"The Slitheen" and "The Sycorax"
by Jacqueline Rayner and Stephen Cole

The second pair of books in the cute Doctor Who Files series are The Slitheen and The Sycorax, each focusing on one of the new series' alien threats. These guides continue the format of the first two volumes, beginning with standard information about the aliens and branching out into broader subjects.

With both books featuring aliens-of-the-week, there's perhaps less information available than there were for The Doctor and Rose. In the case of the Slitheen, there are a handful of TV episodes to cover which are looked at in sometimes-excessive depth (a list of all the Slitheen-possessed human bodies from Aliens of London seems a bit too pedantic for the intended young audience), but it's also nice to see the novel The Monsters Inside receiving attention on a couple of occasions.

The Sycorax book has even less source material, so it's great to see that a lot of the information here is actually brand new. The origin story of the race is good fun, and the theory behind their rocky vessels is fantastic and really rather clever. However, as with the "Tea" section in The Doctor, the efforts to branch the book out from Doctor Who to general knowledge fall flat with an uncomfortable and incongruous section on the various different blood types. Just what your average child wants to read about, I'm sure.

The short fiction included in the back is, once again, the highlight. The Sycorax story is The Final Darkness, which comprises of the logs of a Sycorax crewman commentating on the events of The Christmas Invasion. It seems at first like a bit of a cheat that this approach has been used instead of a wholly-original story, but Stephen Cole's narrator is fantastic, if only for his childlike vocabulary ("human scum [...] on the brink of falling down-ness"). And the idea of a hardened alien warrior popping off to write his diary in the midst of action is priceless.

Oh, and Jacqueline Rayner's story No Fun at the Fair in the Slitheen guide is the story of a lone Slitheen who has been inspired by Earth funfairs, and wants to build one of his own, but with added murder. No, really.

When I bought these books, I expected them to appreciate them as a nice product for younger fans, but didn't expect to enjoy them myself. In actuality, I love them to bits, and the short stories are amongst the most fantastically funny fiction Doctor Who has ever produced. Put simply, whether or not you have a young Whovian in your family, you need to buy these books!