Just War by Lance Parkin
In Brief: It's 1941 and the Nazis control the channel islands and possess a new super-weapon with which to win the war against England. Aliens, parrallel-dimensions and alternate-timelines are (surprisingly) not involved.
It's getting more and more difficult to find ways of saying "the book was very good indeed" with the recent run. Other than Shakedown (which was more juvenile than bad) I think it's been at least a dozen New Adventures since I ran into a poor entry in the series. I have to wonder if the decision to finally get rid of Ace (or rather the version of the character we had towards the end) helped to inspire the various authors involved. Or it could just be that after some notably lesser efforts there was a greater effort put into quality control and in particular having fewer "first novels" thrown at the reader.
And having David A. McIntee not write anything after the horrible First Frontier was a boon.
Although ironically Just War is Lance Parkin's first book and it's one of the strongest entries in the series. This is a great book for the regulars and in particular Roz gets a chance to gain some real depth during the book as she pursues a romance in WW2-London (not so easy for a woman from the 30th-century). Roz really reinforces that having an older companions (in the case in their 40s along with the 30-something Benny) for The Doctor is a very good thing, having someone who is more of an equal leads to a much more dynamic setup compared to the screaming-youngsters so often seen on TV.
Of course for a TV show someone younger *does* make demographic sense.
Although unfortunately Chris has yet to really been given a chance to shine, most of the time being too much portrayed as a naive and immature. Although the authors *do* like to go on about his physique...
But through and through this is Benny's book. Most of the narrative centres around her mission for The Doctor to investigate a suspected German super-weapon that's been spotted near the occupied island of Guernsey. Passages as she's captured and tortured by the Germans are the most harrowing and intense events in the entire range of books as Parkin pulls no punches. We know that what she goes through *hurts* and it's through luck and skill that she's able to escape, not a rescue by The Doctor. Having a version of The Doctor who's more the background manipulator was a running theme throughout the New Adventures, however more and more there is foreshadowing that it's eventually going to come at a price.
Also Parkin goes a good job of not making the Nazis typical stereotyped villains through having most of the characters (bar Benny's torturer Wolff) be *almost* sympathetic. At the same time the English are not complete good-guys but instead must act as people do in a time of war.
So to sum up: Interesting setting, well-written characters and a satisfying resolution to the main mystery (the "super-weapon" is slightly advanced technology that is due to The Doctor being unwise in discussing ideas to a scientist on an earlier visit to Germany ). Just War is a fault-less, if intense, entry in the series.
Shakedown by Terrance Dicks
In Brief: The Tardis crew are chasing a shape-changing spy who carries a "terrible secret" Hot on their heels are everybody's favourite potato-heads, The Sontarans.
What to say about Shakedown? Well, other than that it's written by Terrance Dicks. It's a typical Dicks effort in being a competently-written if extremely straight-forward book. Still, he knows how to put together an efficient Doctor Who story and really make it tick. Of course that's hardly a surprise considering the many many TV-stories he had involvement with through writing or script-editing from the 1960s through 80s.
And at least the novel never reaches the "no more than minimal description" depths of a Target novelisation.
However, what's notable about Shakedown is that it's partially a novelisation of a filmed story, albeit one that originally had no involvement at all from The Doctor.
Back in the wilds of the mid-1990s, with it obvious that no new show was liable to ever appear in TV, some fans with resources at their command managed to produce several direct-to-video stories with a Doctor Who link. So with rights to some aspects of the show available (certain monsters and/or characters, but not The Doctor or Tardis) several videos were made which were semi-officially in the Who "universe". One of the more notable (as in having somewhat (comparatively) of a budget) was "Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans", which was written by Terrance Dicks and starred several Doctor Who (and Blake's 7) actors, albeit none in their original roles.
And some weird looking Sontarans.
The other video of this ilk worth mentioning is "Downtime", although it's a big mess of Yeti, computer viruses, The Brigadier, The Brigadier's daughter, 2nd-Doctor companion Victoria and Sarah Jane Smith. There were also a series out there concerning the X-Files-like investigations of one Liz Shaw and another featuring Autons.
In terms of quality (as memory serves, I should probably try to track down a copy to re-watch) "Shakedown: The Return of the Sontarans" wasn't great, mainly due to the severely low budget of the production (of course we *are* dealing with the Doctor Who universe here) . However despite this hindrance many of these videos were quite fun and better than they should have been, mainly through being very obvious labours of love for all involved. These were productions by fans who wanted to make Doctor Who like they remembered (which explains tendency to use aspects from the 60s and 70s rather than the more recent stories) since the BBC obviously weren't interested.
It could be argued that the show we've been getting out of Wales since 2005 is the ultimate version of this sentiment.
So using an author like Dicks makes sense and the style of story (straight forward action-adventure in space) is quite a contrast from the at times confounding plotting of stories from the 1980s.
Some familiar faces in unfamiliar roles.
In order to turn a 50-minute show featuring no Doctor or other parts of the show itself (other than the Sontarans) into an official Doctor Who book, Dicks has stuck the plot of the video itself into the middle of the novel. So while the crew of the solar-sailer Tiger Moth are being menaced by Sontarans and a shape-changing Rutan The Doctor & Co. are waiting on nearby planets and space-stations to rejoin the story-proper. If one didn't know about the video the seams aren't *too* visible, well except that a couple of characters who are killed at the climax of the middle-section show up again later in a "Ha Ha! I wasn't really dead!" manner in order to extend the story up to the needed 250 pages. Still, greater crimes of writing have been committed during The New Adventures.
Also, after the mature character-study of The Also People this book is a major step down in terms complexity of writing-style, nothing here is above a 12-year-old's reading level. However one of the appeals of Doctor Who is how the style of story one gets can change wildly from week to week, so it's not really a complaint, just something worth noting. So as such all of Shakedown's characters are fairly broad. And I doubt that it would really be possible for anyone to write an introspective Sontaran.
So, overall Shakedown is a fun if slight book. Terrance Dicks definitely knows how to keep the pages turning. So in the great scheme of The New Adventures I'd rank Shakedown as being good but a trifle disappointing since it never reaches the quality of his earlier Timewyrm: Exodus but is nowhere as awful as his vampire & gangsters opus Blood Harvest.
The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch
In Brief: The Doctor and company holiday inside a giant sphere that contains its own sun and two-trillion inhabitants. Conversations with God and Dalek poetry ensue.
Very possibly The Also People is the best entry in the entire New Adventures range. What's surprising is that such high praise doesn't come from a tale of high adventure or timey-wimey shenanigans but rather due to having a book based around well-written and interesting characters in an intriguing setting. While I'm sure the pacing and lack of "action" wouldn't be to everyone's taste (those sad sad people) there's a refreshing maturity to the novel that is hugely appealing. With such a large Tardis team at the moment getting a chance to slow things down and get to know the characters, in particular Chris and Roz, actually improves the entire series as we can get much more invested in events when we understand their impact on the regulars.
In contrast to Generic Companion #1 and #2 we've had throughout 2011 in the form of Amy and Rory.
Giving his companions a chance to rest The Doctor lands in the WorldSphere on The People, a super-advanced utopian society made up of a combination of biological and mechianical beings. Managing all (including the sphere's artificial sun) is the supercomputer God, who provides for all and asks in return only the occasional conversation and to be able to provide a mysterious yellow dip that nobody eats at parties. While of course The Doctor has ulterior motives (Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart ended up within the WorldSphere after the events of Set Piece) and there is a murder-plot thrown in, most of The Also People revolves around the regular characters as they get to know some of the citizens of the Sphere.
There's also some romance afoot as well for Roz and Chris, although as ever in Who it ends in tears. Benny gets some good moments as she's faced with a deeper understanding of the moral choices that The Doctor has to make, particularly around the now-feral Kadiatu.
I remembered a great deal of this entry in the New Adventures from my original read back in 1995 (in a good way), and was glad to find that the book hasn't aged a bit in the past 16 years (especially after the oh-so-90s Head Games). The Also People is also a great demonstration of how much the New Adventures strove to move beyond just being a tie-in to the TV-show. The appeal for much of Who (at least to me) has always been about how the series centres around throwing its characters (and the audience) into new and unusual situations and seeing the impact (both good and bad).
There's not really much more to say about the book since it's hard to be critical when there's so little here that warrants criticism. The Also People is funny, sad, moving, breezy, deep and everything good about Doctor Who wrapped up in 250+ pages.
