Second paragraph of third story ("The Northern Heights", by Mark Stevens): As you approach the watchman's gate, you feel your muscles tense.This is one of those moments where they often try to reach out to you, probing at your foremost thoughts, trying to rearrange them into some sort of suggestion to which they hope you'll adhere. Sometimes they' ( Read more... )

This was the first of 29 anthologies of stories featuring the first eight Doctors published by Big Finish between 2002 and 2009. This takes the dubious proposition that astrology as developed on Earth might somehow be relevant to Gallifrey, and asks twelve writers to write stories based on signs of the Zodiac. The results are variable; the one that ( Read more... )

A collection of short stories featuring the first eight Doctors, all set in Prague. Like some of the other Short Trips collections I found the clunkers more memorable than the better stories - there's a dire First Doctor / Ian tale, for instance - but I'll also note that the stories I found best tended to be those by authors I had already heard of ( Read more... )

I guess I've read half a dozen of Big Finish's Short Trips anthologies by now, and found them a bit of a mixed bag; sometimes a decent linking concept makes the whole better than the sum of its parts, sometimes one or two outstanding stories are all that can overcome the problems of a duff central idea. This is one of the better volumes I have read ( Read more... )

In an agony of indecision before Christmas when Big Finish announced that they would stop not only publishing but even selling their Short Trips anthologies, I bought half a dozen of them (based on a combination of reported scarcity and LibraryThing ratings) of which this is the first in sequence. It's a bit variable, to be honest; I was not blown ( Read more... )

I got this collection mainly because it had the only Erimem story I had not otherwise read or listened to - "The Gangster's Story", by Jon de Burgh Miller. I was not bowled over by it, or indeed by many of the other stories in the collection, which is built around a theme of people whose survival affects the Web of Time and who are therefore ( Read more... )

1) Doctor Who Short Trips [6]: Past Tense, ed. Ian Farrington

A bit more of a mixed bag than the two other collections I've read in this series, with some real turkeys - the nadir of the collection, interestingly, is an eight-page sketch which doesn't appear to have been properly finished, by none other than Eric Saward. But there are some very ( Read more... )

7) Doctor Who Short Trips [2]: Companions, ed. Jacqueline Rayner
8) Doctor Who Short Trips [3]: A Universe of Terrors, ed. John Binns ( Read more... )