Doctor Who: Ten Little Aliens [Paperback]

This is the 50th anniversary collection story of the First Doctor. This story, first published in 2002, has the First Doctor, with Polly and Ben arrive in the Tardis in a place that appears to have no oxygen, just a pressurised atmosphere. Donning spacesuits, the trio step out of the Tardis.

But before we meet up with the Doctor and his companions, we have been reading of a group of Anti-Terror Elite trainees, gearing up for their last combat training mission. They're a ragtag bunch - from all over Earth and Earth satellite and colony planets, they all have their own chips on their shoulders, and their own secrets. And none of them are particularly likeable. Led by the tough Marshal Haunt, who has her own secrets, the team are to land on an asteroid which has been set up as a mission zone with killer droids. There they face their final test. But when they meet up with the Doctor, Ben and Polly, that's just the first of things that start to go horribly wrong.

I've never read Ten Little Indians, by Agatha Christie, so I'm afraid any reference to her work in relation to this book sailed straight over my head. But perhaps that's to my advantage, because I had no preconceptions about the story at all. I approached it merely as a Doctor Who story, which involved a team of space grunts on a mission. That's not a bad premise for any sci-fi story, and if it has the good Doctor involved as well, that's got to be a good thing.

Stephen Cole seems to be quite a prolific author, and has written a number of Doctor Who books as well as other books. Interestingly, when I looked him up on Wikipedia, and searched on the original printing of this novel, the cover showed an image of the Schirr, which I thought was good to have available.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I was utterly engrossed from the first page to the last, and I achieved absolutely nothing productive all day while I curled up with this book. The author has taken what could be just a space junket and turned it into what I felt was a really enjoyable, totally credible Doctor Who story. The characters of the Doctor, Polly and Ben really felt `real'. The other characters also had a good solid feel to them all the way through. There are clever contrivances in the book as well - a section showing the space team's backgrounds was neatly done, and the neural network interface section was really clever. I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in the story in this way. This story had a visual `feel' to it - I felt it could translate very neatly onto the small screen, and I could envisage it playing out before me. I think this book is great - a great First Doctor story, and great Doctor Who. Totally recommended.

This was my first experience of reading a Doctor Who story - I had always been afraid that my imagination wouldn't be up to the task. Happily I have been proved wrong with this story. This was also my first experience of the first incarnation of the doctor and it was interesting to encounter a doctor who was constrained by age. The story was suitably creepy and the latter section was interesting with its 'choose you own adventure' format. I'm glad I picked this up.

It's Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary this year, and as a lifelong fan of the show I'm indulging it even more than usual, including spending time with each Doctor in print leading up to November's celebrations.

Ten Little Aliens sees the first Doctor and his companions Ben and Polly trapped inside a strange asteroid with some space marines on a training mission. It turns out, they're not the only ones there. This is a book with too many ideas for its own good, and the result is a horrible mash up. The Doctor and companions are very well captured, and there's no discord jumping from their screen incarnations to the page. The space marines are also a lively and well drawn bunch, and the book just about gets away with putting them and the TARDIS crew in the same story.

After that, things start to creak at the seams. Two wildly different alien menaces turn up, one of which bears an unfortunate passing resemblance to the Weeping Angels from the modern show, while the other... is it odd to say that aliens in a novel look cheap? These do. The body horror aspects they bring into play are well written, but all the visuals invoke Doctor Who at its worst. Added to that, the book traps the whole cast in a series of cave tunnels for the whole story. It might effectively recreate the era, in which the same tunnel set could be reused endlessly for budgetary reasons, but books don't have the same financial issue as a small TV show in the 1960s, and the locale is boring. Add to that some odd extras - one chapter is in a choose your own adventure format that while interesting, jars with the flow of the novel - and you have a book that never quite merges its different tones to tell a consistent story. Cole can write, and delivers the TARDIS crew effectively, but this falls short as a novel.