Storm Harvest by: Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

To this point in the Past Doctor Adventures run, the Seventh Doctor novels have been building their own idea of what Season 27 could have been.  The stories all feature the Seventh Doctor and Ace, implied to be shortly after Survival with the exception of The Hollow Men, and the books by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, coming from potential pitches to the BBC for television stories.  Storm Harvest is the third novel from this writing pair and of the three I have looked at thus far, it is the one that most typically resembles a televised Doctor Who story.  The novel is structured in a four-episode structure, like the other works from Perry and Tucker, and concerns the Doctor and Ace going on a holiday to the aquatic planet Coralee.  Of course, the holiday takes a turn for the worse when an archeological expedition uncovers the secret of an ancient civilization on this leisure planet.  Much of the first half of the novel succeeds because of the archeological expedition and some great worldbuilding from the authors.  Perry and Tucker add to the mystery of Coralee early on with the Doctor’s plot while Ace is processing the events of their previous novel, Matrix.  The authors even include a footnote or two to explain where the characters are in their relationship and why Ace is in need of a holiday at this point in her life.  There is this excellent idea of a dark secret from the past that may be returning that works incredibly well to ramp up the tension and give this novel the tone of a late 1980s action thriller.



Perry and Tucker also include talking dolphins, quite a Douglas Adams style idea played entirely straight, as the talking dolphins are from Earth and have become members of their own society.  This isn’t the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy dolphins left the planet, but dolphins who have learned to speak and function in human society which is just fascinating.  It is a real shame that Perry and Tucker didn’t spend much time to actually develop the dolphin society, leaving characters like Q’lip in the background without a lot of development.  There is an excellent character late in the novel who turns out to be a sleeper agent for the invading alien Cythosi, which use genetic modification and almost Slitheen-like skin suits to integrate their sleeper agents.  As a race, they are essentially every late 1980s, early 1990s terrorist cell with an alien coating which makes for some interesting storytelling throughout the book.  They are an off-screen presence for much of the early portions and it isn’t until the halfway point where any real threat reveals itself.  The real threat of Storm Harvest are the Krill, a biologically engineered race of aquatic killers.  They are beautifully rendered on the front cover, which for a 1999 Black Sheep cover has aged rather well, partially due to the color scheme.  The Krill aren’t exactly mindless villains, but Perry and Tucker make them persistent killers, consuming anything they come across, slashing people to ribbons, and providing a great threat.



The biggest issue with Storm Harvest is that as a novel this really is trapped by formatting.  Storm Harvest is a novel that would have felt much better if the four-episode structure was paired down to three, like many of the Sylvester McCoy stories on television excelled at.  Yes that would have probably made this a shorter Past Doctor Adventure, but there is a lot of padding here and the story has the Battlefield problem of feeling like a three-part script expanded out to four.  This shouldn’t be a problem as Perry and Tucker could have used the extra space for more character development, as the side characters seem quite a bit underdeveloped.  As it stands Storm Harvest is the weakest of the three Perry and Tucker novels I have covered to date, but still manages to be an enjoyable story.  Seek this one out if you are a fan of the action thriller genre and wish to see it with a Doctor Who style twist, or were a fan of Mike Tucker’s 2001 Big Finish Production Dust Breeding, which serves as a sequel to this.  7/10.