Books: Doctor Who: Paradox Lost (2011)

  

"London 1910: an unsuspecting thief finds himself confronted by grey-skinned creatures that are waiting to devour his mind. London 2789: the remains of an ancient android are dredged from the Thames. When reactivated it has a warning that can only be delivered to a man named 'the Doctor'. The Doctor and his friends must solve a mystery that has spanned over a thousand years. If they fail, the deadly alien Squall will devour the world." 

Even as a fan of the franchise, have collected the novelizations of all the original serials (and collected adaptations of the modern series), when it comes to the original media tie-in novels, I’ve been reticent in reading them. Much like the Star Trek and Star Wars novels, most are just fan-wank tales which usually contain a lot of continuity throwbacks for the fan readers (I really don’t see non-fans reading these novels) and sequels to serials. Most of the original novels released in the 90s generally fell into two categories: really good or really poor. So based on this, I stayed away from reading the modern series novels because some –if not a lot- looked just horrible. And the few reviews I’ve read on various sites have not been encouraging, either. Most of the criticism seems to be how difficult the writers have with capturing each of the Doctor’s TV mannerisms and translating them on the written page. Others include having the Doctor almost be a secondary character in his/her book. Still, there are a few novelists who do have a following, who do seem to understand the Doctor in whatever regeneration he’s in, such as Gareth Roberts, James Goss, J.T. Colgan, and Una McCormack.

Paradox Lost is rather mostly continuity free (and set sometime after the events of TV episode The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood two-parter) and a rather fun tale (that borrows a lot of themes from Back to the Future II and the Star Trek: The Next Generation 2-part episode Time’s Arrow. So it does have a bunch of timey-wimey stuff, but thankfully Mann keeps the logic in check). While it does have the traditional Who trope of splitting up the Doctor and his companions, the “guest” cast is small, which makes the story flow much quicker. The Squall get the short-shift here, as they’re just mindless killing machines. They serve a purpose because George Mann says they should, but, yeah, one dimensional. 

But again, this is another tale set in past, which has an inter-dimensional invasion and no one stops to ask how London and its surrounding suburbs never makes note of this, Also, Angelchrist mentions many times how the London secret service (which he was a part of) is aware of the alien activity (curious if he was alluding to Torchwood?). The book has the police covering up most of the story by saying a serial killer is on the loose, but the word was not coined until the 1940s (though it became more popular in the 1970s), as writer Dorothy B. Huges used the term “Series Killer” in her 1947 book A Lonely Place.