Sad to say, even a Magrsian NSA was never going to have the depth of
The Blue Angel or the playfulness of Verdigris, but Paul's mainstream
books for young adults have always been worth reading. Unlike some YA
books, they never talk down to the reader, have unsuitable bits in
them and have even been known to have the supposed Reader
Identification Figure (copyright the first dozen BBC NSAs) turn out
not to be perfect after all. My eleven year old daughter loves them
and SIck Building continues the trend.

In Sick Building, the Doctor and Martha come to Tiermann's World the
inhabitants that the Voracious Craw, a much bigger version of the
sandworms from Dune with an appetitte to match, is on its way to
destroy their planet. To their surprise, the only people on the planet
are a family of settlers, living in their sentient Dreamhome, designed
and built by the erratic genius father of the family, Professor Ernest
Tiermann.

Sick Building (not as good a title as the original Wicked Bungalow,
but blame Cardiff for that) is actually pitched a little bit younger
than Magrs' Young Adult books like Exchange, being more on a par with
something like Hands Up or the recent Twin Freaks. The human
characters are slightly less complex, the situation a bit less subtle
and the interaction less nuanced. But it's still a fantastically
imaginative story, a fast-paced fairground ride of a book in which the
Magrs' equivalents of Mrs Potts and Lumiere from Disney's Beauty and
the Beast rebel against a genuinely unfeeling and wholly selfish
creator. Magrs imbues the two main Servo Furnishings - Barbara and
Toaster - with genuinely heroic personalities and if there's
occasionally a little too much of the Mad Scientist about Tiermann, it
is only occasional. Magrs even finds time, like Mark Michalowski in
'Wetworld' before him, to slip one or two tiny meta-textual jokes into
the book.

Finally, the ending is brilliant - the kind of thing which in the
hands of the TV series would be rubbish (see the Slitheen, for
instance) but which in Sick Building seems like the only way in which
the Craw could be seen off.

Stuart