September Books 3) The Suns of Caresh, by Paul Saint
She nearly collided with a man sitting on an unpowered vehicle. It had only two wheels, one in front and one behind, yet he seemed to have no difficulty balancing. Further on, a man was shouting at nobody while he pressed a small box against one side of his face, and an old woman on a nearby bench set fire to a white tube she was holding in her mouth.
This Past Doctor Adventure, with the Third Doctor and jo Grant, has a number of excellent concepts. Caresh itself is a planet which (slightly implausibly) orbits alternately around one of its two suns, with a threatened civilisation and an interfering Time Lord or two. A Careshi woman turns up in England of 1999, one of a number of symptoms of the chaos caused by her home world's problems, and there are some very good cognitive dissonance passages like the one above. There's some impressive writing of Tardis misbehaviour and body horror. But it didn't quite hang together for me, and I found some of the colourful elements (Israeli archaeological site, for instance) confusing rather than illustrative. Still, worth reading for fans of the era.
This Past Doctor Adventure, with the Third Doctor and jo Grant, has a number of excellent concepts. Caresh itself is a planet which (slightly implausibly) orbits alternately around one of its two suns, with a threatened civilisation and an interfering Time Lord or two. A Careshi woman turns up in England of 1999, one of a number of symptoms of the chaos caused by her home world's problems, and there are some very good cognitive dissonance passages like the one above. There's some impressive writing of Tardis misbehaviour and body horror. But it didn't quite hang together for me, and I found some of the colourful elements (Israeli archaeological site, for instance) confusing rather than illustrative. Still, worth reading for fans of the era.