That's a really evocative cover. It was on the edition which I borrowed from Sherwood Library in Nottingham in 1976, and left behind at my grandparents' in Co. Durham. We retrieved it the next week, but I think it incurred my first library fine.
The only that has stuck in my mind about this novel is that one chapter is only two pages long, which seemed incredibly, amusingly short to me and my primary school-aged friends, until a while later someone found a two word long chapter in a Gremlins novelisation ("Pete forgot." as I recall).
It was one of the first I read - I'm pretty sure it was my first third Doctor novel - so it got re-read a lot and some parts of it I remember quite vividly - the descriptions of the over-crowded Earth left behind, for instance.
I find it interesting, given it is a story not that highly rated in fandom, how influential it was on the new adventures which made extensive use of IMC, adjudicators and the over-crowded Earth.
The Pertwee era was a big influence on the NAs, even though it was the height of the anti-Pertwee movement. Frontier in Space was also influential, and I've seen it pointed out that the NA's theory of time travel is deeply indebted to The Time Monster (chronovores, the time vortex, interstitial time etc.). The Mutants is another influence on stories like Original Sin. Maybe because the Pertwee era had an internally-consistent future history, and one fitting the kind of pessimistic futures that moody, politically progressive NA authors wanted to write!
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dancing_serpent
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Date: 2017-12-09 08:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2017-12-09 11:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-10 01:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-09 11:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-10 01:12 pm (UTC)I find it interesting, given it is a story not that highly rated in fandom, how influential it was on the new adventures which made extensive use of IMC, adjudicators and the over-crowded Earth.
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Date: 2017-12-10 01:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-11 10:58 am (UTC)