Lords of the Storm by: David A. McIntee: For the Greater Glory of the SonRutan Empire

Every good writer can always make a flop if the wind is in the right direction and Lords of the Storm is the story that is David A. McIntee’s flop.  It tries creating prestige by touting itself as a prequel to the brilliant Shakedown without sharing any of the characters from that novel or even the story.  Yes the Sontarans and Rutans feature in the novel and technically it does lead in to Shakedown if only peripherally, it really has no connection to the other book.  It actually sees the Doctor and Turlough landing on a planet influenced almost entirely by a toned down Islamic culture where the Sontarans invade.  To defeat the Sontarans the Doctor has to make a deal with the Rutans to allow them access to the TARDIS to get it back and save the planet.  The plotline really isn’t anything interesting to shake a stick at and it is hard to avoid comparing to Shakedown which does all the same things, but a lot better.  There is a nice twist where one of the Sontaran commanders is actually part of the Rutan Host which is the obvious twist which should have happened at least once on television as the Rutans are shapeshifters.  A positive for the prose is that McIntee is still a very compelling writer and the prose is very easy to get through as McIntee at least makes the writing style easy to get through when the story is not very good.

 

McIntee isn’t very good at writing for the Fifth Doctor as he actually comes across as possibly the Fourth Doctor or maybe the Third Doctor, but not the Fifth Doctor.  He really doesn’t do much in the story except try and stop the Sontarans and doesn’t make an impact on the plot for the story.  Turlough at least feels closer to the idea of what he was supposed to be on television as the Artful Dodger type character.  He has to lead large sections of the novel and works pretty well as an unreliable narrator which is really how Turlough should be portrayed.  I can easily imagine this being adapted and improved in a Companion Chronicle style with Mark Strickson and Dan Starkey doing a reading together.  The supporting characters for this story are really bland in most sections, so much so that I don’t remember who they were as people or what distinguished them from each other.  There is a really good idea present however of translating an ancient Indian caste system which is a system I have studied and forcing it into a society in the far future.  It could be a good commentary on how old ideas can change as while the caste system is rigid it is no longer motivated by religion or reincarnation.  You could hypothetically change caste as things are changed differently in ways here which is a really good idea present.  This is really one of the ways that the novel is easy to read as the culture for the planet is very deep and makes a very good point.

 

To summarize, Lords of the Storm is not a very good novel.  There are good ideas present for exactly what is going to go on with the Doctor and Turlough which I really like and a deep culture for the planet.  The problem is that most of the conflict has been done before and done much better in Shakedown with a really good twist having quite a lot of ramifications for the Sontaran clone batch.  There are scenes of the Rutans which are also good, but nothing else really stands out.  35/100