The Eye of the Giant (Doctor Who - The Missing Adventures Series)

Rating:
Summary: B Grade movie queen rules the world!
Review: One of several novels set after the TV serial 'Inferno', and featuring Liz Shaw as the third Doctor's companion, 'Eye of the Giant' is essentially a B-grade sci fi movie plot in a Doctor Who story.

An alien artifact is found in the stomach of a shark, and brought to UNIT's London HQ for investigation. The Doctor uses his space-time visualiser to find out where it came from, but strange radiation results in a crossable bridge to an island in 1934, where a small movie crew are at work.

An alien ship has crashed on the island, and its contents will effect the future of Earth...

As well as featuring the under-appreciated Liz Shaw, this novel is also used as an introduction to UNIT regular Mike Yates, here holding the rank of sergeant. As well as spending some time exploring the characters, the novel also looks at another under-used Doctor Who item: whether actions carried out in the past can result in changes to the present. And not a very pretty set of consequences are on display...

Christopher Bulis is generally a good author, but I would have been happier if his 1930s characters were less reliant on established clichés.

Rating:
Summary: The Thrill of the Fight
Review: The reason I enjoyed THE EYE OF THE GIANT is almost certainly because I saw the name on the cover and adjusted my expectations accordingly. I knew to expect readable prose, shallow-to-middling characterizations, a straightforward plot and not much in the way of surprises. That's what I expected, and that's what I got. And I liked it. It won't win any awards, but if you're looking for something that just entertains, you could do a lot worse.

"I could imagine this one actually being filmed in the 1970s" is often used as a complaint about a book that hasn't reached the full potential that the written word offers. Yet while that statement is applicable here, I don't see it as a disadvantage on this occasion. THE EYE OF THE GIANT invokes the spirit of the era without rehashing the same material.

There's not really much to talk about here. The plot is adequate, not being overly flashy, fancy, complicated or deep. However, I'll give it a lot of credit for being entertaining, which I expect is all the author was attempting. Of course, on the downside, there's a couple of really odd false endings, where it seems that the story has ended and then it jerks to life unconvincingly like a dead celebrity reanimated for a beer commercial. The book would have been a lot stronger had these additions to the end been removed.

On the subject of the book's cast, well, let me say that I doubt whether Bulis has ever written an entirely three-dimensional character in his life. But he's written much worse caricatures before, and his original characters here perform their functions adequately. His depiction of the UNIT cast as it existed in the show's seventh season I found surprisingly effective. He doesn't provide any superior insights into the era, but he does invoke it well with very few paint-strokes.

It gets a little fanwanky at times (Captain Yates first meets the Doctor), but overall I enjoyed this one. I may not remember many details about it a year from now, yet for the few days it took me to plow through it, I cannot deny that I was having a good time.