Ten Little Aliens

Well I finished it, and it only took 3 months of what felt like homework for the first 200 pages. I think we should start with the version of this review I wrote 100 pages in out of a need to vent my frustrations...

I wish I had liked this book, I could have liked this book, but little by little, small moments and inconsequential lines wore me down so I am now forced to conclude this is not particularly good.

I'll start with the biggest gripe, the characterisation of Polly, who the author chooses to write as 1.girl, 2.hot, 3.frightened, and little else. To give an example, early in the story Polly gets teleported to the middle of a cave system in total darkness and her first instinct to navigate her way out (after she has stopped being terrified) is to use a lipstick she is not currently in possession of to mark the cave walls she cannot see, and while she does come up with a viable plan soon after the moment still annoyed me, it was wholly unnecessary and made her seem stupid. Most instances that bothered me were not as notable but they were very frequent to a very frustrating degree. Even if the 60s characterised her similarly, which is a big if, this was written in the 2000s and could have shown the character a little more respect.

It's not just Polly though, it's all the women in this story. It took 70 pages to find out Shadow had shrapnel embedded in his face, he was the perspective character for the first chapter, and this is notable because at this point in the book I knew exactly which of the women in the story were hot and which were ugly and why. Every time Ben saw someone for the first time there's a comment in the narration of if he finds them attractive, and every time Polly came across one of the men there's a comment in the narration about how they find her attractive. It is so frustrating because it is so unnecessary and entirely one sided, nobody is ogling Ben, and other than Shade I don’t know if Polly found any of the men attractive

Like, I want to enjoy this book, the mystery is intriguing, I like the idea of it playing with its format in later chapters. There are moments that there's a reprieve from the constant frustrating moments and I would get into the story for a short while but then I'd get snapped out of it by some annoying line. Why have Ben make a random racist comment seemingly just so Polly can tell him he shouldn’t have said that? Why x? Why y? Why z? Please I just want to enjoy the book. I like the story underneath all of this. Please let me enjoy the book! Aaaagghhhhhh.

I wrote all that while reading the first 100 or so pages of the book, before the real meat of the plot got going. It is all very true to the frustrations I had in the those opening chapters, after that the annoying elements of the narration slow down, although do not entirely go away, to the point I can actually ignore them (perhaps because all the characters have finally been introduced to one another so the running commentary on the attractiveness of the women stopped).

Unfortunately while I stopped being actively frustrated by it, the book did not get that much better. The plot started to feel more repetitive and less interesting, but I would say my biggest problem was the characterisation.

Frankly, there are too many of them, it took until near the very end for me to even be able to name them all. There are a handful who were interesting and characters I could distinguish from the others, but that still left four or five (I honestly can’t remember) who I simply did not care about because it was impossible to get to know them and what made them distinct characters. This would potentially have been fine, background army grunts are a dime a dozen in Doctor Who as a whole, but if they're all in one group and half the them can't be trusted it’s a lot more important to be able to tell who’s who, and I couldn’t.

Of the core TARDIS team, Ben is really the only character to receive any amount of love. The Doctor is an active part of the story but most of the time what he’s doing feels at best tangential from the current focus of the plot, this is mostly fine, the Doctor not explaining themselves if par for the course, and there are certainly some action heavy sections the first Doctor can’t really participate in, so I don’t hugely begrudge the book this, Polly however… well let’s just say it doesn’t much improve on those first hundred pages. It feels at times that the author wanted to write a first Doctor and Ben story and Polly is only there out of necessity.

Let’s see, I’ve talked about the writing and characters, I suppose I should talk about the plot, the thin thin plot. Look, it's not bad, just repetitive. There are many times where the group splits up to look for something or someone, later regroup for a chapter just to split up again. It all works in the moment but by the time you finish it all just feels kind of like padding.

There is also the overarching mystery of what exactly is going on. I don't have a lot to say on that front, it's serviceable for the most part, although the resolution in the final few chapters was at times very hard to follow, characters I thought were dead in fact weren’t for no discernible reason, I won’t say anything else in an attempt to keep this spoiler free, but yeah it wasn’t great

I would take my opinions on the plot with a pinch of salt, I very much read this book in fits and starts, it took me around 3 months, and I would sometimes take breaks from it for a few weeks. It could very well be that the novel flows really well if read at a more normal pace. My thoughts on the characterisation and writing however should be taken entirely at face value though as the reason I struggled so much.

Now you may ask, why did I bother, if I disliked the book this much why didn't I simply stop reading. Well it was at least partly that I have never read a Doctor Who novel before so wanted to finish the first one I tried, but mainly I was really curious about the choose your own adventure style section I knew was towards the end, curious enough to keep me slogging through the first 200 pages.

I did really enjoy the choose your own adventure section, it flowed really well and was pretty tense throughout, I particularly enjoyed being able to get different characters perspectives on the same events. It also, mercifully, was written very differently, no annoying comments, or rather if there were I didn't notice because it's in first person and thus not outside narration, just the characters thoughts. I found myself trying to make sure I read as much of it as possible

Was it worth it? No, I waded through a whole load of rubbish to read one genuinely good section. But hey I did it, and now I can confidently say nobody else should ever read this book again. Sorry Stephen Cole I'm sure this isn't a reflection of any of your other writing, and I do mean that genuinely, I know he’s written a lot for the extended universe, so it's sort of necessary to believe it.

A very different kind of story that does its own thing, but also shows just how flexible this Doctor can be.

Our party lands on small comet in the far future. Soon they meet up with a crew of human Space Marines, who are on a training mission. However, when these marines come across the corpses of their sworn enemies, this training mission might be more difficult than they first expected.

This story is way grimmer than the other stories up till now. Death is common. The space marines are battered and wounded before the story even starts. Blood, corpses and body horror fill the entire book with barely a hopeful sentence to break the tension.

And yet, this still works as a Doctor Who story. Why? Because the Doctor and his companions are written perfectly. They feel completely in character. These comparatively innocent characters are dropped in the darkness, but that doesn’t mean they act like different people. The Doctor is still tired, but holding on. Every line Ben says feels like him. And, while a little worse off than the other two, Polly still feels like her kind and hopeful self.

It really is a matter of balance. Constant darkness rules this book, but the Doctor, Ben and Polly are like a little light that won’t be dimmed. You know they will do what they always do: Save the day. And they even manage to spread a little bit of that hope to their fellow travellers.

The Space marines are well defined characters in their own right. The story starts us off before the mission, so we get plenty of time to see them interact with each other. We know what bonds are between them. So when the horrors take place, we know they take it personally.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re not all good friends, but they have a dynamic between them that works for the mission. Some trust each other blindly, some are loyal to their commander, some are outsiders. They take this dynamic with them on their mission. During all the tension we see walls between them break down, while other walls raise up. It’s very well done.

But, while all the characters work, I can’t say the same for the main plot. It is plenty strong, but it sometimes feels like things don’t land as hard as they should. For example, the main mystery. Shortly after arriving, our combined group finds the bodies of 10 leaders from an opposing faction in a glass prison. Yet throughout the story, some bodies disappear from behind the glass. The story really tries to build up the tension with these disappearances, but I never felt like it mattered all that much. It never had a direct influence on the character’s chances of survival, so I wasn’t worried.

The eventual revelations about their escape didn’t work for me either. It is some technobabble about time glass that I don’t really care for. The body horror was already in full swing at this point and that had more of my attention. And while one influences the other, the techno-babbly explanation never really made overall plan around these bodies all that clear, which was a bit of a bummer.

But overall, it all still works because of the cast. The individual story beats are strong, just not always properly interwoven. Finishing this book feels like finally letting go of a breath you took weeks ago. Which is a compliment! All the tension is built brilliantly and I can forgive the stumbles it had at the end. Well worth your time.

Past Doctor Adventures #53:

--- "Ten Little Aliens" by Stephen Cole

When I was about 8, my classroom at school had the Astrosaurs books in them. These books, about anthropomorphic space dinosaurs going on adventures, were penned by the writer of this book, Stephen Cole. I read the first few of these books, and remembered somewhat enjoying them but I also remember that in the second book, it ended with the villains getting boiled alive inside a planet that was in actuality a giant egg (fun little coincidence there). I remember being very confused about the sudden step up in brutality, seeing these character drowning in basically egg magma was slightly horrifying for an 8 year old. I've always wondered why the book suddenly became so weirdly dark and after reading Ten Little Aliens, I know why: Stephen Cole desperately needs therapy.

A platoon of ten battle hardened marines arrive on a desolate rock for a training exercise but discover they aren't alone. First, they find the Doctor, Ben and Polly, having arrived and become trapped on the asteroid and second, they find the corpses of the galaxy's most wanted terrorists frozen in time. Just what horrors went down here? And is whatever caused them still lurking around?

(CONTAINS SPOLERS)

This book is brutal. Constantly introducing new and horrifying elements of body horror and gore: having a tumour work its way out of somebody's pores, a man's face rejecting bits of shrapnel embedded in his skin, a woman slowly being transformed into a disgusting alien being. It's honestly wild to see such things in Doctor Who, especially with the First Doctor at the reigns, the main character of one of the most child-friendly eras of the show. The characters in this book waver between being forgettable and pretty great, Ben chiefly among them being fantastic in this book, putting his navy skills to use amidst the platoon of war-scarred soldiers. Meanwhile, as for the marines, only about half of them are memorable, the others are either killed pretty quickly or just aren't very interesting. Haunt and Shade are the couple characters to pick out, they're certainly the most interesting of the bunch. This book also has some fantastic moments in it, like when Shade blames his failure during a training exercise on his suit, so Haunt f**king shoots him in front of all his peers to show that there's nothing wrong with the armour, or when Ben investigates the source of a stream of blood running from the top of a pillar, surrounded by cherub statues we've repeatedly seen throughout the book, only to insert the line "the statue turned to look at him" once Ben reached the column's summit. Cole's writing is really chilling when done right. Probably the most famous thing about this book is the very unique and creative choose your own adventure section towards the end, where you can switch between peoples view points in whichever order you wish. Absolutely one of the best parts of the book and a really cool idea to boot that lead to some great moments of horror.

As for negatives, I think a good majority of this book is paced horribly. The entire first half is just the marines searching the very plain corridors of the asteroid, which is an incredibly dull and lifeless setting I never got invested in; it was mostly just empty and dark tunnels. Cole describes this book as being an Agatha Christie mystery crossed with a space marines story and whilst that latter part is certainly what this book is, I was never invested in the mystery. Based heavily of And Then There Were None, this book shows a number of the marines disappear along with the alien bodies, however I was neither invested in their deaths nor the answers to them and the reveal towards the end just didn't feel very satisfying. I also must bring up my issues with the characters, as besides Ben and a few of the marines, all the others blend in. Polly's just kind of there for most of the book, barely being a part of the plot until the end and the First Doctor really wasn't the right choice for this book, he never feels right in this setting, I would of probably chosen seven instead for this story as it feels more like something he'd be involved in.

Aimless wondering down corridors and forgettable characters mostly overshadowed by some fantastic moments of horror and tension, some great character work from the few members of the cast done right and shockingly great body horror are what you should expect to find in this book. Certainly not the best piece of prose I've ever read but well worth a shot.

7/10

Pros:
+ Amazingly written and genuinely disgusting body horror
+ Certain moments in the story that were absolutely fantastic
+ A chilling atmosphere, especially in the second half.
+ Really cool and inventive choose your own adventure section towards the end
+ Ben works great in this book and is easily my favourite character in it
+ Half of the side cast are really great characters
+ Though I have a problem with him for most of the book, the Doctor in the third act is brilliant

Cons:
- Slow pacing that causes the first have to move like molasses
- The other half of the marines are utterly forgettable
- Polly has next to no agency in the plot until the very, very end
- The First Doctor definitely was not the right choice of Doctor for this story
- The murder mystery element does not work well and barely interests me
- Boring and uninspired setting