Book Review: Ultimate Regeneration by Christian Cawley

Ultimate Regeneration is a book compiling reviews and articles from the Doctor Who fan-site Kasterborous (named, of course, after the constellation that Gallifrey was in). The content is tied up with a newly-added cohesive narrative that covers the five years of Russell T. Davies' tenure as showrunner and writer. There are contributions from others as well, and they are given appropriate credit on the front cover. But for the most part it's what Christian Cawley thought of Davies' tenure. 

However, that is not to say that the book is sycophantic as such books tend to be. Quite the opposite, in fact; if I didn't know any better, I'd say that the writer hates Davies with a passion. Many of the scripts that Rusty comes out with are said to have disappointed him, even when the episode seems perfectly fine. (In fairness, he does admit that these reviews are very much 'of the time' and that he has come to change his feelings about some aspects after re-watching them; he is also full of praise for the episode "Midnight.")

The cover (pictured as there is no Amazon page to link to as of this writing) is designed and illustrated by Anthony Dry (whose colourful visual style you may recognise from the "nifty art cards" mentioned in my earlier Doctor Who Series Fnarg review) and I must say I'm impressed. Most self-published works are just done with bare-bones covers, not professional-quality work. 

The book does have two main problems, but one is cosmetic and the other is to do with content. The first is to do with the editing. I appreciate that as a self-published work, it won't have editors but it can't have been that hard to get someone to volunteer (I'm sure one of their readers would've jumped at the task). Hell, I would've done it for an editor credit. The book did have quite a few typos and suchlike. A particularly notable one is that they got Freema Agyeman's surname wrong twice in the same sentence - first they missed the letter 'y' (leaving 'Ageman') then reinserted the 'y' but left out the 'e'. 

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Article Author: Scott Varnham

I write for Blogcritics.org, Kasterborous.com (a Doctor Who fansite) and my personal blog (http://Scottv2.wordpress.com). I can be found on Twitter as Scottv1 where I try to be interesting.

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