Review: Doctor Who Target Books: Empire of Death / The Robot Rebellion / Lux / The Well

Another batch of four novelisations of recent Doctor Who adventures in the revived Target range, and these seem to be doing well for the BBC as there are more in the pipeline. I do wonder if doing them in batches is the best marketing approach though?  I suppose it reduces the need to try and promote a book every month doing it this way, and it also means they're not working to such a schedule on them.  But I sort of miss the book-a-month schedule of the olden days - or a book every two months perhaps.

The odd thing about these recent adventures is that they're not (as yet) releasing ALL the stories, even though they are a linked narrative in each case. This means that the reader just gets part of the picture each time, and then the author has to fill in what detail is needed. For these titles these running themes are around the multiple appearances of Susan Triad in Empire of Death and the appearances of Mrs Flood in the others.

So to the individual books, and these have very individual styles.

Empire of Death is a novelisation by script editor Scott Handcock of the final two episodes of Ncuti Gatwa's first season as the Doctor, and as such it it is longer than the others. It follows the transmitted episodes fairly faithfully, but Handcock also adds in some material which was cut from the scripts for various reasons (which includes a rather nice, but probably very expensive to realise, sequence on the planet Vortis where we again see the giant ant-like Zarbi (first seen in the 1965 story 'The Web Planet' and never again!)).

There's more explanation of what is going on here, especially around why Susan Triad has been cropping up everywhere, but the book still doesn't quite explain how Sutekh has changed from being a powerful alien with delusions of grandeur into being an actual God of Death. The writing style is quite basic and thus the novelisation proceeds at a pace similar to the TV episodes, with the big climax and reveal of Sutekh coming around mid-way through. There's not much to explain the Doctor's sojourn in the dead and dying universe to find a spoon (a remaining piece of reality), or the - complete lack of - significance of Ruby's family and her being left by the church on Ruby Road and all the pointing and old VHS and Time Window mystery in the first half.

I quite liked that Sutekh's harbingers, and the Beast himself, had their dialogue in a different font. It brought to mind Terry Pratchett's Death who of course spoke in OMINOUS CAPITALS.

Overall I enjoyed the read and I feel that it acquitted itself nicely given that the story wraps up the whole season of stories which led to this.

Next up is The Robot Rebellion and I really enjoyed this one. It's possibly my favourite of the four. What author Una McCormack has done is filleted and deconstructed the events on screen and presented them in a slightly revised order and with additional material to fill in the elements missing from what we saw. Thus the inhabitants of Missbelindachandra One are more rounded and believable, and we understand more the timeline from their perspective, as well as from the perspective of Belinda herself. The Doctor too seems to be running around, in and out of scenes, just missing Belinda but being always on the periphery. 

It's an enjoyable and rollicking read and makes the most of the novelisation format to expand and explain more what happened on screen and to provide a rounded and enthralling read. I could see young readers loving this tale of robots and space queens and gunfights and battles and AI monsters and wanting to see the TV story after reading it.

Belinda is introduced well and I was interested to see that the revelations at the END of this season were not included in the novelisation, so what we are told and shown here is the same as in the televised version. Which is probably as it should be - leave it to the novelisations of 'Wish World' and 'The Reality War' to deal with those!

The third book is Lux by James Goss, and I assume they gave him this one as he made such a great job of The Giggle a few years back. Goss tries to repeat the magic here, but sadly for me it fell flat. There's not the same level of cleverness that can be brought here as offered by The Giggle. We do get a couple of pages told in animation (which are possibly screen grabs off the televised story - I'm not certain) and there's some imagery to support the sequence where the Doctor and Belinda have to literally pull themselves out of the frames of film, Looney Tunes style, in order to escape. The designer is also having fun playing with fonts too ... adding a sort of cartoonish element to the read.

The meta sequences with the Doctor Who fans are nicely done (and they get a prologue to themselves as well) but overall I found this book somewhat lacklustre. As though it was trying too hard and not quite hitting the target (excuse the pun).

It covers all the bases and includes the Mrs Flood cameo at the end (but does not explain or add to it) and overall was an okay read with not much added to the teleplay.

Finally we have The Well by Gareth L Powell, a name new to the Target novelisations, but Gareth has been writing Science Fiction for many years now and is very accomplished at it. This shows in the book as his writing is elegant and flows well, introducing us to our leads, and then the hapless space marines who have been assigned to find out what has happened on this strange planet.

The book, like the TV story, has more than a few allusions to the film Aliens and has a similar tense set-up and revelation. I found it exciting and well paced, with lots of backstory added to help readers identify with the marines. The situation they find themselves in seems hopeless but on this occasion the Doctor doesn't quite manage to win through!

One interesting element is that because the story to which this is a sequel has not (yet) been novelised, Powell has to fill in here what happened on that previous meeting, and this does open up a big question - as on television - as to why the creature's motivations and modus operandi has changed between then and now. There's sadly no answers in the book, so just go with it and enjoy the ride! This was my second favourite read of the four, managing to bring in a novelisation which worked as a book in itself rather than just a straight retelling of the TV script.

I'm not quite sure why the chapters are interspersed with Personnel File entries for the marines, except perhaps to add more backstory to them. My feeling was that this information, if relevant, would have been better served by being included in the narrative, rather than being placed in these segments. However these don't detract from the overall read which is fast and intriguing and more than a little scary.

It's nice and nostalgic to see that the books each identify who the Doctor is on the cover (for Lux this is amended to explain it's a cartoon version of the Doctor), but for the cover of The Well, there's actually six characters pictured, and the main one isn't the Doctor at all ... which could be somewhat confusing!

The next three novelisations in 2026 are for 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit' (Matt Jones), 'The Time of Angels'/'Flesh and Stone' (Jenny Colgan) and 'Aliens of London'/'World War Three' (Joseph Lidster).