I have a review of Kate Orman’s Eighth Doctor book The Year of Intelligent Tigers in the latest issue of Shooty Dog Thing, a Doctor Who fanzine edited by Paul Castle.
Category Archives: Speculative Fiction
Doctor Who Reviews: Sometime Never
This is another old _Doctor Who_ tie-in review. If it seems oddly snarky, consider that I wrote it years ago, not long after the book came out, while I was still actively following a series that was determinedly running itself into the ground.
Sometime Never… is the culmination of over three years of eighth Doctor books. This is the ultimate fruition of the ongoing storylines introduced during Justin Richards’s tenure as editor. This is the climax that every EDA since The Burning has built towards.
And it stinks.
It’s too damn long, for one thing. Sometime Never… only exists to tie up a number of dangling plot threads. That’s it. There is nothing else to it: no theme, no plot, no character development. The little that Sometime Never… accomplishes could be done in the space of a novella. But Richards has 280 pages to fill, and he fills them with padding. Lots of padding. The most superfluous padding since Robert Jordan published volume three hundred of The Wheel of Time. Over seventy per cent of the American sales of Sometime Never… have been traced to a single bulk purchase by the Wisconsin Federation of Mall Santas. They’re going to scotch tape copies to their beer guts this December.
Tie-Ins I Never Expected to See
Apparently Martha Jones has “Rich ruby hues with a liquorice nose. Mouthfilling sweet chocolate malt flavours and a slightly tart fruity finish,” while Captain Jack is “Rose gold in colour, a hoppy nose with undertones of honeydew melon.”
(Link via Behind the Sofa.)
Doctor Who Reviews: Palace of the Red Sun
This is another old Doctor Who tie-in review, written years ago and revised only slightly.
Why do we always come here?
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like some kind of torture
To have to watch the show.–The Muppet Show
Reading Palace of the Red Sun, I had occasion to think of Statler and Waldorf. They were the two old guys who sat in the balcony in “The Muppet Show.” Whenever anyone did anything, their response was a derisive comment and a forced laugh. This took a serious toll on everyone’s self esteem. Eventually Kermit had to keep a therapist on call backstage to prevent some of the less stable Muppets from slitting their wrists.
Obviously Messrs. S. and W. thought the show was crap. Yet for some reason, week after week, they kept coming back. You see, Statler and Waldorf led empty, hollow lives. The dreams of their youth had withered, leaving them unfulfilled. Their families had long since died or moved away. If not for the Muppets, they would have spent the evenings in their tiny, dingy rooms at the nursing home, drinking themselves into a stupor and reminiscing about their glory days before the war. I think on some level Kermit understood this, because he never had Animal drag them out behind the theater and beat them to a bloody pulp.
Palace of the Red Sun brought this to mind because it parallels my own relation to the literary works of Christopher Bulis. Not the drinking and the empty life–just the fact that, no matter how bad his books get, something keeps me coming back.
Maybe it’s the ideas. Bulis does almost nothing right, but there’s one thing he’s good at: coming up with interesting ideas to build his novels around. Palace of the Red Sun has a planet of fairy tale holograms and gardening robots, surrounded by a temporal anomaly and placed under siege by a megalomaniac who’s granted an extended interview to a mediocre journalist. In an alternate universe, a place of sunshine and lollipops, somebody like R. A. Lafferty or Philip K. Dick might have taken this stuff and turned out a quirky, interesting, exciting novel.
Unfortunately, this is the real world. It is frequently cloudy. The lollipops fell on the floor and are now covered with lint and crud from the avocado shag carpet, which hasn’t been shampooed since the late seventies. In the real world, this novel was written by Christopher Bulis, and Christopher Bulis could not write his way out of a wet paper sack with a sharp pencil. His characters are cardboard. His prose is flat. His dialogue is inane. He can’t even make a decent plot from the great ideas he managed to pull together. The Doctor and Peri spend 280 pages wandering through a morass of stupid cliches. They run around, get captured, escape, and meet rebels. The Doctor patronizes the secondary characters with shallow “wisdom,” and Peri is sexually harassed. There’s even a subplot about an intelligent robot learning what it means to be human. I looked in vain for some sign that Bulis was trying for irony–apparently he just doesn’t realize how stale this plot is. (You know an idea is past its sell-by date when it turns up on Star Trek. Multiple times, even.)
Palace of the Red Sun sucked. Yet I could not turn away. Perhaps someday Christopher Bulis will write another Doctor Who book. If so, I will buy that one as well, and read it. Because it feels so good when I stop.
Doctor Who Reviews: The Slow Empire
It’s been a while since I’ve posted much on this blog. I should do something about that. To get things going, here’s a review of a Doctor Who novel which originally appeared in the second issue of Shooty Dog Thing, a fanzine edited by Paul Castle.
Of course, if you’re not a fan this won’t be of any interest. Feel free to skip it.
If you are a fan, let me recommend The Slow Empire by Dave Stone.
You may have come across The Slow Empire. If so, its profound ugliness probably discouraged you from picking it up. When I say The Slow Empire is ugly I don’t mean it’s unpleasant or somehow immoral. I’m saying it’s physically ugly, as an object. BBC Books’ chronically maladroit designers managed to top themselves with this one. On the cover, a dull arrangement of planets and electrical arcs in the colors of unpleasant bodily fluids haloes the head of a half-blurry, bile-filtered stock photo of Paul McGann. Inside, whole sections of text are laid out in Comic Sans MS, the font that turns everything it touches into an amateur garage-sale flyer. This thing looks like it was vanity-published by a high school dropout.
In short, The Slow Empire needs a little love… the more so because Dave Stone is an acquired taste. Honestly, he’s kind of weird. But it’s a grounded weirdness. Stone has a deep grasp of human nature; characters react to freakish and strange plot twists in ways that seem just somehow right. There’s an aura of conviction here that many Who writers can’t manage. He’s also digressive, tossing ideas around like cheap salad, following wherever they lead. His books are as much about his digressions as about plot, and The Slow Empire has less plot than most. It’s there, but it’s not the point so much as an excuse to have a novel.
A Couple of Links
I’ve been fighting exhaustion all winter. You might get some idea of how tired I’ve been, and why, when I say that where I live we’ve had forty inches of snow since December.
While I’m trying to come up with a real post, here are a couple more links:
1. How would you feel if you were a new SF writer, and on the back of your brand-spanking-new first novel you found this?
(Via.)
2. Jeff VanderMeer is soliciting his readers’ weird stories on his blog.
New Adventures Reviews: Deceit (Part One)
(This is the first half of a half-finished review. I’m hoping going ahead and posting it will prod me into writing the rest.)
The word for Deceit is “functional.” It does not tell an exciting story. It does not explore characters in great detail. It doesn’t say much about the human condition. Deceit was conceived and written solely to advance the editorial goals of Peter Darvill-Evans, New Adventures mastermind.
He’s testing his own editorial guidelines. He’s reintroducing Ace. He’s filling in the New Adventures’ future history. He’s cleaning up and retconning the last few books’ worth of characterization oddities. And he’s explaining his theory of time travel. As Darvill-Evans says in his afterward/apologia, “That’s a lot of functions for one medium-length novel to perform. I hope you didn’t notice it creaking under the weight of so many burdens.”
Deceit creaks. Understandably. Any writer juggling five such unwieldy objects hasn’t got a lot of spare attention for the things that make a book, y’know, good. The surprise is that Deceit is adequate. Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: Deceit (Part One)
IFComp Reviews: Deadline Enchanter
Another IFComp 2007 review. There are lots of spoilers behind the link.
New Adventures Reviews: The Pit
I just read The Pit. It’s staring into me, man. It’s staring riiiiiiight into me.
The Pit. My god. No title has ever described its book with such pure and concise accuracy. Not even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This book is a legend among Doctor Who fans. Fifteen years later the mere mention of the name Neil Penswick brings fainting fits. Some people swear their copies of The Pit have tried to kill them.
Can The Pit really be that bad? Yes, it can. Is it the worst of the New Adventures series? Yes, it is. Is it really, as has been an article of faith for so long, the Worst Doctor Who Book Ever?
Well, no. But only because so many boring runarounds were published by BBC Books. The Pit is at least interestingly bad.
New Adventures Reviews: The Highest Science
(Another Doctor Who book. Continue bearing with me.)
I’m just getting back to rereading the New Adventures, and I find I don’t have much to say about The Highest Science—in fact, I couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm to read it properly, though I skimmed bits of it. I don’t know why. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I have nothing against Gareth Roberts in general. It just didn’t grab me. (I’m actually more interested in rereading The Pit, just to see if it’s as bad as I recall.) So this is a much shorter and less careful review than some of my others.
Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: The Highest Science