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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Read, November 15, 1999
This review is from: Corpse Marker (Dr. Who Series) (Paperback)
The second of Boucher's books I have read. It is much better than his previous offering "Last Man Running." A sequel to an actual televised adventure, Robots of Death, which Boucher wrote, it is very easy to get into the story if you are a fan of the program. Or have seen the televised episode. As he wrote both, the returning characters act and feel like their TV counterparts. It is easy to imagine them because you've actually seen them and know what they look like. On the downside, where "Last Man Running" errs on the side of an oversimplified plot, "Corpse Marker" goes the other direction. There are at least five seperate factions in this story, all with characters and motivations. Plus, The Doctor and Leela get seperated and spend the first 2/3 of the book in seperate subplots. It becomes too much, spread too thin, over too little time and space. The ending is a flurry of trying to tie up loose ends, leaving some very obvious plot gaps and questions (apart from the fact that Boucher was trying to end the book). Other than three returning characters (from the televised adventure), there are a number of new characters. The most memorable to me is the cocky pilot that the Doctor teams up with for a time. Spouting pseudomilitary and fliers jargon, he's a stereotypical jock pilot, always worried about his aircraft over anything else. His fear and mistrust of the Doctor is comical (he thinks the Doctor is a dangerous deadly secret agent). I couldn't put the book down and finished it in no time at all. A recommended read and a good Doctor Who adventure.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointingly familiar, November 15, 1999
This review is from: Corpse Marker (Dr. Who Series) (Paperback)
In the mid to late 70s, Chris Boucher began a successful writing career by producing two Doctor Who serials broadcast back to back, The Face of Evil and the Robots of Death. The latter wasn't wasn't universally liked by Doctor Who fans, and Terrance Dicks could only manage a rather flat novelisation of it. However, The Robots of Death was exciting at the time (and still is, IMHO), and this was probably to do with the Jim Acheson's design of those creepy mechanical men. At a time when Star Wars' stormtroopers were bursting onto our screens, Acheson's robot design was comparable in excellence, and done on a miniscule budget (if you look closely enough, you can see that the robots' gloves are just Marigolds painted silver and that the corpse markers are bicycle reflectors). Acheson went onto to win a couple of Oscars, so it may be no coincidence that his time on Doctor Who is considered to be its golden age. Chris Boucher was another of that talented team. So successful was his work on Doctor Who that he became script editor of Terry Nation's Blakes 7. However, it's still a bit of a surprise to find that the first speaking character in Corpse Marker originates from Blakes 7, and not Doctor Who. By doing this, Boucher has explicitly stated that both these narratives operate within the same universe. In this way, Chris Boucher has produced a typical script editor novel. Like Terrance Dicks and his vampires, Boucher seems determined to bung in all his past successes. All he has produced though, as the Doctor says here, is something "disappointingly familiar". In Corpse Marker, Carnell has escaped from the Federation and settled in Kaldor City, hiring his services out to all and sundry. It's worthwhile reviewing the Blakes 7 episode in which he appeared ('Weapon') and the Robots of Death in order to understand what exactly is going on here. For instance, the three survivors from Robots make very early appearances: Captain Uvanov, Pilot Toos, and Mover Poul. Uvanov and Toos have moved up the Company ladder, and Poul is just as hysterical as he ever was. In The Robots of Death, Poul announced his desire to return to Kaldor City, as he wished to live with humans, rather than robots. However, there are robots in Kaldor, performing the menial tasks laid out for them by their human masters. The Robots of Death was typical of Doctor Who stories vetted by script editor Robert Holmes at the time, in that it was a hybrid of many different tales. There was the Agatha Christie murder plot, stealings from Frank Herbert's Dune (the sandminers here search for lucanol rather than melange), and Asimov's Robot stories. And there seemed to be an ongoing postcolonial gothic running through out many of them. In The Robots of Death, Taren Capel, brought up by robots, created a robot rebellion to free them from slavery. The fact that he's a bit mixed up was brilliantly conveyed by Acheson clothing him in a Ku Klux Klan hood (which also served to hide the true identity of the villain). The robots in Corpse Marker are also slaves. Bizarrely, the main form of transport in Kaldor City is not some form of automobile, but a robot pulling a kind of Asian rickshaw. This is something which Boucher has obviously drawn out from the original serial, as Acheson's robot design had Asian features and the decor of the Sandminer had elements of the traditional Japanese home (screen prints for doors). The crew of the Sandminer were of different Terran races, but the hierarchy there was based on family (the twenty Founding Families), rather than race. Since so much of the decor is Asian however, it does suggests that this is the most powerful influence, and that the collapse of American hegemony is inevitable. One might argue that there is a strong capitalist motive throughout Kaldor City, but this is hardly synonymous with the West. Much of Boucher's drama comes from exploiting the tensions within this hierarchy. The robots themselves never truly seem to be much of a danger. They were always more of a visual threat, creepy because what they said was often quite banal. Camera trickery in the Robots of Death let you see the Robots' victims from their mechanical point of view, in what now seems a quite perverse way (reminiscent of the controversial film Peeping Tom). On the page, however, the robots are very flat and because they don't have personalities, they're very difficult to write about, as Terrance Dicks discovered in his novelization of Robots. Boucher creates new robots and a new Karel Capek robot revolution to go with them. And how has Taren Capel returned from the dead? And that's just about as exciting as it gets. Watching Weapon and Robots of Death in comparison with Corpse Marker reveals some of Boucher's disturbing traits. Characters who do wrong in his scripts are often warned pitilessly that they'll go to the pits: the pit of the Horda in Face of Evil, the slave pits of Ursa Prime in Weapon, and the Sewer pits in Corpse Marker. Each of these stories has an invisible barrier which restricts movement (like IMIPAK in Weapon), a quasi-religious cult, and scientists with a tendency to run off and hide with important bits of information. The author also seems to have lost a lot of his discipline as a script editor: the ending is horribly rushed. The only character who really seems alive at times is Leela, but then Boucher was the writer who originally created her. Chris Boucher almost seems to be complicit in presenting his work as every bit formulaic as that of Terry Nation and Terrance Dicks. In Robots, Leela asks about the TARDIS' magic, and anticipates the Doctor's reply by acknowledging that there's no such thing as magic. But Chris Boucher's work once had magic: where has it gone?
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good characterization--a satisfying story, May 22, 2000
This review is from: Corpse Marker (Dr. Who Series) (Paperback)
This book didn't rock the Who Universe, but it /did/ succeed in telling a very good, atmospheric, 4th Doctor/Leela story. Plus, I enjoyed a closer look at the robot-dependent society from "Robots of Death," extending the bits gleaned from the episode into some logical assumptions.
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