Wednesday 9 June 2010

DW: Night of the Humans

More adventures with the Doctor and Amy, it's the Night of the Humans by David Llewellyn.

The TARDIS is drawn to a junk planet, on which several ships have crashed. One, long ago, was a human ship. More recently, a Sittuun ship. And incoming is a comet to ruin everyone's day. The Doctor is trying to save everyone, but the humans aren't interested. And then Dirk Slipstream shows up...

Actually, I'll talk about that last point first. Dirk Slipstream is presented as if the audience is already familiar with him, to some degree. There's references to a previous adventure, in particular to being in prison with the Doctor, that made me think this was somehow following up on a minor plot point from Monsters Inside. But nope, just David Llewellyn inserting himself, I mean, writing a care he was interested in. And yet, he merely comes across as a jerk. Aside from padding some of the book out, he could easily have been cut without any real issue.

The Sittuun could be an interesting race, and much is made of them being alien and not liking the humans... except that they all have human names and are written as humans, so that was a bit of a miss. The humans themselves are supposed to be somewhat non-human, become primitive, but they are written as merely backwards, and not that savage either. The dichotomy fails to impress.

Again there's the problem with the books being written without too much knowledge of the characters. Some Eleventh Doctor moments, but largely generic. And Amy isn't well defined past 'feisty companion'. The only other fully developed character is Charlie... who is an alien... with a completely human name... so that worked well.

Yet another book to put on the 'myeh' pile.

[END]

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