Timewyrm: Genesys

• written by John Peel
• Review: The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Ace to ancient Mesopotamia, a critical juncture in human evolution which demands strict non-intervention. But Ace is appalled at how women are treated in this place and time, and worse yet, the Doctor receives a recorded message from his fourth self warning about an ancient menace capable of ravaging the web of time from its beginning to its end. On Gallifrey, they had a name for this menace - the Timewyrm. And to the Doctor's horror, it has arrived on Earth and is already influencing events.

  Who would have guessed that great things would have come of this first book? It's almost hard to imagine that a series of novels with the depth and complexity of the New Adventures began with this novel, which barely fit the range's early tagline of "stories too broad and too deep for the small screen."

  For what it's worth, John Peel does a decent job of picking up from where Survival left off (though that's almost been made obsolete by the flood of BBC past Doctors novels and audio plays that also happen in an unspecified post-Survival timeline). But there's something pedestrian about Peel's writing style that always kept me from really sinking my teeth into this book. Don't get me wrong, back in 1991 after a year's drought of Doctor Who following the show's quiet cancellation, I was grateful to have a new story. But aside from taking place in a setting that would've been impossibly expensive to mount on a BBC-TV budget, and featuring suggestions of nudity and a few cases of extreme violence, there's little about Timewyrm: Revelation that was beyond the scope of the average Target novelization. Indeed, Target Doctor Who novelizations such as The Curse Of Fenric and Remembrance Of The Daleks had already far exceeded this novel in a stylistic sense.

  Still, considering how utterly different the NAs became later on, Timewyrm: Genesys was a good way to ease into the series, and the best was truly yet to come.

• reviewed by Earl Green

Timewyrm: Exodus

• written by Terrance Dicks
• Review: The Doctor and Ace, still following the temporal trail of the Timewyrm, track it down to World War II-era London, but somehow the timeline has been significantly altered - Britain has been overrun by Hitler and the Nazi regime, and the Doctor and Ace find themselves trying to ply both the Britischer Freikorps (a cell of resistance fighters) and the local Nazis, led by the fanatical Lieutenant Hemmings, for information on what has happened. To Ace's horror, the Doctor tries to infiltrate the Nazi ranks, endearing himself to none other than Adolf Hitler...only to discover that the Furher has the Timewyrm on his side.

  Good old Terrance Dicks. Nobody can lay out a good old-fashioned Doctor Who storyline like this man can, and perhaps he should've been given the opportunity to launch the New Adventures. Timewyrm: Exodus is ultimately the strongest of the foor-book cycle that led off the series, and shows that Dicks, a traditionalist though he may be, understood the demands that the new novels be more complex than the average Target novelization. (In case you've never touched a Who book in your life, Dicks wrote something like 80% of those novelizations, so if anyone knew what the parameters were, it'd be him.

  The one disappointment here is that Dicks leans on an old rival from the Patrick Troughton era of the TV series. This quietly pleased the raging fanboy that lurks deep inside of me, thrilling at arcane continuity references, but in a way it diminishes the power of the book, turning Hitler from a demented megalomaniac into a mere pawn. Last I checked, Hitler was a demented megalomaniac, and to have him ensnare the Timewyrm with his mind unaided would have been far more terrifying. "Ah gee, Hitler was just a fanatical sod who happened to nearly take over half the world with the help of a psychic alien influence" lessens the power of the story and its use of such an important historical figure - and it almost makes him a sympathetic character in a couple of places, which I doubt anyone's ready to swallow.

  A much more worthy opponent is Hemmings, who launches his own inquisition to find out what the TARDIS is. This concept - Nazis learning how to use the TARDIS - has since become something of a staple of post-TV-series Doctor Who storytelling (also see the Big Finish audio Colditz).

  For those of us who, at first, just wanted nothing more than for the television series to still be on the air, Timewyrm: Exodus was a nice, warm, placating old pair of comfortable shoes. It felt and tasted like Doctor Who, and despite the fact that it didn't break any molds, back in late 1991, that was just fine.

• reviewed by Earl Green

Timewyrm: Apocalypse

• written by Nigel Robinson
• Review:

Timewyrm: Revelation

• written by Paul Cornell
• Review: The Doctor and Ace brace themselves for their final confrontation with the time-manipulating Timewyrm, with whom they've done battle from the dawn of man to World War II and beyond. But the Timewyrm sets a subtle trap for them as its final gambit, luring them out onto the surface of the moon sans protective gear. Ace is left on the brink of death, forced to relive repeated encounters with Chad Boyle, a schoolyard bully who once tried to kill her as a show of playground superiority. The Timewyrm then hold the Doctor's tormented companion hostage to ensure his cooperation - but she hasn't anticipated that the Time Lord would receive help from a handful of strangers, including an out-of-place couple, a bewildered vicar, and a psychic entity living withing the structure of a country church.

  For years, I kept away from any mention of Timewyrm: Revelation. The book simply did not appear on the bookshelves near my home in 1992, and I never got to find out how the Timewyrm cycle which kick-started the New Adventures novels came to an end. Not until ten years later.

  Why so gung-ho about this one book, when I long ago sold or gave away much of the rest of my New Adventures books? For one thing, it's by Paul Cornell, my favorite Doctor Who author, and not only that, but it's his first Who novel and forms the first of a loosely-connected series of four such books. And by God, I stayed right away from the spoilers for ten years until I got to read it myself.

  So was it worth the wait? Well, sort of. In some ways, I'm a tad disappointed - Cornell's journey into the Doctor's inner consciousness, complete with appearances from the first, third, fourth and fifth Doctors (along with deceased companions Adric, Katarina and Sara Kingdom), seems like a bit of fanboyish fluff. The first and fifth incarnations of the Doctor are used in an interesting way, at least. In one other scene, Ace runs into a quasi-Shakespearean trio of witches who offer an explanation of the female companion's archetypal role in the Doctor's adventures, and all of a sudden I wondered if I was reading fiction, or if I was reading a scholarly literary deconstruction of Doctor Who in general, jammed awkwardly into a work of fiction.

  It's an entertaining read for the most part despite these odd indulgences of the author, though I'm sure that, against the straightforward, largely uncomplicated and very traditional Doctor Who adventures that the first three Timewyrm books represented, Revelation must have been a tremendous culture shock to fandom way back when. (And not just fandom either - legend has it that the late John Nathan-Turner, then still just stepping down from the producer's office of Doctor Who on television, objected strenuously to Cornell's initial manuscript and was overridden by editor Peter Darvill-Evans.) Paul Cornell's books only got better from here on out.

• reviewed by Earl Green

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible

• written by Marc Platt
• Review:

Cat's Cradle: Warhead

• written by Andrew Cartmel
• Review:

Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark

• written by Andrew Hunt
• Review: