"Only Human" by Gareth Roberts

I got this New Who novel because I wanted to keep in a 9th-Doctor mode while working on my finish-a-thon story. What I ended up with was the Curate's Egg: it was good in parts. Didn't help that (a) I just started watching "Guns, Germs, and Steel" on TV this week, and so wasn't really open to stupid cliches about primitive humanity (b) AstroGirl's recent post about the Doctor reminded me about how he actually loves humanity -- and yet what reason does this book give for his fascination with humans? It is apparently because they're "not boring".

The themes of this book were (a) feelings are good/what-makes-one-human (b) lying makes you successful. Bah! Bah! Bah! I spit on both of these assertions.

More irritations:
- this was supposed to be a Doctor + Rose + Jack book, but Jack spends most of the book in a different time-period
- the motivation of the villain was never explained, except perhaps with the cliche that if you lack emotions and are super-intelligent, you of course are going to want to destroy humanity. (eyeroll)

The good bits:
- a quite amusing escape by the Doctor at one point
- most of the fish-out-of-water bits from the point of view of the Neanderthal, Das.