Second paragraph of third story ("Reversal of Fortune", by Graeme Burk): Mikhail laughed so hard he began to cough. For an instant his vital signs became bee-bop-syncopation and arrhythmia.
The theme of this book is explorations of closed environments, and how the Doctor's arrival might change them (or not). I couldn't help but think that the steel ( Read more... )

The fourth of the Big Finish Short Trips anthologies, and the third edited by Jac Rayner, published in 2003. At that stage we had eight canonical Doctors, so it seems in retrospect a fairly obvious idea to compile a collection of nine stories, each featuring one of them, with one more featuring them all. And while there are many cultural uses of ( Read more... )

I've fallen a bit behind with bookblogging again, so here's the start of an attempt to catch up before the end of the month/year. For the last few years, I've gradually and systematically working through the published Doctor Who novels; I had a lapse in writing them up at the height of Clarke Award concentration last year, but kept on reading. This ( Read more... )

Penultimate book in the Eight Doctor Adventures range of novels, written (as the author explains in an afterword) to explain away a minor continuity error in Revenge of the Cybermen, but actually quite successful in its own terms as a story of grand redesign of parts of the Solar System for ostensibly aesthetic purposes that gets hijacked by ( Read more... )

This is one of those Who novels that could have made a good TV episode - indeed, it possibly did, with the central theme of children's nightmares becoming reality used twice that I can remember in New Who (Fear Her and Night Terrors). There's also a zombie character from the seventeenth century. It's solid stuff, well-written, giving the Doctor, ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third essay: I'm going to look at Barbara and Ian not only as televisual companions to the Doctor, but as icons within the wider worlds of Doctor Who. Who were they, why were they key to the success of the series, and why do we still keep returning to them over 50 years after Ian was the first person to say "but it was just a ( Read more... )

The Sleep of Reason, by Martin Day

Second paragraph of third chapter: Dark clouds are gathering - both literal and, if I might be permitted so fanciful a notion, symbolic - and I do not happily watch them as they form.
One of the last of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, seems to have got rave reviews from a lot of people though I am with hammard who warned ( Read more... )

The Eighth Doctor Adventures were getting pretty self-referential by this stage, but this is a good case study - Rose brings the Doctor, Fitz and Anji to a very well realised Victorian Engliand, where they find a rogue time machine and a stage act very reminiscent of a Christopher Priest novel that came out not long before; and there are references ( Read more... )

It's just as well that I read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia a few months back, or I would have felt a bit unmoored in this Eighth Doctor story of the Spanish Civil War. There is a time-changing entity plot, but I found myself instead appreciating Halliday's recreation of the awfulness of the 1930s, with one Eric Blair wandering in and out of the ( Read more... )

A hilarious yet dark mixup of the Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Anji with the Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1970s (and a dash of Roger Rabbit). The Scooby-Doo sections are particularly good at getting under the skin of what is really going on there. It would be very easy for a story with this premise to misfire completetly, but Lyons is an effective ( Read more... )