Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma

so is Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma as bad as I've been led to believe? six of us own it so I figure someone here must have read it...

Um ... it's a peculiar book. It doesn't feel much like Turlough, it's a very odd time travel story. Is it extraordinarily bad? No, not at all. But it's an oddity.

It's decidedly stranger than Harry Sullivan's War (which remains one of my absolute favourites - Ian Marter clearly had lots of fun pastisching spy novels there). It just seems not to fit with, well, anything.

A very long time since I read it, but I remember not enjoying it much at the time.

John

Given the return of K9 and Company and RTD's mooted (but stopped) Rose Tyler: Defeander of Earth mini-series, was The Companions series an idea ahead of its time or a hint that the K9 spin-off is going to be on rough ground?

(hur hur)

I think, I may be wrong, that WH Allen were keen to do original novels in the eighties, but the production team didn't let them. I'd be amazed if the Turlough book, at one point or another, wasn't a Doctor Who book. Attwood did Blakes Seven Afterlife, and that's even more peculiar, I think.

Oh yes, Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma is pretty bad (from what I remember nearly 20 years after I read it!).

I think I lost it at the point when I realised that the villain's name was Thatcher spelled backwards.

Mind you, it does mean that I remember something about it, which is more than you can say for some of the original novels...

I wish Doctor Who books were easier to get around where I live. Harry Sullivan's War? Harry Sullivan is my favorite underappreciated companion!

Katissima - Harry Sullivan's War was hard enough to find back when it came out, never mind now!

It's a great mash up of Bond (with a dramatic finale on the Eiffel Tower like A View to a Kill*) and Buchan (with a chase sequence over the Firth of Forth bridge - as in The Thirty-Nine Steps). Lots of scottish lochs and secret agents. I was reminded of it when I read Silverfin. But all by Marter writing as Harry - you get a clear sense of Harry's voice (not surprisingly).

I have found that Doctor Who books on the whole are almost impossible to get in the States. I did luck out, and an old roommate of mine found a box in her fiance's attic that had some old and not so old Who stuff that he didn't want. So, I got a couple of books (Tomb of Valdemar and a couple of really old novelizations of episodes...and a boxed FASA Doctor Who roleplaying game! Unfortunately, I haven't been able to convince anyone to play it with me yet. The rules are kind of odd (and I hate learning roleplaying game rules...), so I thought it would be easier to do D20 future rules or something, but I haven't had any interest in that either! One day!

Good grief! I'd forgotten about the FASA RPG. Was that the one where players characters were members of the Celestial Intervention Agency?

I never got around to playing it either - the rules weren't the easiest to follow (heck, that was FASA for you).

"I have found that Doctor Who books on the whole are almost impossible to get in the States."

Indeed -- I was lucky to drop into the Virgin series when they had the deal to distribute to bookstores in the US, so I picked up most of the series at-price. I shudder when I poke 'round and see how much some copies of, say, Human Nature or Damaged Goods run for, now -- the former, according to Bookfinder, runs from $7 to nearly $40 for a copy!

And I used to play the FASA Doctor Who game -- we had one running on-and-off for about a decade+. In fact, my friends gamed with McCoy once at a con; he just dropped in after his bit and decided to try this weird RPG thing...

You might want to try the Time Lord game -- it was published over a decade ago, but the book itself still seems to be online at the Who-RPG page. I recall it as being a much simpler ruleset, although my then-GM for DW hated it.

I remember it as being slightly odd, but I enjoyed it. Probably more than most people here, going by comments...