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 | Reviews for Synthespians™ |
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There are 4 reviews so far. To add a review of your own for this item, visit the voting page.
| By: | Joe Ford, Eastbourne |
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| Date: | Saturday 24 July 2004 |
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| Rating: |   8 |
A truly insane book that might seem shallow and overwritten but is in fact a great deal of fun. This is Craig Hinton's best book by miles because he remember that Doctor Who was about entertainment and not technobabble and continuity. The sixth Doctor is captured to perfection and Peri gets a decent amount of page space too, it is lovely to see her letting her hair down for a change. Its a bit slow in places and the ending will leave you thinking who cares??? but it made me laugh loads and has some gorgeous bitchy dialouge.
| By: | Hatman, Round the street corner |
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| Date: | Friday 26 May 2006 |
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| Rating: | 2 |
Very, very camp. and rubbish
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| Camp, Rediculous, Yet Fun |
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| By: | Nick, Australia |
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| Date: | Monday 21 August 2006 |
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| Rating: | 5 |
This is my Third Doctor Who novel, and I must say its probably the weakest. ITs very camp, rediculous, and the story seems to be going no where alot of the time. But its also alot of fun, with the extremely bitchy dialouge and fun chases through the city, and its good to see the Autons in a new, yet rediculous new form.
5/10
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| A Bit Preposterous at the End |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 19 April 2019 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
"Synthespians," Craig Hinton's final Doctor Who novel, is probably his best Doctor Who novel. However, because the others are not particularly good, I am merely saying that this one is somewhat more tolerable than the others. The problem of Hinton's writing, in my view, was that he tried to go too big, but was rather limited in his imagination of what big was. This led to trying to write from the perspective of godlike beings, but only imagining them with flimsier motivations and more adolescent emotions than the human characters had. Thankfully, Hinton resists this impulse here, though he had the opportunity to do so had he wished. The story itself is a camp sendup of late 20th-century television, and in some ways anticipates the "Bad Wolf" episode that would be broadcast a year later. The TARDIS is dragged off course, arriving on Reef Station One in the 101st century. Here, a long isolated human colony has been reshaped to conform to Earth television broadcasts that are only just arriving. The station has zones set up like sets for various kinds of TV drama - a gritty, depressed 1960s style noir London, a glitzy night-time soap opera land of mansions full of bickering billionaires, and so on. At the heart of all this is Walter J. Matheson III, the owner of virtually everything, who is ruthlessly destroying the remaining owners of what he does not have. He is in league with the Nestene Consciousness and the Autons (no giveaway there to anyone who knows Doctor Who lore). Doctor 6 and Peri get separated for most of the novel. The early parts work as a slow buildup of menace - things seem normal, but something is lurking there. The action slowly picks up pace toward a melodramatic and gory conclusion. The plot is fairly predictable. Hinton, as is his wont, drops in dozens of throw-away cultural and Doctor Who references, and sometimes awkwardly breaks his role as third-person narrator to make ironic asides. It is readable enough. The superficial characterizations and predictable plot drag it down.
