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Head Games (Doctor Who, the New Adventures) Paperback – January 1, 1995

by Steve Lyons (Author)

4.4 4 ratings

'This isn’t Hell,' the Doctor assured her. 'It’s only a sequel.'

Stand by for an exciting new adventure with Dr Who and his companion, Jason. Once again, our time-hopping friends set out to seek injustice, raise rebel armies, overthrow dictators and beat up green monsters.

But this time, Dr Who faces a deadly new threat: a genocidal rogue Time Lord and his army of combat-hardened, gun-slinging warrior women. To make matters worse, this foe is a twisted version of the good Doctor himself - and if Dr Who and Jason can’t stop him, he’ll end all life on Detrios and Earth.

Armed only with their wits and with the modest power of control over reality, our heroes must face Doctor Who’s evil double: the megalomaniac scientist who calls himself simply... 'The Doctor’.

Print length

258 pages
Language

English
Publisher

London Bridge
Publication date

January 1, 1995
Dimensions

4.5 x 1 x 7.25 inches
ISBN-10

0426204549
ISBN-13

978-0426204541
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ London Bridge; paperback / softback edition (January 1, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0426204549
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0426204541
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.5 x 1 x 7.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,228,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #174,155 in Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 4 ratings

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Steve Lyons

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Steve Lyons has written over thirty novels - and has also written extensively in other media, including audio/radio plays, talking books, comic strips and short stories. He has ‘worked with’ such popular characters as Doctor Who, the X-Men, Strontium Dog, Sapphire & Steel and the denizens of the Warhammer and Stargate universes - as well as creating his own. He has written non-fiction books about TV shows and films, contributed to many magazines and also worked as a script-editor and proof-reader. He lives in Salford, near Manchester, in the UK.

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M. Crow

It was a fun read going back to the usual situations the seventh ...

Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2015

Verified Purchase

once again we are back in classic Doctor who. It was a fun read going back to the usual situations the seventh Doctor and his companion go through. Fits in with the storyline of the New adventures which of course are Classic adventures by now. Enjoy

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2003

HEAD GAMES features Steve Lyons returning again to the ideas Peter Ling created in the television serial, THE MIND ROBBER. The main difference here is that instead of people being trapped inside the Land of Fiction, the encroachment is going in the opposite direction. The previous Master (Jason) is venturing outside the Land, but still retains its fictional powers. And one of his first actions is to create a hero to travel with. He produces a mysterious scientist/time-traveler. Someone who fights monsters and rights wrongs. Someone by the name of "Dr. Who".
Despite the heavy moralizing and angsty emotional stuff, there's a lot of fun material here. The comparisons between Dr. Who and our own Doctor are amusing and only occasionally overbearing. One of the main themes that the book touches on is the shift in personality that the Seventh Doctor undertook when he: (a) first changed companions, and (b) switched mediums, going from television to book form. Much of this comparison takes place through the eyes of Mel, the squeaky-clean and utterly boring first companion of the Seventh Doctor. Her characterization is very much based on the stories that she appeared in and it's hysterical to see her reaction to the darker and ambiguous universe that the Seventh Doctor now finds himself dwelling in.
There's an unfortunately large part of the adventure that is so clichéd and stereotypical that I wondered if Lyon wasn't making some grand statement about formulaic stories. Actually, given the rest of the book's contents, this almost certainly is a statement of some sort, but that doesn't excuse it from being a mostly uninteresting waste of time. Rebels running up and down corridors. Fanatical religious rulers misleading a population. A mysterious artifact that gives life to a whole planet. A boring conflict between humanoids and reptile-aliens. Just thinking about it makes my eyes start to close. Lyons' prose is decent enough here to alleviate much of the pain, but it certainly isn't enough to breathe life into these sections.
Despite the cover featuring an ugly question-mark pullover and an ACME weapon waved at a Bonnie Langford publicity photo, there's also quite a lot of seriousness going on here. The Doctor faces both his past and his possible future in the forms of the Sixth Doctor and the Valeyard. There's a large decision affecting the lives of lots of (admittedly boring) people. HEAD GAMES is playing many games at once, and manages to win more than it loses, but only barely. The Doctor is at his darkest, yet this aspect of his personality seems very contrived here.
In fact, a lot of the angst is handled awkwardly. While Mel's reaction to the difference in tone is entirely believable (the universes in stories like TIME AND THE RANI and DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN have a completely different flavor from what we would see in later, darker adventures), her reaction to the change in the Doctor seems much more over the top. If Mel had stuck around for one extra story, would she have freaked out at the end of REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS? And if so, why should we care? We all noticed the Doctor upping his game as he settled into his seventh persona, but was there anyone out there who hadn't figured that out already and needed it pointed out in a novel? Granted, Mel's behavior here could been seen as being consistent with her TV character, but if something was annoying on-screen, why go through pains to recreate it? While it was fun to laugh at her exaggerated reactions, I'm just not sure that the comparisons were quite as clever as Lyons thought they were.
Although I'm spending a good deal of time talking about the negative points, there were many set pieces and individual scenes that I really enjoyed. The sequence of the Doctor stuck on a train while the adventure slowly falls out of his control is something that I remember vividly from my first reading, many years ago. The parts dealing with the Land of Fiction's creations are for the most part handled well, and there are one or two moments that put a shiver down my spine. The Doctor and company's battle of wits against Dr Who and Jason is a fun diversion.
I did enjoy HEAD GAMES overall, but there were major portions of it that I simply wasn't interested in. The bad sections weren't enough to actively turn me off, although I found some places to be a tough struggle to get through. In a book that's doing lots of things at once, there's always something different just around the next page, and, fortunately, there was just enough good stuff to pull me through. As controversial as the Valeyard/Sixth Doctor material turned out to be, I found myself quite interested in these sections (especially the hints that would be explored later in Kate Orman's THE ROOM WITH NO DOORS), but I'm just not sure what they had to do with anything else.

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