October Books 12) Lights Out, by Holly Black
This is the very latest Doctor Who prose to be published, a short ebook by Holly Black, well-known horror writer for younger readers, which is actually a coda to the eleven ebooks published last year, one for each Doctor; presumably the whole lot will appear in paper as a collection soon. (My advice - buy it, but skip the rather weak opening story by Eoin Colfer.)
This is very good. We have a non-human protagonist and the Twelfth Doctor (between Deep Breath and Into The Dalek) having an adventure as a consequence of getting coffee at an interplanetary coffee joint, in which you find just precisely the sorts of aliens from both Old and New Who who you would expect to see stopping off for a break between adventures. The tropes of both the Whoniverse and sf more widely are beautifully handled and the story, though very short, packs a decent punch. Well worth the (very low) price.
I had not read any of Black's work before, being a couple of decades out of the target readership, but if this is her standard I can see why she has a following.
This is very good. We have a non-human protagonist and the Twelfth Doctor (between Deep Breath and Into The Dalek) having an adventure as a consequence of getting coffee at an interplanetary coffee joint, in which you find just precisely the sorts of aliens from both Old and New Who who you would expect to see stopping off for a break between adventures. The tropes of both the Whoniverse and sf more widely are beautifully handled and the story, though very short, packs a decent punch. Well worth the (very low) price.
I had not read any of Black's work before, being a couple of decades out of the target readership, but if this is her standard I can see why she has a following.