Holy run-on sentence, Batman!
Novelizations that don’t skim over important plot, character development, dialog, or “setting” generally are an automatic 3 star rating.
Novelizations like that where I really enjoy the theme or story behind the plot trend upward to four stars.
The problem with Varos is that the televised story is a marvelous commentary on television itself, and anyone trying to capture its biting commentary on the page has a near impossible task ahead of them. Knowing that the televised story’s author is also the author of this adaptation gave me hope, but unfortunately it seems like they missed the point.
Someone like Donald Cotton may have realized this upfront and decided to re-adapt, letting the events play out more or less as televised, but adding a meta-commentary on the very process of novelizing. Short of that effort, the focus could have been placed more on the difference between what “the viewers at home” see, and what the people running “the show” are having to scramble to get ready or fix.
Instead, we get detail that we don’t need, in very weird ways, that drag the quality of one of the best Colin Baker stories down. Like the previous two stories, it is a good demonstration of “less is more”, but really “more is not better.” The “more” in this case turns out to be not only sheer words before a pause, clause, or period, but also repeating words in sentence full stop.
Again, like the previous two stories, a balanced partnership between an editor and an author is vital to making a book feel good to read. This book has so many run-on sentences, sprinkled throughout every chapter, that it seems like it wasn’t edited at all. The detail we get in those run-on sentences goes in circles so many times that I ditched one pdf version of the book for the recent reprint, only to discover that the problems were not the result of a character scanner gone mad, which might have been another welcome metatextual addition to this novelization, as it slowly eats away fat sentences throughout the book until we’re back to Dicks-level pragmatism.
Oh no, now they’ve got me doing it!
This script includes the idea of an environment that makes you think something is far more intimidating than it really is. Since the novel keeps that idea, you’d think it would use that in a way to mold these weird excesses of prose into something meaningful. Maybe even have it be the way Sil talks — _correction_ — the way Sil’s translator box talks?
Again, I’m trying to “fix” the book rather than review, apologies.
It’s very weird that the original author of a well-liked script manages to miss the point of novelization. Capture the great stuff about the original story, capture the interesting changes from the televised version, or go in a completely different and interesting direction using the same base elements.
The point is not to transcribe events, only elaborating in useless ways to meet a word count so you get paid more. (I seriously doubt it would have worked that way.)
This should have been more than a three, because the story itself is easily a four/five, but the lack of consistent editing, if nothing else, drags it back down.