Scan barcode
A review by hammard
Doctor Who: Parasite by Jim Mortimore
3.0
This seems to really divide people in Doctor Who community. Some people consider it unreadable trash, others the raddest book of the new adventures. As such I went in expecting a hot mess long the lines of The Pit or Legacy. What I found was neither opinion was true, actually a pretty middling VNA (in my current ongoing rankings of stories I am reading in order, it is 23 out of 46).
What we have instead is very much a Big Dumb Object story, like Greg Bear's 1985 novel Eon, combined with a gritty biopunk story, like Greg Bear's other 1985 novel Blood Music (there is just a chance Mortimore was a fan). So as such it is a lot of our characters wondering around an alien environment that is weird and mysterious whilst also dealing with a parasitic organism killing people off.
There are big leaps of logic and at times I did feel my patience wearing thin with the over use of description or people being out of character. However, it was never actually boring. And after was has been a rather uninspired set of books for the latter half of 1994 (two vampire stories, two haunted house mysteries, a gothic horror historical celebrity, religious aliens at war, a continuity mess and the interesting but dull Venusian Lullaby) it is nice to see them pushing the boat out a bit and do it well.
Now on to 1995, where everything changes...
What we have instead is very much a Big Dumb Object story, like Greg Bear's 1985 novel Eon, combined with a gritty biopunk story, like Greg Bear's other 1985 novel Blood Music (there is just a chance Mortimore was a fan). So as such it is a lot of our characters wondering around an alien environment that is weird and mysterious whilst also dealing with a parasitic organism killing people off.
There are big leaps of logic and at times I did feel my patience wearing thin with the over use of description or people being out of character. However, it was never actually boring. And after was has been a rather uninspired set of books for the latter half of 1994 (two vampire stories, two haunted house mysteries, a gothic horror historical celebrity, religious aliens at war, a continuity mess and the interesting but dull Venusian Lullaby) it is nice to see them pushing the boat out a bit and do it well.
Now on to 1995, where everything changes...