24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009)

Jack Bauer is sent to Colorado to deal with cultists, gunrunners, crooked cops, and stereotypical bikers from Hell - any and all of whom could be ready to take down a whole conference full of big business tycoons. And if you couldn't have guessed, it's gonna be another long day for Jack. Crazy vagrants! Shootouts in ghost towns! Hallucinogenic gas! Grizzly bears! My name is trashy book reviewer Dr. Mattaconda. And today... is the longest day of my life.

Well, despite the title, I found out rather quickly that Head Shot is sadly not a porn novel. Typical. Instead, it's part of a series of novels based off the hit espionage series 24, the show where everyone is double crossing everyone and regular characters are routinely killed off in order to save on paying the actors more for going past a certain number of appearances on screen... I mean... for the surprise factor! Yeah, that's it! It's long been a favorite show of mine and in all honesty is probably the last 'event' television series I actually watched as it was being transmitted. The novels were, to my estimation, a complete afterthought, were poorly advertised, and never seemed to generate much in the way of fan enthusiasm.

Set in a nebulous time before season one of the show, Special Agent Jack Bauer is dispatched to the mountains of Colorado to oversee potential security concerns surrounding a major business summit of high-powered industrialists. The mysterious disappearance of a cult making their domicile in the same proximity of the conference is bad enough, but then two ATF agents who were tracking said cult also turn up missing. On top of this, Jack's boss Ryan Chappelle has detected what he believes to be a stock market scam where someone with inside knowledge is rapidly selling off stocks of all the companies represented at the industrialist conference. Suffering from a bad case of altitude sickness and a killer headache, Jack prepares to unravel a conspiracy to destabilize the American economy and upend the status quo forevermore...

I can't find a whole lot of information on the David Jacobs that wrote this particular novel. He wrote a few of these 24 novels and he's also credited with a few true crime books, but other than that, information is scant. I suspect it may be a pen name and I might also guess he's British based on certain word choices ('trousers' instead of 'pants', for instance). I believe his take on the 24 novels are somewhat different than other authors in the series because instead of trying to follow an ensemble cast around like the television series did, Jacobs focuses strictly on the main character. This makes Head Shot read more like a typical adventure novel, which in my estimation is a good thing. In fact, I would go so far as to say despite the occasional moments of the laughable or absurd found in this book, if you could somehow rip out all of the 24 references and stick a schlocky piece of artwork featuring some beefsteak dude with a gun on the front cover, Head Shot would read as a perfectly acceptable men's action novel from the 70's or 80's.

Unfortunately, all of the 24 books I've read thus far seem to be shackled by the gimmicky notion of trying to mimic the television show's format of each episode taking place throughout an hour of 'real time', thus each chapter is supposed to be one hour of the day. Even as a diehard 24 fan, I don't think I would be offended if the format was abandoned for the novels and we just had traditional chapters that play out naturally. The reader really has to suspend disbelief in several chapter breaks to pretend the real time format is also at play in this book. For instance, one chapter ends with a character announcing to Jack that the bodies of two unfortunate agents were found. The very next chapter - the beginning of the next hour - sees Jack already at the crime scene doing his investigating thing. Studious fans have observed Jack and other characters making miraculous time on the freeways during the seasons of the show set in Los Angeles, but Jack is just straight-up teleporting in certain parts of Head Shot.

In keeping with the credo of the television series where any character could die at any given moment, plot armor be damned, Jack's initial partner, a member of the Denver branch of CTU, is quickly dispatched by the enemy. That character's replacement is a by-the-business blonde named Anne Armstrong who is perhaps more shockingly also dispatched after it seemed certain she was going to be Jack's backup throughout the rest of the novel. Instead, Jack's real backup arrives in the form of two rough and tumble bikers named Griff and Rowdy. No, I'm not making this up. Yes, it is incredibly goofy. But we get a little taste of what 24 might be like if it was crossed over with Sons of Anarchy in this novel, and that is a form of goofy I can get on board with.

I also learned in this novel that Jack Bauer takes his coffee black. I knew I always liked Jack for a reason.

I can't imagine anyone other than an ardent 24 fan ever picking this book up, but if by some chance you like the show and you're down with men's action novels, you might consider giving Head Shot a whirl.

Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks (1976)

Cast your eyes back to a time when the Daleks were still scary! The notorious genocidal pepperpot monsters return to bring the Doctor more grief - and this time they have their madman of a creator in tow. Guns! Mutants! Climbing rockets! A Bohemian looking hero with a long scarf! Just add a few more pithy remarks and the usual wise-ass intro is finished. But have I the right... to review Genesis of the Daleks?

What can really be said about Genesis of the Daleks at this point? It often wins fan polls as the greatest Doctor Who television story of all-time (or at least ranks somewhere in the top five) and has been discussed ad nauseum over the decades as arguably the most important Dalek story since their introduction in the 1960's. Terry Nation's story is dark, exciting, and shocking even on repeat viewings. It's filmed like a high production action movie by David Maloney on an extremely limited BBC budget. And Tom Baker, still early in his long run as the Doctor, truly settles into the role and finds an extra layer of gravitas to add to his characterization. All things considered, Genesis is one of those lightning in a bottle moments in the show's history. So when it came time to do the novelization of this story, could any of the on-screen magic truly be captured by the written word or would it simply be a pale imitation?

Intercepted from a transmat beam at the end of his last adventure, a baffled Doctor emerges onto a fog-covered battlefield and meets with a shadowy emissary of the Time Lords who tasks the Doctor with a dangerous mission of utmost importance: travel back in time to a point in Skaro's past before the Daleks become a dominant force and either subvert their development or thwart their creation entirely. Upon accepting the mission, the Doctor finds his companions Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith have been sent along with him by the Time Lords. The three friends quickly become embroiled in the seemingly never-ending conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds - and also run afoul of the unfortunate 'Mutos' - the wasteland dwellers who are descended from the first wave of unfortunate souls mutated by chemical weapons at the outset of the war. However, nothing can prepare the Doctor for his first encounter with a scarred, wheelchair-bound Kaled scientist who has invented a seemingly indestructible living tank that will surely end the war with the Thals decisively...

For this read I went with the Pinnacle Books edition. In case you're unfamiliar, in the 1970's there was an attempt to bring the Doctor Who novelizations to an American audience shortly after the television show first started making appearances on various US based TV stations. Only ten novelizations were produced before Pinnacle canned the project, but the resulting books have nonetheless lived on as fun curios for Who enthusiasts and collectors. They are almost identical to the original Target Books novelizations, barring three things: one - new cover art and a new, unique Doctor Who logo that never appeared on any other merchandise throughout the show's history, two - a text introduction from science-fiction luminary Harlon Ellison in all of the books essentially introducing what might otherwise be an unfamiliar audience to the concept of Doctor Who and what the character entails (while also gleefully offending Star Wars and Star Trek fans like only a top-tier troll could), and three - various Americanizations of words or turns of phrase throughout the texts. The word 'trousers' becoming 'pants' is often cited as one such example, but the most infamous of these text alterations are the Doctor's bag of Jelly Babies becoming 'jelly beans' because American kids wouldn't know anything about Bassetts confectionary foods. It does kind of fascinate me to think that somewhere out there is a tiny subset of older American Doctor Who fans who's first exposure to the show was actually through these books.

Regardless of which version you're reading, Terrance Dicks is at the helm for this novelization, and his writing style is simply perfect for a fast-paced and action-oriented story like Genesis. In years past I used to eschew Terrance Dicks novels because I was a youthful snob who thought Dicks' writing was too basic and simple to offer anything of substance. Now older (but probably only slightly wiser), I understand why Terrance Dicks was so prolific in his day. Dare I say, Dicks is like the Elmore Leonard of science-fiction writers: he'll never use ten words in a sentence when only three or four will do. Brevity and pace are the cornerstones of his writing style. And that's what makes his novelization of Genesis of the Daleks a joy to read. You could easily blast through it in a long afternoon if you really wanted to. Even if you're like me and you've seen the television serial dozens of times and generally know what's going to happen, you may still find yourself rapidly turning pages to get to the climax.

Like many of the Who novelizations, there are some small deviations from the televised material: some longer fight scenes, some altered lines of dialogue, a brief glimpse at rejected Dalek designs, a scene between two of the supporting characters that was never filmed, and perhaps most tantalizingly, the incident which crippled Davros (a Thal nuclear strike) is given a brief mention here. Davros is arguably the main attraction of this book. Yes, he would later become something of a butt-monkey in the series (and apparently the current skinwalker version of the show that I refuse to acknowledge as legitimate won't even use him anymore because showing a villain in a wheelchair might upset a disabled person... or something? Excuse me while my eyes roll into the back of my skull...) but in his introductory adventure Davros is one mean, deranged, and obsessed son of a bitch. I particularly love the dialogue exchanges between Davros and the Doctor where their differences as both scientists and men are brought to the fore. And the Doctor inadvertently giving Davros knowledge of future events adds a brilliant wrinkle into an already well-layered story with unbelievably high stakes.

I haven't read all of the Target novelizations yet, but of the ones I've read so far, this one rates fairly high on the list. iIf you're only ever going to dip into a few of them, I would definitely recommend Genesis of the Daleks to be in that pile.

Star Trek: Here There Be Dragons (1993)

It's the basement dwelling nerd from the 1990's ultimate fantasy - Star Trek meets Dungeons & Dragons! Gather the party - Riker the swordsman, Troi the buxom wench, Data the whip-wielding rogue, and Picard the bard. (Look at me, I made a rhyme.) Prepare thyself for the crew of the Enterprise to get medieval on your ass!

I mostly know of John Peel from his work within the Doctor Who range. He famously wrote Timewyrm: Genesys, the first novel in the Virgin New Adventures series, and was tapped to pen novelizations for some of the early Terry Nation Dalek stories such as The Chase and The Power of the Daleks in the 90's. So venturing into Here There Be Dragons I was interested to see what Peel could do for another storied sci-fi franchise.

While on a routine cataloguing expedition of a nebula, the Enterprise encounters a pleasure vessel that bizarrely opens fire on the Federation ship before self destructing. An escape pod reveals the only survivor from the cruise ship to be a long-haired rogue who got stuck with the name Castor Nayfack - presumably when the name generator website his parents were looking at crashed. Mr. Nayfack claims to be an undercover Federation intelligence agent tracking a group of big game hunters poaching large reptilian creatures said to resemble dragons from ancient Earth's mythology on a remote class M planet located inside the nebula.  Nayfack informs Picard that the planet is populated by humans apparently scooped up from 13th Century Germany ahead of the Black Death and placed on this remote world by the Preservers. Unable to resist a mystery and an apparent visit into a version of Earth's past, Picard leads an away team onto the surface to the settlement known as Diesen. Picard's team is only in Diesen for mere minutes before Nayfack gives them the slip and Graebel - the local black market man posing as an honest wine merchant - has drugged them and is preparing to sell the team into the slave trade. However, it is quickly revealed that Picard suspected treachery from Nayfack's too good to be true storytelling all along, as a second away team led by Riker materializes and begins following the tracker covertly placed on Nayfack's person by Dr. Crusher...

So it's not quite a fantasy novel as may have been initially teased by the setup, but many of the trappings of generic fantasy are there, including evil rulers, grim castles, dank dungeons, and the aforementioned 'dragons'. The dragons are revealed to be less the flying and fire-breathing variety and more like giant-sized cousins of the Komodo dragon, but they turn out to be a deadly obstacle nonetheless. As we get deeper into the novel, we discover the game hunting angle is only one aspect of criminal enterprise carried out by the gang Nayfack belongs to. This gang of ne'er-do-wells is also running a scam in the art world too - selling off goods purported to be from medieval Europe as artifacts to otherwise clueless collectors across the galaxy. For some reason, both the plot and the medieval flavoring of Here There Be Dragons reminded me of certain episodes of Stargate SG-1 where the SG-1 team would inevitably meet a human society still stuck in the distant past on a planet that looks remarkably like the forests of British Columbia.

As in many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there is a B-plot included here as well. Perhaps realizing a clash with a gang of thieves to be a relatively low stakes affair, the author included a subplot about the gang's leader bombarding the Enterprise with gravity bombs that threaten to tear the ship apart, which the likes of Geordi, Worf, Dr. Crusher, and Barclay have to deal with.

Yes, this is apparently a rare Trek novel featuring both semi-regulars Lieutenant Barclay and Ensign Ro as part of the main cast of characters. For the most part, Barclay is portrayed as the goofy and anxiety ridden geek from this era of TNG, but Ro on the other hand... I'm thinking John Peel must've had a thing for Ro's actress Michelle Forbes, because not only is he keen to point out how attractive other characters think she is (Riker I can see, but Picard would not give a shit), but when Picard's team is taken in by the slavers, Ro is separated from the others and sent to the evil Duke's private chambers to be kept as a sex slave. No, seriously... Ro literally mulls over her potential future as a living "sex toy" at one point. Now, this is still in a mostly PG-era of Star Trek, so nothing too terribly explicit or raunchy is allowed to happen, but Peel makes sure the reader knows Ro is stripped naked and given nothing but a too-short and too-tight dress with no shoes or underwear to parade around in for most of the rest of the story. I guess if you're looking for some good Ro fan service gooning material this book will be right up your alley.

We also learn in this novel that it's not just Sherlock Holmes that Data has an obsession with, it's also Indiana Jones, as he manages to snag one of the slavers whips and does some android ass kicking with weapon in hand. The part in the aftermath of battle where Data begins to autistically pontificate about the history of 20th Century film and Indiana Jones in particular and Picard facepalms and rudely cuts him off to save himself from a migraine is probably the most on the nose example of Peel perfectly capturing these characters in prose form.

I had a good time with Here There Be Dragons and found Peel's fast paced, no nonsense prose to work in accord with the Star Trek formula. Not only would this have made for a good standalone episode of the TV series, but it's a story that could have conceivably worked within the show's budget and special effects capabilities at the time. (The dragons would probably have to be dodgy CGI, but that was to be expected on occasion.) I give this one a Captain's commendation and recommend it be enjoyed alongside a cup of Earl Grey. Hot.

Doctor Who: Instruments of Darkness (2001)

The Doctor, Mel, and Evelyn are up against an ESP wielding spy network, Amazonian assassins, sinister albinos, death cultists, and an elusive lunch schedule in one batshit crazy turn of the millennium sci-fi cum espionage romp. Grab your multicolored coat and pour yourself a glass of carrot juice, we're going Auton hunting!

There's no other way to say this: Gary Russell's Instruments of Darkness is a bloody train wreck. A whirlwind, highly readable in most places train wreck... but a train wreck nonetheless. Where to even start with this one? I believe this novel is certainly an endurance test for avid Whovian readers. One might be tempted, as I was, to put the book down before getting through the first few pages. The opening pages are dedicated to scenes of grisly murder and several attempted rapes, which is more the kind of edgelord milieu you expect to see in Doctor Who's Virgin New Adventures series. The Doctor (ostensibly our main character, no?) also does not appear until some 30 pages deep into the story. That's when I started to realize Gary Russell is indeed enough of a madman to basically try and re-create a Doctor Who season 22 story in novel format.

If you haven't watched for a while or you're a lapsed fan, season 22 is where script editor and ingratiating gobshite Eric Saward thought it would be a great idea to take the leading man Colin Baker out of the story for the first twenty-five minutes or so of almost every serial while turning the amount of nihilistic violence in the show up to eleven while the show's producer John Nathan-Turner was probably too busy sipping martinis to notice.

That divisive style is what Gary Russell chose to partly emulate here. But our fearless author doesn't stop with his delusions of being a mad scientist there, oh no. Instruments of Darkness is actually the third in a loose trilogy of Doctor Who novels, one of which is from a completely different book series from a completely different publisher with a completely different incarnation of the Doctor! Confused yet? To be fair, thanks to the 'wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey' nature of a series like this and some quick recapping of events, it's probably okay if you come into Instruments of Darkness without reading the prior novels.

And then there's the seemingly never-ending parade of side characters in this book who are introduced on a whim and then disappear into the ether for ten or so chapters only to make a sudden return later in the narrative when convenient to the plot. Meanwhile, the side characters that actually are given a fair amount of print and character development are abruptly killed off in random acts of cruel violence that are - again - not too far removed from the Saward stewardship of Doctor Who on television.

Gary Russell clearly wants to be writing an espionage-tinged 007 continuation novel here, so much so that in an eye-rolling, groan inducing passage we learn that the Doctor is great chums with author Ian Fleming and, naturally, he introduced Fleming to an ornithologist friend of his with a familiar namesake that would go on to inspire the spy novelist. I can only assume this is a nod to the Doctor influencing H.G. Wells in the serial Timelash, but my goodness, is it really necessary to be that cute? Does the Doctor have to be responsible for every cool thing in history?

DID I ALSO MENTION that Instruments of Darkness serves as a crossover with the Doctor Who audio adventures by providing us with the prose debut of a previously audio-only companion character?

Is anybody following this?!?

So you're probably thinking this whole book sounds like a complete disaster up to this point (and you'd be mostly right), but there's something about this wonderful mess that just... works. In addition to Bond, there's a heavy X-Files flavor about the proceedings as well, and this meshes well with the Sixth Doctor's more 'action man' style. But what really takes Instruments of Darkness to the next level - and what makes this a recommended read for Whovians - is the author's insertion of Evelyn Smythe into the proceedings. Amidst all the mayhem and spider's web of plot twists is a touching and oftentimes hilarious repartee between the Doctor, Evelyn, and Mel, the latter of which cottons on fairly quickly that there is a love affair always simmering beneath the surface between the Doctor and Evelyn. She is, in many ways, the perfect companion for the brash and arrogant Sixth Doctor, because her no bullshit schoolmarm demeanor is always capable of keeping this version of the Doctor in check and she appears to finally be an intellectual equal of the Doctor. The Doctor and Evelyn quarrel throughout most of this story like an old married couple and poor Mel is usually caught in the role of referee trying to separate them. Russell's handling of this is so infuriatingly charming you can't help but root for these two to somehow break the chains of forbidden love and retire to some groovy space bungalow on a distant planet. Alas...

Recommended...?

Doctor Who: Dragonfire (1989)

The Doctor and Mel arrive in the space trading colony known as Iceworld in search of adventure. There they discover the intergalactic rogue Sabalom Glitz, a dodgy stolen treasure map, and tales of a dragon's horde hidden deep in the ice caverns below. Oh, and a precocious teenager with a fondness for explosives named Ace. The only thing standing in their way is a banished ice vampire by the name of Kane who just so happens to also desire the treasure. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll have a face melting good time. It's Dragonfire!

My continuing journey with Target Books' novelizations of Doctor Who stories continues with Dragonfire by Ian Briggs. I'd heard good things about this one (namely the author expanding some sections that were cut from the screenplay he wrote) and it's a television story I find to be fairly decent, but ultimately this one was as by-the-numbers and run of the mill as you can get with the old Target collection. Competently written, but extremely workmanlike throughout most of the pages.

The story is sort-of The Maltese Falcon in a bunch of caves beneath a shopping mall in space. It's also the late 80's in the midst of Thatcherism when this was written, so I'm sure there's supposed to be some standard Britbong angst over the 'evils of capitalism' or some such doggerel worked into the background of Iceworld, but it never truly feels like a fully baked idea. For the most part, Dragonfire is standard Doctor Who running through corridors kind of stuff. There is quite a... not necessarily a plot hole, but a staggering logic gap when it concerns the villain Kane and his ongoing exile on Iceworld. He apparently has great power even in his banishment, yet chooses to become what is essentially the hermetical landlord of the trading post for what seems hundreds of years. And of all the probable competent types to land in Iceworld over the many years, Kane chooses the halfwit Sabalom Glitz to try and use as a patsy to get the coveted dragon's treasure for him. There's some strange plotting and character decisions going on here, as if the story was rushed out the door to meet a deadline.

Dragonfire is also notable for being the introduction of Ace, played by Sophie Aldred in the television series. The Seventh Doctor and Ace are probably my favorite pairing on-screen, so I have no complaints about the character appearing here for the first time. Her introduction is obviously an allusion to The Wizard of Oz with how she is a seemingly normal girl whisked away from her bedroom to a strange new world. Many stories and one hell of a character arc later, we discover the reason for the time storm that brings Ace to Iceworld in the first place and how her meeting with the Doctor was fated to happen. But that turn of events is thanks to then-script editor Andrew Cartmel. It's telling that the best part of this particular novel is the Doctor's farewell scene with Mel, which was dialogue originally written by Andrew Cartmel and not Ian Briggs. Its elegance stands out noticeably amid the standard dogsbody prose:

That's right, yes, you're going. Been gone for ages. Already gone, still here, just arrived, haven't even met you yet. It all depends on who you are and how you look at it. Strange business, time.

I will concede that the expanded areas of the story by Ian Briggs are at least somewhat interesting. The notorious cliffhanger at the end of part one where the Doctor is hanging by his umbrella from the edge of an ice chasm now at least makes a modicum of sense. And there's some brief but powerful character development for a couple of redshirts in Kane's crew. You'll also never feel so sad about a child losing a teddy bear as you will in this novel.

One original idea by Ian Briggs that was dropped from the television adaption because of sensitivity issues is the idea that Ace and Glitz had a relationship of some description before the Doctor and Mel arrive. I'm guessing it was axed because Ace is supposed to be a teenager and Glitz is a hairy forty-something dude. There's just a hint of the idea still in this novelization though, as Glitz "knows the way to Ace's room". Scandalous!

Ultimately, Dragonfire is not a terrible read, but it's certainly one for the top-tier superfans of Doctor Who only.

Star Trek: Bloodthirst (1987)

Captain's Log, supplemental. A distress call from the outpost Tanis has put on hold any chance of me bedding down another alien babe. Now, the only survivor of a hot lab catastrophe is loose aboard the Enterprise, and some of the crew think the man is a... blood sucking vampire of old Earth mythology. Naturally, Mr. Spock believes this theory to be most illogical. But some of our crew are now displaying signs of... vampirism. The only cure may be to record another half dozen Priceline commercials and hope for the best. Kirk out.

I usually have mixed feelings about Star Trek trying its hand at the horror genre. None of the horror-themed episodes from the original series right up until the Star Trek series concluded with Enterprise would make a 'best-of' list for me. I concede there's more than enough room for a horror element to be explored in the Trek universe, but the way the series would usually approach it always came across as a television show trying too hard to do something it's not normally equipped for. That, and the horror episodes usually became fairly one-note in a hurry. How many dreary 'nightmare' episodes of The Next Generation did we endure through anyway? The few times horror did work in Star Trek was usually more of the psychological variety and it very often involved Chief O'Brien being made to suffer in various sadistic ways in the dreaming world to further amplify the true horror of being married to series villain Keiko O'Brien in the real world. But I digress...

Bloodthirst is a Star Trek novel set in the original series timeline that takes that spooky Spirit of Halloween set from the episode "Catspaw" and turns it up a notch. It is, more or less, a version of Dracula in space. And the entire novel builds itself up to one shining moment when our erstwhile Russian navigator Pavel Chekov gets to say the word... "wampires". No, I'm not kidding. Yes, it's as awesome as you think it is.

The author of Bloodthirst wrote a number of Trek novels between the mid 80's into the early 2000's, including several of the film novelizations. J.M. Dillard is the Star Trek pen name of one Jeanne Kalogridis, who unsurprisingly went on to write a series of vampire novels in the 90's. Bloodthirst is clearly something of a love letter to Dracula and a plethora of other vampire related fiction, although the main antagonist is not a traditional vampire. Dillard cleverly spruces the story up with a sci-fi aspect, fashioning the villain's bloodthirsty state as the result of an illegally developed bioweapon from a backwater Federation outpost. There are other villains for Kirk and the crew to contend with besides the would-be Nosferatu, including a rogue admiral and an eleventh hour visit from the Romulans.

Because there's only so much that can be done with the series regulars, Dillard introduces several of her own original characters to the crew of the Enterprise. The original characters are mostly red shirts in the security team, but surprisingly none of them feel like throwaway characters. We have Stanger, a former lieutenant demoted down to the lowest ranks because of a rather foolish decision to take the blame for a crime he didn't commit. Tomson, the stern-faced viking woman who has become the ship's chief of security. Lamia, an Andorian ensign who is one of the few blue-skinned women in proximity to Kirk that hasn't boned with him yet. And Lisa Nguyen, the sensitive one who is wrestling with the idea of leaving the Federation for life on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. There's also a kooky admiral named Waverleigh who is apparently old friends with Kirk, drinks heavily, and talks to taxidermic animals. There's one exchange this character has with Kirk where the captain concludes the conversation by saying: "Admiral, you are weird." which had me rolling because it's such a bizarre line but I can also hear Shatner delivering that line with the usual ham.

Of the regulars, while Kirk and Spock have some moments, because the story doubles as a medical mystery, Bloodthirst is undoubtedly a McCoy episode. Good ol' Bones gets plenty of screen time in this novel while he struggles to understand the bio-engineered virus and plays human chess with the vampiric virus creator Dr. Fauci Adams. Nurse Chapel is also featured prominently in the story, but I won't spoil her role for anyone interested in tracking this novel down in the future.

I had some fun with this one. The writing keeps a fairly brisk pace and there were a few genuinely squeamish moments if you're really into the horror aspects, but the novel manages to course-correct back to traditional sci-fi as the climax draws closer. Recommended.

Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond (2023)

The Doctor, Romana, K-9, and Adric find themselves drawn into a transcendental void alongside the crew of a slave ship and their lion-esque time sensitive slaves. There are no roads in the void, but if there were, they would all invariably point towards the mysterious arch and the hall filled with cobweb coated mirrors inside. What mysteries lie within the eponymous Warriors' Gate and can they be exploited to get this misfit band of time and space castaways out of the void and back home? Hunker down, boys - it's a Tom Baker in the maroon coat episode!

Warriors' Gate ranks fairly high on my list of all-time great Doctor Who serials. For me, it's the highlight of a criminally underrated season of the show. Say what you will about John Nathan-Turner's run as producer and his obsession with the question mark motif, the Fourth Doctor's cosmetic changes, the departure of some of the regular cast members, and the sometimes uncomfortable on-screen friction between then-lovers Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, season 18 of Doctor Who with its overriding theme of entropy carrying through all the stories like a precursor to more contemporary plot arcs in television is really what set the show up to have darker, more mature, and I daresay more adherent to the science-fiction genre based stories throughout the rest of the 1980's. Warriors' Gate - with its weird and surreal edge, trippy visuals, and hints of black comedy sprinkled throughout - has won me over every time I've watched it.

So here we have the original screenwriter (and author of the original Target novelization) Stephen Gallagher doing an updated version of his own work on Warriors' Gate. The original text from the 1982 novel is purported to be 'expanded' (although I'd have to read them back to back to tell you if that claim is true or not), but this 2023 version becomes an anthology by including two linked short stories after the conclusion of the main story. More on those short stories in a moment.

Right away, fans of the show will notice a number of alterations from the televised version of this story. Apparently, the novelization is based in part upon earlier drafts of what would become the shooting scripts, so things that were changed or abandoned entirely when it came time to film are included here in the novel, including a completely different introduction to the slaver spaceship and how it ends up trapped in the void where the majority of the story takes place. The way in which Romana is written out of the story at the conclusion is also handled differently, first with a touch of foreshadowing, and then with a more drawn-out and emotional farewell scene. I personally prefer how it was handled on-screen, which opted for a quick Douglas Adams-style goodbye, the Doctor paraphrasing Shakespeare, and then end scene. Obviously, your mileage may vary here.

Warriors' Gate and Beyond also loses a lot of the wonderfully weird stuff in its adaptation to print. Despite his best efforts, Gallagher's descriptive language simply cannot capture the strangeness of how the void looks on-screen, nor does he come close to echoing the trippy proto-MTV music video visuals of the Tharils phasing in and out of time. We also sadly lose the slightly unsettling and bizarre black and white photograph backdrops of the world beyond the mirrors. Instead of trying to rival the show in terms of flavor then, Gallagher takes the novel in a different direction, focusing more on the petty class warfare that seems to be a constant for the crew aboard the Privateer slaver ship. He also spends a fair amount of time devoted to the insipid and sometimes impotent authoritarianism of the captain Rorvik. And without spoiling anything, the crew's rather ghastly fate at the end of the novel is a lot more disturbing than what was allowed on BBC television at the time. The author certainly had an axe to grind when it came to middle-management bureaucracy.

This all still makes for an intriguing science-fiction story, but it's one more grounded in our own reality than the otherworldly nature of the television adaption.

After the main story of Warriors' Gate wraps up, we have two short stories. "The Kairos Ring" sees Romana and her Tharil companion Lazlo riding the 'time winds' in much the same way the Doctor uses his TARDIS to catapult themselves backwards and forwards through time to different battlefield eras as they combat an alien parasite collecting soldiers of living dead to create an unstoppable army. In the process of battling this enemy, Romana and Lazlo put together their own little mostly scholarly fighting force comprised of refugees of time. A lot of readers seem to enjoy this story, but it feels a bit twee for my liking, and has all the breakneck pacing of the awful post 2005 NuWho series that I have come to despise.

Meanwhile, "The Little Book of Fate" sees the Eighth Doctor bump into Lazlo and a regenerated Romana hiding in plain sight as a troupe of carnival freaks at a traveling show. I'm going to sound like a major league nerd here, but while this story doesn't specifically contradict other stories, the implication that the Doctor and Romana haven't seen each other possibly since she left in Warriors' Gate does gently ignore the Virgin-era novel Blood Harvest where the Seventh Doctor collects Romana from E-Space. Either way, I found this story as equally unnecessary as the prior short with that same bad hint of NuWho ick in the vicinity with allusions to the Time War wankery. The last thing I want is any whiff of the new series polluting classic Who, so I would say both short stories are mediocre desserts after a satisfying main course.

Mostly recommended.

Doctor Who: Dancing the Code (1995)

The Doctor and Jo, along with some of the UNIT regulars, a terrorist, and an annoying journalist (is there any other kind?) are drawn into the clutches of a civil war in a north African hellhole, but this is no ordinary war, kids! Instead of standard munitions, chemical warfare, or playing Nickelback records on full-blast until their enemy's ears bleed, one side has decided to utilize GIANT ALIEN BUGS long burrowed into the planet. Is this Doctor Who meets Starship Troopers, or is this a more Lovecraftian take on 'be careful what the hell you wake up from deep slumbers'? Only YOU can decide! Reverse the polarity!

Long before the wankery and wokery of the revived skinwalker series of Doctor Who starting in 2005, there were the "wilderness years" - the now-halcyon period of time after the series had gone into semi-permanent hiatus starting in 1989. From this quasi-cancellation sprung a number of creative outlets in which to give fans new Who adventures: comics, audio dramas, direct-to-VHS atrocities, PC games, and of course, original novels. The first several years of novels were published by Virgin Books, which gave us both 'The New Adventures', which starred the then-current seventh incarnation of the Doctor, and 'The Missing Adventures', which featured stories about past Doctors wedged into any convenient gap the author could find between television episodes.

As great as it was for a young fan such as myself to receive new content based on the series while it was off-the-air, one of the recurring bugbears of the Virgin era of Who novels was their insistence on cramming in edgelord content that seemed woefully out of step with the spirit of Doctor Who. There's been many a treatise on why this happened across all corners of Who fandom over the years, so I won't tread old ground in this individual review, suffice it to say when I was a kid entering that brooding age of adolescence I found some of the edgy Doctor Who novels to be wicked fun, but as a more mature adult with a deeper appreciation and understanding of the classic series I find the novels that take forays into the grimdark to be misguided at best, tedious at worst.

But this is already a very long introduction to get us to tonight's feature presentation: Dancing the Code by Paul Leonard, one from the Missing Adventures series featuring the Third Doctor and his assistant Jo Grant. It's a novel that I want to love because it has a genuinely interesting and different take on the usual alien invasion plots that were quite commonplace during the Third Doctor's reign. The story also gives us a vastly different setting in the north African desert than we could ever hope to see in the same heavily budgeted television series as it was in the early 1970's, in addition to action set pieces that I'm sure any fan of the Third Doctor would love to see. (The Doctor piloting a jet? Sign me up.) The author also provides characters from UNIT, such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Captain Mike Yates, some actual soldiering to do instead of relegating them to third wheel butt-monkeys as is so often the case in later-era UNIT stories.

Unfortunately, Dancing the Code is dragged down by the aforementioned creep of edginess that blighted so much of Who's Virgin years. This novel is, in a word, gory. Not that I have a problem with the bloody or grotesque crossing over into science-fiction, but it was always handled delicately in Doctor Who, primarily because it was still considered a family show. There were frightening things shown on the screen from time to time, but there was always a line and the producers, directors, and designers of classic Who never crossed it. Dancing the Code on the other hand has bucketloads of random NPC's getting brutally murdered at every turn. Paul Leonard seems to gleefully flaunt the Virgin-era trope of attempting to shock the reader by introducing a completely superfluous character to us and giving the reader just a tiny bit of insight into their life before something suddenly jumps out at them and rips them apart a page or two later, complete with the hackneyed "the last thought through his head was..." line that never seems to hit home because we simply don't care about these characters. But then there's also really gnarly and joyless things like Jo having to watch a little girl in a desert camp die after a bombing because part of a bicycle lodged through her chest, or doomed characters essentially melting into stinking goo in front of others.

Again, there's a time and place for mature, boundary pushing, revolting R-rated stuff, but I don't believe Doctor Who is the proper venue for it at all.

There was definitely some good that came out of the Virgin Missing Adventures, but Dancing the Code is one you can safely skip.

Doctor Who: The TV Movie (2021)

The Doctor is tricked by his oldest enemy - the Master - to land the TARDIS in a Canadian city San Francisco, where he is gunned down by some hoods with shitty trigger discipline. After regenerating into the guy from Withnail and I, the Doctor recruits a pretty young lady (gee, who would have guessed?) and formulates a plan to stop the Master from destroying the world. Motorcycles and Y2K hysteria abound! Would you like a jelly baby?

Because I fell off Doctor Who fandom for several years once it started to become Doctor Woke, I had no idea Target Books were publishing reprints of old Doctor Who novelizations until I recently ran across some by happenstance at a local bookstore. I picked up a few because I'm a cheap whore for nostalgia, and the first one I tore into was Gary Russell's The TV Movie - which I later discovered is an altered, souped up version of the original 1996 novelization which had the even more creative title of The Novel of the Film.

I suppose a word about the Doctor Who TV movie is in order before I proceed with talking about the novelization any further. Well... it's certainly a thing that happened. My stance on Doctor Who is that the series ended definitively in 1989 and never really returned. The original novels and later the Big Finish audio dramas kept the spirit of the series alive in an expanded universe format, but what we received in 2005 may have been called Doctor Who, but it was now loud and hyper-active and tended to eschew science-fiction in favor of emotional wankery. (And I won't even comment on the war crimes committed once Chris Chibnall got his claws into the show.) In between the actual series of Doctor Who and the pretender series we had this strange one-off television movie with all kinds of Americanized compromises on a decades old British institution. Of course it was never going to work. Even with the rose-tinted glasses on, it's still a tough watch all these years later. But there are moments of greatness. Okay, maybe that's a stretch. There are moments of potential greatness. Okay, that could be a stretch too. Well... there are moments.

This reprint has a chance to improve upon some issues contained within both the TV movie itself and the original novelization. Yep, it wasn't just the tele-movie that was a clusterfuck. The book was based upon an earlier draft of the script, which meant by the time it was released to the public there were quite a few discrepancies between the pages of the book and the events on-screen. So with the 2021 version we have a lot of lines of dialogue cleaned up to be more in line with the film and some minor continuity errors corrected. We also get a little mini-adventure with the Seventh Doctor actually collecting the Master's ashes on Skaro and comically evading a Dalek sentry while doing so. However, I think the one change most fans will be happy that this retooled version of the novelization rectified is the biggest flub from the tele-movie - you know exactly what I'm talking about, it's the stupid "half-human" line - which is now re-framed as the Doctor telling a joke. A near-perfect fix.

I actually enjoyed this book. The prose is about what you'd expect from an author highly influenced by the breezy style of Terrance Dicks and while it's nothing to really sink your teeth into, sometimes you're just looking for one of those carefree reads. I still think the plot is pretty threadbare and Grace, the Doctor's de-facto companion for this adventure, ultimately foils the villain's scheme by messing with some wires instead of the Doctor doing something clever or heroic to save the planet, but these are failings of the original script this book is based upon. There's still some moments of gravitas to savor, such as the Doctor trying to return to reality after a particularly traumatic regeneration or the horror scenes of the paramedic Bruce becoming the Master and then coldly offing his loving wife. If there's one thing I did genuinely enjoy about the TV movie, it's Eric Roberts hamming it up as the Master, so I appreciated all of his theatrical dialogue in this novel.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Siege (1993)

A serial killer is loose aboard DS9 and it's not just any serial killer, it's a shapeshifter. Can Odo put a stop to the murders before the station runs out of red shirts? And will Odo be able to find out about his people from the murderous shapeshifter? (Spoiler: this is a season one story, so no!) And in what would constitute the b-plots in a regular episode of Deep Space Nine, an alien evangelist and his family show up to annoy everyone around them, O'Brien tries to learn a magic trick to impress a toddler, and a spurned former business rival of Quark's shows up with a wild scheme to buy the entire space station from the Bajorans.

Despite being a fan of Star Trek since my youth, I have never read one of the novels related to the series until now. I'm not really sure what kept me away from the books, other than perhaps intimidation at the sheer number of them in existence. Seriously, just take a gander at the list of Trek novels on Wikipedia sometime. These damn things reproduce faster than a Tribble.

However, I recently came across a listing for a whole batch of Trek books on an auction site for a steal of a price, and the majority of them were Deep Space Nine books, which made the deal even more enticing for me. Deep Space Nine, if you didn't know, is proven to be the superior version of Star Trek appreciated by real manly men who are desired by all the womenfolk and frequently bench-press like Jesse Ventura getting prepped for a role in Predator. I don't make the rules, folks! Just letting you know how it is...

So anyway, The Siege by Peter David (not to be confused with the season two episode of DS9 of the same name). What a hell of a book to begin my journey with Star Trek in prose with. I didn't do much research, but from what little I did, I gather The Siege has something of a dubious reputation in some fandom circles. Some people with more delicate sensitivities hate it. Those people would be nerds. Me, an intellectual... well, I loved it.

Let's consider for a moment all the dark and dire things in The Siege:

-Quark has a holosuite sex program featuring Jax and Kira. Finally, a Trek writer acknowledges what the majority of us would end up using the holosuite for: porn.
-Bashir has a program created in said holosuite featuring a dying child. He then tricks the mother of said child into the holosuite so she can watch the child die in order to coerce and traumatize her into accepting Bashir's treatment for her actual child's terminal illness - a treatment that goes against her and her son's religious beliefs AND ultimately causes her to lose her faith in her god AND results in her getting divorced AND sees her and her son now exiled from her own people. Our Man Bashir delivering the highly ethical Hippocratic results as always!
-Oh, and there's the killer on the loose too. We read about a series of exceedingly brutal, gruesome, and graphic murders - one of which a small child and her sexual assault survivor mother are witnesses to. Just peachy.

And... most heinous of all...

-Keiko O'Brien *shudder*

And of course, there's Odo's insane shapeshifting power levels where he's doing Mr. Fantastic-esque feats of stretching and maneuvering, including some hilarious fight scenes with his shapeshifting rival towards the end of the novel. I suspect the author actually knew better, but he tries to make excuses for Odo's over the top feats in the preface by telling us the book was written at a time early in DS9's run when only five episodes had aired. I call bullshit, because armed with only those five episodes and the series bible, the author was able to nail the tone of all the other characters, especially The Sisko™, who is afforded several moments of badassery - both with a phaser trickshot and as the 'don't fuck with me' style diplomat in the face of two hostile ships bearing down on the station. No, I think the author just had a vision in his mind of Odo being able to have his hands turn into weapons like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 or magically shapeshift wheels from his ankles so he could skate around the villain and he wasn't backing down from that goofy vision, series continuity be damned. And I am strangely okay with it.

It may sound like I'm complaining, but I only do it in good fun. The Siege is a solid, breezy read if you can get past the occasional haymaker towards continuity. If nothing else, it got me in the mood for more literary Trek.