not terribly interesting in either of these forms- just a shouting, gloating, megalomaniacal super-being, and darling they are three-a-penny round here. More interesting is the little team of outcasts the Doctor gathers around him- bare-breasted priestesses, hairy throwbacks and semi-talented street performers. And that's just Ace! Nah, I'm kidding. Peel actually works some decent educational material in here, again making this feel like a weird hybrid of an early 60s story and something more faithful to the McCoy TV era. It's no masterpiece of course, but weighing this up with 'The 8 Doctors' I know which series I'm more looking forward to spending time with.
'I never make stupid mistakes,' he retorted, trying to muster all his dignity. 'Only very, very clever ones.'
Four stars- and my goodness these books are turning out to be more expensive on ebay than I was expecting.

8D1 The Eight Doctors (Terrance Dicks)

Presumably there was some logic involved in the choice of TD to launch the Eighth Doctor range, though it's hard to see what it was. Stalwart of the show though he may have been, and a cheeky-faced enthusiast he remains even now (doesn't he? he's still around, isn't he? damn, I'd feel rotten here if I'd missed something...), but even on his best days he was a pedestrian writer, and by the time of The Eight Doctors his best days were a distant memory. I'll slip my first use of that gorgously disparaging term 'fan fiction' in here, and of course the irony is that our first taste of fan ficion comes courtesy of one of the great Doctor Who pros. Not all his fault of course- I'm sure his brief was to throw everything in there, kitchen sink quite possibly included, but Lordy this is an artless mess. I came to this craving a banquet, and I got beans on toast. You know the worst thing though? I still enjoyed those beans on toast. And there's nothing here to make me want to quit this all-consuming project of mine.
Following straight on from that nameless TV movie thing ('The Enemy Within'- give me strength...), the Master has left one last trap for Doctor #8. Triggering it, he is left with complete amnesia and has to pop back and visit each of his previous incarnations in turn to gather up all their memories and experiences (not sure actually why he couldn't have bypassed the first six, and just taken what he needed from #7, but I'm sure there's a damned good reason for it). And you can tell quite easily which era of the show really belonged to Dicks- the first couple of Doctors are written a little shakily, and he goes downhill towards the end, but the ones in the middle? Well, he nails them. The most prolonged sequence though, curiously enough, is the one with #6, mid-Trial, and wih Gallifrey in chaos. There's nothing particularly special going on here, but it's kinda fun reading a different take on some of the old classics.
The new companion is Samantha Jones, but my goodness is she an afterthought. We meet her running away from some drug-pushing schoolboys early on, and she has a tagged on coda. Nothing to make her or break her really.
Ultimately though, what I'm going to take away from The Eight Doctors, and I have no doubt that I'm far from alone here, is the phrase 'very small, very pretty.' Jo is vs and vp on page 72, but hell she's earned it, she's carried it with her through many a story- alas, Zoe was vs and vp just four pages earlier. I'm not sure the phrase, pithy though it may be, can support them both- I suspect ultimately there may be only one way to decide just who is the smallest and who is the prettiest.
Unfortunately I can't think what it might be.
I like grading things, and I'm giving this three stars out of five. I've had a pretty good day and I'm feeling generous. I'm off to ebay now, looking for 'Vampire Science'.

The Longest Story In The World

The wave of Doctor Who fiction of the 90s all but passed me by, and it shouldn't have done. I think I felt myself a bit above that sort of thing. I remember articles in magazines and rows of books in comic shops, but though I retained a furtive interest in the TV programme, the books were on an altogether less significant level. Or so I thought. I picked up a few over the years- found a lot of them to be junk, but also found a significant number to be hugely entertaining, respectful of the show they had sprung from but also innovative and intelligent in ways the 'new' TV series has only rarely come close to (ooh, controversy).
So what this blog is-
I'm setting myself a wee challenge. What with one thing and another stress has crept into my life in the last few months in ways, frankly, I could do without, and I need entertainment- occasionally even of the mindless variety- to help chill me out and focus me again. I'm hoping the Doctor Who books are going to help me with that. My- frankly hugely unlikely- aim is to read all the New Adventures and 8th Doctor books pretty much in publishing order, and throw a few comments up on here as I go along. As usual with these kinds of things, I'm writing primarily for myself- one of my mental kinks is that a thing never seems entirely real to me until I've written about it- but also with a hope that some poor innocent mind will find what I write to be useful or, damnitall, even entertaining. The different ranges will be mixed up, and there may well be some Big Finishes and other bits in there too. It's my cookie and it'll crumble the way I tell it to. So! From the top gentlemen, please...