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By: | Grant Wlliams, England cornwall |
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Date: | Friday 30 November 2007 |
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Rating: | 10 |
This is a very book. It hocks you in at the begining of the book This is one of the best books
By: | Antony, reading |
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Date: | Tuesday 25 December 2007 |
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Rating: | 8 |
It has a few very odd things happen in it. I was confused at the beginning by what the otters had to do with everything and why the monster keptt saying "you will be me." But by the end I understood perfectly.
Well, the doctor gets alot of characterization. Martha Jones gets next to nothing to do at the beginning of the book and the rest of the charcaters are well characterized. All in all though, this book is a very good read but gets a tad boring towards the end. Still, a good book!
By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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Date: | Sunday 9 November 2008 |
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Rating: | 7 |
The Doctor and Martha arrive by accident (unexplained) on the colony planet Sunday. The land is mostly marshy swamp. The colony is failing because a meteorite landed in the nearby ocean, causing a massive tidal wave. Of course, the meteorite contained more than just rock, and now the Doctor and Martha must put a stop to the alien menace threatening the colonists.
There are shades of Frontios in this story: a distressed colony under siege, an incompetent leader, factions among the colonists. The threat in this case fits what is going on more commonly in the rest of science fiction these days, focusing on brains, intelligence, and in essence biological computers (though nothing is ever called that in the novel). The novel moves along nicely and avoids being the gore fest that many in BBC paperback range were. The setting would make this impracticable to produce for TV, yet the plot follows a typical Doctor Who pattern. Thus, a reader may easily create the "episode" of this novel in his or her imagination. The dialogue involving the Doctor and Martha are especially in tune with the TV series.
Michalowski is not a particularly subtle writer, though, and there are many missed opportunities for using some stylistic editing. His sentences carry the information well enough on the word level, but do not change with the mood of the action. The opening scene exemplifies this principle well, where the scene is of sudden, punctuated violence, yet the sentences are essayistically stolid. Similarly, the story delivers the Doctor Who experience, hence the rather high ratings, but does not go beyond that. Michalowski does not use the novel medium to its advantage to get deep inside characters and to pause over concepts. The third person narrator provides us with the camera view of the action and when he occasionally conveys a character's thoughts, the thoughts are the obvious ones.
So, this is an enjoyable, lightweight Doctor Who romp, but never more than that.
Read this on a train on the way to Chicago. In parts it reads like some of the best writing of master horror writer Stephen King. Both the Doctor and Martha have solid help with the characters in this adventure Candy, Ty and the villain Mr. Pallister. Allons-y!