Customer Reviews

Corpse Marker (Dr. Who Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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?

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.

A wonderful portrayal of the Doctor in all his unflapableness (that is a word in whoness). As he is fond of saying "it's always a happy surprise when it turns out not to be" and this book was. Leela is a bit more human than savage and her role more pivotal while the Dr. is his witty self throughout. The plot I leave for others, suffice to say the Doctor is back in all his glory.

The Doctor and Leela arrive on the planet Kaldor. The society where the crew members from the Sandminer from the televised story 'Robots Of Death' originate from. The incident on the sandminer concerning Taren Capel and his killer robots has been hushed up with the survivors suffering mental breakdowns. This time someone has instructed the Robots to kill again, the whole city of Kaldor is their playground, and this time they look human.

Chris Boucher obviously wanted Leela portrayed more as a warrior than the stupid savage that was televised. This novel, as in Chris's previous novel 'Last Man Running', has Leela kicking, slashing, stalking and protecting as her warrior code kicks into overdrive making the scenes with her fantastic. No more stupid Leela - yay!!

The book has a fast, exciting pace that continues all the way through. But I think it helps a lot if you are familiar with the characters and the scenario from 'The Robots Of Death'. The Doctor tends to go a bit overboard with his humour but still remains in the boundary of his character. There is also a character , Con the Flierman, who will have you in stitches and would have been great to see again (unfortunately circumstances do not permit this).

On the down side, the novel is extremely anti-climatic. Everything is running along at a fast pace, then BAM, the shows over, thanks for coming. The ending is very quick and confusing, maybe Boucher has a certain page limit he can submit and he over wrote it and had to squeeze it all in at the end. Or maybe it was meant to continue in his 'Kaldor City' audio series from BBV. WHO knows!!! (hahah bad joke)

One more time, for those just tuning in: Chris Boucher was the writer behind two fairly well-regarded Fourth Doctor TV stories, "Face of Evil" and "Robots of Death". Unfortunately he's also the author of the not-as-well-regarded "Last Man Running", which somehow managed the feat of having a book full of people who don't add up to one actual character. I'm sure it has its fans, but it wasn't exactly a real deep reading experience.

This is an improvement. Not a masterpiece, mind you, but a step up. Boucher revisits the world of "Robots of Death", taking us a few years forward in time to visit with the three survivors of the sandminer disaster, a world that isn't aware that robots can kill. A world where robots are starting to kill again.

As several others have said, one of the great things about "Robots of Death" is that it suggested an entire world without really living the sandminer, you really did get a sense of the culture of this robot-oriented society. It gave us a glimpse of a rich world just off-screen that could conceivably exist and here Boucher tries to take us more into it. He's partially successful.

The problem is that what seemed strange before now is just another future world, just with more robots. While we get a sense of the decadence and dependence, the culture doesn't come through as strongly. The setting is strong enough to be distinctive and Boucher wisely doesn't totally strip-mine memories of the beloved original TV story to drive the entire plot. It would help to know who the three characters are before you start, but it isn't necessary and they don't seem to play a big a role as you might think.

The result winds up being a bit of a muddle. Robots are trying to kill those survivors, and there appears to be a cult forming around the memory of Taren Capel, who was the lad behind the original robots o' death. The Fourth Doctor and Leela wander into this, and things proceed in a fashion that somewhat resembles a plot. Part of the problem is that the novel squanders a wonderfully creepy beginning with Poul screaming at the sight of a corpse marker (due to his nervous breakdown) and doesn't really effectively use the scenes of robots killing people (there's one good scene later when the Doctor walks in on the aftermath of a robot slaughtering an entire room). Plus, with the view expanded to include an entire society, we don't get much of an idea of how this might affect the whole society, beyond "Nobody is really going to believe this." Meanwhile, the cult becomes cultier, and there might be a mad computer behind it and well, hey, now the book is over.

The end result is more interesting than his last effort, but still oddly colorless. None of the characters really seem to resonate before getting their necks broken and special mention goes to the cultists, who get real annoying after a while. All the pieces of the society that we see don't feel like they belong in a cohesive world as much as little fiefdoms within the story. The plot circles around itself and ultimately seems to be a bunch of scenes that don't make much sense together but get helpfully explained to us right at the end by a character who is barely in the book. The best part of the novel is Boucher's portrayal of Leela, still light-years better than any other writer's attempt and a good case for why she might be the most effective companion when written properly, a good mix of curiosity and sheer self-sufficiency (it's good that her and Doctor are separated for a portion of the novel, because he really wouldn't approve of her methods).

But considering we're leaping off the sandminer into a whole world, we need more than just more crazy killer robots in a bigger setting, and that's pretty much what we get here. It doesn't do a disservice to the original story, and there was certainly more than enough room for a sequel of sorts, but other than a few interesting scenes, the novel as a whole doesn't really add up to much.

The Robots of Death, a story from the Fourth Doctor's adventures, was one of those that I truly enjoyed. Fascinating robots, interesting characters and a background that suggested, that hinted at, a realistic civilization in the background. The setting had weight and the only problem was the story.
This book is a continuation of that story, in which the Fourth Doctor and Leela visit Kaldor City, giving us another glance at this interesting, if flawed, society. Too bad this chance is tossed away like bath water.
First off, it seems like a character from Blake's Seven is the first person we meet. Having only seen parts of it I don't know this character and I don't really understand what he is doing. Does he have a evil plot to destroy everybody? Was he after the Doctor? Was he an alien?
The robots themselves, who I loved from the television episodes, don't really get to stand in the foreground. They seem like a vague threat, barely showing up on the radar screen.
Even the Kaldor City seems dead and uninteresting. I don't get enough details to even picture it in my mind. Where is it? When is it? Where are most of the people? Heck, where are the robots? What reason does the whole city have to exist if all they do is build robots and mine the storms. Where does the wealth go? Who do they trade with? Are there other cities?
Over all the story seems to be a mixture of different plots that didn't really click together. Outside of the cover, the book was kind of lame.

This is an exciting sequel to the TV episode "Robots Of Death." It is written by the same author who wrote that teleplay. A great Tv show and a fine sequel. Featuring the fourth Doctor and Leela.

Following on directly from Chris Boucher's previous Doctor Who novel, 'Last Man Running', this book sees the Doctor and Leela arriving in Kaldor City, where they find the robots once more acting homicidally. Also returning are Uvanov and Toos, two of the Sandminer crew from 'Robots of Death'.

For me, especially in comparison to 'Robots of Death', is slow and plodding. Some of the events seem rather pointless.

Whereas 'Robots of Death' was a murder mystery, this book is something of a spy thriller - not one of my favourite genres. If they suit you better, this might be a book you'll enjoy.