I have not watched any TV shows with the 4th Doctor, but I was able to immediately get into the groove of things as the humour and pace were, oh, so familiar! I figured out who the villain was really early on though, I don't think that was such a good thing. Appropriately near-catastrophic end that usually heralds the end of a season on TV with the TARDIS needing a complete overhaul. I honestly wondered while reading that part whether he was going to regenerate! ( )

The second segment of the Key to Time is hidden somewhere on the planet Calufrax, so off Romana, the Doctor and K-9 go to track it down. However, when they arrive, Calufrax doesn't actually seem to be there, despite what the Key to Time tracer thinks. They've instead landed on the planet Zanax, which is drowning in material wealth but whose citizens are starving because you can't eat precious gems. What's going on with this planet? Can the Doctor turn things around and retrieve the next segment of the Key?

This novelization is based on earlier drafts of Douglas Adams' scripts, which were found among his papers at St. John's College, Cambridge, so there are differences between this and the broadcast story. I actually found this a bit long-winded, although that could have been the influence of the hardcover edition I read. It took me a while to get into, longer than I feel a Doctor Who novel should take. I did like all of the K-9 bits, though, and think John Leeson would make a good narrator of the audiobook for that reason. Romana also gets some good limited third-person narration ("the universe seemed to consist entirely of shouting men. Where were the interesting women?").

Overall, I enjoyed bits of this and like the reconstruction from earlier scripts as an exercise, but Shada was a better novelization in my view. ( )

Fun expansion of the not well regarded Fourth Doctor episode. The last of the original series to be novelized... and I have a full set! Goss was able to use early story treatments and script drafts to expand the plot and characters. You can tell Adams was working on Hitchhikers during the same time period. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2784594.html

As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss as possibly the best regular writer of prose for Who at present. Here he follows on from the success of his novelisation of City of Death to tackle the missing book from the Key to Time series. And it's great, turning a somewhat problematic and wobbly screen story into a rather well developed narrative, filling background, foreground, and much else. The Doctor/Romana banter remains, cranked up a bit if anything; even K9 gets some good moments, plaintively calling "¿ɹǝʇsɐW" after lading upside down at one point. The Captain, the Queen and Mr Fibuli, who are all of course cartooney characters, none the less get a bit more depth and dimensionality in this treatment, and the Mentiads, renamed Mourners, make a lot more sense on the page than on the screen.

For a bonus we get the original story treatment by Adams, where the nature of the planet and the character of Romana had not yet fully evolved, and his thoughts on the Key to Time (which end with the hand-written word "Mice") - a lot more insight into story development usual. And there are some interesting hints about the true identity of the so-called White Guardian. ( )