Cyberman 2 - Machines

Cyberman #2.3

by James Swallow

Genres: Audiobook

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, a 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 OUTLAW, the 6th action-packed Marc Dane novel, is published by Bonnier.

Along with the Marc Dane 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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Things building toward a thrilling, and inevitable, climax.

[Frank Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

"You're saying they're... alien?"
"Yes and no. It's complicated"

Isn't it just? Complicated, that is. I mean the origin of the Cybermen. Before starting this audio series I wanted to do a bit of a recap of all that we've learned about them on-screen so I jumped onto a fan wiki and learned (or I suppose relearned) that the Cybermen home planet was originally a twin planet with Earth, long before Humankind appeared and that some catastrophic event sent the whole planet hurtling off into the galaxy. Cray-zee stuff.

Anyway. That's really got nothing to do with this episode, apart from the link with the quoted conversation snippet above. I don't have much to say about this episode. Another mostly slow one, but the story has progressed well.

I'm a big fan of the author's Star Trek and Warhammer 40K books so I've been trying to, I don't know, see if I can recognise his writing.... but I really can't. Probably the different format doesn't help to make a reasonable comparison.

Speaking of the format, audio dramas are generally not as well written. In this episode there was a lot of scenes where characters were just talking out loud to themselves in order to carry the story for the listener. It just feels unnatural.

Alright, that's seven episodes down and one to go. Bring on the finale!

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars - Just a whatever story

[Seb Hasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This entry in the second series of Cyberman really split itself down the middle, with the first half being just random character drama and dead ends; the second half raising the stakes to the highest they’ve been. This story has the widest cast of any Cyberman story yet and it shows, when focus should really be on the key players, it instead elects to focus on random human characters. I understand the point is to fully map out the way Cybermen are the diametric opposite of humanity, but this much is obvious from Dr Who Cyberman stories, let alone 7 stories in this range. They went in an unexpected direction with the series antagonist, and that did genuinely catch me by surprise; that aside however, nothing remotely enrapturing occurs. This story is clearly about getting the characters and plot from point A to B, a necessary evil as it were, but does still offer a well written sixty minutes of drama. Said drama isn’t going to be very distinct from what’s come before but it definitely will keep you engaged for the series finale.