Short Trips: Time Signature
The Jadepagoda mailing list had a long and agonised debate a few years back, before new Who came along and changed everything. The debate went something along the lines of "Who fans will buy any old tat with the logo on, therefore BBC books publish any old tat. If we, as Who fans, only bought the books by the authors we actually like then possibly the quality might improve and even if it didn't we wouldn't have wasted money on books we knew in advance that we wouldn't like." While I recognised the validity of this argument I couldn't quite bear the idea of not being able to say "I have every Doctor Who novel and novelisation on my bookshelf". However, I eventually, with much indecision, decided I didn't need every officially published Doctor Who Short Story on my bookshelves, especially since the "Short Trips" collections by which these were primarily published were generally rather dull and inispiring. So, with much pride, I heroically cancelled my subscription. But then I began to hear rumblings, also on Jadepagoda, that "Short Trips: Time Signature" was actually rather good. And, mostly, it is.
The key idea is that time has a musical signature by which it can be manipulated and a particular tune which causes severe damage when played. Interwoven with this is the story of one of the Doctor's companions (created specifically for this run of short stories) who gets caught up in the events surrounding this tune.
It is clear that given this sort of imagery to play with the authors are prompted to create something a little bit more ambitious that "a Who adventure compressed into 10 pages" and stories which, for the most part, genuinely benefit from being short. It has to be said that the first story, Philip Purser-Hallard's "The Ruins of Time" is a compressed Who adventure, complete with sections that pretty much start with someone saying "Phew, I'm glad that whole rescue attempt there wasn't room to describe, went well!" but one of Purser-Hallard's strengths is world-building and he wisely chooses to focus his story on exploration of this world rather than on the capture-escape runaround taking place within it. Marc Platt's "The Hunting of the Slook" was a much better offering than the disappointing Benny Novella he turned in for Old Friends but neither this nor "Gone Fishing" (a nice story about a fishing trip from Ben Aaronovitch) really reach the heights of the work Platt and Aaronovitch were producing for Virgin. They are both solid enough tales and, I suspect, written more maturely than the stuff they wrote in the 1990s but they lack that sense of experimentation and excitement that I had previously associated with their work.
If I have a criticism of the collection it is that there is no real explanation given for how the new companion comes to hear the "Time Signature" tune nor how he metamorphoses from a fishing enthusiast into a composer and conductor. I was sort of expecting this explanation to be the pay-off in the final story of the collection, Andrew Cartmel's "Certificate of Destruction" but that proved to be a rather bland cats vs dogs tale with little relevance to the rest of the collection. So much so, that I was rather bemused by its placement as the final story when the rest of the collection had done such a fine job of dropping the pieces into place one at a time, while zipping backwards and forwards through the Doctor's incarnations.
This criticism aside, its still a solid Doctor Who short story collection. There are no real duds, and most of the stories are distinctly above average and, most importantly, treat the fact that they are short stories as a strength rather than a weakness.
The key idea is that time has a musical signature by which it can be manipulated and a particular tune which causes severe damage when played. Interwoven with this is the story of one of the Doctor's companions (created specifically for this run of short stories) who gets caught up in the events surrounding this tune.
It is clear that given this sort of imagery to play with the authors are prompted to create something a little bit more ambitious that "a Who adventure compressed into 10 pages" and stories which, for the most part, genuinely benefit from being short. It has to be said that the first story, Philip Purser-Hallard's "The Ruins of Time" is a compressed Who adventure, complete with sections that pretty much start with someone saying "Phew, I'm glad that whole rescue attempt there wasn't room to describe, went well!" but one of Purser-Hallard's strengths is world-building and he wisely chooses to focus his story on exploration of this world rather than on the capture-escape runaround taking place within it. Marc Platt's "The Hunting of the Slook" was a much better offering than the disappointing Benny Novella he turned in for Old Friends but neither this nor "Gone Fishing" (a nice story about a fishing trip from Ben Aaronovitch) really reach the heights of the work Platt and Aaronovitch were producing for Virgin. They are both solid enough tales and, I suspect, written more maturely than the stuff they wrote in the 1990s but they lack that sense of experimentation and excitement that I had previously associated with their work.
If I have a criticism of the collection it is that there is no real explanation given for how the new companion comes to hear the "Time Signature" tune nor how he metamorphoses from a fishing enthusiast into a composer and conductor. I was sort of expecting this explanation to be the pay-off in the final story of the collection, Andrew Cartmel's "Certificate of Destruction" but that proved to be a rather bland cats vs dogs tale with little relevance to the rest of the collection. So much so, that I was rather bemused by its placement as the final story when the rest of the collection had done such a fine job of dropping the pieces into place one at a time, while zipping backwards and forwards through the Doctor's incarnations.
This criticism aside, its still a solid Doctor Who short story collection. There are no real duds, and most of the stories are distinctly above average and, most importantly, treat the fact that they are short stories as a strength rather than a weakness.