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The Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on a space station that has
recently been overwhelmed by zombies. What is even stranger
is that unfamiliar people, who claim to know the TARDIS crew,
inform them that the undead threat has already been dealt
with - by the time-travellers themselves...
We
all know that a good story needs a proper beginning, middle
and end. This novel includes these structural elements, though
not necessarily in that order. All to often the endings of
Doctor Who novels can prove to be anticlimactic, but
that's no problem here, because Morris (an author new to this
series) gets his ending over with first!
Having
arrived on the space station, the Doctor and Romana soon realise
that they need to go back in time and experience the adventure
out of sequence. This is an idea that has been touched upon
before in Who fiction (in The Space Museum,
for instance) but never explored as fully as this. It gets
confusing at times, and is best read in as few sittings as
possible, but such confusion is necessary for the structure
of the narrative to work. Only at the end does everything
make sense, and thus the reader gets a sense of resolution.
Up
until that point, confusion is offset by humour. The author's
background in sketch writing is apparent in his situations
and characters. For example, the time-travellers narrowly
avoid meeting their previous selves, as happens to Marty McFly
and Doc Brown during the more amusing moments of Back to
the Future - Part II, while Romana echoes Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure by devising a retroactive jailbreak.
A sensation-seeking news reporter called Harken Batt brings
to mind Damien Day from the Channel 4 sitcom Drop the Dead
Donkey, while Hoopy, the name of a "really together" hippy
reptile, is an adjective originally coined by Douglas Adams
in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
This
is a witty and challenging novel, and a worthy successor to
Gareth Roberts' Fourth Doctor/Romana Missing Adventures.
Richard
McGinlay
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