Timewyrm: Genesys by: John Peel: The Beginning of a New Era

John Peel's Timewyrm: Genesys has a lot to establish if the Virgin New Adventures were going to take off.  It had to follow up Survival and introduce the readers to how the direction these novels were going to go.  Peel also decides to add a scene explaining the basic premise of the show which is really good as you see Ace lose her memory so we can have an exposition dump.  After that we get a story where the Fourth Doctor during The Invasion of Time, has recorded a message warning his future self of the escaping Timewyrm.  These scenes in the book are really the weakest as they get self-indulgent and they keep cutting away to the characters who will be important later.  It causes the pace of the story to have a really slow start instead of just leaving it for when the TARDIS arrives.

Once the TARDIS does arrive however, the pace picks up almost immediately with the Doctor and Ace getting involved with Gilgamesh, Enkiedu and the goddess Ishtar who are well written characters except for Enkiedu who is too much of a straight man to Gilgamesh's crazy kingliness.  Ace gets some great lines and situations with her disgust at Mesopotamian societal norms and casual sexism.  Her best scenes exemplify a theme of the novel, being that societal norms can’t always be judged by today's standards unless there is something intrinsically wrong with their beliefs.

The novel is oddly not divided into parts as if it was a TV story but as one long story almost like the Epic of Gilgamesh it was inspired by.  And like the ancient epics this novel has a great villain in Ishtar who is basically the female version of Sutekh from Pyramids of Mars.  The only difference is that Ishtar isn't all powerful until the end when she becomes the Timewyrm.  So all in all I give Timewyrm: Genesys 75/100 for being a really good introduction to the New Adventures and really good at continuing the development of the Doctor and Ace.