RATING: 2
The problem is, I generally like Steve Lyons work. "The Witch Hunters" remains my all-time favorite PDA, and I also kind of liked "Salvation".  But this one... I just found it boring, trite, and maddeningly cloy.

The book brings back the Selachians of Lyon's previous 2nd Doc PDA, "The Murder Game", and takes as its plot the final days of an Earth military campaign against them. This is used as a spring board for a story that is essentially an anti-war statement. Ok, fair enough, no problems there. But then it proceeds to truck out just about every anti-war cliche a century of far better writing has produced: the unbelievably incompetant commander, the helpless and peaceful civilians caught in the middle, the honorable soldier who just follows orders, the Big Weapon that people are afraid to use but will use anyway (even though it will kill billions of lives). I don't know, I've read it all before and I just couldn't stomach it one more time.

Lyons tries, but for the most part does not succeed, to make the Selachians nominally sympathetic, even though they are cast as pretty much the bad-guy race here. To me, this was probably the biggest problem with the book; by the end of it I not only felt very little sympathy for them, but in some ways thought they were getting exactly what they deserved -- the exact opposite of Lyon's intentions. So much for this morality play. As for the other bad guy, Commander Redfern (the CO of the Earth forces), he comes off as being more of a caricature than anything.  Disciplinarian, militaristic to a fault, but otherwise incompetent as a commander, there is not a shred of originality or anything otherwise interesting to him.  Some effort is made to go into why he is the person he is, but the final result to me was that I questioned how an idiot with his background could ever possibly find himself in command of such an operation.  Yes, yes, I know.  Suspension of disbelief and all that.  Still, there are bounds even here.

Other secondary characters are OK.  The scientist Mulholland, in charge of the ultimate-weapon-of-the-moment (the G-Bomb, basically a gravitic implosion device), is bearable as the traditional scientist-with-the-uneasy-conscience.  A couple of miliary characters -- Michaels, Paterson, and a few others -- round out the story with views of the entire conflict from the front, as it were.  Perhaps a better story might have been if someone like Lt. Michaels had been the one who was being ordered to drop the G-Bomb and commit genocide, rather than the tin-plated Redfern; the story of an honorable man being ordered to commit something anathema to his beliefs would have been far more interesting than the set of pat and stock events Lyons plays out for his characters.

As for the regulars, Lyon's 2nd Doctor is pretty much OK, not exciting but not too far from the mark. Companions Jamie and Zoe come off (uncharacteristically, for a Lyons novel!) as a little bland, especially Zoe; at one point I had the impression that this story had originally been conceived with Victoria in mind. This is a shame, as Jamie and Zoe are among my favorite companions, and I have yet to find a novel that has done either of them justice.

So overall, this is not a recommended novel unless you are Doctor Who completist; even then, I'd say read it if you had nothing else about and were desperate for a DW fix.

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This Review Copyright 2000, Douglas B. Killings.  All rights reserved.