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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
I Hope There Isn't A Second Frontier On The Way,
By Andrew McCaffrey "The Grumpy Young Man" (Satellite of Love, Maryland) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: First Frontier (Doctor Who New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)
I originally read FIRST FRONTIER within a year or so of its initial release. At the time, I thought it was a fun adventure that skillfully brought an old villain back to life while telling a fun story. My recent reread was not quite the same pleasant experience. Already knowing the plot twists and surprise revelations, I simply found myself getting bored waiting for everyone to just get on with it. A really great book can be read many times with the lack of surprises not diminishing the overall experience one bit. But FIRST FRONTIER is not such a book. With its initial thrills and shocks already known, it simply doesn't have enough else to make itself interesting to read.The setting should have helped things a bit. It's a story told during the 1950's in the Southwestern US, where vague reports of unidentified flying objects have been rumored and whispered about to this very day. It would seem an ideal place for a good Doctor Who story, but the book never quite pulls all the potential out of this set-up. We meet a few of the local townspeople, who should be a colorful collection of down-to-earth folk, but their appearances are too scattered to liven up the narrative. We encounter the numerous shadowy military and government types who are obligatory in such UFO-centric stories. They occasionally shine, but more often than not are just dull. When most of the action switches to Washington, DC, there simply isn't enough time left to establish this new location. The result is that the new setting fails to stimulate the plot. The Washington, DC of FIRST FRONTIER feels less like a living, breathing city, and more like a collection of map references. McIntee's prose style is something that I simply cannot get used to. Individual sentences are constantly extended beyond rhyme or reason. They're kept on life support by protracted clauses and random punctuation, only to wither and die long past their sell-by date. I was forced to reread numerous sentences or paragraphs multiple times before I could decipher their meaning. There's very little that's plainly incorrect, but there's a lot that's just confusing or awkward. And it's not as if this is a stream-of-consciousness style of novel. It's just an action-adventure with prose that impedes the reader's progress rather than allowing him or her to speed through the journey. FIRST FRONTIER is definitely not a book that benefits from having the reader take his time. One of the things I found most distracting was McIntee's tendency to introduce potentially interesting characters, but then to remove them from the action almost immediately. Rather than letting the story gradually build up around its characters, the book is constantly leaping from location to location, each with it's own supporting cast. No one is given the opportunity to develop, resulting in characters that, while can't truly be described as one-dimensional, never become more than embryonic. But this book's biggest stumbling block is the lackluster plot that all the characters are slowly stumbling through. There's so little for the Doctor to do, that he disappears for long stretches of time and nothing changes during his absence. In other Doctor-light New Adventures, at least one could feel the Doctor's presence even when he wasn't on center-stage. Not so here. But at least this gives us the chance to see the companions shine, right? Well, sort of. Benny and Ace are certainly there, and they're occasionally well characterized, but they, like everyone else, have nothing much to do. I will say something positive about the book though, and that is that I did like the alien race created here. The Tzun have obviously been thought through very carefully, as there is quite a lot of detail about their various factions, denominations and beliefs. I appreciate an author who puts time and energy into inventing a believable alien race instead of just making them humans in rubber suits. The only quibble I have on this part of FIRST FRONTIER was the fact that most of the Tzuns' philosophies are saved to the end, rather than having them sprinkled throughout the text. Keeping everything back meant that they seemed to suddenly gain a dimension at the end instead of appearing multi-layered at all times. But, still, the effort was there, and I did appreciate that. All in all, there are just too many pointless action sequences for me to care much about any of them. The fight sequences in FIRST FRONTIER are those type that you can skip to the end, figure out which side won, and not have missed anything important. It's the typical sort of stuff. Guns blazing. Fists punching. Things exploding. Me yawning.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exellent...edge of your seat entertainment...unforgettable,
By A Customer
This review is from: First Frontier (Doctor Who New Adventures) (Mass Market Paperback)
The reasons for my rating is the intelligence of the book,the intelligence of the writer, ( David A. McIntee ) and especially the ending. It kept me reading, encaptured and on the edge of my seat. stunning work, and a definite buy!
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