Yikes, this was a bit of a mess. These New Adventures have been off to a very rocky start for me and Apocalypse has hardly reversed that trend.

At a base level, this story is interesting. In the far, far future, near the end of the universe, the Doctor and Ace encounter the world of Kirith, full of genetically engineered people as part of an experiment by a sinister group of telekinetics called the Panjistri. I really liked some of the ideas Nigel Robinson explored here but things really faltered on the execution. It's a shame, too, because there is an interesting story to be told here about power dynamics, politics, and the science fiction setting felt right up the ally of Doctor Who.

What we get however, is a dry, uneventful story. It takes forever for anything to happen, lots of pages are wasted just going from one location to the next, and the prose itself doesn't feel that descriptive or well put together to me. I saved an excerpt I feel nicely gets into some of the weakness in the writing I'm talking about here:

"He backed away in disgust and looked about wild-eyed for something with which to defend himself. Never once taking his eyes off them, he crouched down, and picked up a large rock."

These are two consecutive sentences! So is the Doctor looking around for a rock, or staring at the monsters? It's simple but indicative of the rather constant clumsiness that plagues the book. A major character like Miril dies and barely gets referenced again other than a sad look from the Doctor when he learns about it. The whole thing leads up to a God Machine thing being built and then it just absorbs another major character and blips itself out of existence. That second character, Raphael, has some good character work too, only for it to kind of go nowhere because of the weird God Machine thing. Plot lines go nowhere while twists are revealed clumsily and without sufficient fanfare to give these moments weight, so it comes accross as a very light and unsubstantial read overall.

All that is building up on the Timewyrm's involvement here, but once again, just like in Timewyrm: Exodus, that doesn't really even feel like it was necessary. This whole story could have not involved the Timewyrm and very little would have changed. There are some mysteries going on with the Second Doctor and his preceding regeneration that would need to be cut, but that mystery is utterly pointless anyways.

To put it all quite simply, I cannot recommend this book, and so far the entire Timewyrm saga seems skippable to me. The most entertaining part so far was reading the second printing afterword Virign put in, and seeing how they basically had to reconcile with the series' controveries that had accrued by then. Also, this is a small part, but the cover felt quite weak - barely conveying the story nicely. It is easy to see what people objected to in these early days of Doctor Who novels continuing the story so haphazardly. I am currently reading Revelation and it is fun so far, so I don't know if that will change anything once I've finished that, but until then, I definitely think these books are worth avoiding.