I really enjoyed this book ( )

On a fortress built into an asteroid on the frontier of the Haddron Empire rests Hans Keysar. Formerly one of the three consuls of the republic, he is a prisoner after a failed attempt to become emperor that resulted in a debilitating civil war. Now on the eve of a visit by Milton Trayx — his friend, former co-consul and victor in the civil war — someone is engineering a plan of escape. But that plan doesn't factor in the unexpected arrival of the Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria, who arrive just as the first moves are made . . .

I must confess that early on in Justin Richards's novel I was tempted to give up on it, as it starts out slowly and introduces a number of ill-defined characters who were at times difficult to distinguish in the text. Once Richards sets the pieces of his story into place, however, the novel snaps together into a fairly entertaining book that leavens the "base under siege" storyline that were such a standard of the Second Doctor's era with a degree of political intrigue. The twists at the end — some predictable, others less so — keep things lively and entertaining as well. I'm glad I persevered with it, as it proved in the end to be worth the effort. ( )

I first read this book when it came out, in either late 1998 or early 1999. I would have been fifteen years old. I recall liking it at the time, which is almost certainly in part because it featured a halfway decent take on the second Doctor - my personal favorite - who had often been the subject of some truly dismal characterizations in earlier books. Coming back to it...yes, Richards does reasonably well with the second Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria. They're not pitch-perfect, which probably says how much their characterizations were devised by the actors playing them on television more than anything else. Richards, who has a famously good ear for characters' verbal idiosyncrasies (he wrote the first eleventh Doctor novel, it would seem, on the basis of a few script fragments), chooses to go the humor route with the Doctor here, amping up his comedic potential and arranging the kinds of physical business that Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines often developed in rehearsal. It sort of works - but it also feels, oddly, rather calculated. The second Doctor has a lot of different aspects to his character, and it was only in the final showdown that I felt like Richards chose to show us more than one or two of the more obvious ones.

The plot, unfortunately, is incredibly perfunctory (although, again, it improves somewhat for the final denouement). Like so man Doctor Who books, it's about futuristic soldiers in space, and the machinations of more than one character to gain power. It was probably a little more acceptable to me in the late 1990s when I wasn't so jaded against this type of pseudo-hard-SF, but it's awfully boring to me now.

Is this the best second Doctor book the BBC could have picked to represent the second Doctor in its 50th Anniversary collection? Nope, it's not. That probably would have been Mark Gatiss' The Roundheads, set during Cromwell's attack on Charles I (and I'm staggered there isn't one pure historical in the entire set). That said, it really is one of the better candidates just by not being universally loathed. The second Doctor has never had a great run in prose, and surely that must be down to what a skilled actor Patrick Troughton was. His Doctor remains inimitable - and I would certainly rather watch either of his newly-recovered TV stories than read this book again! ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1854822.html

This is more like it - epic Richards rather than formula Richards, with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria turning up in the middle of an intricate conspiracy involving imperial politics which are reminiscent of the rise of Julius Caesar, though very different in the detail. Some excellent plot twists and turns, some of which I think I saw coming and some of which blindsided me. The characterisation of the Doctor is a little off-key but I've read much worse. Enjoyable, and probably reasonably accessible for non-Who fans. ( )