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APRIL 2007

When I walked into my local bookshop last weekend I wasn’t at all surprised to

see that of the three Doctor Who novels currently in the chart, Stephen Cole’s Sting of the Zygons was in a far higher position than both Wooden Heart and The Last Dodo. It seems that it wasn’t just the regular readers of the range (children, teenagers, me…) that have been picking this one up - I’d imagine that a good few of the old guard have been leafing through this one and feeling a pang of nostalgia for the old Target days.

Now Sting of the Zygons isn’t brilliant, intense or moving. Indeed, it’s far from being the best Doctor Who book ever written, but then again it’s certainly not the worst. In fact, it is exactly what it purports to be: an exciting adventure featuring the tenth Doctor, Martha Jones and

the Zygons set in the Lake District just after the turn of the century.

And if I’m honest, this book actually exceeded my

expectations. I’d thought that Cole would simply re-

hash Terror of the Zygons (or “Doctor Who and the

Loch Ness Monster”, to Target readers!) in a new

setting with a different Doctor and companion. He

doesn’t. He very cleverly works into this story all the

key tenets that make the Zygons what they are, but he

presents them in a slightly different way. For example, Cole introduces a few new elements –

the Zygons dependency on lactic fluid, the malfunctioning Skarasens, and the Zygon mutiny

to name just a few. There is even one especially clever twist that I really didn’t see coming.

Let’s just say that one Zygon has camouflaged himself particularly well…

However, unlike the rather peripheral Macra in Gridlock,

the Zygons in this story are unmistakably Zygons, just like the ones that were seen on television back in 1975. For

the children reading this novel with no knowledge of the Tom Baker serial then I would think that this book would

have the same effect on them that Doctor Who and the

Loch Ness Monster had on many readers thirty years

ago. However, for fans of Doctor Who new and old,

Sting of the Zygons still has much that is new to offer.

Turning to the principal characters, Cole writes very well

for Martha Jones. Sting of the Zygons is a strong story

for her; too strong, perhaps, when measured against her appearances on television so far - she certainly has quite

a bit more gumption here. That said, I suppose that this book is set later on in the current season and so I would

imagine that how Martha is portrayed here is more in line

with how we will see her character behave later down the line.

The Doctor, as ever, is captured flawlessly. The author has even thrown in a few Series 3-isms like “Allons-y” and “never waste time on a hug”, the latter really summing up the tenth Doctor’s current emotional state.

On a final note, I must apologise if this review isn’t quite as technical as the one on the BBC website written by the children of Millbrook Combined School - “[Cole] used ellipsis to keep you guessing” etc – all I really can say is that Sting of the Zygons is a fun and a nostalgic novel; infinitely better than Cole’s recent catastrophe, The Art of Destruction. Thankfully that disaster seems to have been the exception rather than the rule so far as his Doctor Who novels go…

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2007

E.G. Wolverson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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