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Reviews for Time and Relative

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Cold book

By:LS Jansen, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Date:Sunday 26 May 2002
Rating:   4

Surprisingly juvenile and unimaginative. Though I give Kim Newman points for trying to write from the pov of an alien 'teenage' girl, he lacks warmth and the touch that made the early stories quite good. He should stick to vampires.



Nice try....could be better

By:Jerry Lewandowski, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Date:Tuesday 6 August 2002
Rating:   8

It is very hard to find a storyline that fits in with the doctrine and cannon of dr. who, and its even more difficult to set the story before the series stated with an unearthly child. time and relative was a good but really not what i'd consider a good pre-dr. who story. using susan as the point of view was a good idea but the book tried too hard to explain a bit about the doctor's past without giving too much away.

also, the idea of a being that lived on the earth during the ice age was a nice touch but got too silly with the killer snowmen routine.



Loved It

By:Lawson, Jamie., Kent
Date:Monday 27 March 2006
Rating:   8


I loved this story. It sets up the scene well for An Unearthly Child while telling a cracking story in the meantime. This Novel is told from Susan’s point of View and combines her thoughts and feelings of Earth and contrasts how Alien and Human she is at the same time.

To me the story acts as an unofficial Pilot episode which shows a more rigid side to The Doctors character before it is touched by humanity and becomes officially "Nanny to Space and Time."

An Excellent Read highly recommended! :-)



The First First Doctor

By:Steve Hauley, M K
Date:Sunday 13 September 2009
Rating:   8

A well written story from Susans point of view on how The Doctor came to like us "Humans".



Unique

By:Doug, Pocono Summit, PA, USA
Date:Thursday 24 December 2009
Rating:   6

Time and Relative is indeed a fairly juvenile story, which takes the form of entries in Susan's diary, and is very Doctor-lite, focusing more on the details of Susan's school life in England and her friendships with other teens and kids, in the midst of an invasion by the Cold. And yet, in the middle of all of this, Time and Relative captures the stark mystery that's found in An Unearthly Child, and gives us another look at that rough, early first Doctor, in his alien glory and unconcern for much of human life. That rough, stark alienness was lost fairly early on in the early years of the original series, so it remains a bit fascinating to see, even viewed through the lens of a strange teenage girl's personal writings...



Cold

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Friday 12 March 2010
Rating:   7

The Telos novellas were a publishing venture allowing authors to use Doctor Who elements and take them anywhere they wanted. These were to be deliberately different from the TV series. "Time And Relative" fulfills this brief. Told in the form of pages from Susan's diary and taking place a few months prior to events in "An Unearthly Child," the story focuses on how a teen mind views events that might end up in a Doctor Who adventure. The setting is the great freeze of 1963, which actually did happen, though for unclear reasons Newman offsets the date. In this version, we see the Doctor and Susan as they were in the unaired pilot episode, the Doctor cold and generally unsympathetic, taking a very strict "hands off" policy, and Susan struggling to maintain her superior aloofness, but also highly sympathetic to the human point of view. The limit to one point of view means that we do not get to see all that is happening, and much is guessing and inference.



Interesting perspective

By:Rhonda Knight, Hartsville, United States
Date:Friday 1 August 2014
Rating:   8

Not enough Doctor, but still true to the first episode.



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