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A review by roba
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet by Douglas Adams, James Goss
4.0
It's an odd experience, reading a Who book now. The characters are such a fundamental part of my imagination (shots from the Tom Baker period, including the reveal shot of the Captain's face from this story, are some of my earliest memories; and I'm never likely to read more books by a single author than I have those by Terrence Dicks) that it's hard to distinguish the effect the words I'm reading are having from those generated by the bits of my brain that deal with what K9 saying "Master?" sounds like.
This effect caused some problems here: Adams' story is epic and audacious SF, but even though I don't remember more than a few seconds of the TV broadcast I couldn't help but mentally translate it into BBC production values circa 1978. Maybe if Adams had actually written this novelisation his prose could have lifted it out of that particular hole (my mind assigns itself a bigger budget when reading Hitchhikers).
That said, James Goss has a good stab at moving in the right direction. He gets the tone right, and from the notes it sounds like he's made good choices in including material from other drafts that didn't make it to the television. Plus there's some excellent Adams dialogue – it's easy to imagine Tom Baker delivering it with relish.
This effect caused some problems here: Adams' story is epic and audacious SF, but even though I don't remember more than a few seconds of the TV broadcast I couldn't help but mentally translate it into BBC production values circa 1978. Maybe if Adams had actually written this novelisation his prose could have lifted it out of that particular hole (my mind assigns itself a bigger budget when reading Hitchhikers).
That said, James Goss has a good stab at moving in the right direction. He gets the tone right, and from the notes it sounds like he's made good choices in including material from other drafts that didn't make it to the television. Plus there's some excellent Adams dialogue – it's easy to imagine Tom Baker delivering it with relish.