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 | Great humor.. too much sex and violence |
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| By: | Virtual Vikki, Red Bluff, CA, USA |
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| Date: | Wednesday 7 August 2002 |
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| Rating: |  10 |
By David Stone (the author of three Judge Dredd novels) he also wrote one of the solo Benny novels and two other NA's.
Avast, ye scurvies! Hoist the mainbrace, splice the anchor and join the Doctor and Benny for the maiden voyage of the good ship Schirron Dream, as it ventures into the fungral dark air spaces occupied by the Sloathes - those villainous slimy evil shape shifting monsters of utter and unmitigated evil that have placed a system under siege!"
There are several interior illustrations and one very unusual map-diagram in the back of the book.
The back of this book was very odd. The standard blurb about the New Adventures was replaced with this...
"Stories deeper, wider, firmer, plumper, perkier, yellower, crisper and with more incredibly bad jokes than you can shake a stick at, theNew Adventures take the TARDIS into previously unexplored realms of taste and stupidity."
A lot of people really hated this book. I thought it was the best book so far of the entire series. Some of the gags are fantastic. The humor is good. On the down side, there is quite a bit of sex near the beginning of the novel when Bennie and the Doctor take up working in a brothel. There is a bit of violence too. Perhaps a bit more than needed to be in the story. The pirate aspects are good. The characters are very very likable. I was glad it was one of the longest Doctor Who books to date. I was a bit sad when it was over. I wish it could have gone on longer.
| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 4 June 2025 |
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| Rating: |  6 |
Sky Pirates! is one of the less-liked NA novels for good reason. Author Dave Stone has applied nearly all of his writing energies to the jokes, which leaves the plot and conception hanging loose and tattered from the yardarm. Humor is, like music, very much a matter of personal taste. I won't say that the book isn't funny, but rather I will say that I did not find it funny. All the sexual innuendos, the exaggerated descriptions, the snarky footnotes, and quirky characters just did not "land" for me most of the time. That left me searching for something else to grab to make the novel work for me, and, alas, I found nothing there.
The problems are these. The novel does not have a plot per se; it has a capture-and-escape first half followed by a quest second half. The quest, however, is never fully explained. The characters are supposed to go after these "Eyes" (gemstones of power), but the reason for doing this is never fully explained. What are the Eyes supposed to do once one has gathered them? Another problem is that Stone provides setup for various things to which he provides no payout. For instance, it becomes fairly obvious that some kind of malign, godlike, superbeing is manipulating events, but the way Stone writes it, characters and situations appear to have been created from the imagination of this being, which is why they talk in extraordinary ways and follow predictable adventure story behaviors. That is, the characters appear to be faux "characters" rather than faux people, and as such it feels through much of the novel that this whole setup is a fiction of some kind and only The Doctor suspects it. Sadly, this concept is not what Stone goes with, so that we are left with no explanation at all of why characters talk and act as they do other than that it is good for a few jokes that they do so. Yet another problem is that Chris and Roz have almost nothing to do in this novel other than be captured and tortured. In their first full TARDIS adventure, they are almost entirely sidelined. The Doctor makes one passing remark about them, and then, as far as anyone can tell, completely forgets about them. And so does Benny. When, near the end of the novel, it finally looks like they may have some contribution to the plot, it turns out that this contribution is pretty meaningless. The Doctor is back to being The Great Manipulator, a characterization that I have never found interesting or compelling. Last, as far as this review goes, is that The Doctor and crew lack motivation. They are blasted into a pocket dimension or something like that, by a reality bomb of some kind, and then simply occupy that reality, moving within it while having no clear goal. If the goal is to reunite with the TARDIS (and there is no explanation of how they got separated from the TARDIS), then why do the characters act with no urgency to accomplish this goal? Alternatively, if there is something "wrong" with this pocket dimension, there is no urgency to fix it.
In the end, I am left disappointed by Sky Pirates! It has many opportunities for interesting concepts and intriguing plot twists, all left behind in service of a very niche kind of humor. Plus, it is much too long (300+ pages) if the goal is just to be funny.
