2007 Book Log #40: The Sands of Time, by Justin Richards

I know that there are better Doctor Who novels than The Sands of Time by Justin Richards--I've read them. But unfortunately I hadn't realized until partway into this one that it was written by the same gentleman who wrote The Clockwise Man... which was a shame, since this made for a less than impressive first novel exposure to the Fifth Doctor.

Now, to be fair, Mr. Richards was also starting off a bit handicapped with this one, writing about the Fifth Doctor in the first place. My Fifth Doctor fu is admittedly scanty; of the various Classic Doctors, he's one of the ones for whom I've seen only a tiny handful of episodes. But so far my impression of him is... well, let's put it this way. Five isn't half-bad looking, and I'll give him marks for brains, but he's just dull. Especially when compared against the vivid charisma of Tom Baker's Four, and certainly compared to Nine and Ten. I am told by spazzkat and solarbird that yeah, that's about the size of things with Five. Problem was, when I compare this book to the other Richards Doctor book I've read, I could see practically no difference whatsoever between his handling of Five and his handling of Nine, past basic physical description. This does not assure me well that this gentleman would do better writing any of the other Doctors.

It also doesn't help that Five's companions, at least in this novel, are deeply annoying. Nyssa didn't get to do much more than lay around in an induced coma through most of the plot, and Tegan? Tegan was actively grating. She pretty much spent the first half the book whining about how bored she was, which honestly made me want to punch her lights out. I kept wondering exactly why this girl had decided to go haring off with the Doctor to begin with. I mean, sure--Four and Ten do just as much if not more technobabbling than Five, but at least with Sarah Jane or Rose or Martha, you have the sense that even if they don't understand half of what the Doctor's yammering on about, they at least give enough of a damn to try to pay attention and get a decent idea of what's going on. I am informed that this is also rather par for the course with Tegan in the actual episodes--so again, while one can give Mr. Richards marks for accurate portrayal of the character, this doesn't say much when the character in question needs to be pitched headfirst out the TARDIS door.

There are aspects of this book I did like--as with Jonathan Morris' excellent Festival of Death, Richards does try to liven things up a bit by jumping around in time and reminding the reader that why yes, the Doctor is after all a Time Lord and his adventures will sometimes just not be linear. That in fact is what kept me just interested enough to read through until the end to see what happened, but once I was finally done, I'm afraid I came out of it with an overall "meh". Sorry, Mr. Richards. One and a half stars.