Doctor Who: Sick Building (Doctor Who (BBC Hardcover)) (Hardcover)

~ Paul Magrs (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Tiermann's World: a planet covered in wintry woods and roamed by sabre-toothed tigers and other savage beasts. The Doctor is here to warn Professor Tiermann, his wife and their son that a terrible danger is on its way. The Tiermanns live in luxury, in a fantastic, futuristic, fully-automated Dreamhome, under an impenetrable force shield. But that won't protect them from the Voracious Craw. A gigantic and extremely hungry alien creature is heading remorselessly towards their home. When it gets there everything will be devoured. Can they get away in time? With the force shield cracking up, and the Dreamhome itself deciding who should or should not leave, things are looking desperate...

About the Author

Paul Magrs is the author of four previous Doctor Who novels The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel, Verdigris and Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Random House UK (September 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1846072697
• ISBN-13: 978-1846072697
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #269,271 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Silly building, December 29, 2007

By	Anne K. Simmons "doodlemum" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The new line of Doctor Who books are meant to be juvenile-friendly stories. No problem. I'm a big kid. However, juvenile-friendly sometimes translates into silly. In Sick Building, we have a giant, planet-sucking blob, a house that's gone crazy, and a vending machine with a bit of a crush on the Doctor. The threat never really seems all that threatening, perhaps because the solutions are, well, silly: the Doctor doing a one-man (and two-machine) cover of Bohemian Rhapsody to sooth the savage beast (OK, I chuckled at that); and an ending that involves a lot of soda pop and a very loud PA system.

Heaped on top of the silliness is a cliched arrogant genius serving as the antagonist. He's just not interesting enough, and far too predictable, to drive the story.

There are good points, though. Paul Magrs has a solid writing style and he does a decent job of voicing the Doctor and Martha. He sets up a nicely awkward relationship between Martha and the teenage boy, Solin, who is unusually mature and direct in expressing his interest in Martha. And the Doctor teaming up with a rag-tag assemblage of intelligent household goods, called Servo-furnishings, is rather sweet and very Doctor-ish.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Very Good, July 25, 2008

By	Peter Deadman (Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The concept for this story was great, and very old series like. A small group of people, an insane machine, an imminent threat, time running out.

But what happened? A mess, that's what. Perhaps the most jarring thing was the sugary sweet 'disaster averted in the last 5 minutes' ending, which need not have happened. Since the surviving characters were about to escape, they could have left the planet to be destroyed, but some silly Deus Ex Machina plot came along to drive off the monster.

The Doctor and Martha don't get much to do here, in fact nothing much happens at all. The antagonists are pretty dull, and the supporting characters are dull and/or silly. Really, a vending machine and a sun bed?

This story suffers from poor pacing, coincidental chances and a vanishing villain. It is not explained why the mad computer vanishes, it's kind of just ignored.

I didn't like this story. Just because a story is written for a younger audience doesn't mean it should have a bad plot and characters. I've liked several of these new adventures (Sting of the Zygon for example), but this one just didn't do it for me at all. What's worse, there was a lot of potential here.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I feel like a total Sukkazz, March 25, 2008

By	Jon Huff "designer and aritst" (IL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The title is a joke. The Sukkazz are characters in the book. Seriously. I won't even go into how the pronunciation of these vacuum-like robots could be totally misinterpreted. But it's a good example of all the things wrong with this book.

Simply put, this is the worst book I've read in a long time (and I read a lot of books from all kinds of genres) and certainly the worst of the new series Doctor Who books that I've read. The worst sin of the book is that it's incredibly boring and repetitive. The author clearly finds the Tiermann family far more interesting than the reader ever will, and their monotonous clashes with the main villain/villains of the piece grow very boring and frankly preposterous.

Doctor Who can stand a great deal of whimsy. That's one of it's charms. But this book pushes it to it's limits into the plain silly. The plot runs around in circles until its idiotic ending. I really wish I could get my money back on this book.

On top of that, the Doctor and Martha are woefully miswritten. Martha comes off the best, but only because she's written in a very bland, generic way. The 10th Doctor is the worst served. There are times when he sounds like ONE of the Doctors, but not the 10th. And sometimes he says and does things you can't imagine any of the Doctors saying.

It takes real talent to meld high-tension story lines with a sense of fun and whimsy. That's not on display here. Playing it straight up is often much easier. So while it might be good to commend the author for trying, it's so woefully misjudged I couldn't muster more than two stars for this book.