Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles [Kindle Edition]

Cards on table: I am a big Dr Who fan and a Moorcock fan from the 70s / 80s devouring all the Eternal Champion books wherever I found them. When I heard of this novel I was both astounded and apprehensive - would this be a Dr Who novel written by Moorcock or a Moorcock novel with Dr Who in it?

Well the novel is littered with the Moorcock trademarks - arrows of law, law vs. Chaos, cosmic balance, multiverse and a character named Cornelius. We also need to bear in mind Moorcock's novel for the film Great Rock and Roll Swindle for which he (essentially) reproduced a Jerry Cornelius tale (though a good one!).

We then need to think back to the good Doctor - I am just listening to the Big Finish Key2Time series, and it is clear that the Doctor as well uses the language of law/order vs. Chaos, multiverse, the Key to Time itself is a balance, so actually the language is not that far away.

The novel itself is well paced, very readable and very funny. In fact I was most struck by the sense that the fantastic comic prose describing the bizarre archaic psuedo-cricket / darts / jousting games of the 'plot' (ignoring the hat) could as well have been outpourings of the pen of the most credible of Dr Who champions Douglas Adams.

As a Moorcock fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the look back to Earth history from the distant future - pure Dancers at the End of Time for those that know their Moorcock.

Why only four stars? Well I think too much was added to the Who universe to set the backdrop for the story; Amy was left as a cypher until suddenly taking her place as a key character for the final third; the Doctor himself seemed to have all the faults of the Matt Smith character (appearance over content) and didn't quite capture his strengths of timing and expression. I also didn't like the self-referential ending which also reminded me of the Runaway Train post-ending (i.e. setting up the story by going back in time after the story happened).

I leave though this thought - we've had the Coming of the Terraphiles, what price the Return of the Terraphiles?

First the good news. After a disappointing run of cash-in audio adventures that were light on plot and ideas, The Coming of the Terraphiles is an honest-to-goodness novel - and has been published as such - running just short of 11 hours on nine CDs, complete with fully drawn characters and worlds and an ambitious plot written by a `hard' scifi writer with impeccable credentials. The bad news is that despite Clive Mantle's generally excellent reading, it feels like it's often a little too fully realised to work on audio, with the prologue and opening chapters taken up with so much florid backstory and character detail, often conveyed with plentiful nonsensical wordplay that even Edward Lear might have balked at, that the story seems to take forever to get started and often gets lost in the purple prose when it does. All too often it seems as if even the smallest of actions leads to yet more lengthy description and backgound that would work better on the printed page where you could read (and just as importantly, reread) at your own pace to keep your bearings. Moorcock too often seems more interested in engineering worlds than telling a story: you can't fault the detail even if it is overfamiliar, but you do find yourself wanting him to just get on with it at times.

At times this is more of a Moorcock novel complete with his trademark obsessions and characters - another variation on Jerry Cornelius, more Multiverses, more Arrows of Law - with the Doctor sidelined to a minor player who almost feels shoehorned in, never quite commanding the story and often feeling subordinate to it and the author's already long-established worlds. As such it may well disappoint or alienate some fans of both the series and Moorcock. Certainly it's hard to make a case for this working better as an audiobook than it does on the printed page: this one just doesn't seem quite right as a listening experience and not just because, like other readers before him, Mantle has difficulty with Amy's Scottish accent...

Let me begin by saying I have been a fan of Doctor Who for many years - I followed the classic series and then was overjoyed when it returned to the screen in 2004. I have also read widely of the works of Michael Moorcock and have greatly enjoyed his dark surreal fantasy novels with fascinating characters, anti-heroes such as Elric and Corum. I was therefore, after my initial disbelief, very excited to hear that the BBC had commissioned Moorcock to produce a DW novel.

Unfortunately this failed to satisfy me as EITHER a Doctor Who or Michael Moorcock novel - yet alone both. Doctor Who references were minimal, while characterisation of both the 11th Doctor and Amy was poor. From a Michael Moorcock perspective there were myriad references to "the multiverse" and the battle between "law and chaos", but it was a far cry from the intelligent writing I associate with Moorcock.

The setting was comedic and nonsensical, the characters farcical and the conceptual science bizarrely ridiculous. An awful lot of time was spent playing weird sports events which the rules and terms were never really adequately defined so it was very hard to keep track of who was winning and how they were doing it.

To my mind Moorcock has taken the worst elements of Doctor Who and his own writing rather than the best. From Doctor Who he incorporated the sometimes childish plots and characterisation that is occasionally present in the series but none of the rich history that the series has established, from his own writing he took some of the bizarre conceptual theories but none of the depth of characterisation or sense of epic adventure.

I really regret that this is the case. I was looking forward to this so much.