The Underwater Menace

"Life can be very beautiful here under the sea."

Writer: Nigel Robinson 

Format: Novel

Released: July 1988

Series: Target 129

Featuring: Second Doctor, Polly, Ben, Jamie

Synopsis 

When the TARDIS lands on a deserted volcanic island the Doctor and his companions find themselves kidnapped by primitive sea-people. Taken into the bowels of the earth they discover they are in the lost kingdom of Atlantis.

Offered as sacrifices to the fish-goddess, Amdo, the Doctor and his companions are rescued from the jaws of death by the famous scientist, Zaroff.

But they are still not safe and nor are them people of Atlantis. For Zaroff has a plan, a plan that will make him the greatest scientist of all time - he will raise Atlantis above the waves - even if it means destroying the world...

Verdict 

The Underwater Menace was a very good novelisation and was a much welcomed relaxing break from work after seven days straight of early wake ups and long days. I'm amazed I've been able to keep up with the blog but I'm very glad that I have because I'm on quite the daily streak at the moment. I do hope I can make it continue through most of the summer! I read this novelisation on the usual train journey from south to mid Wales and with my speed of reading randomly increased since starting university, I broke with my tradition of doing the c.120 page Target novels and went with this one which was closer to the 140 page mark. And despite not having a seat until nearly an hour into the journey, I still managed to finish the book before arriving at my destination. I was quite impressed with that. I made it adamant to myself that I would be doing a Second Doctor story today because since October, this is only my third story to solely feature Patrick Troughton's incarnation of the Doctor and that's simply not good enough. I try to do my best in varying the Doctor I do in a story but I've simply not done enough that features the Second Doctor. Even this was my first ever Target novelisation of one of his stories! I've also only done one previous novel solely featuring him as the Doctor but I have blogged every televised story he appeared in as well as quite a few Companion Chronicle audios. I was quite surprised with the amount of deviations from the television story and despite half of it being missing from the archives, it's a story I knew very well and whilst the changes weren't major, they were certainly noticeable and deviation between television and book is a common thing. I'll soon be embarking on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels and I'm sure that'll be mightily different to the HBO TV series. I really liked the uniqueness of this novelisation having a prologue and epilogue to separate things out. We saw the aftermath of The Highlanders as well as the lead into The Moonbase which I thought was great. Jamie's reaction to what was going was fantastic with this being his first full story. His relationship with his new companions blossomed wonderfully as things went on. I was impressed with how well the relationship between Ben and Polly was captured in print and was done so in a similar way to my relatively recent reading of The Smugglers, a story that got a good reference here. The other references to Galaxy 4, The War Machines and The Tenth Planet were also terrific. The setting of Atlantis in a close to present day time is certainly an interesting place to set a story but actually worked very well indeed. Professor Zaroff's madness was presented very well in prose which impressed me and I like how his infamous line got itself a chapter title. The book cover is brilliant and I liked how the novel made me realise how little the Fish People actually feature in the story - it wasn't much at all. The revolt was planned well but I loved Polly's earlier reaction to the fact she was almost operated on and would become a Fish Person. She admired what had happened but didn't at all want it for herself. Zaroff's plan for Atlantis was just ludicrous and calling him a mad scientist was a bit of an understatement really. I enjoyed his relationship with the Doctor, whose characterisation was very strong, very much. The way his defeat was brought about was excellent and I liked the idea of Atlantis being preserved under the water, just as its inhabitants wanted. Overall, a great little read!

Rating: 8/10