Generally I enjoy it when an author feels like they are smirking at their own cleverness from behind the page. Reading such books comes with a healthy dose of satisfying I-see-what-you-did-there-ness.
Dr. No seems like it wants to be such a book, except it didn’t quite work for me.
I still enjoyed the book, and if you like James Bond (or Austin Powers) and geek out over obscure mathematical and philosophical concepts, you might, too.
It turns out Douglas Adams wrote some Doctor Who scripts before he got famous for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. James Goss turned several of those scripts into novels.
In this one, the universe is threatened by war robots every bit as terrifying as the Daleks or the Cybermen, but in the form of robot cricketers. They were created by the people of Krikkit, who learned they weren’t alone in the universe, had a planetwide freak-out, and decided to kill everything else in the universe so they could be alone again. Fortunately, the Doctor and Romana come to the universe’s rescue.
I expected silliness, and there is plenty of Douglas Adams–style silliness. But it’s not just a gimmick; it’s a fun novel with characters I know and love, and we all had a good time together.
A project to digitize a bad dictionary gets worse when an editor discovers numerous mountweazels the S entries. The story follows the editor who added them and the editor who discovered them. Frequently funny. Definitely worthwhile.
