Just finished reading this. (shrugs) eh.
I dunno. It didn't leap up and say 'wahey!' to me at all. It seemed very muddled and all over the shop. Legion was good, but having heard of the explanation for humanoids being so common and that the Hermit was periphally featured, well, I thought this book would be a lot more important, and not, sigh, another murder mystery.
There are also way too many characters in this book, I kept getting Chrstine and Cheryl mixed up, and the writing, while good in some parts, is atrocious in others. The authors think that writing 'Bernice was characteristically sarcastic', or, 'such-and-such said 'this' uncharacteristally' will demonstrate that they have gotten their characters right. It doesn't. It's sloppy, unprofessional, and da mned annoying!
Well, at least now I can say I've read every NA up to and including 'Theatre of War'.

Hermit? What hermit?

Yes, it's not much of a book, in fact my estimation has gone down since reading it and I wouldn't now be generous enough to say that 'It's not actually bad.' It is.

Hermit - K'Anpo

Oh. I didn't notice him in Lucifer Rising. Well, I don't REMEMBER noticing him, but then I don't remember much about this book. Speaking of memory, isn't it odd how the Doctor has the power to mess around with people's minds so that they readily accept him and his Companions? I can think of a few thousand other occasions when this hitherto unsuspected ability would have come in very useful indeed.

I'm wondering if his ability to use the Force---er, I mean, cloud people's minds---no, wait a minute, confuse people isn't something that he learned later. Or is this just another sign of how the Seventh Doctor is the most manipulative of all the Doctors?

Why the hell didn't he just get himself some psychic paper?

Why is Miles listing the four possible reasons for Paula's demise when a few pages earlier it's made quite clear that 'for reasons I can't pretend to understand, she jumped the gun and tried to make a go of it in an ordinary starsuit, with predictable results'?

'I know you're not as astronomer, Christine, but by all that's sensible, do your homework' - er...QUITE. How come she's been on this project for FIVE YEARS whilst remaining blissfully unaware that the local moons are defying all the laws of physics? (This isn't TV, guys. There ARE other ways of communicating information than have the characters explain it to each other in words of one syllable.)

'Like two large, round eggs, his eyes were bright and full of joyful intelligence' - yeah, I've always found eggs CHOC-ful of joyful intelligence, myself.

Ace is wearing body-armour and lycra leggings? Not the all-over combat suit I seem to remember from the previous and numerous subsequent stories?

'The door suddenly clanged shut, neatly slicing his umbrella in half as it do so. Before he could quite come to terms with the sudden, shocking demise of an old and comfortable piece of apparel...' - you DESTROYED Seven's umbrella?! It's like the Terileptil's murder of the sonic all over again! Other than the fact he seems to acquire a new umbrella pretty •••• fast, of course.

'Eyes that had beheld the birth and death of the universe...' - HAD they? I thought he didn't quite get back to Event One in Castrovalva/Edge of Destruction and only visited the end of the universe on a date with River?

'What I don't need is some jumped-up civil servant waving his inferiority complex in my face' - interesting. In view of the fact Benny will spend half her TARDIS lifetime in the company of TWO Adjudicators...

Sam is 'struggling to keep up with her power-assisted strides' - how come HIS spacesuit isn't power-assisted?

'It's a clever little cocktail of my own invention: a universally compatible software encoded on magnetically aligned molecules of paint. Atomization gives instant access to any hardware...The program acts autonomously...It's even colour-coded...And such a pretty colour!' - Hmm. I realise this is the SEVENTH (and therefore more-prepared-than-most-of-the-rest-of-'em) Doctor, but still, this all seems a BIT MUCH for someone who hasn't even bothered to reinvent the sonic screwdriver...

'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' - SERIOUSLY? After BILLIONS of people have been left GENOCIDED on FIVE PLANETS by a COMPLETELY UNKNOWN attacker...? Why hasn't that President been LYNCHED?

'Meanwhile, on Sifranos, the long task of burying the dead has only just begun' - not wanting to sound...insensitive...but - why bother? EVERYONE on this planet is dead (or ONE of 'em would surely have reported DALEKS!) and I doubt anyone will be wanting to repopulate this defenceless world any time soon (especially as Earth's bankrupt so can't AFFORD to do so) so why not leave 'em all to rot and eventually bulldoze over all the skeletons and/or start colonising again on one of the OTHER continents...?

'There's ••••-all use for a writer of kids' books in a world with a childbirth quota' - yeah, cos stopping humanity BREEDING LIKE RABBITS until they destroy the planet means there are NO kids and NO kids' books! OH WAIT! NO IT DOESN'T!

'Usually, some warping at the edges of one's vision indicated tarns-dimensional engineering' - since WHEN! Have ANY of us felt that on gazing adoringly at the TARDIS, all these decades...?

'"There's obviously a pattern," Bannen said, gazing around, "but I'm buggered if I can find it." "It's based on a Fourier series," said the Doctor absent-mindedly' - I'm not sure which is weirder, the master-manipulating Doctor letting slip vital information for no readily apparent reason, or the COMPLETE LACK OF REACTION from the bloke who's just been handed the key to the mystery he's spent FIVE YEARS studying.

Christine just goes round telling colleagues that her mum (aka the new RULER OF THE EARTH EMPIRE) bumps inconvenient people off?

'This security system...bore a closer resemblance to the DOS-based languages she'd used at school than to the more outré STROSS-based languages she had encountered in the past year or so' - OK, I'm not expert, but frankly I'm ASTONISHED that any computer in c2154 would bear ANY resemblance to a Perivale comprehensive computer in the 1980s. Also, why has Ace only been messing around with computers in the last 'year or so' rather than in the last THREE years she's been hanging around the twenty-sixth-century military.

'The Doctor's left knee was beginning to ache. He recognized that ache. It meant that somebody, somewhere, needed his help' - since WHEN!

'The zyton seven - hymetusite reaction gives ninety per cent of its energy of fusion up as neutrinos. If you lined the fusion chamber with neutrino detectors, of which there is a surplus sitting in your storerooms waiting for a rainy day, you could increase your power generation capability by a factor of ten' - and, er, nobody thought of this BEFORE the Doctor pointed it out? Even the ENERGY POLICEWOMAN?

'Surprisingly, the girl's death had hit Cheryl hard, and even Piper had looked haggard for a few days afterwards' - this is A FEW DAYS after Paula's 'death'?! The REST of the book implies it was just TODAY. (Like her father facing four days of mourning when the Tewa tradition says four days of mourning, total.)

'For a foolish moment Bannen tried himself to recall what an Earthly sunset had been like, and was glad when he failed' - yeah, that WAS pretty foolish of you, given that your 'only memory of the open sky' was 'a single image of gunmetal clouds'.

'What's "tourism"' asks Bannen. You know, the guy who has REALLY obscure facts like 'An American subsidiary of a company called Panorama Chemicals filled the Carlsbad Caverns with plastic waste in twenty-one forty' at his fingertips...

'In human terms she was beautiful' - who d'you think you are, ECCY? TIME LORDS LOOK THE SAME AS HUMANS!

'The Rills of Galaxy Four have developed a political system in which the uglier they are the more power they are given' - uglier by whose standards, exactly? They must look quite attractive to themselves (plus, I think they're pretty cute. I mean, if I absolutely HAD to have sex with SOMEONE in Galaxy 4 it would almost certainly be the Rill).

Earth Central's hierarchy in 2154 is Islam-dominated since WHEN! (And...um...when did it get rid of its sexism? Since all the senior officials we encounter - Earth President, Chief Adjudicator and Energy Police - are female?)

'I gave him some clues. That was my first mistake. I also made sure he had enough power to follow those clues up. That was my second mistake.' - OK, it's not quite a Tomb-of-Valdemar situation but why exactly DID you make said mistakes, Doctor? You say you were relying on the Energy Police to hold Bannen back but he wouldn't have NEEDED holding back if you hadn't handed him ultimate power on a plate...(Plus, you KNEW there was a murderer on the loose and you should perhaps have foreseen that any self-respecting murderer would have offed the irritating Energy Policewoman first. Also, she wouldn't have HAD to clamp down on energy use any more after you'd supplied them all with unlimited power.)

To be continued...

'Rebelling against the bland uniformity of the base...Yukio had grown a bushy, spade-shaped beard' - BLAND UNIFORMITY? Everyone we MEET seems to be wandering around in dreadlocks/bright-yellow hijabs/with tiny Belial clay beads in their fringes/clutching Ancient Native American prayer-wheels etc etc...

'Jesus found his mind drifting. Adrenalin withdrawal made him introspective and sleepy' - I'd find this a lot easier to swallow if he wasn't currently wearing a helmet full of his own vomit.

'They had already tried to get him to mount a rescue mission using his ship. He had explained that the amount of paperwork involved made it impracticable' - I thought the entire POINT of Adjudicators was that they were judge, jury and executioner over ENTIRE PLANETS without bothering with any PAPERWORK.

And why didn't THE DOCTOR storm the Adjudicator's ship if it could have rescued Ace and co?

'The face of the Adjudicator in Extremis seemed to be composed of flat green slabs' - which makes it rather odd that Bishop can spot her 'stern visage' and 'words lagging behind her mouth' on-screen.

'The planetary attacks? I thought they were isolated incidents' - what, ALL FIVE Earth-run planets that just happened to get wiped out in an isolated manner...?

'One more friend pulled away by the black tide' - what, JESUS was Ace's FRIEND? Whereas THE DOCTOR AND BENNY don't really qualify for several dozen more miserable books...?

'You're not agoraphobic are you?' 'So what if I am?' - er...this might possibly not be the best FIVE-YEAR job for you. Could the psychologists not have found any NON-agoraphobics for this mission...?

'Deep down the heat and pressure are so great that even hydrogen is a metallic liquid' - I thought heat made liquids into gases, not vice-versa?

It's a tribute to the fact the authors actually aren't bad that it takes over a third of the book for that ALIRGHT! SO THERE'S A PLANET FULL OF ALIEN MYSTERIES NO ONE HAS ANY HOPE OF FATHOMING! YOU CAN SHUT UP ABOUT IT NOW!! feeling to kick in.

'Oh shut up! You make me sick. You understand everything. And you use everyone, for whatever little scheme takes your fancy' - I s'pose this was new and not so tedious, twenty-two years ago. What is was and still is, however, is upsetting. Ace and Seven were SO •••• GOOD together on-screen...

'Cheryl said slowly, "Are you trying to tell us that something...is extracting the energy from the variations in magnetic potential that the moons are passing through?" "Quite so." Bernice could hear the smugness in the Doctor's voice' - and NO ONE thinks to ask WHY he didn't mention this FIVE YEARS earlier? (Since he's got 'em all hypnotised to think he's been here all along...)

'Perhaps I should go with one of the ladies. After all, there may be danger' - OK, I SUPPOSE I shouldn't complain. This is, after all, over a decade before the rebels of Earth make their gender-relation roles QUITE clear, thus leaving one siding with the Daleks.

'He was eighty-seven. A man still in his prime.' - the book's full of such things. Making a mockery both of its desperately-overcrowded Earth AND of Androzani's 'Hey, I'm eighty but I only look fifty THANKS TO SPECTROX!'

'She took her hip flash from her coveralls and emptied it in one long gulp. Alcohol doped with various smart chemicals stung her throat' - I've watched (read. Listened to. Whatever) Benny boozing for twenty-three years and have NEVER noticed her mixing it with CHEMICALS. Smart or otherwise).

'He wondered where Sol was. He was an administrator, not an astronomer, and that question had always floored him. Was Sol even visible from here? He was damned if he knew' - well, since it means so much to you, why didn't you ASK some time during the past half-decade?

The Doctor didn't NOTICE Benny was carrying Ace's blood-stained jacket under her arm?

'Archaeology is my life, Doctor. And you've made archaeology worthless to me.' - Since when has Benny felt like THIS? Why does she go on...y'know...BEING AN ARCHAEOLOGIST for the rest of her life?

THE DOCTOR collects pins?! WHY and since WHEN! I seem to remember Troughton having a slight drawing-pin fixation in Space Pirates, but for heaven's sake...!

'And now you're out of the way, whatever spell you've put on them is fading' - even assuming the Doctor's absurd 'Accept me!' superpowers exist, I don't see why they should cease to exist just cos he's locked up for a few hours. Also, wouldn't YOUR FRIEND HAS JUST BEEN ARRESTED FOR MURDER be a more plausible explanation for Benny getting cold-shouldered?

'Making love with Tim in the vaulted egg chambers' - who the hell is Tim? And did he make it onto her list of lovers in Happy Endings?

'His new wife, Beruna' - and yet they've got an adult daughter? In this ultra-traditional society? Still, it all turns out to be a dream so nitpicking it is even more pointless than actually READING it. And if this doesn't shut up about the sodding Whale soon I'll be tempted to go harpoon one myself.

'Christ. Oh Christ' - I thought Benny was big on some goddess at this stage of her life?

'From the messy consequences of the Kroagnon affair to the vraxoin raids of Azure, from the Macra case to the Vega debacle, Bishop's record was immaculate. Not one failure, not one incorrect prosecution, not a hint of doubt anywhere' - OK, leaving aside the blatant fanwank (cos, let's face it, the blatant fanwank is the best part of this book), I completely fail to see how ANY investigator could achieve a 100% success rate. And then there's the fact he's later accused of pretty much wiping out an entire population. He claims they were all criminal scum but personally I can't help but suspect a slight lack of immaculateness in THAT particular case.

To be continued...

'Deep down the heat and pressure are so great that even hydrogen is a metallic liquid' - I thought heat made liquids into gases, not vice-versa?

We are talking about pressures millions of times greater than ordinary air pressure. Under those conditions the atoms get so crowded that their electrons can freely move around, turning hydrogen into an excellent conductor of electricity. Normal metals get their conductivity from the same kind of free moving electrons. In their case, it's not pressure but specific configurations of their electron's orbits that let them move around. It's also what gives metals their 'metallic' sheen. The 'cloud' of electron permeating them reflects light with great efficiency.

Obviously I didn't UNDERSTAND most of that but if you say it's OK, it's OK...

Paula goes from 'Dad, you shouldn't have come' to 'we have been waiting for you' in about two seconds flat.

'I'm nine hundred and forty-three' - since when! I thought you were nine hundred and FIFTY-three long before now, in Time and the Rani...?

'People glanced fearfully around at the impassive troops, waiting for the executions to start' - blimey. You mean IMC had actually MELLOWED by the time of Colony in Space...?

'The food dispenser drifted aimlessly, offering tasty delicacies' - tasty delicacies?! Wasn't Ace whinging earlier about having to eat all this recycled food?

'A person could starve to death while that thing forced...ham rolls on vegetarians' - but surely the ham rolls can't be made of REAL PIG?

Does EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the future use their spouse/lover's name as their password?

Look, if your book is UNDERRUNNING it's understandable to have all this get locked up/escape/get recaptured stuff...but what's THIS bloated monstrosity's excuse?

So the Doctor and Bishop hear gunshots and it takes them ten minutes of hard running to get to where Ace is standing over a smoking body?! What are the acoustics like in this place, for heaven's sake?!

'It seemed to Teal Green that he and Cheryl Russell had wasted all their time since escaping from Miles's office ducking and weaving. IMC troopers were everywhere' - well, YEAH. This is what happens when you've just been taken over by IMC. So why exactly DID the Doctor send them on this extraordinarily dangerous and pointless mission to find out what's going on at Operations. That promptly gets Teal killed. (Well, not THAT promptly. There's a lot of padding involved, obviously.)

'I would say that your action today is an atrocity unparalleled in my long and bitter experience' - sorry, what! Legion's asset-striping a planet! You must have led a pretty sheltered life, Doctor.

Earth doesn't have any CATS left?!

'It was you that manoeuvred me into Spacefleet, remember?' - no I bloody don't! When, where, how and why?

'Nice as it is having you all back again, especially you, Krau O'Rourke' - why especially HER?

'I know the way that IMC operate. Now that Legion is dead, they'll be leaderless. They'll act to minimize their losses, and pull out immediately' - so how come IMC is so successful if it basically paints a big target on each captain, and forgets to appoint any DEPUTIES?

'Suddenly went blind, deaf, and dumb. Screaming, he thrashed around the office' - how could he scream if he was dumb?

Benny's never heard of morphic fields in spite of Miracle Day?

'And that is why there are so many humanoid races in the universe. The Gallifreyans evolved first, and thus created a morphic field for humanoids' - pretty weak explanation compared to the Time Lords DELIBERATELY Anchoring the Thread.

'His hair was mattered on top...Acedoctorbernice had forgotten the dirt ingrained in his face, and the slackness of his smile..."Maybe I didn't love you"...She felt pity for him, mixed with something dangerously close to contempt. Why hadn't she seen how pretentious he had been?' - Jan WAS Benny's dear friend (and nearly-lover) and the love of Ace's life. And the man who nobly laid down his life to protect a world from the Hoothi. Long before either of 'em had the chance to get tired of him. So (leaving aside the later Cornell Ace-is-TOTALLY-still-in-love-with-Jan books) why are you being so HORRIBLE to him?

Also, why is Ace announcing that 'Like you shared me with Maire? Like you would have shared me with any other woman who took your fancy?' Doesn't she mean that SHE shared him with other women rather than that he shared HER with them? (Leaving aside the fact they WERE actually faithful to each other for all of their time together, HELLO!)

There are 'hovering flocks of air-diamonds' in the Gallifrey sky since WHEN!

'She'd been following the trail of her father's lost ship' - she HAD?! Then why did she give up the trail the moment she MET THE BLOKE WITH THE TIME MACHINE?

'The Dalek invasion that's coming up - when is it? Twenty-one sixty-three? Twenty-one sixty-two?' 'Twenty-one fifty-eight' - ah, no doubt this is a hilarious in-joke about the dating of said story. Meaning that humans went on printing calendars for six years after the genocide and alien-take-over of their planet. Get your PRIORITIES straight, people!

'"Don't worry. You may not have to endure my secretive little ways for long...I feel a change in the air" he muttered darkly' - Sunshine, we're gonna have to put up with your secretive little ways for HUNDREDS more NAs, PDAs and audios. So what the hell are you TALKING about?! Presumably the surprise regeneration that Mortimore was (already?!) planning for Parasite...?

So Miles is fine living happily ever after with Piper? Her treachery got his daughter killed, and a few other people including the woman she deliberately and personally knifed to death in an attempt to cover her tracks but hey, she's obviously IRRESISTABLY SEXY or something despite the fact that Miles has just spent five years completely failing to react to her come-on signals...

Haaang on. Cheryl loves her husband but just can't stop her affair with Paula just because she gets married? But Paula dies before her eighteenth birthday! And Cheryl's been married for FIVE YEARS! Someone tell me I'm misinterpreting SOMETHING!

So. The picture of the future Earth. By the mid-twenty-second century it's 'disintegrating into a crazy mess of restrictions, paranoia and self-destruction'? First I've heard of it. (And dammit, I'm at mum's and my AHistory is at home.)

'On Earth, with living space at an unprecedented premium...' - what, even with all those colonised planets and the Energy Police stopping most people BREEDING? (Without, oddly enough, stopping 'em living to really obscene old ages in a surprisingly youthful and healthy manner.) 'Even married, their space allocation would have consisted of only two rooms, there wouldn't have been room to swing a cat' - THAT expression has endured when cats haven't? And frankly The Doomsday Weapon did this sort of thing WAY better.

'You can't breathe the air without a mask, you can't stand in the sunlight without a hat, you can't turn on a light without permission from the Energy Police' - blimey. Looks like the Daleks did humanity a real favour, then. (Especially with America's economy collapsing in '46 and them all turning to cannibalism. Yeah, first I've heard of it too.)

Ah yes, our the Seventh Doctor. Unfortunately Dave Stone's the only other author really pushing the Doctor-as-multi-dimensional-superbeing message, and he REALLY goes the whole hog. THIS just has quite irritating and pointless stuff about Our Hero being able to levitate a few inches, magically pick up his umbrella, have his hat hanging in the air for a few seconds, run around in the dark thanks to his eyes' miraculous light-collecting properties, have super-strength, fuzz up people's memories to make 'em think he's always been around, etc etc.

Just goes on and on and on, relentlessly. Lane's good at (interesting, if not enormously plausible) future-history, and Mortimore's good at scale, but, let's face it, 'Corporations are evil!' isn't the universe's most original message, and where's the PLOT?

'Suddenly went blind, deaf, and dumb. Screaming, he thrashed around the office' - how could he scream if he was dumb?

I believe that dumb means one cannot speak, but not that they can't utter any sound at all. That would be mute?

Benny's never heard of morphic fields in spite of Miracle Day?

Was she on Earth when that was happening? And even if she was, I don't think that was public information.

(And dammit, I'm at mum's and my AHistory is at home.)

Well, there's always Google. And please say hello to your mum for us.

I believe that dumb means one cannot speak, but not that they can't utter any sound at all. That would be mute?

It never occurred to me before that there was a difference between 'dumb' and 'mute'...

Benny's never heard of morphic fields in spite of Miracle Day?

Was she on Earth when that was happening? And even if she was, I don't think that was public information.

She wasn't on Earth but it SHOULD have been one of the MAJOR events of the millennium. Still, the rest of the Whoniverse is ignoring Miracle Day so why shouldn't Benny.

(I thought the morphic field explanation was public knowledge but come to think of it I'm not sure WHY I thought that. It's not like the details of Miracle Day exactly stick in one's memory.)

(And dammit, I'm at mum's and my AHistory is at home.)

Well, there's always Google.

Tried that. Got sent to TARDIS Wikia whose coverage of said period consisted of...Lucifer Rising.

(Come to think of it, why the hell is the thing called Lucifer RISING anyway? Sure, the planet manages to kick the invaders off-world, but not until they've done a LOT of damage.)

Anyway, am home to cat, civilisation and Who collection. AHistory doesn't have that much on the period (if you ignore its ridiculous mention of the COMICS all over the place) but apparently Earth was funding a transit station on Charon only a couple of years after Lucifer Rising was claiming the American economy had collapsed (GodEngine). Which isn't impossible, I suppose. And the events of The Murder Game of THE SAME YEAR are put before rather than after the collapse. And the pre-modernist architectural revival of the mid-twenty-second century (Cold Fusion) COULD have been pre-64. And people could have been too indifferent to Earth in St Antony's Fire to bother mentioning any continent-wide cannibalisms that might have been occurring there...

So Lucifer Rising's claims CAN fit into the Whoniverse a lot more easily than a lot of OTHER things, but they still feel pretty...unexpected and gratuitous.

And please say hello to your mum for us.

Certainly not. My dad would have loved a 'hello' from Nitcentral (if he was still, y'know, ALIVE) but mum has been trying to get me to 'grow out' of Who since I was FIVE...

Certainly not. My dad would have loved a 'hello' from Nitcentral (if he was still, y'know, ALIVE) but mum has been trying to get me to 'grow out' of Who since I was FIVE...

Well, maybe if she knew what a great bunch we are, she'd reconsider.

Hmm...

'I would say that your action today is an atrocity unparalleled in my long and bitter experience' - sorry, what!

Unparalleled doesn't mean worst ever, just that there are no close parallels. The Doctor's seen plenty of people attempting worse atrocities, but none which are just like the one in this book.

Then why did she give up the trail the moment she MET THE BLOKE WITH THE TIME MACHINE?

For the same reason as Nyssa pretty much forgot about her home planet. Meeting the Doctor drove virtually all thoughts of their life before him out of their minds, such was the force of his personality.

Meeting the Doctor drove virtually all thoughts of their life before him out of their minds, such was the force of his personality.

Christ, you're right.

This REALLY SUCKS when you're THREE YEARS OLD when you first encounter him.

I never even had the CHANCE of a life before him.

There are 'hovering flocks of air-diamonds' in the Gallifrey sky since WHEN!

Yeah, I didn't notice anyone saying 'Watch out for birds AND SKY DIAMONDS' in The Last Day...

'I'm nine hundred and forty-three' - since when! I thought you were nine hundred and FIFTY-three long before now, in Time and the Rani...?

Bookwyrm suggests that 'maybe he's ageing backwards at this point' which almost makes sense - that's what Merlin did in The Once and Future King and of course we all know the Doctor's Merlin - except that it's impossible to comprehend how that would actually work...

Bookwyrm also regards the book as distinctly racist: 'The Doctor even describes [Federique] via her skin colour, which is said to be "a flawless olive colour", despite the fact that he never comments on the skin colour of any of the white characters' - yeah, that IS weird, I've always had the impression that when Martha said 'Not exactly white, in case you haven't noticed' he totally HADN'T noticed - 'Tanetoa is identified as "Belial's Samoan cook". This person's only defining characteristic is their race - something that, again, isn't even mentioned for any of the white characters. And, naturally, they have one of the most menial jobs on the base' - and yet Earth Central's hierarchy is Islam-dominated at the time...

The Doctor even describes [Federique] via her skin colour, which is said to be "a flawless olive colour", despite the fact that he never comments on the skin colour of any of the white characters

If everyone around me had the same type of skin color, except for one, I would also single out that atypical skin color as something distinctive to describe them, no racism intended or implied.

But I don't think they DO all have the same skin colour, Bookwyrm claims that racial stereotypes abound to MOONBASE levels of racial-stereotype-aboundingness.

Though I suppose that would mean that plenty of other non-white characters don't get their skin colour described by the Doctor and it's a bit stupid getting paranoid about a one-off.

I'm not entirely convinced by the racist-implications (see also: 'equating someone's ancestral roots with debilitating madness' in the case of one of the Native American characters) but it's the sort of thing I should have spotted in the reread and didn't cos, let's face it, I DO assume the majority of characters will be white and anyone who stands out will be described accordingly.

Dammit, Who needs more stories with non-white casts than Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS where, OK, all the extras were black but all the extras were also nasty, thieving, and/or moronic scum.

TARDIS Wiki: 'sheep became extinct around 2106 after the Ozone Purge, though records of their existence survived. (PROSE: Lucifer Rising)' - moronic after Planet of the Spiders (DOCTOR: Mutton? You have sheep on Metebelis Three? ARAK: Our ancestors brought them with them.) even if SOME people would claim it's not the stupid book's fault it didn't notice 2211's Woolly Rebellion (It Takes You Away)...

'Even has a gratuitous appearance by the Master!' - TV Zone review. Um...WHERE?