Home : Archive : TSV 41-50 : TSV 43 : Review

Time of Your Life

By Steve Lyons

Book review by Paul Scoones

This book starts very well indeed, and while there is perhaps just a little too much going on for anyone other than the most alert of readers to fully digest all of the subplots on a single reading, Time of Your Life generally lives up to its early promise.

Steve Lyons has written a clever and often amusing satire of the current state of television entertainment. This book is everything Vengeance on Varos should have been. It is witty and highly entertaining with a cast of larger-than-life characters alongside whom the usually overbearing Sixth Doctor rarely stands out, which is to the advantage of readers like myself who were none too enamored with the excesses of Colin Baker's on-screen persona.

I doubt that anyone reading this book will have trouble recognising who the devotees of Timeriders ('suspended since 2189') are based on, nor should they have much difficulty placing the inspiration behind the feisty moral campaigner Miriam Walker (even the initials are the same!).

Lyons has clearly thought very carefully about the impact the events of the trial would have had on the Doctor's psyche, and it is therefore quite credible that at the start of the novel we therefore find him living the life of a hermit the Sixth Doctor once contemplated in The Twin Dilemma.

Retrospectively, Time of Your Life is a rather frightening story, because the mass televisual entertainment dependent dystopia depicted so realistically in this book seems quite a feasible extrapolation of the future of our own society. As such, it makes compelling reading, and shines above most other Missing Adventures.

This item appeared in TSV 43 (March 1995).

Index nodes: Time of Your Life