Cyberman 2 - Extinction

Cyberman #2.4

by James Swallow

Genres: Science Fiction

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]

Well, that wraps it up. I suppose. Although, it felt like it’s still got some possibilities for a Cyberman 3. Maybe. Who knows. My take away here though was: “the truth will set you free” or that “the assimilation will continue” - take your pick.

[Frank Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, what the hell just happened? This was not the onslaught that we were expecting. Which is a good thing, it's good to get the unexpected. And we've had so many Who stories end in extinction (or more often near extinction) events that I think it's also a good thing that the title is misleading.

I don't really know the logistics of how these things come together, but I presume the BBC or Big Finish writers had a general story arc and they brought the authors on board to pen it into a full story and script. Which would make it a fun coincidence that one of my favourite Star Trek authors penned this very Star Trek ending. Perhaps that's not the case, perhaps he wrote every detail and it's no coincidence at all.

This was fun overall but I am glad that I've reached the end. It got a consistent 3 Stars from me throughout, although there were definitely better and worse episodes. I don't want to bang on about how inferior audio dramas are (wait a minute, yes I do), but this really would have worked so much better as a novel. Especially since for me the main draw for audio dramas is hearing the familiar voices and we have none of those in this story. Seriously. James Swallow would have made this a spectacular novel.

As it is, 'Cyberman' was fun but not thrilling. Good but not great.

[Seb Hasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first thing that comes to mind when recalling listening to this story is the way the Cybermen are inevitably defeated. The ‘logic bomb’ and hacking the Cyber Planner were obvious decoys from the start and the series clearly had a twist up its sleeve, just nothing as boring as it turned out to be. Thematically it’s genius, playing on the primary principle of the Cybermen ‘logic’. Drama/entertainment wise however, it just felt like sitting back and listening to the baddies and heroes do long division for the last 10 minutes of the story. There is a satisfying resolution for the stories of Sam and Liam, and somewhat so for the other human characters but the problem lies exactly there. ‘The other human characters’ I say this because I genuinely cannot recall an individual name, their contribution to the plot being mainly to serve as obstacles to overcome, and to whine on with the expectation being the audience cares because the writer says so. I would merit this story as higher than ‘just about bearable’ but not greatly so, and is by far the weakest story of Cyberman 2 and possibly of the entire range. Therefore effectively saying ‘I got through it without giving up’ is the strongest merit I can accredit to a story that does everything right, while making the ‘right’s’ so boring.