Timewyrm: Apocalypse [PROSE/1991.10.17]

★★★☆☆

  The more I read the early Virgin New Adventures books, the more I note that they're more than willing to blow kisses to the past as well as craft the future... although at this stage, there's a lot more looking back inwards rather than setting the sights outward. A few isolated snippets of an early-days Second Doctor here, an actual hallucination of him there, it's all very nice to see that the new adventures come from the familiar show we all know. 

  Timewyrm: Apocalypse is a very easy-to-read novel, though it comes off as being a bit... stale. Everything from the basic ideas to the characters to the conclusion feels like Nigel Robinson strived to create an intellectually stimulating slice of Doctor Who and instead came up with Doctor Who: Abridged. This is, of course, not inherently a bad thing; The War Games was very much a representation of everything Doctor Who was as well, but the difference between this novel and that serial is that the latter is bursting at the seams with fun, excitement and tension. Apocalypse, for all its good intentions, ends up as a very average-to-good piece of science fiction. The seemingly perfect world, the splitting of Doctor and companion and the latter rounding up a group of rebels to rise against their tyrannical masters, even the reveal at the end of part three that turns the entire story on its head — they're all here.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  I had a good time reading Timewyrm: Apocalypse, I don't wish anybody to get the wrong idea. The problem I have with it is purely hinged on the fact that it could have been much more entertaining and challenging (Nigel Robinson obviously has the kind of writing style to grab the reader's attention), not that it was in any particular way bad. It's a decent Doctor Who adventure, and if anything it manages to keep readers interested in what comes next.