Cyberman 2 - Terror

Cyberman #2.2

by James Swallow

Audiobook

Published January 1, 2009

About the author

James Swallow is a New York Times, Sunday Times and Amazon #1 bestselling author and scriptwriter, a BAFTA nominee, former journalist and the award-winning writer of over sixty-five books, along with scripts for video games, comics, radio and television.

DARK HORIZON, his latest stand-alone thriller, is out now from Mountain Leopard Press, and the 10th Anniversary Edition of NOMAD, the 1st novel in the action-packed Marc Dane series, is published by Bonnier and JAB Books.

Along with thrillers, his writing includes, the Sundowners steampunk Westerns and fiction from the worlds of Star Trek, Tom Clancy, 24, Warhammer 40000, Doctor Who, Deus Ex, Stargate, 2000AD and many more.

For information on new releases & more, sign up to the Readers’ Club here: www.bit.ly/JamesSwallow

Visit James's website at http://www.jswallow.com/ for more, including ROUGH AIR, a free eBook novella in the Marc Dane series.

You can also follow James on Bluesky at @jmswallow.bsky.social, Twitter at @jmswallow, Mastodon at @jmswallow@mstdn.social and jmswallow.tumblr.com at Tumblr.

Reviews

[Rick]

Another exciting chapter, the intrigue, subterfuge and menace grows.

[Frank Davis]

"The humans have brought this on themselves. We're past the point of no return."

I suspected the pace would wind back for this episode and it has. They started to use the format a bit more I think, instead of just having two characters tell each other exactly what they see in front of them all the time. For eg. we get like a news flash/news report at one point which I thought worked well.

I guess the major satisfaction of this episode for me is that finally someone takes the possibility of an infiltrator seriously. Otherwise I didn't think much happened in this one, people and events were just moving into place for later.

I'm keen to get through this series now so I can get back to reading real books because they're just better than dramatised audio. Zing!

[Zach]

Boring set up story

[Tabitha]

Well that was... terrifying in places. Less the actual story than what's being set up in the background, but still.

[Seb Hasi]

I really liked this story for two central reasons: the human/android war being explored with some philosophical nuance, and the tensity of the character drama. Once again the stuff on earth really isn’t that interesting, and aside from building up Paul Hunt as even more despicable; nothing really makes me care about the characters down there. The Cybermen on earth finally start doing something for the plot apart from providing sound effects and I like how the depiction of forced conversion is here. It’s nothing like how it’s ever been depicted on TV, and the body horror is a nice change from the heavy sci-fi. This is also the first story to end on a properly interesting cliffhanger and it really is the ‘all is lost’ moment of the series. Even with the weaknesses and lesser effective moments so far I was definitely prioritising listening to part three so I can see how things are resolved.