Having completed the set of Doctors last year, one might have thought Christopher Bulis would be satisfied with his achievement, but it seems he's embarked upon a lap of honour.

Doctor Who often depicted entire civilisations using only a handful of characters, a smattering of extras, and hearsay. That the planet on which the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara find themselves has a similar facade - being less densely inhabited that those in charge might wish the observer to think - is a notion rich with potential for humour, or satire, or something.

Sadly, such promise is wasted in City at World's End - a title all too clearly a distillation of names of diverse familiar television episodes which is, in it's lack of imagination, perfectly suited to the novel to which it applies. Similarly uninspired - and, moreover, pointlessly symbolic - is the name of the city of Arkhaven, where the TARDIS crew finds itself stranded mere days before a moon is due to crash into the city, rendering the area uninhabitable. The immediate concern of the indigent population is, understandably, escape to set up a colony elsewhere.

Such apocalyptic themes coincide agreeably with the aura of millennium-psychosis surrounding this range of late. However, on this and previous evidence, Bulis should never have graduated beyond the bad fan fiction that City at World's End undoubtedly is. None of the disparate strands is given sufficient room to develop, and yet there is no lack of unexciting narrative incident - Barbara spends more than half the book in isolation, agonisingly repetitive chapters describing her unchanging predicament. A more insightful or daring writer might have taken the chance to give Jacqueline Hill her mandatory couple of weeks' holiday. If this were representative of the Doctor Who of 1964, the show would never have lasted past episode 52.

I suppose it's fairly inoffensive - only the conclusion really drags it down, featuring supposedly surprising twists so obvious I'm amazed the writer wanted to draw the reader's attention to them. And the denouement is shockingly bad - I'd defy anyone to read chapter 34 without wanting to hurl the book against a wall.