Item - Mission to Venus

The author of this book only wrote one Dr. Who script, the early (and sadly mostly lost) Galaxy Four. I can only hope that his scriptwriting skills were better than those he applied in creating this odd beastie. I'm nearly speechless. Although things start promisingly, and the story and characters almost seem in keeping with the series, it all goes horribly wrong somewhere along the way. The story grows more and more incoherent, finally ending with a thud, and the prose becomes increasingly awful (or maybe I just became more aware of its awfulness), frequently going on pointless tangents filled with an almost 19th-century-style melodramatic verbosity. The author clearly hasn't a clue what to do with the gamebook medium. At first, there are a couple of actual choices, but then it descends into the senseless dice-rolling that permeates this series.... Then, for a change of pace, it's "write letters on pieces of paper and draw one out of a hat." Then it's "see which of these anagrams you can sort out the fastest." Then it's "which math problem do you solve first?" Unlucky options lead to bizarre and nonsensical ends, and, for that matter, the correct ones also lead to a bizarre and nonsensical end, albeit an upbeat one. The whole thing isn't as offensively bad as Crisis in Space, but it's still pretty horrific.

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