Steven Alexander's Reviews > Doctor Who: The Also People

I came to this one with high expectations. I was so disappointed.

I class myself as a "big fan" of both Iain M Banks and Doctor Who, so this crossover with a Culture-inspired society (actually ripped wholesale with a few minor changes to the names) seemed appealing to me. Sadly, it failed to hold my interest. The Doctor, Bernice, Roz and Chris wander about a Dyson Sphere, meet some people at a party, have sex, get angsty about past adventures and generally faff about. About halfway through the plot starts up as they get involved in a murder-mystery, but sadly it's all solved with a bit of sci-fi flim-flam.

There are other problems, basically you've got little chance of following this one unless you've read the previous 9 or 10 books, because the focus is on the characters having a bit of down-time.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

There's also a girl on a beach who is a mindless huntress - turns out this is Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, first introduced in Transit. She apparently became a time-travelling, mega-death causing ultra-being in a previous novel, but here she's catching fish. For reasons I couldn't follow she starts to get her memories back and everyone worries she's about to start on a hyper rampage and destroy all of time n'space, but fortunately she dances on a beach instead.

The Doctor stops a war between some Ships (hyper-intelligent spaceships) by talking to them in a scene we don't see. Also, he causes one of them to explode by doing something we don't see. He has set up Kadiatu on this planet by doing something we don't see. Roz somehow solves the mystery of the murdered drone using information we're not privvy to. One of the characters gets pregnant with Chris Cwej's baby but this doesn't seem to be resolved or have an impact on the characters.

It's like the important parts of the story have been deleted and replaced with long boring bits about a baker and her flying bread. There are so many sections that seem to be coming to a point or a climax, then they just stop and are never revisited. I don't find that to be clever writing, it's more confusing.

Also confusing were the character names. Top marks for giving us properly alien-seeming names, but take all those marks away again because the characters weren't strong enough to allow me to differentiate them. If they had (for example) been paired up with the main characters it would have been easier, you could have said "Ah this is a scene with Roz and Am!Xt!s'Qarvi!!" but they all wander about and bump into each other at random.

I didn't like the philosophical Just So story at the start and end of the book. I found it very Pretentious Hancock.

Iain M Banks tends to set his books on the edge of the Culture, or focus on a character from outside the Culture, because a story set on the inside with only Culture characters would be inherently dull. I guess we've got the regular TARDIS team here, but it just didn't kick into life for me.

There is a great bit where Benny and the Doctor get attacked by little sandworms on the beach. There's real threat to the characters and a clever solution that we can understand. If the rest of the novel had given us a bit more adventure and spice like that, I think I would have enjoyed it.