This is gonna be a short one, folks, because merely thinking about this book makes me very angry.

Timewym: Genesys is an insult to Doctor Who. As the opener of the Virgin New Adventures range, that's even worse. I almost gave up on the whole book series as a result of just how embarrassingly disgusting the story and its contents are.

For one, John Peel's style of writing isn't for me. That on its own would be fine, but it's his active contempt for the Seventh Doctor and Ace to the point of depicting them out of character for unexplained reasons that make this book a tough pill to swallow. Then he commits the cardinal sin and has the Doctor justify sexual assault with the ‘it was a different time’ excuse. So not only has he deemed these two unfit to be written decently, he also actively goes out of his way to make the Doctor irredeemable because... I dunno, he hates McCoy or something?

Oh, and the book also makes a woman - a grown woman - jealous when a literal child gets her crush's romantic attention. It's bad enough that a grown man is having sexual feelings around a minor, but the fact that a woman three times her age gets envious over this is even worse. Who read this book and went “hell yeah, this is Doctor Who material” and authorised its publication? What was the excuse?! “Oh, we're writing for adults, so we have a license to be edgy”? This isn't edgy, it's unreadably awful and disgusting.

Yeah, and less than five minutes later, said little girl has her bum pinched. How very insipid.

So - the Doctor justified unsolicited groping, a minor is preyed upon, and even then, we're not done with the list of sins this book brings to the table. No no, because Gilgamesh's comments on how he views men and women are laid bare for us in the form of this beautifully sordid quote, “If you came as a woman, we might make love. If as a man, we could fight. As you are, your form seems ill-suited to anything.” What a lovely quote to put in a Doctor Who book, huh? Didn't you pay good money to read about an apish man who sexualises kids talking about how women and men are only good for f*cking and fighting respectively? I know I sure didn't!

Peel is obsessed with characters talking about or thinking about sex. The main female lead who isn't Ace, Ta-Nin, is literally said to be examining her body when we first meet her, and has a flashback about how Gilgamesh said she was hot when they were making love. Can we go five minutes without characters thinking about what they do in bed? Why is this funny blue box show book going on and on about how goddamn horny all the characters are? Why is this laboured so much in the book?

To add even more fuel to this accursed fire, Ace is introduced... stark naked. How quaint, the book is sexualising a character whom we last saw at age sixteen. Ace is a minor. Even thinking about that just makes me sick. Couple that with a character who is repeatedly described as having “bare breasts” and you realise what kind of book you're reading. It's seedy, it's insipid and it's disgusting.

So once you wade through all this murky and disgusting material... the rest of the plot is incredibly dull. The Doctor fights a shapeshifting alien who's landed in a historic period of Earth's history, and that's about it. Most of the character development for said alien is left off to the next book, so... why should I waste my time with such vapid rubbish?

And that's the whole thing. Who was this book written for? Doctor Who fans? Clearly not, as the book seems to be actively contemptuous towards the show, its characters and its history. The suggestive and explicit content clearly isn't catered to the fandom either, unless the intended readerbase are degenerates. Does it continue Doctor Who effectively? God no, this doesn't feel like the tone the show would take following Survival. Cartmel would probably dismiss this wholesale, and so do I. Don't read this book. Just don't. You're doing yourself a favour if you haven't read it, and if you have, my most sincere apologies.

Timewyrm: Genesys should be best forgotten about. Or burnt to heat your house. Take your pick.