Zamper (New Doctor Who Adventures) [Paperback]

So, it was to my utter shock that I found myself really enjoying the beginning of the book. The story revolves around a planet called Zamper whose sole industry revolves around the creation of shockingly powerful spacecrafts. In usual Doctor Who tradition, the planet's population consists entirely of five or six people, while the work of building starships rests on the backs of some rather ugly little alien slug things. This work has been going on for five centuries, and no one seems to know exactly who created this world, or how the apparently mindless slugs are able to generate these highly advanced technologies. It should be noted that not all of the questions raised are eventually answered.

As I said, I found the beginning of the story to be quite absorbing. The various mysteries are set up quite nicely with intriguing clues dropped here and there. The cast is extremely small, but gives the book a rather cozy feeling at first. I should note that while "cozy" isn't an adjective I would be normally be happy in describing a book as, compared to what I was expecting, "cozy" was great. Even the Chelonians who I thought were absolutely horrific in their previous outing didn't annoy me. In fact, I was quite amused and entertained by their antics.

Unfortunately, as the book progressed, my interest waned. ZAMPER has a rather small page count (clocking in at barely two-hundred and fifty), but it really would have worked better with about a hundred less. This is a short novella stretched out to the size of a novel. The middle hundred or so pages consist of people wandering through corridors, crawling through caves, sitting around in hotel rooms and other scenes of no excitement.

The ending of the story is the final nail in the coffin. The Doctor's plan to save the day is absolutely ridiculous. Roberts can't figure out what to do with certain characters, so he kills off most of them off-screen. It feels as though he knew he had a poor ending to his story in mind, so he kept padding out the middle sections hoping that by the time he got to the end, he'd have thought of something better.

Well, he didn't. At least, I don't think he did. If the ending that he came up with was actually better than another one he thought of, then I cannot imagine how unbelievably poor that one would have been. If I had stopped reading ZAMPER at about the one-hundred-page mark, I probably would have considered this as Roberts finally putting out a decent and enjoyable book after two major clunkers. Unfortunately, having survived the middle padding and the final decent into muddled incoherence, I would not be able to say that. I understand that Roberts' Missing Adventures were far superior to his attempts at writing for the Seventh Doctor. I certainly hope this is true. I could not recommend ZAMPER to anyone because of its bungling of its own potential and its sad collapse into boring corridor-running and cardboard-characterization. Yet, it's the Roberts NA that I enjoyed the most. That, to me, speaks volumes.