Placebo Effect

Sometimes the propensity of "Doctor Who" to take various elements and sort of mash them together and in the process create something that you'd never really be able to experience anywhere else. When this works properly you get works of near genius, such as taking the Daleks and sticking them inside an authentic Victorian house, or the more recent examples of jamming a spaceship and pre-Revolutionary War France together. But there are times when the pieces all don't come together properly and while you don't get a total mess, you get a work that isn't quite the sum of its parts. This is one of those works. The Doctor and Sam show up on Micawber's World in time for the 3999 Olympics. Not surprisingly, bad things are starting to happen and nobody quite knows why. There's Foamasi on the planet doing their usual dastardly things, quite a few people are starting to act decidedly odd and somehow it's all sort of connected but not in the way you might think. And underneath it all an old enemy is really about to make life miserable for everyone. Yeah, the Wirrn show back up, after having not been seen for like thirty years. This in itself is not a bad thing as they are surpremely scary monsters and actually do work fairly well when not on the screen. And a lot of the scenes where they are taking over people or their agents are spreading whatever mischief that the insects are up to are extremely unsettling because they seem implacable and unstoppable and nobody knows what the heck is going on. Having them in the book alone makes for a fairly gripping plot. Unfortunately what happens is that six other things are going on and the Wirrn sort of get shoved into the background while the B-plots circulate in the foreground. And it's just too much. You have the Foamasi, who are very entertaining in their own right, running about and manipulating each other while the Doctor tries to sort out who is in the right and who is just causing trouble, meanwhile there are several other subplots devoted to various going-ons at the Olympics and Sam's run-ins with a church that thinks that aliens and people shouldn't breed. As you can tell, things start to get crowded. It also doesn't help that the plot sort of meanders, we digress for a while to cover the wedding between two former companions that you've never met (who vanish anyway partway through, presumably on a honeymoon) . . . it's a cool concept to imagine the Doctor having years of adventures in the five minutes he's gone from Sam but there are times when I'd rather read about those adventures than the ones going on in the book itself. Also the book gets sidetracked briefly while Sam and the cult leader have a debate about evolution and creationism, which is neat and all but is never followed up on, so you get a "what does this have to do with the plot?" moment. That doesn't mean the book isn't bad, it's just . . . not exciting. The Foamasi are actually a welcome addition to the novel, they are a lo

The eighth doctor and Sam go to a wedding on Micawber's World. The year is 3999. What was to be a wedding ends up a disaster. It is a great book. There are many alien species in this book. I recommend this book to any science-fiction lovers.