Reviews

Doctor Who: Parasite by Jim Mortimore

andystehr's review

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4.0

I love it when the Doctor Who books go really big and use concepts that the TV show could never have done. Parasite is that! I'd almost like to read a spin off about what happens in the millions of years in the future described at the end.

nwhyte's review

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3.0

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1973973.html[return][return]A New Adventure with an impressively imagined setting, a possibly living cylindrical structure containing madly mutating mosses, monkeys, and massive trees, into which the Doctor, Benny and Ace arrive and get tangled up with terminal mayhem. I found it a bit of a slow read but have a feeling that may be my fault rather than the author's. The science of the setting may not be completely sound but I was able to suspend my disbelief.

nukirisame's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

hammard's review

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3.0

This seems to really divide people in Doctor Who community. Some people consider it unreadable trash, others the raddest book of the new adventures. As such I went in expecting a hot mess long the lines of The Pit or Legacy. What I found was neither opinion was true, actually a pretty middling VNA (in my current ongoing rankings of stories I am reading in order, it is 23 out of 46).

What we have instead is very much a Big Dumb Object story, like Greg Bear's 1985 novel Eon, combined with a gritty biopunk story, like Greg Bear's other 1985 novel Blood Music (there is just a chance Mortimore was a fan). So as such it is a lot of our characters wondering around an alien environment that is weird and mysterious whilst also dealing with a parasitic organism killing people off.

There are big leaps of logic and at times I did feel my patience wearing thin with the over use of description or people being out of character. However, it was never actually boring. And after was has been a rather uninspired set of books for the latter half of 1994 (two vampire stories, two haunted house mysteries, a gothic horror historical celebrity, religious aliens at war, a continuity mess and the interesting but dull Venusian Lullaby) it is nice to see them pushing the boat out a bit and do it well.

Now on to 1995, where everything changes...
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