Parasite

One of the Doctor Who "New Adventure" novels from the 1990s. In this one the Doctor and companions Benny and Ace encounter a huge spaceborne habitat, the interior of which contains a bizarre zero-gravity jungle.

The book is quite a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, the writing, while hardly scintillating literary prose, lacks the clunky, amateur quality you often get in TV tie-in books. Benny and Ace are mostly well done, with each of them getting to put her expertise to use. And there's a real attempt at solid science fictional world-building, as well as a use of the written format to do things that, even now, would never work on the small screen. On the other hand, I just didn't find the story very compelling at show more all. There's lots of exposition about the culture and history of this particular solar system, none of which really goes anywhere; lots of encounters with hostile lifeforms and parasites that cause people to mutate in weird ways; and a scientifically dubious plot involving odd (and yet somehow largely unsurprising) revelations about the true nature of the habitat. None of it really excited me, and by about halfway through I was having trouble keeping my attention on it. I almost think that it might have been better to have taken this imaginative setting and used it as the basis for an original story, rather than trying to write a Doctor Who novel around it, as I actually found the book much more interesting in the first few pages, before the Doctor and friends showed up. Also, while I'm not generally keen on long passages of visual description, I do wish the author had been a little bit more specific and vivid in describing the alien plants and animals. I have no idea, for example, what the heck a monkey with seven radially located arms looks like. How is it possible for something with that body plan to even resemble a monkey? No doubt the author had some picture in his head, but there's just not enough detail there on the page to convey it to the reader. (There is a picture of one on the cover -- I think -- but the artist doesn't seem to have been able to figure it out, either, and appears instead to have given up and just drawn his own interpretation of an alien monkey. Which is okay, because, in keeping with the grand tradition of this series, he was also drawing his own interpretation of the most godawful cover known to man, which makes it difficult to spend much time looking at it, anyway.) show less

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A New Adventure with an impressively imagined setting, a possibly living cylindrical structure containing madly mutating mosses, monkeys, and massive trees, into which the Doctor, Benny and Ace arrive and get tangled up with terminal mayhem. I found it a bit of a slow read but have a feeling that may be my fault rather than the author's. The science of the setting may not be completely sound but I was able to suspend my disbelief.

From a 2022 vantage point, it's hard to talk about any of the New Adventures solely as novels; they instead become stand-ins for philosophising on the series as a whole. So allow me to kowtow to this tradition.