Doctor Who: New Series Adventures - Only Human Review

After hearing good things about this story I was interested. I have now read it and I can officially say this is a great story but not my favourite.

My theory is that people love this tale because it’s written like a Doctor Who episode, and a great one at that. This does bring forth my personal issue with this novel. It’s a novel.

My mind can’t help but imagine that this was an episode that was never made and was instead written as a book.

The pacing is the key issue here.

The events of this novel occur very slowly with story beats happening at a reasonable rate but the detail seems to be missing.

It’s a shame as well because the number of interesting one off characters that just show up before they vanish or have any real impact to the story is a bit much when you consider the length of the book.

Still now I can think of the character from The Clockwise Men and Winner Takes All and not one was wasted.

Here we have a smaller cast and sure the focus on them is great but there are so many missed opportunities when it comes to already interesting characters.

With that being said I certainly had a lot of fun with this story even if there was another missed opportunity. See if you can get where I’m coming from here;

A group of humans so far in the future go back in time because they’ve lost their history records when their databases went down, as they come from a time where humans are solely depended on technology. One of the running themes is that of emotion and human nature, to the point where one of the characters sees such things as emotion and morality as a weakness making her believe that humanity should’ve been UPGRADED...

They should’ve been Mondasians from before they created Cybermen. Not an origin story but a tale about where that spark came from.

Besides from that, and a surprising lack of Captain Jack, I did like the concept and the misadventures everyone has.

The way I see this story is like this; we had another slow paced novel last time focusing on something darker than usual so here we have more of a pick me up story. Not to be taken to seriously and to have fun with above anything else.

I personally did, a lot!

7/10