Vanderdeken's Children [PROSE/1998.8.3]

★★★☆☆

  Quite unfortunate its placing on the Eighth Doctor Adventures list may be (it's stuck between two very memorable books, Placebo Effect and The Scarlet Empress), but I think Vanderdeken's Children offers a lot to the reader if they're willing to sit through quite a bit of exposition and rather long and boring sequences detailing the journey towards this mysterious alien spaceship. Like the best of fiction, it mostly leaves the audience to figure out/decide on what the truth is. It's a shame that this mystery factor isn't enough to cover for some of the more tedious sections of the book.

  The Eighth Doctor and Sam very much inhabit standard Doctor-and-companion roles in this one, and depending on who you ask, the 'derelict alien ship in space hiding terrible secrets and even more terrible evil forces' trope would also come as an exhausted trope for them. I think Dr. Who should ape more and more fictional subgenres, but that's just me. I enjoyed what Christopher Bulis did with it, i.e. ditching the tried-and-true revelation of evil aliens and instead offering a more interesting and complex explanation... which also happens to be deeply rooted in tried-and-true sci-fi tropes. Oh well, at least this trope isn't used as much in Dr. Who (the mysterious aliens and the victims of their attacks are the one and the same, trapped in a time loop).

  I would've been much more favourable towards Vanderdeken's Children had this been written with more style and/or focus (the various stories the book jumps between can mean the pacing gets seriously loose sometimes, something that's particularly egregious in the first half), but I still like it. The unorthodox chapter structure more or less works for me, and the Event Horizon time-loop story is soemthing I normally enjoy very much. It's not the most memorable EDA by any means, but it does its job.