The crossover sub-genre has famously paired characters that should by rights only exist in their own worlds and never, ever meet. Over four decades, from the conventional (Superman/Spider-Man, Batman/Incredible Hulk) to the sublime (X-Files/30 Days of Night, Batman vs Predator) to the bold (Superman/Aliens, Joker/Mask) to the absurd (Aliens vs Predator vs The Terminator, Freddy vs Jason vs Ash), crossovers have become an “event” fixture of comics. Although many crash and burn on their titles alone, some crossovers work, due to the passion of writers and illustrators who are the best in the comics business.

Even Star Trek has had its crossovers. The Enterprise crews of Captains James T Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard teamed up with the X-Men in the Nineties and Kirk’s crew recently met the Legion of Super Heroes. Doctor Who, however, has avoided entangling itself with other TV/film tie-ins.

In 2012, that changed when IDW, publisher of Doctor Who and Star Trek comics, printed Assimilation2, an official Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who crossover (endorsed by Paramount and the BBC). This eight-issue mini-series (recently collected in two volumes by IDW) paired the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory with the crew of the Enterprise-D to protect the United Federation of Planets from a Borg/Cybermen alliance.

When IDW announced the project, there was promise of an epic tale. Sadly, the mini-series fails to live up to that ambition. Writers Scott Tipton, David Tipton and Tony Lee have all delivered some fantastic stories for IDW’s Doctor Who comic (Lee’s The Forgotten is outstanding) and for this crossover, they are highly respectful of both properties. However, as a story, it seems the scope of the brief may have been too grand and ambitious, even for them.

Assimilation2 is way too long. IDW thinks an epic should be eight issues. Instead of an action-packed, tightly-paced story over four to six issues, we have an adventure that plods along, despite the scale of the extra-dimensional threat. Indeed, the first two issues are studies in how different modern Doctor Who is in tone and tempo to Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The first issue sees the Doctor, Rory and Amy complete an adventure in ancient Egypt, exposing an alien criminal masquerading as the Pharaoh’s vizier. The second issue focuses on the Enterprise-D’s visit to ocean world Naia VII, where Starfleet is involved in an intensive mining operation to extract materials for the return bout with the Borg. The first chapter is evocative of modern Doctor Who, with the TARDIS team thrown into the thick of trouble. The second chapter is a dull, staple Next Generation episode, with the crew doing little exciting or consequential. Sadly, when the story proper begins halfway through Issue 2, its tenor and pace continues to mirror the staidness of ST:TNG and not Who’s vigour and wit.

When you expect Issue 3 to ramp up the story, it is sidetracked by a pointless flashback in which the Fourth Doctor aids Captain Kirk and his away team against a Cyberman raiding party (of the Revenge of the Cybermen caste). Once that mini-adventure is over, it takes another two issues for the Eleventh Doctor to convince Picard to trust him and overcome his suspicion/hatred of the Borg – and that’s not until Issue 5! It’s then another three issues before the TARDIS and Enterprise-D crews take the fight to the enemy. When events come to a head in Issue 8, the climax is disappointing.

The story follows the typical formula of crossover comics. There is uneasiness and distrust amongst the protagonists while the antagonists predictably turn on each other. For example, just as Batman and Judge Dredd have to overcome their differences to outwit the Joker and Judge Death, so it takes a good few issues for the Doctor and Picard to agree on a partnership for the greater good. Meanwhile, the Cybermen prove more than a match for the Borg, which tests credibility. Largely because of Doctor Who’s constrained TV budget in the past, the Cybermen have always been the poorer cousins to the Borg, lacking their resources and firepower. Yet they usurp their Trek universe counterparts with ease and in the bargain threaten two universes. Given the short shrift they have had in Doctor Who (going from chilling metal giants to figures of parody in a few stories), making the Cybermen “the big bad” is a good idea. Unfortunately, the Cybermen’s aggressive behaviour is more characteristic of the Daleks (I suspect IDW’s preference for a Dalek/Borg alliance would have been vetoed by Terry Nation’s estate). Certainly the Cybermen’s portrayal (characterised by the Borg-enhanced Cyber Controller in Issue 8) contradicts the single-mindedness and logic of the steel giants.

The characterisation of the protagonists is faithful and consistent with their TV portrayals. The Tiptons capture Matt Smith’s Doctor’s eccentric and madcap persona and contrast it well with Picard and Riker’s earnestness. What doesn’t work is Picard’s attitude to the Borg. While Picard’s behaviour is consistent with episodes of TNG post-The Best of Both Worlds, it is undermined by the fact that this sequence of events occurs during the Enterprise-D’s seven-year mission and before the events of Star Trek: First Contact. In fact, the way Picard overcomes his reservations about his perennial foe contradicts Patrick Stewart’s brilliant performance in First Contact (when we see just how bitter Picard is about the Borg).

As can be expected with an ensemble cast, the story is unkind to most of the TNG characters. The Doctor, Picard, Data and Riker dominate the “screen time” and dialogue, Worf gets a few good action scenes but LaForge, Crusher and Troi are grossly underused. Amy and Rory are also relegated to observer status but still feature in the story more than the unlucky trio.

Although her presence in the story is also brief, the Doctor’s meeting with the Enterprise-D’s enigmatic bartender Guinan is the highlight of the comic. Guinan is what the Doctor would call a “time sensitive” who can perceive differences in the flow of time (witnessed in TNG episode Yesterday’s Enterprise). She is the perfect foil, throwing the Time Lord with her ability to read him. “I must admit, you have me at a ... loss ... that doesn’t happen ... often,” he muses. This example of character interaction works well, fulfilling a function common in crossovers – highlighting specific characters’ differences and eerie similarities.

Unfortunately, other character relationships don’t fare so well. There are brief, memorable exchanges. The TARDIS crew’s arrival on the Enterprise is amusing (Data confuses the TARDIS crew for malfunctioning hologram simulations) as is the Doctor’s retort to Riker when the commander scoffs that he could be 100 years old: “Don’t be ridiculous, Commander. I’m nowhere near 100.” When Worf declares his usual mantra that “Today is a good day to die,” Rory’s comeback is “I never much care for it myself ...” But for the most part, this kind of banter is limited and the story is mostly humourless.

While the story disappoints, JK Woodward and Gordon Purcell’s interior artwork is stunning. Purcell pencils and inks the story and Woodward paints, contributing to a look that echoes peer Alex Ross’s work. In close up, most of the characters resemble their TV counterparts and the look is so organic (compared to other comics) that when the Fourth Doctor/original Trek crew flashback occurs in Issue 3 and the art reverts to a traditional comic book style, you are sadly reminded that you are reading a comic!

Each of the eight issues had regular and retailer incentive covers, with the standouts belonging to Woodward for his Borg/Cyberman combo to Issue 2 and Issue 3’s fantastic cover art of Revenge-style Cybermen menacing Captain Kirk. Special mention also goes to some of Joe Corroney’s alternate covers, particularly the Issue 1 RI cover putting the Doctor, Rory and Amy in charge of the Enterprise, and the Issue 3 homage by Elena Casagrande and Ilaria Traversi to the movie poster for Star Trek: First Contact.

Unfortunately, while the cover and interior artwork is impressive, it emphasises that Assimilation2 is all style, no substance. I certainly don’t envy the task the writers and artists had but despite their best efforts, we have a story that, like many blockbuster films, over-promises and under-delivers. Nevertheless, the story is plausible enough that you can believe the Doctor and Guinan can chat like old friends, Amy and Rory can have a quiet discussion with Troi, and Data would be unfazed by the TARDIS’s interior dimensions. This convinces me, despite the faults of Assimilation2, that there is scope for future Doctor Who/Star Trek crossovers. Given IDW has the comic book rights to JJ Abrams’ incarnation of Star Trek, pairing Matt Smith’s Doctor with Chris Pine’s Kirk and Zachary Quinto’s Spock is recommended – or perhaps IDW should go out on a limb and pair the Doctor with Captain Kathryn Janeway and the USS Voyager in the Delta Quadrant ...

At any rate, the next crossover should be promoted as Doctor Who/Star Trek! It irks that Star Trek had top billing, especially when Doctor Who is the live TV program and TNG expired over a decade ago with Star Trek: Nemesis! But that’s just a minor gripe ...

Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation2 is available in two trade paperback volumes by IDW Publishing: Volume 1 (ISBN 978-1613774038) and Volume 2 (ISBN 978-1613775516).

This review contains plot spoilers and is based on the UK edition of the ebook.

The second of Puffin’s e-shorts, this story focuses on the second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon. At times it reads rather like Lovecraft lite: Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s own short story called ‘The Nameless City’ was published in 1921 and dealt with ancient ruins sung of by the (fictional) Necronomicon's "mad poet."

The Necronomicon also makes an appearance in Michael Scott’s story, and his beaked, clawed and octopus-like monsters are reminiscent of the Cthulu Mythos. I wonder just how appropriate these Lovecraftian debts are: when the TV series threatens to become ‘too scary’ for young viewers then negative commentary never seems far away, but perhaps different rules apply to the written word rather than the visual image. In any case, readers don’t have to know Lovecraft to follow the story: it’s more a bonus layer of meaning for those who get the references.

On the whole, then, this is a deft mix of Lovecraftian elements and Doctor Who history: Jamie meets a mysterious bookseller named Professor Thascalos who is presumably a well-known character drawn from the Doctor’s past (and future), whilst Vengeance on Varos’s Zeiton-7 forms a further part of events. And the second Doctor is typically well represented via a scattering of iconic dialogue and artefacts: “ when I say run, run” gets an outing, for instance, as does the Doctor’s recorder playing.

If this anniversary series partly retools Doctor Who for today’s younger readers, another emerging pattern seems to be that these ebooks make heavy use of other fantastic literature. Last month’s title was ultimately indebted to a very famous children’s fantasy, whilst this story focuses on connections to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and begins in 1968 on Charing Cross Road, itself renowned for its range of second-hand and collectors’ bookshops. It’ll be intriguing to see whether this bibliophilic, bookish strand continues through later e-shorts, but such is its prominence in Eoin Colfer’s A Big Hand For The Doctor and here, it’s tempting to suppose that “include elements drawn from well-known fantasy literature” was part of Puffin’s brief to writers. Time will tell whether such a device does indeed tie the whole sequence of short stories together, or whether it’s just a first and second Doctor coincidence. (Will Charlie Higson pop up with an Ian Fleming-influenced third Doctor story? Which Doctor should be re-worked via H.G. Wells or Jules Verne?).

Michael Scott doesn't just emulate Who, he also improvises a few new tunes using the show's established elements. Particularly striking is how the Doctor looks out of the TARDIS’s Police Box windows at one point, given that unlike latter-day Doctor Who, the TARDIS of this era didn’t include Police Box doors as part of its console room set-up. And the TARDIS’s organic nature, emphasized in ‘new Who’, is also cleverly seeded into Scott’s scenario.

There’s a recurring sense that this short story wants to introduce readers to the pleasures of culture beyond television. As well as featuring Charing Cross and its bookshops, the TARDIS materializes at the back of the National Portrait Gallery, and Jamie doesn’t just muse about how big the TARDIS interior is, he wonders “how many rooms, galleries, museums and libraries” it contains. Here there may be shadowy schemes and terrifyingly powerful forces from beyond time, but there are also books and galleries and music threaded into the story’s background and foreground alike. It’s Doctor Who coded as a culturally edifying vehicle. With freaky monsters. And the Book of the Dead.

One difficulty with the short story form is that there’s relatively little space and time available to set up and resolve an epic adventure. Consequently, the Doctor’s scheme to defeat an ancient evil existing before Gallifrey is only given minor foreshadowing, and seems to emerge almost out of nowhere. Nevertheless, I can imagine the story’s ending appealing both to younger readers and to admirers of Jamie McCrimmon. And curious conclusions have a long track record in official, original Doctor Who literature, going all the way back to 1960’s Doctor Who and the Invasion from Space, where galactic invaders were foiled in a truly absurd fashion. By comparison, Michael Scott’s storytelling is far stronger, artfully weaving together Lovecraft and loved continuity, even if his finale does strike a slightly off note.

A notable improvement on January’s ebook, this feels much more like Doctor Who, and Scott’s representation of the second Doctor comes far closer to deserving the description “as seen on DVD”. However, with the appearance of Professor Thascalos, and the TARDIS apparently being stranded on Earth, there’s also a definite flavour of the following era: this is very much the second Doctor retroactively composed in the light of what’s to come. Perhaps Scott’s preferred era is really that of the third Doctor, and he just couldn’t resist smuggling in a few series-travelling tropes ahead of time. (Or may be he was expecting to write a Pertwee story, and got bumped up the schedule). But whether it’s coloured by passion or pragmatism, The Nameless City is a definite credit to Scott’s authorial name, skillfully bridging Doctor Who’s eras and offering up a smartly intertextual, atmospheric tale.

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains minor spoilers.

Chronologically speaking (the UNIT dating controversy aside) the majority of the Doctor’s companions from the television program’s classic era have a fairly straightforward relationship with the Time Lord. Dodo, Jamie, Sarah Jane – they all meet the Doctor, travel in the TARDIS for a limited time, and eventually depart. Not so Miss Melanie Bush, a computer programmer from the West Sussex village of Pease Pottage, who travels with the Doctor before she meets him – at least from his perspective.

When the Sixth Doctor first encounters Mel during The Trial of a Time Lord, she has been plucked from his future, during an adventure on the planet Oxyveguramosa – a future in which she has already been his companion for approximately three months (as detailed in Pip and Jane Baker’s Target novelisations, Terror of the Vervoids and The Ultimate Foe). Thereafter, once the trial has ended, the two depart together, despite the fact that their first proper meeting hasn’t actually happened yet. What happens next in the Sixth Doctor and Mel’s temporally complex relationship forms the basis of this new Big Finish adventure (and directly contradicts the ending of the Bakers’ The Ultimate Foe novelisation, which may frustrate some purists).

The Plot:

Travelling alone, having recently bidden farewell to his former companion, Evelyn Smythe, the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) decides it’s finally time to meet Mel (Bonnie Langford) for the first time. Unfortunately, the TARDIS materialises in Pease Pottage on the same day that the Doctor’s brasher younger self is dropping Mel home after the events of The Trial of a Time Lord – despite her protestations that he should be taking her back to the planet Oxyveguramosa.

In addition to the dangers of crossing his own time stream, the Doctor – or rather, Doctors – soon discover that all is not well in Pease Pottage. Former village postmistress Mrs Muriel Wilberforce (Patricia Leventon) appears remarkably spry for a woman who supposedly died in 1964; dinosaurs roam the streets, as do a gang of violent young ruffians clad in ragged Victorian costumes and led by one Jedediah Thurwell (James Joyce); and the younger version of Mel the two Doctors discover working at the Pease Pottage radar station seems distinctly not herself...

Observations:

Written by Matt Fitton and directed by Nicholas Briggs, The Wrong Doctors has the difficult job of filling in a missing piece of a story never told on television, while also trying to avoid any major conflict with alternative iterations of Mel’s story as told in other media (in particular, Gary Russell’s BBC Past Doctor Adventure, Business Unusual, in which Mel’s first encounter with the Sixth Doctor takes place in Brighton in 1989). From this perspective it’s a success; unfortunately as a stand-alone audio adventure, it doesn’t completely satisfy.

The story begins well; its tone is light, almost playful, and characters are swiftly and easily introduced, though unfortunately Fitton fails to develop them well – all are predominantly two-dimensional, more caricatures than well-rounded characters in their own right, save for the lead roles of Mel and the two Doctors, on whose dialogue Fitton seems to have focussed most of his energies, resulting in successful and well defined evocations of the characters at different points in their own timelines.

Performances from Joyce and Leventon as Mrs Wilberforce and Jeb are strong despite the characters’ flaws; less impressive are Beth Chalmers as Facilitator Vaneesh and John Banks as Captain Ksllak, two members of an economically aggressive alien race, the Mardaks, described by the Doctor as "an entire species dedicated to one of the most despicable occupations in the entire universe".

"Robbers? Arms dealers? Pirates?" Mel asks.

"No," the Doctor replies. "Business consultants!"

Joyce and Leventon struggle to convincingly portray the faux-American accents demanded of their characters; nor is Fitton’s satire of modern business-speak particularly compelling. With the Mardaks’ talk of ‘probjectives’ and ‘incentivisation’, there’s a sense that the writer is attempting a satire of the contemporary business world akin to Robert Holmes’ spin on the British tax system in The Sun Makers; unfortunately Fitton lacks Holmes’ wit and skill, resulting in blunt, unsatisfying dialogue and thinly written characters.

Nor is the villain of the piece especially memorable. As Stapleton Petherbridge, Tony Gardner does his best with the over the top dialogue he is given, but some of his line readings are particularly melodramatic, a fault which could have been muted by stronger direction. The revelation of Stapleton’s true nature is frankly silly, though the script nonetheless scores well on the continuity front at this point thanks to its references to "vortisaurs, chronovores, pantophagens; the creeping, swarming things of the vortex". Awkward dialogue aside, references like this are still bound to bring a smile to most fans’ faces.

Despite these flaws, The Wrong Doctors still entertains thanks to its central conceit of two Sixth Doctors and two Mels featuring in the same story. Baker is in magnificent form, clearly delighting in playing two versions of himself, and in her long awaited return to Big Finish, Langford charms. Her subtle differentiation between an older, wider Mel and the ditzy younger version is impressive, and the chemistry between her and Baker is immediate and obvious.

Conclusion:

This tale of cauterised time and pocket universes, temporal anomalies and characters meeting themselves starts strongly but ends poorly. A lacklustre villain, poorly developed characters, and a muddled and over-wrought climax detract from what could have been an engaging and memorable addition to the Big Finish range; nonetheless the adventure entertains thanks primarily to the verbal dexterity and charisma of its star performers and the well-written banter between them – and between different versions of themselves.

This review is based on the MP3 download from Big Finish, and contains spoilers.

From the point of view of early Doctor Who's production history, Spain in the 1580s was what London in 1963 was to the TARDIS travellers in its first two seasons: attempts were made at several points to programme this destination into the schedule, but the TARDIS stubbornly failed to materialise there. Shortly before he left the position of story editor in 1964, David Whitaker had envisaged that he would write a story for the 1964/65 run set in Spain after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, departing the staff with BBC library books on the subject under his arm. He renewed this proposal early in 1966, only to be rebuffed by Gerry Davis. Nothing is known about the storyline, though several years ago Daniel O'Mahony made a commendable reconstruction for the website of the fanzine Circus based on Whitaker's known interests and story structuring, now sadly lost to the internet.

The Flames of Cadiz is haunted by Whitaker's idea, but if anything it is a prequel to it. Whitaker intended to set the Doctor down in a Spain troubled by the failure of the Armada, but Marc Platt places the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan in a Spain preparing for the maritime assault on protestant England. Not only does this mean that a huge fleet is being assembled off Cadiz, but Spain itself is undergoing religious purification as government, church and mob turn on the descendants of Muslim converts to Christianity. The last Islamic state in Spain, the emirate of Granada, was conquered in 1492 by the husband and wife 'Catholic monarchs' Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage brought together the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and thus the larger part of the Iberian peninsula. Their conquest of Granada was first accompanied by a promise of religious liberty for Muslims, but this was soon withdrawn and Muslims - and Jews - compelled either to become Roman Catholics or leave. The descendants of those who converted, known as moriscos (meaning 'moorish', pertaining to a North African, especially a Muslim) were frequently suspected of practising Islam in secret and persecuted.

The theme of discrimination and violent oppression against one or more minorities was very much live in the 1960s Britain from which Ian and Barbara and from which this Companion Chronicle samples its Doctor Who. Inevitably with a production made nearly half a century later, the concept has undergone a remix. This isn't to the advantage of The Flames of Cadiz. Platt seems to interpret the persecution of the moriscos as a direct parallel to oppression of the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain or of African-Americans in the United States. Esteban is specifically described as dark-skinned in a manner which contrasts him with the surrounding population of southern Spain. The burning of his home is reminiscent of arson attacks on African-American homes in the southern United States before and during the Civil Rights campaign. It could be taken for a neat parallel, were it not misleading. The moriscos were not immigrants, but had similar ancestry to their Christian neighbours. Just as the king of Spain could justify his invasion of England on the grounds that he was bringing the country back to the true faith - Roman Catholicism - at the request of a persecuted Catholic minority, so he feared that the moriscos would assist an invasion of Spain by the leading power in the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire. There is a dramatic irony here missed, unless Ian's farewell to Esteban, “Go home to Morocco,” is intended as an echo of white British calls for the 'repatriation' of their non-white neighbours.

There's some entertainment from spotting the allusions to broadcast Doctor Who historicals. There are plot beats borrowed from The Reign of Terror and The Crusade, and the central conceit expands upon the famous “You can not change history! Not one line!” from The Aztecs, as well as underline the fallibility of the first Doctor. Problematically, though, this never gets beyond feeling like a pastiche, and while this isn't in itself a bad thing, as much of Doctor Who is pastiche, The Flames of Cadiz isn't particularly successful pastiche. If Doctor Who's strengths have included genre pastiche as commentary, then this fails on that account partly for the aforementioned misunderstanding of the historical context of the story. It plays with school history and national mythology, in the latter case to a greater degree than its 1960s inspirations, and its portrayal of Sir Francis Drake is predictably unheroic. The cross-dressing propagandist Don Miguel, who is also an agent buying provisions for the Spanish Armada, is revealed through hints of decreasing subtlety to be perhaps the greatest figure in Spanish literature. The tilting at windmills line is surely calculated to inspire a groan.

It's good to hear William Russell and Carole Ann Ford again, of course, and there are doubtless fans wondering when this reminiscence by Ian and Susan takes place. Is there a metafictional Time Lord researcher compiling interviews with the Doctor's companions, one wonders? The appropriation of aspects of William Russell's background for Ian doesn't convince, however, and it's unclear what the story seeks by its adoption of Ian's “I take things as they come” line from An Unearthly Child as a motif, beyond the confounding of the prejudices of both Ian and the Doctor. Nabil Elhouahabi as the morisco Esteban has little to do with a misconceived role.

Given the track record of those involved, especially Marc Platt whose Spare Parts remains one of the highlights of the Big Finish range, I feel I might have missed something about this story. The Flames of Cadiz fails to engross, but that's as much a flaw of the semi-dramatised format as anything particular to the story itself. There is much to-ing and fro-ing with little development. It's not surprising that Big Finish are retiring the Companion Chronicles format, as this blend of retelling and dramatised extract feels too much like an abridged soundtrack album, and the story is too long for this model.

Make no mistake; we Doctor Who fans are a lucky crowd. It’s rare to find many television shows these days whose cult following is rewarded with such plentiful bonus releases on top of the annual new run of episodes, yet since 2006, BBC Books have consistently offered us the chance to indulge yearly Quick Reads adventures featuring the latest Doctor. Aimed at those fans who either simply don’t have the time to pick up Gareth Roberts’s lengthy one-hundred-and-ninth adaptation of Shada, or indeed those who wouldn’t be caught dead leaving WHSmith with anything heavier than the new Doctor Who Magazine, these brief jaunts have nevertheless enthralled readers young and old over the years, and The Silurian Gift aims to appeal to much the same wide audience.

Of course, with the 50th Anniversary year now upon us, and a multitude of celebratory series landmarks and live events undoubtedly on the way, it’s inevitable that Mike Tucker’s new novel carries with it a weight of expectation. Tucker rightfully opts out of including the new companion Clara in proceedings, so the words "Run, you clever boy, and remember" anywhere aren’t anywhere to be found this time around. While some might call this a missed opportunity on the author’s part, if anything in terms of both continuity and the ongoing Clara mystery it make things far simpler- much as Jacqueline Rayner’s 2009 romp The Sontaran Games served as a neat interlude between The Next Doctor and Planet Of The Dead, so too do the Eleventh Doctor’s adventures at the South Pole fit delicately between The Snowmen and Steven Moffat’s upcoming anniversary season premiere coming our way on March 30th.

Crucially, though, it’s the narrative fans will want to assess- can Tucker possibly live up to the series’ fifty-year legacy in the midst of such a rare event in television? Thankfully, the answer is in the affirmative: by reintroducing the Silurians in their 2010-2013 guise, yet meanwhile integrating elements of their classic series lore, the man behind the proverbial camera (or indeed, ‘behind the pen’ in this case) has created an innovative and unique adventure that would be impressive even by the show’s increasingly-high standards on screen. I won’t reveal anything concrete for fear of River Song knocking down my door moments later, but suffice to say that fans of Doctor Who And The Silurians, The Sea Devils and Warriors Of The Deep won’t be disappointed in terms of the reverence and respect that Tucker pays to those three iconic tales.

An author’s characterisation of the Doctor himself is always a vital component to the success of any Who novel, and in this respect Tucker excels. Clearly the three years that Matt Smith has spent in the role so far have given the writer time to accurately develop an incredibly realistic version of the eleventh incarnation of the Time Lord on paper, channelling Smith’s eccentric and humorous dialogue, his active physicality in adventures and indeed his hopeless sense of authority into each and every chapter in which the Doctor appears. The story’s other protagonist is a young journalist, Lizzie, who pretty much fits the bill as the average one-off companion, portrayed in a subdued manner with little overall impact on the Time Lord’s character arc. Tucker’s adversary characters are believable too, each of them either driven by that same lust for power as the likes of Van Statten and Solomon, or indeed a desperate desire to survive on a world which they previously inhabited.

There are one or two shortcomings that hold The Silurian Gift back from aspiring to the level of Human Nature and other iconic Who novels, however. The first flaw is one that’s plagued the Quick Reads saga that the show has adopted ever since 2006, the ultimate brevity of the text and thus the inevitably rushed pacing on Tucker’s part. Perhaps this is a drawback that these annual jaunts will never be able to avoid, yet seasoned readers could well wonder if building towards a climax earlier in the novel would have allowed the author to provide a more meaningful dénouement. Subsequently, although The Silurian Gift’s narrative contains a few unexpected surprises, it’s difficult to shake the feeling of déjà vu of another Silurian tale focusing on the eponymous reptiles’ attempts to take back the Earth, and indeed the inevitable final assertion that humans cannot yet live in peace with their predecessors; seriously, just how many taskforces will awake from hibernation thanks to the Doctor’s choice of postponing their return by 100 years or so? Steven Moffat appears to have grasped the fact that repetition can spawn tedium in this respect, having taken this intriguing race and utilising them in innovative ways in A Good Man Goes To War and The Snowmen, but it’s something that clearly still needs to be addressed in the New Series Adventures novels.

Nevertheless, having been provided with such a sterling first novel for the 50th Anniversary, it feels almost churlish to pick up on its minor stumbles. The Silurian Gift is without question one of the better outings produced within the BBC Books range of Doctor Who novels since they returned in 2005, a fast-paced and enthralling romp that should capture the imagination of both its intended reading-averse target audience and indeed the wider fanbase as a whole. Just as we’re no doubt hoping that this year’s episodes will feature blasts to the past while looking ahead to the future, Mike Tucker manages both challenges with aplomb and confidence. If great reads such as this and indeed the wealth of other CD and DVD releases and news announcements we’ve had so far in 2013 are any indication, then it seems this will be a truly sensational 50th Anniversary year for Doctor Who. Bring on the next ten months…

Reviewing a twenty-first century reading of a twentieth-century novelization of a Doctor Who television serial set in the nineteenth century can be a reminder that perspective, as it travels through time, can become as distorted as Magnus Greel was by his precious zygma beam. When both television and book forms of The Talons of Weng-Chiang appeared in 1977, popular culture’s Victoriana was shaped by different currents of memory, nostalgia and imagination to those we know today. Most obviously, the story’s music-hall setting would have been familiar to many television viewers. The Good Old Days, where Leonard Sachs hosted an hour of music hall featuring contemporary entertainers in late Victorian or Edwardian dress, was a recurring part of the BBC schedule as it had been since 1953. Drama series set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were fashionable, Upstairs Downstairs having been followed on ITV by sagas of the great such as Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill and Edward the Seventh, with Lillie and Disraeli still to come. Television closer to Doctor Who’s viewing time included several series set in the same period, including the turn-of-the-century The Phoenix and the Carpet and the Sunday afternoon Dickens adaptation Nicholas Nickleby.

All these programmes were fed by the fact that in the 1970s the end of the Victorian period was just within or just outside living memory. Pennies and ha’pennies of Queen Victoria weren’t difficult to find in my (post-Victorian) grandparents’ house. Britain had spent most of the twentieth century trying to live up to an imperial myth largely manufactured in the late nineteenth century, of an empire where the sun never set and where British arms and British ships, military and merchant, dominated the globe. Just over thirty years before, Britain had fought, it thought, to defend that empire; by 1977 that empire was gone and with it economic self-assurance and a secure sense of national identity. However, historical dramas set in the Victorian period didn’t just compensate for national bewilderment; they were a reminder of a society from which mid-twentieth century Britain had escaped, one of poverty and disease and rigid conventions governing relations among classes, genders and ethnic groups. At the same time, the culture of British industry still owed much in the 1970s to the Victorian age; it was one where trade unions pointed both to the craft skills of their nineteenth-century predecessors and to the battles won by them for fair wages and working hours, and where managing directors still based their businesses on heavy machinery which had not changed greatly in eighty years. While for Doctor Who’s child audience, its eyes fixed on the twenty-first century, the 1890s of The Talons of Weng-Chiang might seem like ancient history, for many of the adults watching the 1890s might not have felt a long time distant.

This sense of time displacement is relevant to consideration of the book and the audio. One of the first things Christopher Benjamin’s vinicultured voice brings out is how careful Terrance Dicks was to explain the nuances of the story’s setting to his target audience of children reading Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang by themselves. With the visual element removed, the written and spoken word both rely on Dicks’s depiction of the social hierarchy of the music hall audience for initial contextualisation. This opens the first chapter and introduces music hall as something which appeals to all classes in the 1890s, but which does not unite them: ‘toffs’, ‘bank clerks and shop assistants’, ‘Labourers, dock workers, soldiers and sailors, even some of the half-starved unemployed’ are all present but all in places assigned by their spending power. The effect is more raw than that conveyed by the well-groomed audience seen on television at the Royal Theatre, Northampton. It also conveys something of the gap between the welfare state of a 1970s Britain which thought itself egalitarian and an 1890s London which had no social safety net and where class distinctions were dominant in a way easily comprehensible to the child readership.

Terrance Dicks’s attention to replacing lost visual and aural cues with new written detail friendly to an intelligent young audience also applied to characters. Listeners to Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang will hear Christopher Benjamin relate Dicks’s outline of Litefoot’s background as the rebel member of a family with aristocratic connections, and his resigned tones as the elderly waterman spitting his way through life, baffled at the expedition undertaken by the Doctor and Litefoot complete with giant fowling pistol. Dicks’s invention of Teresa’s occupation as ‘a waitress in a gambling club, in Mayfair on the other side of London’ compensates for the loss of Teresa’s costume and make-up, which some viewers have understood as representing a profession unsuitable for children’s literature. Christopher Benjamin’s falsetto Teresa is a brave attempt at youthful feminine joie-de-vivre, but his real strength is the matter-of-fact relation of events which he steadily leavens with urgency and horror as Chang presents his victims to a suitably maniacal Greel.

As 1977 has receded into the past, so John Bennett’s appearance as Li H’sen Chang, a white European actor under pseudo-oriental prosthetics, has caused more and more pained expressions among admirers of the story. Terrance Dicks, in an allusion to the cultural baggage Bennett’s casting and make-up carried with it, contrasted Chang with ‘most Oriental magicians who were usually English enough once the make-up was off’. Chang’s name recalls that of Chung Ling Soo, really the American-born William Ellsworth Robinson, killed when a trick went awry at the Wood Green Empire in north London in 1918. It’s possible that Robert Holmes’s choice of name for his Chinese magician was based on the expectation that an actor of western appearance would play Chang under make-up. Bennett’s casting in this vein drew attention to the artifice of Doctor Who and its reliance on a showbusiness tradition of deception, as well as an exoticism which portrayed the Chinese as unquestionably ‘the Other’. Dicks’s reference in the text acted as a historical note and placemarker for a visual gag at the expense of both conventions which could not be reproduced on the page. However, the fiction of Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu is based on the assumption that world affairs were a competition between easily-defined ‘races’, would still have been current in the childhood of many parents and grandparents watching. The film series starring Christopher Lee was a very recent memory.

Chang’s character is based as much on an understanding of the audience at home as white British as it is upon Chang’s manipulation of the prejudices of the white community. Chang is used, of course, to emphasise the Doctor’s own Otherness – ‘Are you Chinese?’ reminds the hypothetical white British viewer and listener that the Doctor does not share their prejudices. A twenty-first century restaging might seek to reinterpret Chang for a more broadly-conceived audience, but this is not an option here. Christopher Benjamin reads the speeches of Li H’sen Chang in a stage Chinese which suits the status quo, but Chang is now doubly a recreation of past attitudes, steeped in an irony which has lost some power since the 1970s. Nevertheless Benjamin recognises that for all his crimes, Chang is a person to be treated with some sympathy, and his reading of his final scene has the distance of someone dulling with opium the torment of moral self-realisation as well as his physical agony.

Admirers of Leela might feel disappointed by this audiobook. In Benjamin’s reading, Leela is more of a simpleton than she appeared on television, lacking the self-assurance Louise Jameson brought to the role. Dialogue of which Louise Jameson made the most – such as ‘You ask me so that you can tell me’ – is flattened and made more submissive than Jameson performed it on television. Benjamin, though, adequately represents Terrance Dicks’s interpretation of Leela as a childlike innocent in thrall to the Doctor’s genius, whose bravado often exceeds her bravery, difficult though that position is to reconcile with many of Leela’s actions in this story.

Christopher Benjamin’s Doctor is difficult to pin down, not least because he doesn’t seem to have a fixed interpretation. For long periods his intonation is reminiscent of Tom Baker’s deep ringing tones, without capturing them, and at other times there is a mercurial self-satisfied air reminiscent of the Doctor with which Benjamin has worked most recently, Colin Baker. (Admirers of the Jago and Litefoot double act might find that Benjamin’s Litefoot is reminiscent of Trevor Baxter.) However, there is occasionally a glimpse of another Doctor, a gruff and amiable Time Lord who casts a sometimes sternly avuncular gaze over proceedings. The portrayal of the Doctor in a performed reading of a novelisation encourages expectations in a reader and while Benjamin is always authoritative there are too many different voices there to feel one is listening to a consistent portrayal; or perhaps the legacy of Tom Baker looms too large.

Benjamin’s voice is good at conveying the self-consciously heightened sense of danger in Dicks’s economical prose. Much of The Talons of Weng-Chiang depends upon the unknown lying beneath the familiar; so there is trepidation as manhole covers are removed and a deliberate, heavy wariness as characters wade through the filthy, rat-infested sewers. Benjamin and Dicks tell of a London dark and treacherous in its diversity, which it takes the universalist outsider, the Doctor, to navigate appropriately. There are some cautious notes - there seems to be care, for example, not to make ethnic epithets as emotively-charged as they might have been performed on screen in 1977.

There are some memorable moments of sound engineering in this audiobook. The echo placed over Christopher Benjamin’s voice in the pathology lab scenes almost dispel associations with the cramped tiled room and its anachronistic electric sockets covered by even more anachronistic adhesive plastic in the television production. The giant rats are relieved of the burdensome necessity of appearing in the fabric-and-stuffing, and can rely on piercing shrieks alone to instil terror into the heart of the listener. There are not quite as many porcine grunts from Mr Sin as I expected, but care has to be taken not to undermine the reader’s performance. Instead, one can sometimes imagine Christopher Benjamin moving from pathology lab to the night streets of Limehouse, climbing down into Greel’s hidden chamber as a silent companion opens the hatch for him, or hauling himself up in the dumb waiter in an attempt to escape from Greel’s clutches. Despite the reservations above, it’s an admirable reading, with Benjamin moderating his Henry Gordon Jago so as not to overwhelm his narrator’s voice, but not obliterating it; the way he uses his delivery to highlight the differences of class and education between Jago and Litefoot when they meet is a particularly skilled performance.

A release of a science fiction or fantasy story set in Victorian London in 2013 raises a question of genre unknown in 1977. Can Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang be described as steampunk? If steampunk depends on a situation where ‘anachronism is not anomalous but becomes the norm’, as Rachel A. Bowser and Brian Croxall wrote in their introduction to volume 3, part 1 of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies (available free at www.neovictorianstudies.com), then novelisation and audiobook perhaps score less highly than the broadcast version. Terrance Dicks describes Greel’s organic distillation equipment simply as ‘ultra-modern’, which isn’t adequate to the baroque eclecticism of the machinery seen on television. Mr Sin and the Eye of the Dragon fuse the futuristic with cultural signifiers of the ‘old’ in book form as well as on television, though the audiobook’s blaster sound effects probably reinforce the high-tech connotations at the expense of the image of the gold dragon from which the blaster is fired. Even as a digital download in 2013, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang remains the product of a mechanical age when the dissonance between inexplicable futuristic technology and Victorian machinery was more powerful than the imagining of impossibly world-transforming engines; its lacquered Time Cabinet is a gateway for a generic reading which from the book’s own point of view in 1977 has yet to emerge from it.

Whatever the problems it inherits from its source, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang remains a hugely entertaining story and there is much to discover in Christopher Benjamin’s reading. Linger over descriptive passages and muse on how Magnus Greel’s ramblings about time agents and the Doctor’s counter-revelations about the battle of Reykjavik came to influence the programme’s mythology. Hear how both the Doctor and Leela confound the Holmes-Dicks pastiche of late Victorian manners which for all their assumed superiority are no match for the foe from the future. That the story measures its imagined past against a present day which is now very much our history, however recent, only adds another level of curiosity to one of Doctor Who’s pivotal tales.