The Sands of Time by: Justin Richards: The Sands of Time Wash Us All Clean

Writing a sequel to Pyramids of Mars is a difficult idea for a story to pull off because of how perfect that story is.  It has perfect acting, direction, music, and a great villain.  On my personal ranking of stories it is at number seven overall for stories so hearing that Justin Richards decided to write a sequel for his third Doctor Who novel, I was initially wary.  The Sands of Time opens by doing one thing right.  It doesn’t try to replicate the original story, but serves as a loose prequel dealing with other aspects of Egyptian Mythology, in particular the fate of the goddess Nephthys who was trapped in a jar.  The story follows the Doctor and Tegan who try to rescue Nyssa from becoming Nephthys’s host so she can escape the jar.  This is a good way of getting the plot going and keeping it unique from Pyramids of Mars.  While Pyramids of Mars felt like Doctor Who does The Mummy, The Sands of Time has a distinct Raiders of the Lost Ark feel to the proceedings.

 

The Doctor as portrayed in the novel is done very well, with Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor being active in the proceedings.  The novel mimics an Egyptian’s journey through the underworld in many ways and the Doctor serves as our guide as the setting often changes from time period to time period.  Richards also does a good job of writing the human side of the Doctor as throughout the novel he is pained with the idea that this might be the end of Nyssa who has been put into a coma for thousands of years.  You can really imagine the Doctor subtly going through the anguish so soon after the loss of Adric in Earthshock.  While I concede it is a good plot by having Nyssa appear very little in the novel as she is in the aforementioned coma, this is at detriment to the quality as whenever she does appear she is used as a plot device.  She drives the plot forward without any real characterization.  This just leaves Tegan in the role as companion which is also in detriment to the plot as really we don’t get much interesting stuff from the Australian.  She shows the personality of a grieving friend very well, but outside of that she’s there mainly to ask a lot of questions and to complain that things aren’t going well with the plot.

 

Richards is much more interested in writing his many supporting characters for the novel.  Even the minor characters get some development while the main cast and the villain don’t really have too much going for them.  You have Lord Kenilworth and his butler Atkins who work as secondary companions in the story which helps the story improve as they get to be the Laurence Scarman of this story.  There’s also the Prior family who are the result of a great twist near the end of the story, but besides these four the characterization of the novel is severely lacking in any depth.  Richards also made note in the introduction to the reprint that this novel was written while he was travelling and it really shows.  He wrote the story out of order and added in a lot of sections to give backstory which isn’t a bad thing necessarily.  It fails however because half the novel is just the author telling the backstory instead of incorporating it into the plot of the novel.  Yes if it was in the plot it probably would have the Doctor appears only halfway through, but it would make things work out much better.

 

To summarize, The Sands of Time is a typical Justin Richards novel through and through.  It’s got a solid plot with some really good ideas, but Richards is unable to elevate it into anything really that great.  He emulates the era on television to a tee with the disposal of meaningful characterization for the regulars and a supporting cast that is much more interesting overall for the novel.  It is by no means a bad novel, but like many other sequels it is inferior to the story that inspired it in almost every way.  67/100