Item - Venusian Lullaby

This book shows what a TV tie-in novel should be -- it very effectively captures the feel of early Doctor Who while telling a story that would be impossible to convey on television, even with a limitless budget. Filling in the details behind various off-hand references in the TV series to Venus, the book is a good example of the "contact with a truly alien race" sub-genre of sci-fi. The history, geography, flora and fauna of Venus have clearly been carefully thought out by the author, but he presents only enough details to help the reader understand what is going on -- a lot is left out, allowing the imagination to fill in details and resulting in a more involving story with a greater sense of realism. That's not to say that everything is perfect -- I found a few details a little hard to swallow, and the non-Venusian aliens in the story are less well-developed than their more prominent counterparts... but overall, it's a respectable piece of work that makes a nice addition to the Whoniverse yet could easily have worked as a stand-alone science fiction novel if it had not been part of this series. The only thing that really dampened my enjoyment of the story was the difficulty I had in keeping track of the large cast of strangely-named characters, but I coped, and in the end, I definitely didn't regret taking the time to read this one.

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