Well. It's. The thing is.

This could use a serious continuity edit. Or maybe a decision on the part of the author as to who he was writing for. Because it switches kind of abruptly from lighthearted adventure in space to political philosophy, and I liked the space adventure a lot more. Because as a dystopia, it was not that awesome.

Also when I can mentally replace Three with Ten and Roger Delgado with John Simm, albeit with a few mental gymnastics, your characterization might be a little thin. Although I will admit that it probably speaks more to the fashion in which the Doctor is an archetype than it demonstrates the author's inability to create a three-dimensional character. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1033342.html?#cutid4

This was one of those books which, on rereading, failed to live up to my fond childhood memories. Hulke irritatingly switches between writing down for a younger audience and meandering into heavy-handed political parable. For whatever reason, it is written as if it were Jo Grant's first story; and the introduction is much more clumsily handled than in Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons. The back-story of the human colonists is ripped off unimaginatively from dozens of better sf books about future dystopias. And the whole plot basically makes no sense. The least good of the Hulke books so far. ( )