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Reviews for Millennial Rites

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Reading Rites

By:Tom Lingwood, Broseley, Shropshire
Date:Thursday 20 June 2002
Rating:   10

Following Reading System Shock, I decided to give Millennial Rites a try and it’s a brilliant book. This and System Shock are probably two of the greatest Missing Adventures.

Millennial Rites mentions Ashley Chapel, I2 and OffNet, all of which appeared in System Shock.

Millennial Rites’ plot sees the TARDIS landing in England in 1999 for the last New Year’s Eve party of the twentieth century. The Doctor meets up with Anne Travers (The Web of Fear, daughter of Professor Travers from Web and The Abominable Snowmen), now been knighted a dame and awarded an OBE. Anne is worried of another invasion by the Great Intelligence (the previous third invasion mentioned is a preview to Downtime) and millionaire philanthropist Ashley Chapel’s dark research. Meanwhile, Mel has caught up with some college friends. When the millennium arrives, the Doctor begins to feel an old foe is trying to take over his body…

This book sets the date for the UNIT stories and suggests why the sixth Doctor ‘really’ regenerated. I read this book in two days and was thrilled. This book should be in every Doctor Who fan’s collection.



Two Books in One

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Tuesday 18 August 2020
Rating:   7

This may be Craig Hinton's best novel. It is more controlled than the others I have read. There are still problems with it that are common to his Doctor Who books, but these do not quite get in the way as much as they do in the others. The story is that Doctor 6 and Mel are in London for the Millennium change. Mel is meeting up with old college friends, while the Doctor looks up his old friend Anne Travers, now Dame Anne Travers, a powerful civil servant who was the person most responsible for funding UNIT. However, nefarious deeds are afoot involving Ashley Chapel from Gary Russell's novel System Shock, who once worked closely with Tobias Vaughn and has taken his mentor's idea of giving order to the world in a different direction. This first part of the novel, more than half, is mostly a techno-thriller. Chapel's plans go wrong, though, and he creates instead a pocket dimension out of a large part of London which is its own world ruled by magic, and all the major characters in the first part reappear here in different form in the second part. This second section is a mixed magic-tech / swords and sorcery story. What ties these all together is an attempt from Hinton to pull in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Generally, the novel is interesting enough. Hinton still indulges in many of the things I have found annoying in his other novels. One is the gods of the universe, super-powerful beings from "dark times." These are almost impossible to write well because they end up becoming too mundane and human. Another is to throw in too many winks and nods to previous Doctor Who to make a poor little ultrafan's heart go pitter-patter. We also get clumsy emotional scenes in the midst of violent chaos, presumably because Hinton could not think of where else to put them. Overall, though, this is an enjoyable read despite its flaws.



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