Doctor Who: Storm Harvest

Past Doctor Adventures #23

by Robert Perry, Mike Tucker

Years after the extinction of its indigenous races, the sea-world of Coralee is populated by human and dolphin colonists. They are ignorant of what caused the original population to die out, but tales of vicious monsters proliferate.

An underwater massacre makes the Doctor and Ace wonder if one aspect of the legends, the acquatic Krill, might be real after all -- and if so, if they are as deadly as the stories say.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Doctors, Media Tie In

279 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published June 7, 1999

Reviews

[Joni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very complex, but rewarding book. Only for Doctor Who fans, though! Not exactly great literature, but a good story =]

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping, scary, and fascinating. Exactly the kind of story the 7th Doctor should have had on TV, but never did.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable but weak adventure with The Seventh Doctor and Ace, ideal for fans of that era of the show.

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another grisly tale from Robert Perry & Mike Tucker, again working within their own continuity where each of their books follows on from each other. This allows them to pick up a few plot threads from Matrix. In general there is more characterisation in Storm Harvest than you would expect from looking at the cover, but it’s undoubtedly still a monster mash / base under siege kind of story, with gory set pieces and oodles of atmosphere. It’s a very enjoyable page-turner.

3.5

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

No-one reads a Doctor Who book written 10 years after the show was cancelled expecting a work of art, but if you lower your standards a bit and don't look too hard at the plot, Storm Harvest is fun! It's half b-list slasher and half scifi drama that the show never had the budget for

Also there's sentient dolphins

"I wish you a painful death!" Blu'ip screeched, thoroughly enjoying his own melodrama."

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Doctor takes Ace on a beach holiday on a colony world. Dangerous sea creatures are stirring, and there's a war ship hidden from view. Great character as always from these writers. This is a proper monster story with lots of how will they get out of that moments. It is definitely a page turner, I doubt the BBC would ever have the budget to make it. A very good read.

[Daniel Kukwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's nothing truly remarkable about the plot, but it's a well-constructed, solid adventure tale, and it gets its four-star rating thanks to its excellent character work, and its splendid command of the 7th Doctor & Ace...and an Ace who is becoming far more grown up and independent. This is good stuff.

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the experimental "Matrix," Perry & Tucker return to more normal Doctor Who territory with "Storm Harvest." Doctor 7 and Ace go on holiday to beach resort planet Coralee. What could go wrong? Well, apparently there was once an ancient civilization there that built a nearly indestructible bio-weapon called the Krill. No, not the tiny shrimp-things that whales eat. This Krill are individual mechanisms of pure destruction that cannot be reasoned with. It turns out that a race of rugby-player sized humanoids called the Cythosi have somehow learned about these Krill and want to reactivate them to use in their own war. The first two parts of the novel are the exploration parts, where The Doctor and Ace gradually uncover what is going on. The second two parts are the bloody denouement. It becomes one big gore fest driven by not one, not two, but three mad men (well one a Cythosi, one a dolphin, and one a Cythosi who thinks he's human, or sometimes not), each of whom want more or less total destruction of everyone else. I have some quibbles with some of the basic science that Perry and Tucker really ought to have known about, such as that nuclear reactors do not blow up, and probably in the far future, if they are still using nuclear reactors by then, the likelihood of blowing up would be next to 0. Another is that objects travelling in space do not arc. The novel has a number of interesting bits, and goes a long way toward straightening out the relationship between Doctor 7 and Ace. Still, the ending is too frantic, too desperate.

[John Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Authors writing themselves into a corner on page 272 of a 279 page book: “Er...oh yeah! Did we mention that when the monsters die they form a cocoon around themselves? Cuz that’s important!”

[Pietro Rossi · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a very good start, the story lost its focus. Although enjoyable, it could have been so much better.

If you are a Dr Who fan, you will enjoy it.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

The partnership that wrote two very enjoyable Seventh Doctor and Ace novels takes a dip in form with this all guns blazing Aliens v Predator type. The Black Horse series that this book tries to emulate had the vivid images, sounds and tensions evoked by the films to colour the readers imaginations both in comic form and and the novelisations. Storm Harvest has none of that to fall back on and despite Mike Tucker's model of the Krill it's very hard to touch readers fear nerves without actually being able to visualize these monsters. Fear and the sense of threat was and still is the staple ingredient of any Black Horse offering. Storm Harvest doesn't have it.

The opening few chapters remind me a little of Alan Dean Foster's Commonwealth series and indeed the authors drop in a throw-away line mentioning the word Cachalot which was a book from that series set on an ocean world. It's much lighter than the other two books from Tucker and Perry with quite a few amusing lulls in the action. A cigar chomping dolphin just has to make you smile.
Strange how the book tries to put a few years onto Ace whilst attempting the world record for the number of times she says "Wicked!" in one novel.

It's a book that is better than quite a bit of the competition but doesn't match up to the standard the two authors had previously set.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1822726...

A Seventh Doctor novel set between Survival and the start of the New Adventures, following sequentially from Matrix by the same authors. Having just listened to the Big Finish "Lost Stories" set in the same chronological gap, I am struck by how much better both this book and its predecessor are. From the story point of view, it is a basic alien invasion of a future human colony; but there is a lot of very pleasing homage to hard sf classics, particularly the intelligent dolphins of David Brin's Uplift series, and monsters reminiscent of the various works of Larry Niven. Ace, as sole companion, gets some very decent character development setting her up for the more mature arc of the New Adventures; Perry and Tucker remind us that she has already been travelling with the Doctor for three years by this point. So, rather a good one.

[Simon Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tucker and Perry come up with another excellent story for the 7th Doctor.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 3 out of 5]

A relatively mediocre novel that probably would have worked better as a TV show.

[NewWorldGod · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10