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Reviews for Burning Heart

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Short but bitter

By:Tom Lingwood, Broseley, Shropshire
Date:Monday 11 February 2002
Rating:   4

I have a few words to say about this: unexciting, boring, rubbish and weird. Although slightly better than The English Way of Death (read my review), it is still awful.



The Ultraviolence

By:David Layton, Los Angeles, United States
Date:Sunday 12 May 2019
Rating:   6

"Burning Heart" was a difficult read for me. Doctor 6 and Peri arrive on a colony world, a satellite of a larger world, in which the multicultural society is breaking down. The society is run by the Church of Adjudication - government, police, and official religion rolled into one. The church has been taken over by essentially a psychopath who is instigating increasingly harsh rules. Against them are the group known as "White Fire," run by another psychopath, a "humans first" nazi-like organization. Caught in between are the downtrodden non-humans, who are gradually rising up against both oppressors. And influencing it all, ratcheting up the hate, is an intelligence located in the main planet's equivalent of Jupiter's red spot, which has taken over the church's main computer and taken over bodies of various human and non-human people to "feed" it. The situation, which is never fully clarified in the book, gives Stone essentially a closed thunderdome of all out violence, which Stone gleefully throws himself into with vivid, gory, obscene-language laden abandon. The Doctor and Peri get split for most of the novel, with The Doctor out of the main action for so much of the novel one begins to wonder whether this is a Doctor Who novel at all. Stone also, in my view, mis-writes Doctor 6 as too irritating and seemingly uncaring. The end of the novel is somewhat similar to that of "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy," where The Doctor just apparently "knows" what is going on, but how he knows what is going on never gets clarified. Stone does know how to write a good sentence, how to keep the action moving, and to avoid absurdly over-the-top plot twists.



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