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A review by andrew_j_r
Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel
2.0
This book was the very first in a series of books that started in 1991. It was two years after Doctor Who had last been on the television, and it rather looked like it was not coming back. So these books were created to continue the story from where the TV show left off. It contains the same Doctor (as played on TV by Sylvester McCoy) and his companion Ace (Sophie Aldred).
So let's start with the good. The dialogue that the main characters are given is spot on. You can hear both McCoy and Aldred in the words that they are given to speak. Some of the other characters are interesting too, especially Enkidu, who is King Gilgamesh's right hand man.
However, the bad far outweighs the good in this book. The remit of the stories was, and I am quoting from the back cover here, to tell "stories too broad and deep for the small screen". And in this book they utterly fail. This could easily have been told on the small screen, apart from one major problem: the sex and nudity.
Reading this book, it rather feels like the author had decided to use adult elements that they could not get away with on television. So far, so good, but the problem is that his ideas seem to have come from the same source that influenced the early episodes of Torchwood: sticking sex into something does not make it adult, just a bit seedy and desperate. That's how the early Torchwood's came across, and it's the same here.
One example is the character En-Gula. She is a thirteen year old girl who works in the temple of Ishtar, as a prostitute. A bit tasteless by modern standards, but probably the norm for the time. I don't have a problem with the basic premise of the character, but once it was established what she did ("from all accounts, she's got a few effective methods of giving pleasure to a man" her aunt states proudly) we don't need constant references to it. She's a prostitute, we get it. As a reader I can absorb that piece of information without constant jokey references to it, even from the Doctor (which is the one moment where the dialogue did not work). And with the constant references to her breasts, it was almost as though the book had been co-authored by Graham Greene!
The writer was also clearly obsessed with Sophie Aldred. He takes great delight in telling about how she wakes up naked in bed - he stops short of telling us specifics about her naked form, but then he does describe her knickers to us. Ace was a great character, but she does not need to be sexualised like this, especially given that the character spends a lot of time moaning about the innate sexism of the culture she has arrived in. It is a contradiction and it sticks out like a sore nipple.
Also, there is a scene where Ace kills some soldiers with her Nitro Nine explosives. As far as I can recall, apart from the odd Dalek and Cyberman, she never blows up a human being on the show, and it doesn't quite ring true here. At the very least I would have expected some regret from her part, or a severe telling off from the Doctor. But no, nothing.
There is an over reliance of past Doctors in this story, we get a cameo from Tom Baker via a holographic recording, and towards the end the Doctor has to channel his third self because he is "better at what I need to do now that I am". "Bollocks" is my response to that, the Doctor is the same man and if one has a talent and a knowledge, so does another. And whilst I am moaning, I don't buy the purging unwanted memories nonsense, who knows what memory you might need in the future?
So all in all not a bad story, horrendously let down by the way it was written. In fact, a rather poor start to a series that I recall gets much, much better. I have not read these since their original publication, so it will be interesting to see how they progress. But it was a bad start, and actually I am genuinely surprised that more people were not put off after this badly written, over sexualised wank fantasy. It really is not one of the best!
So let's start with the good. The dialogue that the main characters are given is spot on. You can hear both McCoy and Aldred in the words that they are given to speak. Some of the other characters are interesting too, especially Enkidu, who is King Gilgamesh's right hand man.
However, the bad far outweighs the good in this book. The remit of the stories was, and I am quoting from the back cover here, to tell "stories too broad and deep for the small screen". And in this book they utterly fail. This could easily have been told on the small screen, apart from one major problem: the sex and nudity.
Reading this book, it rather feels like the author had decided to use adult elements that they could not get away with on television. So far, so good, but the problem is that his ideas seem to have come from the same source that influenced the early episodes of Torchwood: sticking sex into something does not make it adult, just a bit seedy and desperate. That's how the early Torchwood's came across, and it's the same here.
One example is the character En-Gula. She is a thirteen year old girl who works in the temple of Ishtar, as a prostitute. A bit tasteless by modern standards, but probably the norm for the time. I don't have a problem with the basic premise of the character, but once it was established what she did ("from all accounts, she's got a few effective methods of giving pleasure to a man" her aunt states proudly) we don't need constant references to it. She's a prostitute, we get it. As a reader I can absorb that piece of information without constant jokey references to it, even from the Doctor (which is the one moment where the dialogue did not work). And with the constant references to her breasts, it was almost as though the book had been co-authored by Graham Greene!
The writer was also clearly obsessed with Sophie Aldred. He takes great delight in telling about how she wakes up naked in bed - he stops short of telling us specifics about her naked form, but then he does describe her knickers to us. Ace was a great character, but she does not need to be sexualised like this, especially given that the character spends a lot of time moaning about the innate sexism of the culture she has arrived in. It is a contradiction and it sticks out like a sore nipple.
Also, there is a scene where Ace kills some soldiers with her Nitro Nine explosives. As far as I can recall, apart from the odd Dalek and Cyberman, she never blows up a human being on the show, and it doesn't quite ring true here. At the very least I would have expected some regret from her part, or a severe telling off from the Doctor. But no, nothing.
There is an over reliance of past Doctors in this story, we get a cameo from Tom Baker via a holographic recording, and towards the end the Doctor has to channel his third self because he is "better at what I need to do now that I am". "Bollocks" is my response to that, the Doctor is the same man and if one has a talent and a knowledge, so does another. And whilst I am moaning, I don't buy the purging unwanted memories nonsense, who knows what memory you might need in the future?
So all in all not a bad story, horrendously let down by the way it was written. In fact, a rather poor start to a series that I recall gets much, much better. I have not read these since their original publication, so it will be interesting to see how they progress. But it was a bad start, and actually I am genuinely surprised that more people were not put off after this badly written, over sexualised wank fantasy. It really is not one of the best!