Audiobook Review: Doctor Who – Terminus by Steven Gallagher (writing as John Lydecker)

Back in my days of collecting and reading the Target novels, there were times when my allowance was running low that I’d purchase a novel based almost entirely on the page count. So was the case with “Terminus,” which I recall as being vaguely thicker than most Target novels of its era.

I also recall that the novel didn’t include chapters, thus requiring a bit more effort to find the cliffhangers on the printed page. I know I read it at least once back in the day and then listened to the audiobook of it a few years ago. But as two of my favorite podcasts devoted to the Target line of books closed in on episodes featuring “Terminus,” I was doggoned if I could recall much about the novel — well, beyond the fact that the original cover was fairly uninspiring.

It’s probably been a good decade since I rewatched “Terminus.” And at the rate, my current rewatch of the entire run of Doctor Who is going, it may be a good bit until I do reach it. In many ways, listening to the Target audiobook this time around reminded me of reading and re-reading the Target books before I stumbled across the idea of recording all the serials on VHS so I could watch and rewatch them at my leisure. So I could see the adventure again and see how the visuals from my mind’s eye differed from the visuals achieved on-screen.

This is another one of the fifth Doctor stories that KTEH identified as one of Peter Davison’s favorite stories when I first started watching. Looking back, I find this assertion a bit at odds with how Davison seems to view the story in various DVD extras related to this story. It does make me wonder if the concept of a space station that somehow is responsible for the big bang thanks to some time travel antics was what Davison was referring to when he picked this story back in the 80s or if maybe Nyssa’s departure made it more memorable to him in the short and long term. Either way, I find myself intrigued to see if Davison’s thoughts on the story will have changed when the serial comes out on the Blu-ray box set later this year.

Review: The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

My relationship with Robert A. Heinlein’s stories can be complicated.

On one hand, he’s one of the established masters of the sci-fi genre, with a set of novels packed to the brim with fasincating ideas that still resonate with readers to this day.

On the other hand, some of his stories (while still packed with ideas) simply read like Mary Sue treatises and diatribes by Heinlein in order to justify his pecadellos and worldview. Many of these novels seem to come later in his publishing career, possibly at a point in which he was too big a name for anyone to really edit his stories as much as they had been in earlier times.

I like Heinlein a good bit, but I find it can be hit or miss as to whether or not I will enjoy one of his stories as much as others seem to do. This is especially true of The Door Into Summer, a novel that I picked up a while ago but has languished on my bookshelf for far too long. According to the Internet, Heinlein wrote this novel in thirteen days, after a comment from his wife concerning the cat.

That quick burst of creativity explains why Summer feels like one of the most compelling Heinlein novels I’ve read. It also feels like a bit of a hybrid between the early works of Heinlein and the later, what I refer to as the dirty-old-man works of Heinlein. Engineer Dan Davis creates a new type of robots that could secure his financial future only to get swindled out of them by his business partner and former fiancee. Determined to get back at them, Dan is cryogenically frozen and wakes up thirty years later to a different world, only to find his plans have gone slightly awry and that the partner and fiancee let his beloved cat pass away.

As Dan digs into the world of the future and tries to figure out what he missed, he hatches upon an entirely new plan involving time travel and putting himself into cryogenic sleep again.

The Door Into Summer is one of those stories that doesn’t necessarily hold up to itensive scrutiny, especially given the time travel element of Dan’s plan. However, Dan’s first-person narration is so compelling that I found myself just going with the plan and not really parcing the details and/or nitpicking it.

Nor does it necessarily hurt that the novel predicts a future that is now twenty plus years in our past and didn’t necessarily unfold the way Heinlein envisioned. It’s fasciating to see Dan wake up in the year 2000 and that he has to head to the library to research things still — Heinlein apparently missed the memo on an easily accessible knowledge bank that people would use for things like cat memes and adult content.

And yet, based on this novel and others, I can’t help but think that Heinlein would have loved the Internet for the cat memes and adult content. Since much of Dan’s central motivation is to get back to his cat, the cat memes are fully in play. And if you’ve read later Heinlein, you know that he had some interesting thoughts on relationships and human sexuality. While that does rear its head a bit here, it’s not quite as prevelant as it is in some of the later Heinlein I’ve read.

The Door Into Summer sits firmly in the middle. It feels like a summer reading Heinlein novel — one to be enjoyed in the moment and not necessarily scrutinized in any great detail. I’d argue that if not written by Heinlein, this one might have ended up on a list of obscure, enjoyable sci-fi novels that didn’t necessarily age well, but that modern readers might find fun.

I know I found it just enough fun to chalk up a one of the more enjoyable Heinlein stories I’ve encountered.

Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation – Vendetta by Peter David #20BooksofSummer

I consumed Peter David’s Vendetta in two days when it was first published in 1991. Released during the final remnants of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s fourth season, Peter David brought in so many hanging threads from the original Trek and TNG that my eighteen-year-old self ate it up with a spoon and was ready to declare David one of the greatest writers working and the book one of the best novels I’d ever read.

The novel has had a place of honor on my bookshelf for the past thirty years, moving with me from place to place, but always sitting there, kind of quietly begging for a re-read.* And yet, I’ve resisted. Part of it is that large chunks of the continuity that David waded into have long since been superseded by other Trek tv shows and movies. And part of it was a little voice in the back of my head that wondered if this was the perfect novel at the perfect time in my life and if re-reading it would have it hold up the scrutiny of thirty more years of fandom and those thrill-packed days when I couldn’t put the book down.

*Kind of like a certain character in this novel, come to think of it.