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A review by futurama1979
Doctor Who: Invasion of the Cat-People by Gary Russell
4.0
Polly, Ben, and the Doctor land in 1994, interrupting a professor's ghost-hunting outing with a few of his students in a cliff-side Cumbria holiday house. Forty thousand years prior, before the last great continental shift, five aliens who can shape reality with song touch down on Earth and begin to shape its development. These events are more related than they seem. Also featuring: tarot cards, lots of betrayals, a flying carpet ride sequence, and, of course, cat-people. The "campy, pulpy sci-fi" warning goes without saying.
I've read better-written books and rated them lower, so let me just say that if you're looking for a really well-written DW novel, this is not that. The rating was boosted by how interesting the plot was alone. Seriously, there were some really original, neat story elements in here; I really like when sci-fi really takes into account real scientific that would influence the plot, and this book did that well with the continental drift thing, among others. It's just grounded enough in Earth's science and history to be super entertaining, while still having really out there super sci-fi parts too.
The best thing for me, other than some of the plot stuff, was the character work! I can't say I'm super happy with everything they did with Ben and Polly, but the things I didn't like were small, one-off lines rather than big overarching stuff. On the whole, Russell did a fantastic job with them, and really put the work in to elaborate on their canon characterization - especially with Polly - in a way that I loved. And I loved the backstory content he wrote for her and Ben too!
My biggest issues were that the cat-people were sometimes a little too silly and pulpy, even for me. It was kind of hard to take them seriously. And then the stuff to do with race. I know Russell probably had completely good intentions, but he was still a white British guy in the 90s writing about Australian history; some of the stuff about Native people came off as weird and a little fetishistic.
I've read better-written books and rated them lower, so let me just say that if you're looking for a really well-written DW novel, this is not that. The rating was boosted by how interesting the plot was alone. Seriously, there were some really original, neat story elements in here; I really like when sci-fi really takes into account real scientific that would influence the plot, and this book did that well with the continental drift thing, among others. It's just grounded enough in Earth's science and history to be super entertaining, while still having really out there super sci-fi parts too.
The best thing for me, other than some of the plot stuff, was the character work! I can't say I'm super happy with everything they did with Ben and Polly, but the things I didn't like were small, one-off lines rather than big overarching stuff. On the whole, Russell did a fantastic job with them, and really put the work in to elaborate on their canon characterization - especially with Polly - in a way that I loved. And I loved the backstory content he wrote for her and Ben too!
My biggest issues were that the cat-people were sometimes a little too silly and pulpy, even for me. It was kind of hard to take them seriously. And then the stuff to do with race. I know Russell probably had completely good intentions, but he was still a white British guy in the 90s writing about Australian history; some of the stuff about Native people came off as weird and a little fetishistic.