"I told Nappy to stay out of Russia...but he wouldn't listen"
Written: Dec 15 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Kind of an interesting plot
Cons: Not much tension, a couple of logic holes.
The Bottom Line: The bottom line was one of Napoleon's generals in a past life!
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| hist's Full Review: Doctor Who: World Game Books |
World Game by Terrance Dicks
A Brief Description of Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a science fiction adventure series about the Doctor and one (or more) of his companions. They travel around in the TARDIS, which looks like an English police box, but is really a time travel machine. It's bigger on the inside then on the outside. The Doctor is a Time Lord, a race of beings who can regenerate when their current body is dying. So far, the Doctor has regenerated seven times, which means he's on his eighth incarnation.
The book series consists of two lines: a line about the Eighth Doctor and his companions, and a line that consists of "past Doctors" (Numbers 1-7). The past Doctors are from the TV series that ended in 1989, while the Eighth has only been seen on television in a movie on the Fox network in 1996.
World Game is a novel starring the Second Doctor by himself
Terrance Dicks is almost the elder statesman of Doctor Who novels. He’s been involved with the series, in one capacity or another, for almost forty years. In fact, many Who fans grew up with Dicks’ novelizations of the various episodes as their only Doctor Who reading. When the novels became a little more adult in tone, however, Dicks seemed to try too hard to change. He would either write continuity-heavy nostalgia pieces (Deadly Reunion) or he would try too hard to be edgy and write some really horrible stuff. So it was nice to see something like World Game, a nice historical piece with some interesting characters and a bit more adult content that doesn’t quite pass over into something that might be written by a sick uncle (though a couple of things did make me roll my eyes). It’s an average novel compared to most other Who books, but it’s decidedly one of Dicks’ best.
The Second Doctor has been captured by his people, the Time Lords (the last Second Doctor televised episode). He has broken their cardinal rule by interfering in the affairs of other planets (Time Lords observe, they do not meddle). Thus, he is sentenced to death. Instead of death, however, the Celestial Intervention Agency, the secret organization that will stoop to interfering when necessary, recruits him to investigate some historical anomalies on Earth. Someone is messing with the timelines, and the CIA does not want their fingerprints on anything that happens. They assign a Time Lady to him, Serena (whose name is much longer than that), to keep an eye on him. As they go back to 1794, Napoleon is about to be executed, but another woman intervenes and saves him. Is this part of some elaborate game through Time? Why is somebody trying to assassinate the future Duke of Wellington? And what can the Doctor do to stop it? He is only supposed to investigate and then report back, but that doesn’t sound like the Doctor, does it? The amoral Players are back, and it’s time for the ultimate game, which could wreck Earth’s timeline forever.
I’ll concentrate on the negative first, because I did really enjoy the novel and I’d like to end on a positive note. First, and the most minor, it wouldn’t be a current Terrance Dicks novel if there wasn’t a threatened rape in it. This is really becoming tiresome in Dicks’ novels, as if he thinks that’s the best way to be “edgy.” Thankfully, it doesn’t even come close to happening, but it still made me stop and say “not again, Terrance” when I hit that part.
Secondly, the prose and the plotting need a bit more work. Three times in the first thirty pages, a woman is described as either “startlingly beautiful” or with “startlingly blue eyes.” You really need to find another word, Terrance. Then, the Countess trusts somebody who apparently turns against the Doctor *way* too easily, which is very out of character for her. Of course, the counter-betrayal was so predictable anyway that it didn’t really harm the book that much. Finally, the Players are immortal beings playing this game with humans, but they apparently don’t have very good time travel, as the Countess wants the secrets of the Doctor’s TARDIS. Unfortunately, the Countess also recognizes the Doctor from the game that was being played in 1915, which would seem to indicate that they are able to go to all time periods. Which is it?
That’s about it for the negatives, though. While the prose is rather pedestrian, it more than serves its purpose and it has some interesting stuff in it. He seems to want to showcase his historical research, as he has the Doctor (or others) educating Serena about everything to do with Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars, as well as the French revolution. There is a *lot* of history packed into this book, and while occasionally it drags the book down when Dicks explains it, overall it was quite interesting. Unfortunately, the wealth of historical detail makes one of the non-historical details stand out even more. He references Sharpe (from Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series) by name, which completely threw me out of the book for a moment. Evidently, in Sharpe’s Triumph, Sharpe saves Wellington’s life. Dicks has to namecheck him, which was really annoying. There’s so much real stuff in here, why throw in a fictional reference? I guess Sharpe fans will be happy.
Dicks’ characterization is pretty good in this book too. He usually gets the Doctor right, and this time is no exception, though he’s not exceptional. I could see Troughton doing this, though it doesn’t quite sound like him. The other characters are rather plain, but serviceable. Serena is exceptionally well-done, though. She starts off as the haughty Time Lady but is soon being almost as revolutionary as the Doctor is. The interplay between her and the Doctor is quite good, and is the best part of the book. Napoleon is done well too, and Wellington, though not quite as much.
It also wouldn’t be a Terrance Dicks novel without references to two of his favourite television stories, with the appearance of the unkillable Raston Warrior Robot and the vampire (though I have to question whether this particular type of vampire actually exists in the Doctor Who mythos). Both of them are almost superfluous, though they do make for an exciting sequence or two.
With the interesting plot that Dicks gives us, it’s almost a shame that there isn’t really a lot of tension in the book (though this lack of tension does make the ending even more shocking, at least to me). Most of the sequences had all of the tension wrung out of them by the pedestrian prose. However, the plot itself was good enough to overlook that. If you’re looking for the Terrance Dicks of old, World Game is probably the book for you. However, I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re new to the series. It’s not *that* exciting.
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: David Roy
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