8) Doctor Who: Genocide, by Paul Leonard

Picked this up really as an experiment at WorldCon. I never saw the Eighth Doctor TV movie, so this is my first encounter with him; I had no idea if his companion, Sam, was canonical or not though I now learn from Wikipedia that she had an exciting life“The Green Death”.

Well, it’s not bad. The central plot is a set of time paradoxes – will humanity survive, or will we be displaced by humane, environmentally conscious equine quadrupeds who are very reminiscent of Swift’s Houyhnhnms? The Doctor has to choose one way or the other, and either way an entire race may be destroyed, hence the genocide of the title. I felt there were one or two problems with the internal chronology of the book which could not be smoothed over by time-travel, and too many cases of a) characters promising not to move from a safe location, then immediately doing so and b) “I’m going to kill you now!” “No you’re not.” “Okay, I won’t kill you now but I might kill you later!” And one plot twist was foreshadowed many years ago by Douglas Adams, but I thought Paul Leonard invested it with a certain dignity (leaving a message in the basalt, surely inspired by the towel in the prehistoric volcano). Overall it was just about worth the £2 I paid for it.

I’m stunned to discover that there are no less than 73 books in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series! Are any of them better than this? If so, I’d be interested in looking at them…