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 | Reviews for Death and Diplomacy |
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| Both Readable and Unreadable |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 30 April 2026 |
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| Rating: |   7 |
Dave Stone's second Doctor Who novel is a huge step up from his first, the cluttered and unfunny Sky Pirates!. This novel is still a bit cluttered, and still has passages intended to be funny that are not. However, it is a much smoother read and falls together in the end better. It fits in the DW universe by introducing what is to become Benny's ne'er-do-well husband (to be at this point), Jason Kane. Poor Benny just can't control her hormones and despite herself finds a bad boy irresistible. The novel is divided into two-and-a-half plots: 1) The Doctor is snatched out time and taken to a location called The Summit to negotiate the end to a centuries-long war between three races suspiciously too stereotyped, 2) Benny gets plopped down on a remote planet where she meets, hates, and falls in love with the aforementioned Jason in good old Princess Leia and Han Solo style, 2 1/2) Roz and Chris steal the identities of soldiers and get scooped into the war that The Doctor is trying to stop. The Roz and Chris plot is a side matter and they have no effect at all on the other two plots, which is one of the things that makes this novel still cluttered. Stone's models for his style and plotting seem to me to be the first Doctor 7 series, think Delta and the Bannermen, and a bit of Graham Williams period Doctor Who, think The Invisible Enemy. One thing I found annoying in this novel is Stone's repeated use of the following trope: When he thought about it years later, he realized... Used once or twice this trope would be fine. Used ten or more times in the same novel, it becomes simply irritating. I also found it a little jarring to me as a reader that clearly Stone does not want the reader to take the plot and characters all that seriously, especially given all the ways he points out how stupid and overly convoluted the mad plan to rule the universe is, and how petty and silly the arch foe turns out to be, yet Stone still piles up the bodies and dispenses death to characters like a boy playing with toy soldiers. Death and Diplomacy, for me, was very much a mixed bag.
