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| What: | Human Nature (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 22 April 2025 |
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| Rating: |   8 |
Generally in my reviews I haven't been too kind to Paul Cornell. I have repeatedly found these problems that lead to some dissatisfaction: 1) the evil bad guys all have superhuman mental powers and can take over any person's mind at will, 2) far too many winks and nods to fans, 3) endings of mass carnage, and 4) a better setup than finish. Human Nature transcends some of these problems, and has much less of the others. It is far and away the best work I have read by Cornell. I am avoiding comparisons to the televised version of this story that he did for the Doctor Who series, which has significant differences from the novel, some for the better and some not. In this review, I am just looking at the novel itself.
The plot: Weary of his ways and fearing that he has lost touch with the perspectives of the ordinary beings he spends most his time with, Doctor 7 buys a bit of technology that allows him to store his Time Lord personality and replace it with a manufactured personality, while providing nanites that will convert his Time Lord physiology to human physiology. The Doctor is tired of being The Doctor and wants to spend time being just an ordinary person. The problem: he springs this plan on Benny and doesn't tell her the full story. In any case, they settle into 1914 England a few months before the start of WWI. The Doctor, now human John Smith, is a teacher at a boys boarding school that trains the boys to become military officers. Benny is living as his "niece" in a nearby hotel, supervising the goings on to ensure that Doctor Smith does not get into trouble. However, it turns out that the conversion device is instead a trap set by the Aubertides (Cornell still has not fixed the problem of properly naming his villains), who have an odd reproduction method half cloning and half DNA absorption from what they eat, and who desire to capture a Time Lord and use the information to spread their "family" around the cosmos. The Aubertides arrive in England to track down the device, and chaos ensues.
What makes Human Nature work is that Cornell in this novel has a knack for making characters distinct without making them caricatures, of providing the characters we normally are not supposed to like with some dignity or behavior that rescues them, and providing the characters we normally are supposed to like with some less than savory aspects. The villains are both dangerous and a bit incompetent, which is a relief from the all-powerful villains Cornell usually resorts to. The dialogue works well. The plot is interesting, and this time Cornell does not lose control of it at the end. There are a few problem areas. One is that part of the ending rests upon what can only be described as magic rather than science. Another is the sudden arrival of archetypal beings, godlike living abstractions - Death, Time, and Pain. These get in the way of a what could have been a more controlled ending. And there is the little problem of explaining after events the remains of a school in Norfolk destroyed in a miniature nuclear bomb explosion. The ending still has a bit of tidying up needed.
All in all, Human Nature is a satisfying read, much better than most of the New Adventures novels that came before it.
| What: | The Great Space Elevator (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 1 April 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The Great Space Elevator works best for those seeking pure nostalgia. Jonathan Morris wrote this so that it would fit seamlessly into 1967 Doctor Who. The two reference points for the story and how it progresses would be The Ice Warriors and The Seeds of Death. The TARDIS crew land in near future Earth next to a scientific installation, in this case a space elevator, a new idea in the late 1960s (perhaps not even thought of back then, as the first science fiction story featuring the idea that I can figure is Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise, from the late 1970s). After being arrested for trespassing, The Doctor somehow inveigles himself and Jamie and Victoria into helping the staff solve a problem, one that turns out to be to no one's surprise an attempted alien invasion using the installation. The invaders this time are not well described or clarified, and do not even get a name, but basically they are the Static Electricity Monsters. Much that goes on in the story is relatively preposterous, but since the intention is to replicate the spirit of a past era's entertainment, one would have to call this a success.
| What: | Sanctuary (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 29 March 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
David A. McIntee's Sanctuary presents itself as a pure historical story, a rarity for Doctor 7. There are no aliens, no time paradoxes, no lost extraterrestrial devices. Instead, the story proceeds much like the Hartnell era historicals. Thus, the plot runs mostly this way: something strange happens to the TARDIS, forcing the TARDIS crew to abandon the TARDIS. They find themselves in southwestern France, Landuedoc (or Langue d'Oc), in the early 1200s, just in time for the most horrific parts of the Albigensian Crusades. Doctor and companion get separated, and the first half plus of the story involves them trying to get back together. Once they do, the plot changes to part The Name of the Rose and part Ivanhoe. Bernice falls in love with a disgraced Templar Knight, Guy de Carnac, which of course prepares the reader for the tragic ending. Although McIntee has apparently done quite a bit of research about the period and its historical events, he ends up playing Shakespeare with history, creating characters as standins for one and sometimes two real historical figures, condensing events that cross years into a couple of weeks, and conflating events into single scenes.
Some problematic areas for me are the overly long descriptions of combat, especially dwelling on the physical details of death, the lack of a clear plot, and the telegraphing of the ending from very early in the story. The detailed descriptions of death really put me off. In each case, we have to be told exactly which limbs were hacked off, which body parts were gauged out, which weapon caused each death, how much blood one could see, and on and on and on. I don't know why McIntee insists on devoting so many pages to gore, other than that it acts as padding to swell an otherwise rather slim story.
So, this book is entertaining in that we get plenty of Medieval fighting (all very exciting), a love story that is at least believable enough (de Carnac being very much like Bernice), dastardly nobles stabbing each other in the backs (or hiring someone to do it), and a Doctor 7 who for the first time in a long time seems to be actually doing something.
| What: | Infinite Requiem (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 15 March 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Daniel Blythe's second New Adventures novel is just uninteresting. We get Doctor forcing his way into a problem rather than stumbling upon one. The problem itself is just another super-being that wants to cause chaos because it can. Super being as spoiled child has been done to death, and Blythe brings nothing original to the idea.
It's great to have Christopher Eccleston back as The Doctor. He is wonderful on his first outing for Big Finish. I wish I could say that the story was great. Nicholas Briggs wrote the whole thing, all three parts. This time, he tries to capture the essence of RTD's first run with Doctor Who. It's like the trilogy at the end of a series. The universe is at stake, someone's out to get The Doctor, and his big plan falls completely apart. For me, the first and biggest problem of this story is that the threat to the universe is just another species that needs to eat. Is there seriously no motivation for destroying the universe other than hunger? (spoiler: it turns out not to be hunger, but addiction, but it amounts to much the same thing - insatiable appetite). At least The Master wants to conquer the universe; that's something. However, it really is trivial and boring that the great universal threat is nothing more than a hungry animal. Another problem of this one is a subplot involving time displaced soldiers. This goes nowhere, really, and leaves a major hanging question. The Doctor "saves" the three main ones, but what about all the rest, the legions and retinues? They are just abandoned once The Doctor, accidentally, gets the three leads in. A final really dicey bit for me is that from the beginning, with all the time eddies disrupting history, the listener knows that the story will end up with the "it didn't really happen" ending, complete reset button stuff. This aspect takes away much of the tension and investment the audience feels for the characters around The Doctor. The good part is that Briggs has given Doctor 9 many moments that remind the audience of what made this Doctor so interesting and so missed.
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| A Strong Attempt at Redemption |
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| What: | Set Piece (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 19 February 2025 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Set Piece is probably the best NA novel up to this point, that's 34 novels into the series. This may be because Kate Orman has taken on the assignment of closing one chapter while opening a new one and tried her hardest to make it work. In essence, one can think of Set Piece as the season finale, in which the story has to turn the volume up to 11, and maybe higher, while also tying the loose ends of the series, and correcting some mistakes, at least the big ones, from the previous episodes. Let us take the last first.
The most complained about aspect of the NAs was the characterization of Ace. They turned her into a bland, soulless, shoot first and ask no questions, kill anything that moves "soldier," perpetually angry at everything. Orman fixes this by returning the character of Ace to something closer to how the character had been in 1989. She's still a soldier and fighter, but here the problem for Ace is not that she is ever angry and resentful, but rather that she cares too much, that she has an overwhelming belief in what is right and what is wrong, and an uncontrollable urge to fix what is wrong. It is this belief that gets her intro trouble, that blinds her to the subtleties of existence, rather than anger and resentment. This is a much more likeable, understandable, and mature Ace.
The second problem of the NAs that Orman fixes is the relationship between the three principal characters. In previous NAs, this came in two forms: unbearably fractious to the point that all seem to hate each other, or Ace and Benny as agents under The Doctor's control as mastermind. In Set Piece, the trio are working together for the first time (how many novels did it take to get here?). They genuinely like each other and respect each other. In particular, Orman works very hard to restore the relationship between Ace and The Doctor, realizing that all along this has been Ace's problem, not The Doctor's.
The third problem had been the overemphasis on Doctor 7 as the master manipulator, especially one who risks his companions while staying mostly behind the scenes. Orman goes far in the other direction. The Doctor puts himself in danger first and foremost, here to the point of nearly dying three times, and undergoing three weeks of torture, and undergoing a nearly total physical transformation.
With regard to tying the loose ends, Orman here brings back a character from a previous NA, Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, as pivotal to the plot. She also rummages through the main characters' memories to remind the reader of many things that had happened in previous NAs. She also brings in a few memories from the TV series, with only the occasional wink or nod to the fans. There is a bit of retrofitting explanations, mostly to make The Doctor more palatable.
And then there's turning up the danger threat to 11. The universe is at stake once again. Someone has been punching holes in space-time, and an out-of-control bio-computer spaceship called Ship is gobbling human minds to learn how to stabilize one of the holes so that it can traverse space and time to fulfill its program of saving humanity, which it has wrongly interpreted. The three TARDIS crew spend over half the novel separated from each other with no way to contact each other, seemingly alone in a time of history in which they do not belong. Orman describes torture and death in too precise detail, worryingly so in my view. Plus, Orman brings in Pain, a relative of Death, as a metaphysical entity occupying the characters' dreams.
The novel, however, is not without its problems. From the standpoint of quality of writing, this is probably the best written of the NAs up to this point. However, Orman does get carried away with the flourishes of style, writing in grand metaphors and images about things that would work better if described more directly. The novel is very violent, and I don't think it needed to be. She is a bit of a showoff regarding her literary knowledge, with a clever epigram for each chapter, often in the original language, and some of which are made up Doctor-historical author "unpublished" collaborations.
In summary, Set Piece is by far the most satisfying NA up to this point. I would give it a 7.5 out of 10, 3.5 star rating if I could.
| What: | Warlock (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 30 January 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
This novel is many things, some good, some bad. Andrew Cartmel has a better understanding of prose than most of the other writers in the New Adventures line. The style and tone are consistent throughout. Cartmel has chosen a gritty, hard-edged, criminal underworld milieu for the setting and characters, and never wavers from that plan. The bad is that Warlock is not a Doctor Who novel. The Doctor is hardly in it and he does almost nothing that affects the plot. Cartmel clearly wanted to write a certain kind of story, but perhaps decided that the only way it could be reliably published would be to slap a Doctor Who label onto it. Instead, the novel centers on Cartmel's character Creed McIlveen, an American narcotics cop of the bitter, self-destructive variety that we have seen so many times. He has a sad and lonely past after his beloved died, lives alone with his dog, and secretly wishes that each time he goes on a mission someone will kill him and end his misery. He is also far more intelligent and insightful than any other law-enforcement character. You know the type. Creed gets more pages than any other character in the novel. Another bad spot is that Cartmel has written The Doctor and friends as if this were Mission:Impossible or The Avengers. The Doctor and friends are simply there, as a team, going under cover, on a mission to unmask evil doers. Cartmel doesn't bother to explain how The Doctor and friends got there, why they are there, why The Doctor wants them to investigate the newest designer drug called Warlock. He simply sends Benny on an undercover mission and she does not protest at all. I do not like this idea of The Doctor and friends as a self-appointed team of investigators into criminal activity. The Doctor should stumble onto problems, not actively seek them out. The last bad thing is that, apart from The Doctor and friends and a side character named Julian, every one in this book is nasty, vicious, violent, and thoroughly awful. Cartmel spends far too much time on long scenes that have no point other than to convince the reader of how nasty, vicious, violent, and thoroughly awful they all are. It is very unpleasant reading.
| What: | Decalog (Decalog short story collections) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Saturday 11 January 2025 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
This first official collection of Doctor Who short stories has interesting ideas, but does not come off quite right for me as a whole. The idea is to use a frame-tale structure rather than simply have a collection of stories. The problem is that the frame tale itself sets up an expectation that all the stories will be connected and progressing toward a revelation of a central mystery. This promise, the book does not deliver on as only one of the stories actually bears a direct relationship to the frame tale. The set up is that Doctor 7 wanders into the office of a private detective in 1950s Los Angeles. We know he is Doctor 7, but he doesn't because he has lost his memory. He wants the detective to retrace his steps so that he can find out who he is. Also, a cylinder of some kind seems very important to him. So, the detective (who just happens to be British? for some reason, as in what the hell is a British guy doing as a Los Angeles detective?) instead of doing detective stuff takes his mystery client to a weird old house where a psychic lives, and the psychic does the detecting courtesy of holding onto objects from The Doctor's pockets that will supposedly reveal who he his. Each object, then, becomes the occasion for the psychic to "tell" a story. The lost memory trope seems pretty lame, and fortunately there is a payoff at the end so that it is not so lame as it seems. What is and remains lame is the psychic. That's me, I'm a skeptic. I just cannot buy into the magical psychic powers rigamarole.
On to the stories themselves. The best, by far, is Jim Mortimore's "The Book of Shadows," a cleverly constructed time paradox tale involving Barbara and Doctor 1 in which she gets split into two incarnations at roughly the same time, with devastating consequences for history. The worst, by far, is Vanessa Bishop's "The Straw That Broke the Camel's Back," a pointless exercise that has The Brigadier and Doctor 3 in the early days, not merely disagreeing, but actively despising each other, with Liz caught in the middle. The story is not true to any of these characters, and makes no sense of what happens in later seasons. David Auger's "The Golden Door" is an amateurishly written 2-Doctor story (1 and 6). Tim Robins' "Prisoners of the Sun" attempts to be modernist by using a multiple universes device, but the many leaps and shortcuts force him to leave out crucial details. It probably would have worked better if it were longer and slower paced. Apart from Mortimore's story, the other story worth a second read is Paul Cornell's "Lackaday Express." I am not usually an admirer of Cornell's writing, which I often find too fan-oriented and cliché-ridden. This story, however, is, despite a few flaws, quite interesting as a better-written disjointed narrative than Robins' story. It has Doctor 5 rescuing a young woman who is reliving pieces of her life in a constant loop. The swapping between her perspective, in first person, and the third-person narrative of The Doctor provides interesting contrasts and builds the mystery well. The science behind this is more than just a little off, despite all the sciency language Cornell throws around, and the young woman strikes me as rather petty and selfish, but the concept as a whole is intriguing, and Cornell does not oversell it.
In the end, the collection is like the box of knick-knacks one buys at a flea market: a couple of interesting items plus much dross.
| What: | Antidote to Oblivion (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 31 December 2024 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
A true sequel, "Antidote to Oblivion" is an attempt to rearrange the themes and ideas from "Vengeance on Varos," "Mindwarp," and "Mission to Magnus." This time, Sil is on Earth. During a vulnerable stage in Earth history, when civilizations have broken down, presumably after a war, Sil has come in to recreate Britain as ConCorp. The President is really just a CEO, and is beholden to Sil for loans to get society up and running. Society, however, is failing, and the only solution so far has been to put additives into the water that drug the populace into bland complicity. Sil, however, has a more drastic solution, which is to maximize profit by eliminating 90% of the "surplus" population through introducing alien diseases. To this end, Sil has employed the daughter of Crozier from "Mindwarp," to gather the diseases and create antidotes that will be given only to the executive elite. The plan: capture a Time Lord and use Gallifreyan immunity to boost human immunity. Thus, Sil tricks the Doctor into arriving at ConCorp. He and Cordelia will use the Doctor as the experiment and Flip as the control.
The first parts of the story are alright, though there is a disturbing lack of originality. The main problems for me are that Philip Martin knows almost nothing about how diseases work, how cures work, and how medical research is done. Another problem spot is that he introduces a needless complication by having one of the alien viruses be an intelligent species. It is a side show, and adds no increased danger or urgency to the issue of what might happen if an alien virus enters an unprotected population.
There's some clever dialogue, and Nabil Shaban is once again brilliant as Sil. Those are the high points.
| What: | Quinnis (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 26 November 2024 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
This entry in the Companion Chronicles series has Susan telling a story about an adventure she and her grandfather had before the events of An Unearthly Child. This is meant to fill in a gap created by an offhand remark in the episode The Edge of Destruction. So, The Doctor and Susan travel to the Fourth Universe, landing on a primitive planet where the simple people believe that a single person could potentially have the power to make rain. Of course, The Doctor gets mistaken for rainmaker, and off we go. Susan, meanwhile, has repeated interactions with a ragged orphan girl who turns out to be something quite different and much more menacing. What irked me about this one is the depiction of the people of Quinnis as just superstitious, low-level thinkers ruled by their emotions. It's a hamfisted, stereotypical depiction of societies with basic technologies. Perhaps it fits in with the early Doctor Who stories by working that way, but I find Quinnis disappointing given what it could have been.
| What: | The Creeping Death (Tenth Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Tuesday 26 November 2024 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
This entry into the Doctor-Donna series will probably appeal to those who think this was the greatest combination for Doctor Who ever. It would have very much fit into that series. That is where I have the problems with this one. It fits too much, so that it has all the flaws of that series as well as the virtues. Aiming for swinging 60s London, the TARDIS crew arrive in not so swinging 50s London, on the first day of the worst smog ever to hit that city. Making it worse is an alien species, the fumifugium, who of course live up to their name by eating, or at least thriving in the toxic gasses that will kill a few thousand Londoners across four days. They are making the smog worse, so The Doctor has to put a stop to it. The Doctor, of course, co-opts a ragtag group to help him in that task. Some of them die. He offers the aliens a chance to go somewhere else and stop killing people. The aliens, typically, have no morals apart from "eating good," so refuse. What is wrong here? Well, among other things, in the ragtag crew we get a gratuitous gay couple (whether they are gay or not has no effect on the story), some pontificating about how terrible attitudes were in the past, a plucky young proto-feminist, an alien species with no sophistication of culture or mentality, and tons of "smart" dialogue that just rolls off the tongues of characters, especially Donna, as if they had a repertoire of quips lined up for that purpose. It's entertaining enough, but I find the lack of sophistication at all levels - plot, character, motivation, theme - to be a major drawback.
This collection gives us two four-part series, The Unzal Incursion representing the 1970 season, and The Gulf representing the 1974 season. The first is the better of the two. The Unzal Incursion finds The Doctor, Liz Shaw, the Brigadier, and UNIT fighting another invasion. This time, it is an invasion by stealth. A new training program for soldiers turns out to be an alien brain-washing system to make the Earth soldiers work for the alien invaders. UNIT has been infiltrated, and The Doctor, Liz, and The Brigadier become fugitives, trying to escape capture while also ending the alien menace. The story fits into the 1970 series in being both a rollicking adventure while at the same time a rather sombre exposé of human shortcomings. The second story brings back together Sarah Jane Smith with Doctor 3. Bopping around Time and Space, they land in the future, on an ocean world. Set upon the poisonous ocean is a decommissioned "spin drifter," designed for mineral extraction, now used as home to an artist collective. The story quickly becomes a haunted house narrative, with semi-corporeal aliens that have telepathic abilities forcing people to cry so that the aliens can remove the salt from their bodies. As with most of these things, motivations are somewhat unclear. I would like to see aliens motivated by more than just hunger. Also, I cannot help feeling that The Doctor and Sarah are butting their noses in. At the beginning of the story, they don't really have a stake in what is going on, so why get involved?
Both of these stories include the daughters of the original actors taking the roles of their mothers. Daisy Ashford, daughter of Caroline John, plays Liz Shaw, and does so quite well. They have some vocal similarities, but Ashford does not try too hard to be exactly like her mother. Sadie Miller, daughter of Elisabeth Sladen, is much closer in vocal manner to her mother. She really gets the little characteristic mannerisms, when the voice raises or lowers, distinctive pronunciations, and so on. It is really nice joined with Tim Treloar's marvelous Doctor 3 impression and John Culshaw's equally marvelous Brigadier impression, giving one the feeling that the old gang is back together.
A peculiar aspect of this box set, and I do not know whether this was intentional, is that it is a big exercise in girl power. Both companions are played as strong, independent characters, not just hanging onto The Doctor. Additionally, in The Unzal Incursion, we get the villain, the villain's assistant, and the guest companion, Sergeant Attah, played by women. The entire cast, apart from The Doctor, in The Gulf is female. I find this neither good nor bad, just interesting.
Expanded from an outline and early draft by John Lloyd, friend of Douglas Adams, The Doomsday Contract has Douglas Adams and Graham Williams written all over it. Basically, although the stakes are high, after all Earth might be destroyed, nothing in this is taken even remotely seriously. The entire story is an elaborate spoof of the British legal system. The Doctor is called as a witness for a trial. His old friend from Gallifrey is plaintiff in a case as president of a charitable agency charged with preserving endangered species throughout the galaxy. A ruthless corporate executive wants to use Earth for nefarious industrialization that will mean sterilizing the planet, and The Doctor must prove that he has visited Earth and that he can confirm that Earth has intelligent life. The snag is that in confirming that he has been to Earth, The Doctor is also confessing to a crime since Earth is a protected planet. This one is for fans of 1979 Doctor Who, the series that made ridicule the sole rationale for the show. It's amusing, but not much more than that.
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| Could Have Been Done on Telly |
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| What: | Revolution in Space (Third Doctor Adventures audios) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Thursday 7 November 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Revolution in Space takes Doctor 3 and Sarah to the future, where a colony in the asteroid belt is seeking independence from Earth authority, while behind the political plot an alien artifact extends its terrible influence. As a six-parter, this production probably needs the two plots to sustain the duration, especially given that, as usual for a Big Finish production, the cast is rather small. This story has very much a nostalgic sensibility, a familiarity of reaching into the past to reproduce the past. The plot is very similar The Mutants and Colony in Space, and the story proceeds quite along similar lines. So, the fan listener gets rewarded with a fond feeling of revisiting old friends, but this reduces potential quality of the story, which could use some upgrades in plotting.
| What: | Parasite (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Friday 25 October 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
With Parasite, Jim Mortimore decided to take Doctor Who into the giant, mysterious world genre of science fiction, like Larry Niven's Ringworld, Tony Rothman's The World Is Round, and Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. The idea is that humans have discovered a mysterious planet or giant manufactured object, and some kind of investigative unit has been sent to explore it. In Parasite, that world is The Artifact, a planet seemingly turned inside out. The TARDIS crew have arrived here by accident, but of course just after some shenanigans have gone on with the investigative team. However, against the usual course of events, the TARDIS crew are not blamed for these shenanigans, but instead gradually get pulled into the attempts to discover what The Artifact is, and to discover what political double-dealing led to the deaths of the investigative team. However, all that gets sidelined to a large extent as the novel becomes a survival story, with The Doctor, Ace, and Benny separated and reunited several times. The Artifact is changing, going into a kind of self-destruct mode. On top of that, inside The Artifact, all species of flora and fauna go through impossibly rapid mutations into new species. This process of rapid speciation presents a threat as the life systems contaminate the people inside The Artifact. This is the ambitious part. Mortimore has made the strongest attempt in the New Adventures series of writing a hard science story for Doctor Who. There is no mysterious figure who is the "soul" of the world, no quasi-supernatural nonsense. Mortimore has tried to make it all work on scientific grounds. Part of the problem, though, is that his scientific knowledge, especially in biology, is not quite up to the task. That is not the worst problem, though. Another problem is that, as he conceives it, the inside-out world means that there are two surfaces, two locations that are "the ground," and so in between is a zero-gravity center where all the air is. The ground itself has only light gravity. That means that most of the action takes place floating, or more often flying, in zero-gravity. Mortimore repeatedly forgets this, and so has characters move and act as if they are on the ground. He will throw in little reminders that they are not, but mostly these do not compensate for the long stretches in which people floating or flying are having ordinary conversations, turning toward or away from each other in the normal sense, and so on. Plus, when characters are on the ground, Mortimore forgets that the gravity is low, so that they should be bouncing and bounding along. He has the characters walking through landscapes as if they were ordinary places on Earth. Also, Mortimore makes a quite pointless tie to one of his previous New Adventures novels. The Doctor is out of the action for three fourths of the novel. Mortimore returns to the earlier relations between the TARDIS characters where Ace openly despises The Doctor and distrusts Benny, and Benny has a lot of nothing to do. For me, the biggest problem is that Mortimore wants to batter these characters into oblivion, and still have them act and talk as if they have only little cuts and bruises. Benny is knocked unconscious at least four times. Ace has critters living inside her skin that burst out, she has her eyes gouged out, and suffers several more physical indignities. Benny undergoes impromptu surgery twice, both by people with no medical training. One time, it involves drilling a hole in her head, and another it involves injecting her with poison, and then surgically removing a parasitical creature. How she survives either of these tortures (the second by Ace), and revives to quip away with ironic witticisms like the Benny of old is beyond my understanding. Given what Mortimore puts them through, the entire TARDIS crew should have been dead halfway into the book. It seems to me that all my complaints about the first two years of New Adventures books really come down to failures of editing. These are all problems that the editors could and should have fixed.
| What: | Falls the Shadow (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Wednesday 9 October 2024 |
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| Rating: | 4 |
I read Daniel O'Mahony' s The Man in the Velvet Mask, which I quite liked, before reading this one. So, perhaps my review is skewed because I was expecting so much more out of Falls the Shadow than what I got. I have seen some other reviews, and those that favor this book try to make some justification for such a decision, with multiple qualifications. This, to me, is a sure sign that something is seriously wrong with the book. Let me start with the good things before I get to the many, many problems. O'Mahony is the most stylish writer of the New Adventures novels up to this point (late 1994). His control of language and tone is very good. Plus, if this weren't a Doctor Who novel, it might be better. That is, O'Mahony has written a modern horror novel in the manner of Clive Barker, and then shoehorned in the Doctor Who elements. This structure makes the Doctor Who elements - the characters, TARDIS, Time Lords, and other DW paraphernalia - always feel out of place. It might, therefore, have been a pretty good horror novel if left with the elements that O'Mahony created. As it is, it is a Doctor Who novel, though, and thus does not work. Here are my reasons for saying so.
1. This novel is a distinctly unpleasant read. It is 300+ pages of viciousness and cruelty without break. Thus, if it were a piece of music, it would be a one-note piece of music, a sustained dirge in chaotic harmonies.
2. There is not one character to root for or have sympathy with, let alone identify with. The inhabitants of Shadowfell, the setting for most of the novel, are all psychotic, self-obsessed, and devoid of reality. The outsiders are otherworldly beings with either dubious moral sensibilities, or no moral sensibilities. Each of these - the Gray Man, Tanith, Gabriel, the Mandelbrot set - are, like the book, all one-note. The TARDIS crew are utterly useless. Ace is reduced to angry outbursts, and the attitude of "I don't like it - shoot it," Benny goes from a whining wreck to nothing but lame, smartass quips, and The Doctor spends half the novel in a state of self-pity, and the other half spinning his wheels on plans that have no effect.
3. The plot makes no sense. Perhaps it made sense to O'Mahony, but he fails to deliver necessary connections. He does provide something like an explanation late in the novel, but it really fails to answer all the "why" questions that a reader might have. Basically, O'Mahony has created a fantasy world, but not told the reader what the rules of operation are. Without rules, things just happen. Just as a for instance, he has the character of Jason Cranleigh become a hybrid creature of all his possible selves in the multiverse, or something like that (it is never clearly explained), without any description of how it happened, or an explanation of why it happened. It is just one of the several crazy things going on in the house.
4. The villains, Tanith and Gabriel, lack motivation for their actions, and the other characters have weak and clichéd motivations. Characters just act on whatever whim O'Mahony wants to give them in the moment.
5. Pretentious chapter titles. The chapter titles are names of songs by Kate Bush, Steve Hackett, and others, or novels by J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Michael Moorcock, or movie titles, and so on. It is as if O'Mahony wants to show off his intellectual credentials. The relationship of the allusions in the titles to the contents of the chapters is, at best, loose.
I could say more, but really this is more than enough to display what is a huge disappointment. Perhaps O'Mahony had great ambitions for his first novel, but just not enough time to see them through.
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| As Dreadful in Drama as in Print |
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This is one of the scripts commissioned for the second Colin Baker series that got scrapped. Original scriptwriter Wally K. Daly has adapted it for audio format, and plays the part of the alien parrot bird thing. This is a script that I think should have remained scrapped, and probably should never have been done at all, unless they really were that desperate for scripts in 1985. It is even worse than The Twin Dilemma in terms of plotting, pacing, rationale, plausibility, and clunky dialogue. The whole thing is at the level of the 1930s Buck Rogers serials. The Doctor and Peri decide to take a holiday, and The Doctor finds a hightech bowling ball shaped device that acts as a tourist agency. It suggests the planet Tranquila (how's that for obvious naming), where The Doctor has been before. So, off they go. However, things on Tranquila are not so tranquil (now where did I come up with that?). Tranquila is in a state of permanent truce with their rivals on the other half of the planet, the Ameliorans (who of course are entirely the opposite of ameliorative). This state of affairs has existed for a long time, but one ambitious minor noble doesn't like the status quo. He would like to be in charge, and so he has made a deal with a slimy arms dealer named Mordant, who, it just so happens, sold the bowling-ball travel agency to The Doctor hoping to use it as a device to monitor The Doctor. Mordant has a "hate ray" that he secretly turns on the Tranquilans to make them act like monsters temporarily, so that they would blame the Ameliorans, restart the war, and keep Mordant in the arms business for a very long time. This magic ray gun can be as broad or narrow as he likes, and has multiple settings, such as fear and peace. Oh, and the Tranquilans can transport themselves to anywhere just by thinking about it. I cannot stress enough how preposterously bad this all is. Daly is an old hand at plot by convenience, and doesn't really care all that much if character actions make no sense, or that magic "rays" went out of fashion in science fiction forty years before his first draft. The one redeeming feature is that the actors do their damnedest to make the best of it.
| What: | The Suffering (The Companion Chronicles audiobooks) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Monday 30 September 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
The writer of this story contrives for it to be narrated, with interruptions, by the two actors. Thus, there is a bit of dramatic dialogue, but mostly it is storytelling. The story itself is like the transitional historicals of Doctor Who, set in an important historical era, but with a science-fiction component. In this case, writer Jacqueline Rayner has decided to take up feminism as the cause. Thus, the story takes place in the suffragette era, and revolves around the controversies of female emancipation in 1912, with some playing around about the origin of the Piltdown Man hoax thrown in. The villain of the piece fits into the theme by being a powerful alien female with a vendetta against all males. Thus, Rayner tries to cut a middle path, that feminism is just dandy, but it should not be about hating men. It's the kind of simple approach that would have fit well with 1965 Doctor Who and the concept of a "family show" of the period. It just makes the villain rather uninteresting. There are some cute moments of temporally displaced Vickie and Steven making false assumptions and social errors due to unfamiliarity with the time period. It's all entertaining, if rather simplistic.
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| Why Is It Always "Because I'm Hungry"? |
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| What: | Ghost Walk (Big Finish: The Monthly Adventures) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 29 September 2024 |
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| Rating: | 7 |
Ghost Walk takes us to many places that Doctor Who has already been, and shows us around them one more time. The story is set in a Yorkshire village known as a site of hauntings. There is a contemporary setting (early 2000s?) and a historical setting (early 1700s). In the historical setting, the TARDIS arrives is some catacombs in which resides an alien entity, ancient and awful, that feeds off energy. In trying to escape this entity, the TARDIS crew get separated, and we follow three stories: The Doctor and Tegan trapped with the beast, Nyssa being mistaken for a witch, and Adric sentenced to death for stealing a loaf of bread. Somehow, all of this is connected to the contemporary setting in which a woman who runs a ghost walk business is the key to preventing Sebaoth, the hungry beast, from manifesting and devouring the world. The story thus involves the rapid introduction late into the story of The Doctor's secret escape plan, a la Stephen Moffat. I find some of the story unconvincing, especially the Nyssa part. It does not strike me as realistic that in the 1700s an English village, even one in Yorkshire, would just decide that any strange woman would automatically be a witch and that she would have to go through the old witch torture routines of a century prior. Additionally, I just don't get why ancient beings of immense power from the beginning of the universe have only one motivation - hunger. All they want to do is eat. Surely, the writers could come up with a more complex motivation than that. So, entertaining, but maddening in its deficiencies.
| What: | Strange England (New Adventures novels) |
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| By: | David Layton, Los Angeles, United States |
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| Date: | Sunday 8 September 2024 |
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| Rating: | 6 |
Simon Messingham's first novel is not his best. I have read others that I thought were really quite good, especially Tomb of Valdemar and The Indestructible Man. Strange England lacks the plotting and strong characterization of those novels. It is another of the bubble universe or mental landscape stories that the Virgin Doctor Who book editors seem to like. The TARDIS plops down our crew in a landscape that looks like a typical 19th-century country estate. However, the landscape and people in it are "not right" in peculiar ways. The presence of our TARDIS crew leads to a wave of violent attacks by giant insects, killer fur babies, and various hybrid creatures. Ace gets kicked into the "real world" near the house at the center of the fake world, the connecting incident being a fire that burned down the house. This real world, though, is just as pointlessly nasty and violent as the virtual one, and virtual beings in the "real" world still have both a presence and an effect. So Messingham does not have it quite clear enough what is virtual and what is real. Then, there is the violence. This novel has heaps and heaps of violence, described in graphic detail that goes on and on. It seems to be there mostly as filler, which is another disturbing quality of the book. That is, there is no reason for much of the violence in terms of plot. It seems to be there because Messingham couldn't think of something else for the characters to do. Additionally, the plot device, the key that opens the explanation, does not require that so much of the action be this violent. It could all have been handled another, cleverer, way. A last problem for me is Messingham's characterization of Doctor 7. This Doctor just hangs around "thinking" and letting everyone else get into trouble. His dialogue just did not, to me, sound like Doctor 7. All that aside, there are some very interesting bits in this novel, some ideas that could have born sweeter fruit.
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| Displaying 1 to 20 of 4,116 reviews
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