The Legends of River Song

Like the recent Legends of Ashildr book, this has five short stories featuring River Song. All the stories are from her perspective and are written like they appear in her diary.

Picnic at Asgard by Jenny T. Colgan: Probably the best story of the collection but it's by Colgan so that isn't really surprising. This is one of the last River Song stories that has been mentioned on screen that we haven't seen. It's a fab story featuring a Viking-based sci-fi theme park which is as good as it sounds.

Suspicious Minds by Jacqueline Rayner: River and the Eleventh Doctor team up with an auton Elvis and visit an insect-zoo which is not all it seems. A story that could only happen in Doctor Who which works brilliantly.

A Gamble with Time by Steve Lyons: The Doctor can't cross his own time line so he gets River involved instead. It's a timey-wimey story mostly set in London 2016 featuring a giant alien slug. It's awesome.

Death in New Venice by Guy Adams: My least favourite story. The Doctor is nowhere to be seen in a story about a futuristic rebuild of Venice that goes wrong. Whilst the Venice idea is good I've seen the basic plot before.

River of Time by Andrew Lane: Another no Doctor story but it's steeped in Who mythology anyway. River goes to visit an alien archaeological site where an alien species contemporary to the Time Lords lived. Inevitably they are still there. Very enjoyable.

A good collection and whilst I felt all the authors captured the character well it did mean the style of writing differed a little, as did the format. I felt the authors needed to work more closely together to make the collection a little more coherent. Overall I thought this was one of the best Who releases of recent years. 

In the Blood

The Tenth Doctor and Donna return! Here an alien virus that spreads through the internet is increasing the natural anger in people and killing them. But can the Doctor and Donna find out who is behind it and how to stop it?

Obviously this is very topical, dealing with internet trolls and people being horrible online. I like that the phenomenon now has a Doctor Who explanation because it's hard to accept it's just human nature. I did feel it was just a few years too late to be contemporary to Donna though but I'm happy to let that slide.

With any Doctor Who book there are two big things which affect it's quality. The first is does the author capture the incarnation of the Doctor and his companion? The answer here is a resounding yes. The narrative focuses much more on Donna and often delves into her head in a way that obviously can't be done on TV. Donna is a unique character in Doctor Who and I felt Colgan captured her perfectly. I also thought the Doctor was well portrayed, as was the feisty relationship between the two.

The other question is does the book do something Doctor Who couldn't do on TV? That's also a yes as Colgan has the Doctor and Donna involved in some massive scenes on a plane and then on a train and sends the action from London to Seoul to the Amazon rainforest. OK, in theory it could be done on TV but it's far more than the budget of a typical Doctor Who episode would allow. I also like it when the extended media allow the Doctor to visit places on Earth he doesn't usually get to go.

For me there were a couple of issues. One is that a revelation of this book relies on you having listened to Colgan's Big Finish Doctor Who adventure. I haven't and it really lessened the impact for me, and I suspect that this will be the same for many readers. I also noticed that characters in this books were constantly blinking as a reaction to things. It's fine occasionally but particularly towards the end of this book it's happening at least once a chapter. It's not Colgan's fault as such because I know authors end up repeating things like that but surely someone at BBC Books should have spotted that?

It's great fun to have a new Ten/Donna book and it's another cracking Doctor Who story by Colgan and one which has more relevance to everyday life than most do.