Second paragraph of third chapter: The following Monday, I experienced for the first time in my life the physical shock of seeing my name in print. I was leafing through Doctor Who Magazine and suddenly found I was in it. It said something like, 'Since the new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, has just arrived, it seems likely that it was the producer ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: This particular room was shared by Ace and a science geek called Abner Apple. The guy was a professor, despite his youth. But that wasn’t so unusual here on the Hill where it seemed everyone had a doctorate -with the possible exception of the Doctor.
Getting towards the end of the Seventh Doctor novels now, this ( Read more... )

Roz stared out and saw it on the door step.
The white dog.
I see that I gave very high praise to the previous Cartmel novel in the New Adventures series. I was not as convinced by this one; I kept feeling that I had forgotten important bits of continuity, and the plot seemed to be trying to merge high-school supernatural, spy stories and possessed- ( Read more... )

This was the first, and I think only, book of short stories about Torchwood, and a fine collection it is too. We start with "The Baby Farmers" by David Llewellyn, set in the Victorian Torchwood era which generated so much fanfic from just a few mentions on screen, a lovely canonification of this setting; and then there's what will presumably be the ( Read more... )

I thought this was a particularly good New Adventure, a partial (though independent) sequel to the much earlier Warhead, taking the Doctor, Ace and Benny to very near-future England and America to deal with a peculiar new drug and a truly horrible animal experimentation centre. I was hooked, and felt that Cartmel managed to control the plot and ( Read more... )

I'm way way behind with these, so can't really put time into doing them justice. As usual I'm posting in order of internal Who chronology rather than either release order or listening order, which means the one I listened to most recently actually comes first.

( The Rocket Men: First Doctor and space pirates with jet packs )

This story by Andrew Cartmel, part of the current Big Finish run of 'lost' Seventh Doctor scripts, is basically an introduction story for new companion Raine, whose origins were explained in last month's instalment in this series, Thin Ice. I'm afraid it didn't really grab me as firmly as its predecessor did - I think 'Kaffiristan' is a somewhat ( Read more... )

Well, I was rather impressed by this Doctor Who novel in the New Adventures series. The Seventh Doctor and Ace get caught up in the nasty machinations of a near-future biotech firm, variously in the US, London and a small island near Istanbul. Cartmel is a very good descriptive writer, both in terms of establishing the physical setting and in terms ( Read more... )

( Frankly, I wouldn't bother )