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 | Reviews for Atom Bomb Blues |
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There are 4 reviews so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
This story fits perfectly in the type and genre of the 1989 stories. The way that the characters are introduced at a party is also a clever idea. The alien Zorg and his poetry was a bit silly though...
| By: | Hatman, before time, and space, and matter |
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| Date: | Tuesday 4 July 2006 |
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| Rating: |   5 |
average. precisely average. not good, not bad, not awful, not anything. no up, no down...
| By: | Will Barber, Hull, United Kingdom |
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| Date: | Tuesday 22 March 2011 |
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| Rating: | 9 |
What a brillaint book! A mad book yes, but a fantastic book! The whole flying through dimensions is a bit......Weird but still it is a great book! An awesome book! Now you may think I'm an excitable 20 ish old but truelly this is a great book. Fantastic even!
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 22 February 2022 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
The final book in the BBC Past Doctor range ends the series on a dull note. Former TV series script editor Andrew Cartmel introduces some ideas with potential, but also introduces too many elements that are just nonsense and leaves too many threads hanging. The book starts with Doctor 7 and Ace posing as British scientists working on the Manhattan Project trying to stop... Well, there's problem number one. We don't ever quite know what they are trying to stop, mainly because Doctor 7 never tells Ace, or never gives her an honest answer. Cartmel writes Doctor 7 as too manipulative, too secretive. He has a plan, and the novel starts when that plan is well under way. Yet, we never really know exactly what that plan is. He also writes Ace as far too much the petulant teenager for my liking. The Doctor continuously hints that they are stopping some plot to disrupt the Manhattan Project, but there is no clear idea of what that plot might be or who is in it. As if realizing this problem, Cartmel manages to drag out a villain in the last 30 pages, a Japanese-American dullard in a zoot suit who wants to destroy the universe because doing so will somehow mean that Japan will win World War II in all possible alternate universes. Cartmel also indulges his taste for turn-of-the-century supernaturalist fiction, making it seem that mathematical equations in one universe are the equivalent of magical incantations in another. There is plenty of 1940s B-movie spy stuff, with tommy-gun weilding henchmen in zoot suits, an Oriental femme fatale, an idiotic military security official, and secret plans sent by encoded jazz records. The biggest problem for me is that by the end, there are too many questions unanswered. How does The Doctor know about this plot against the Manhattan Project in a parallel universe? How does he get himself and Ace into this parallel universe and hide the fact from Ace? How does he just happen to know friendly Apache natives and a visiting alien in a flying saucer in a parallel universe? What happened to the scientist who gets a crush on Ace? Those are just some starting questions. So, the novel reads in a way that suggests that Cartmel had many crazy ideas, threw them all into the novel, and did not put much effort into sorting them all out. It is as if the crazy ideas themselves were enough.
