4) Decalog 2: Lost Property, edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker

A collection of ten DW short stories (actually one has no Doctor, but does have Sarah Jane, Mike Yates, K9 and the Master). As usual, of varying but mostly good quality; I hope any of the other contributors who read this will forgive me for favouriting the two Fourth Doctor / Leela stories, one by Tim Robins and set on a commercially exploited Mars, the other by Pam Baddeley and setting settlers against indigenous people on a planet with its own bizarre legal culture. Apart from that, I enjoyed all the rest except the one with Zoe and Jamie and the one with Peri and the peculiar timeshare.

44) Venusian Lullaby, by Paul Leonard

I wasn't overwhelmed with the only other Paul Leonard DW book I'd read, but I must say this one really grabbed me. Jon Pertwee's Doctor used to tell us that "Klokleda partha menin klatch" meant "Close your eyes, my darling - well, three of them at least" (see here, at about 1:20 in). Here Paul Leonard has taken that throwaway line and constructed one of the best alien cultures I've ever read around it; reminiscent a little of both the pentagonal creatures of At the Mountains of Madness (though a lot less evil) and David Brin's Alvin the Hoon, but faced with an imminent world-destroying tragedy - this is Venus of several billion years ago, still habitable though steadily deteriorating. It's set immediately after The Dalek Invasion of Earth and before The Rescue, so the Doctor is here with Ian and Barbara but no younger female companion. Leonard, like most writers, cannot write Hartnell's Doctor especially well, but the story and the setting more than compensate. An unexpected pleasure.

Occasionally, by accident or design, I read two or more books with a common theme and combine them into a single livejournal entry (indeed, checking back I see I've done that four times this month). And usually I combine my Big Finish reviews into multiple posts, as an act of mercy to the vast majority of readers who aren't interested. But this time, my reading and listening schedules happened to throw up a Who novel and a Who audio play with an identical central theme, though very different in the execution of that shared theme.

The Council of Nicæa is a relatively short audio play in the Big Finish range, by Caroline Symcox (who I last saw at MeCon). It brings the Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, his TV companion Peri Brown and new audio companion Erimem to the year 325 and the theological disputes over the nature of God at the eponymous Council. Supporting characters from history are the Emperor Constantine, his wife Fausta, and the competing theologians Athanasius and Arius.

The Witch Hunters, by Steve Lyons, is an early one of the BBC's Past Doctor Adventures, set pretty firmly in TV chronology between The Sensorites and The Reign of Terror, bringing the First Doctor with companions Ian, Susan and Barbara to the village of Salem in Massachusetts in 1692, just in time for the infamous witch trials.

Both are stories in which there is no sfnal element in the historical context apart from the Doctor and his companions, and thus are very much rooted in the early traditions of the show. Both stories are a kind of response in Who terms to other writers - Symcox reacting against J. N. O. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines, Lyons more favourably to Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Both of them feature a historical context where, essentially, the bad guys are the mainstream authority Christians and the listener/reader is invited to sympathise with the underdog (Arius and his followers/the accused "witches"). In both cases, the youngest of the Tardis crew (Erimem/Susan) is instrumental in trying to change history in the favour of the underdogs, in both cases (and this is hardly a spoiler) unsuccessfully.

Symcox takes more liberties with the setting (Arius is portrayed as a young man and Athanasius as somewhat older; in fact the reverse was the case), as she is writing a more standard Doctor Who story and also has less time to do it in (less than 100 minutes, compared to Lyons' 282 pages). As often with Who, the Doctor gains the confidence of the authorities rather implausibly rapidly, which then of course accelerates the amount of trouble he and his friends get into. The two key elements of the story are the didactic part, informing the average listener who is (safely) assumed to know very little of the Council of Nicæa, and the character development of Erimem, who sides with Arius partly out of national solidarity (Arius was from Alexandria, Erimem is an ancient Egyptian pricess) but more out of a sense of fair play. She pleads that because 325 is her future, she should not be accused of trying to change the past. It all worked rather well for me, certainly much better than The Church and the Crown, an earlier audio with a similar concept except that the Doctor intervenes to force history into our timeline.

Lyons makes the reader work harder; he has more characters to follow (not just four in the Tardis crew instead of three, but a large chunk of the population of Salem) and more background knowledge is assumed. He is also sticking closer to the historical sequence of events, though The Crucible is explicitly referenced, with the Doctor and crew taking in the first performance in Bristol in 1954, and the Doctor then returning with Rebecca Nurse to take it in again. Actually Lyons handles the possibility of changing history a bit less convincingly than Symcox, with even the Doctor rather un-Doctorishly seduced by the possibility of intervening to save lives. He also requires the Tardis to operate rather more accurately than we saw at this stage of the show's history. Balanced against this, there are a lot of pleasing references to the first few television stories. The narrative has its own drama, which carries the book in the end, but the Tardis crew rather end up with the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Anyway, I found it interesting to compare and contrast between the two approaches - same basic idea, but different format and different details.

( The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy )
( The Green-Eyed Monsters )
( The Dance Of The Dead )
( The Mirror Effect )

In summary: The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy and The Dance Of The Dead excellent, The Mirror Effect OK, and The Green-Eyed Monsters less impressive. Also of course The Plague Herds of Excelis is set in the middle of this sequence.

26) Match of the Day, by Chris Boucher
27) Last Man Running, by Chris Boucher
28) Corpse Marker, by Chris Boucher
29) Psi-Ence Fiction, by Chris Boucher
30) Drift, by Simon A. Forward
31) Eye of Heaven, by Jim Mortimore

It's interesting that the six Doctor Who spinoff novels featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela are all from the more recent BBC series of Past Doctor Adventures rather than the earlier Virgin series of Missing Adventures; that all of them are set before K9's arrival in Who continuity; and that four of the six are by Leela's creator, Chris Boucher, who also wrote three of the five TV stories featuring her but not the metal dog. Obviously K9 is more successful with Romana or Sarah Jane (each of the Fourth Doctor's departing female companions having ended up with one).

( Chris Boucher )
( Match of the Day )
( Last Man Running )
( Corpse Marker )
( Psi-Ence Fiction )
( Drift )
( Eye of Heaven )
( Leela )

So, the last of the Gallifrey audios with Louise Jameson as Leela, Lalla Ward as Romana, John Leeson as K9 and Mary Tamm as Romana's evil twin.

The first two of these five, Fractures and Warfare finish off the Pandora arc, with Romana and Leela successfully fighting back from the catacombs of Gallifrey. The final three, Appropriation, Mindbomb and Panacea all deal with the palace politics of deciding who runs the place once the internal conflict is over, and ends on an undecided note, Leela and Romana preparing to leave a devastated planet. The first two really do follow on very closely from season 2, so much so that I think the entire sequence of fifteen plays probably works better as five blocks of three rather than three blocks of five. Alan Barnes, as so often, excels in the final play which is the best of a generally decent run.

17) The Glittering Storm, by Shaun Lyon
18) The Thirteenth Stone, by Justin Richards

These two audiobooks are both based on the recent TV Sarah Jane Adventures, and are read by Elizabeth Sladen. I have a particular concept of what I rate as a book for the bookblog and what I don't. I'm counting these two because they are described as "audiobooks" and, crucially, feature only one reader doing the text. I listed the audio autobiographies of Tom Baker and Nicholas Courtney on last year's bookblog on the same basis. The Big Finish Companion Chronicles, by contrast, have two actors each, so I reckon that makes them plays rather than books.

Yet all the Big Finish plays are listed separately on LibraryThing, so I've posted all my reviews of them there, even though they are not tagged as bookblog entries here. An argument could be made that if it has an ISBN number, it's a book, or at least a review of it is fair game for one's bookblogging. Another argument can be made that it's my blog and doesn't have to satisfy anyone except me. I expect I will come back to this fascinating topic some time.

The Glittering Storm ( isn't as good as The Thirteenth Stone )

The Thirteenth Stone ( is better than The Glittering Storm )

Having mostly enjoyed the first set of these, I can say that the second set is of the same order of quality.

( Mother Russia: Steven tells a story of the First Doctor in Napoleonic times )

( Helicon Prime: Jamie and the Second Doctor on holiday, solve a mystery )

( Old Soldiers: Brigadier recounts a German adventure with the Third Doctor )

( The Catalyst: Leela and the Fourth Doctor in Edwardian times )

So, try the first of these, and if you like it, experiment with the rest; good performances from the key actors, not so sure about the story in some cases.

I wasn't overwhelmed by the first series of Sarah Jane Smith audios, but the second run is brilliant. Clearly Big Finish have rather hit their stride with the various spinoff series, I Davros also being a pretty unqualified success. And as with I Davros, I reckon the Sarah Jane plays would be fairly accessible to a non-fan, perhaps even more so; the setting is contemporary, and the only heavily sfnal element is in fact Sarah's own personal history (apart from the ambiguous ending). They form a single story arc, and all of them are by David Bishop, whose novel Who Killed Kennedy I enjoyed last year, and whose Test of Nerve, from the first run of SJS audios, turned out to be rather prophetic in its tale of terrorist attack on the London Underground.

( Buried Secrets )

( Snow Blind )

( Fatal Consequences )

( Dreamland )

One of the triumphs of the stories is the way in which families turn out to be important, more important than gangs of conspirators. We have Will Sullivan (played by Tom Chadbon = Duggan in City of Death) and his vanished but adored brother Harry, and the mother and daughter team of protesters, Maude and Emily, in the third story; and the revelation about Josh in the last story as well. And of course we listeners know that there is another family relationship there as Natalie is played by Elizabeth Sladen's daughter Sadie Miller.

Finally, it is a bit surprising that the same mistake was made three times of giving Sarah a Harry Sullivan-lite gormless male sidekick - Brendan in K9 and Company, Jeremy Fitzoliver in the two Third Doctor audios, and Josh in the first series of Big Finish's Sarah Jane adventures. Turning Josh into a deeper and more rounded character here was one of Bishop's best moves. Removing the twittish male side-kick altogether for the new TV series was an even better move.

As sometimes happens, I'm catching up with my Big Finish audio listening. I got through the second series of Bernice Summerfield audios, none of which reached the heights of the first series.

( The Secret of Cassandra )
( The Stone's Lament )
( The Extinction Event )
( The Skymines of Karthos )

So, if you are getting any of these, make it The Stone's Lament.

'I saw amazing things, out there in space. But there's strangeness to be found wherever you turn. Life on Earth can be an adventure too.

You just have to know where to look.'
4) Invasion of the Bane, by Terrance Dicks
5) Revenge of the Slitheen, by Rupert Laight
6) Eye of the Gorgon, by Phil Ford
7) Warriors of Kudlak, by Gary Russell

These are four short, cheerful books, full of positivity, sticking pretty closely to the first four broadcast Sarah Jane Adventures. It's interesting that the BBC have chosen to go back to the old approach of novelisation of the broadcast stories for Sarah Jane, while instead publishing original fiction featuring the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and Torchwood. I sense a didactic purpose, getting kids into the reading habit with these attractively covered volumes, each of them 119 pages of text in fairly large print (at a cost of £4.99 each, which, alas, is standard these days). I don't think it took me as long as an hour to read any of them.

( Invasion of the Bane )
( Revenge of the Slitheen )
( Eye of the Gorgon )
( Warriors of Kudlak )

Anyway, I'd recommend all of these for the younger Who fan, who might then be persuaded to lend them to older Who fans.

This is just a brilliant sequence of audio plays - apparently now available with the set of BBC Davros DVDs, which does make that sound like an even more attractive purchase, and comes close to conferring the stamp of accepted canonicity on the stories. Davros is, of course, perhaps the only character for whom you could develop a detailed back-story like this; the Master is too closely linked with the Gallifrey mythology, and there are not really any other villains of serious depth (some might come close - I have a high regard for Mavic Chen, myself.) This could have turned into the most awful fanwank, but in fact we have a tight, taut set of plays depicting the rise of Davros through the ranks of the Kaled leadership on Skaro against the background of the "Forever War" against the Thals. Terry Molloy reprises the title role (apart from most of the first play), and in the last play we get Peter Miles as Nyder.

( Innocence )

( Purity )

( Corruption )

( Guilt )

In summary, a brilliant set of four plays, which I suspect would stand on their own as dramas even for a non-Who fan.

Big Finish started with these six stories back in 1998, featuring Bernice Summerfield, a companion invented by Paul Cornell in 1992 for the Virgin series of New Adventures with the Seventh Doctor. It's a much stronger start to the series than their early Doctor Who stories, possibly because they were adapting novels that had already been published, though I think that can't be the whole story. I had only read one of the books, Kate Orman's Walking to Babylon, so most of this was new to me. All good stuff, apart from the last one.

( Oh, No It Isn't! )
( Beyond the Sun )
( Walking to Babylon )
( Birthright )
( Just War )
( Dragon's Wrath )

Anyway, I'll listen to more of these.

I'm about four DW review posts behind at the moment, so bear with me while I clear the backlog. It's not really accurate to think of these five plays as a series in themselves; they follow pretty much straight on from the first series of four uniting Louise Jameson as Leela and Lalla Ward as Romana, the latter now president of the Time Lords, and the end is pretty unresolved. I liked the first two of these most, mainly for fannish reasons, but they were all decent enough.

( Gallifrey 2.1: Lies - Mary Tamm returns as the ghost of Romana I! )
( Gallifrey 2.2: Spirit - Leela and Romana on holiday together )
( Gallifrey 2.3-5: Pandora, Insurgency, Imperiatrix )

A series of five (well, four and a half) audios from Big Finish, featuring the now retired General Sir Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and his successors at the head of the British branch of UNIT, portraying them as a sort of military X-Files, but locked in combat for Britain's security with the Internal Counter Intelligence Service (ICIS). UNIT's new commander, Ross Brimmacombe-Wood, is played by none other than David Tennant. I enjoyed them very much.

( discussion with spoilers )

So, in summary, these are all good fun; if you want to listen to just one to sample, make it #3, The Longest Night.

One side issue: I was comprehensively spoiled for important plot twists by reading the Wikipedia entry for UNIT, and while normally I don't especially mind, in this case it really did impair my enjoyment of the plays. Hoping to preserve others from being caught the same way, I deleted the key sentences from the WikiPedia page; they were immediately restored by another editor citing WP:SPOIL: "It is almost never acceptable to delete information from an article because it constitutes a spoiler." WTF?

12) Decalog 3: Consequences, edited by Justin Richards and Andy Lane

One of the early collections of "authorised" Doctor Who short stories from Virgin Publishing. I bought it because two of the ten stories had been flagged up to me in different ways in the last couple of weeks, and neither of them disappointed: Peter Anghelides' "Moving On", a bittersweet bridging narrative for Sarah Jane Smith between K9 and Company and School Reunion (or the Big Finish version if you prefer), and Steven Moffat's first published Doctor Who story, "Continuity Errors", which has the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield meddling in the time stream pretty comprehensively.Unexpected bonuses were Guy Clapperton's "Tarnished Image" featuring the First Doctor and Dodo Chaplet, and kradical's "UNITed We Fall", bringing the Fourth Doctor and the Brigadier to UN headquarters in New York for an audit. But none of the others was bad.

I have slipped behind in noting these, partly due to my long trip ending after 24 hours rather than six days last week. So this will be a fairly short set of reviews.

( Five Sarah Jane Smith Plays... )

( ...five with Five, Six and Seven... )

( ...and three of Eight. )

Anyway, looking forward to the next ones now; though I may take a break from the sequence for some more spinoff plays first.

Big Finish's series of audio plays featuring the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Doctor Whos have been a roaring success. Unfortunately they cannot do the same for the first four Doctors, with the actors who played 1-3 having shuffled off this mortal coil and #4, the glorious Tom Baker, being famously unwilling to reprise the role. So what they have done is to get four actors who played companions of the first four doctors tell the story of a "missing adventure", with one guest star in each case providing the voice of the chief villain. It's a grand idea, and I liked all of these, though each had small problems which one can overlook.

( Frostfire: Vicki, reminiscing in Carthage, tells the story of her meeting with Jane Austen and the Phoenix )

( Fear of the Daleks: Zoe relates her strange dreams )

( The Blue Tooth: Liz Shaw and the Cybermen )

( The Beautiful People: Romana and the health club )

But anyway, in all cases the fun outweighs the annoyances, and they are all worth adding to your library.

I bought this CD of three radio plays related to Doctor Who when in Forbidden Planet in London last month. Two of the three are very good indeed, and I guess I can ignore the third.

( Regenerations: Doctor Who meets Northern Ireland politics - fantastic )

( Blue Veils and Golden Sands: interesting biographical portrayal of Delia Derbyshire )

( Dalek, I Love You: awful )

14) [Doctor Who:] Made of Steel, by Terrance Dicks

Yes, Terrance Dicks is still out there, still writing Doctor Who novels; this is in the BBC's £1.99 "quick reads" series, picked up in Forbidden Planet last week. The Doctor and Martha get mixed up with a remnant cell of Cybermen (incidentally answering the question my wife asked me after we watched "Doomsday") and also deal with thick and uncomprehending military types. Dicks makes a valiant effort to catch the Tenth Doctor's character, and on the whole succeeds, with only a few passages which I thought too reminiscent of the Third Doctor of Dicks' novelisations. A decent quick read.

Am sitting on Eurostar en route to London and ultimately Bath, where I am staying tonight and speaking at a conference tomorrow. I managed to get through the four plays in the first Gallifrey sequence this week, and they are fun and enjoyable if not necessarily great works of literature.

Let's face it, for someone like me who is a child of the Fourth Doctor era, the only two companions who matter, apart from the incomparable Sarah Jane Smith of course, are Leela and Romana. And K-9. And, er, K-9. The idea of putting Louise Jameson, Lalla Ward and John Leeson (and John Leeson) together with a half-decent script is so obvious in retrospect that you wonder why it wasn't done as a series much earlier (OK, it had been done in Marc Platt's novel Lungbarrow, and in a Big Finish play I haven't heard yet).

( detail )

I particularly liked the first and fourth of these four plays, both of which are by Alan Barnes, who hadn't previously registered on my consciousness as a Who writer. I will look out for more of his stuff, and listen to more Gallifrey as well.
------------------

There being so many Doctor Who spinoff novels out there, there is no way that I can read them all; but occasionally I will have an idea for getting hold of several that share a common theme, or have been recommended in the same place, or whatever. Most of them are easy enough to get via second-hand shops or eBay, and some (including one of the four below) have been put online by the authors because they are out of print. I bought/downloaded all four of these because they are the only Doctor Who spinoff novels featuring the First Doctor's somewhat obscure companion Dodo Chaplet. I will probably do another post at some point on Dodo's life and times in the Whoniverse, but each of these books was actually rather good in its own different way, the pluses definitely outweighing the minuses in each case.

4) [Doctor Who] Salvation, by Steve Lyons (.co.uk, .com) ( review )

5) [Doctor Who] Bunker Soldiers, by Martin Day (.co.uk, .com) ( review )

6) [Doctor Who] The Man in the Velvet Mask, by Daniel O'Mahony (.co.uk, .com) ( review )

7) [Doctor Who] Who Killed Kennedy?, by James Stevens and David Bishop (.co.uk, on-line) ( review )

Anyway, all four of these were rather good. More thoughts on Dodo for a later day. But I refuse to discuss whether the First Doctor had only one heart (O'Mahony/Man in the Velvet Mask) or two (Lyons/Salvation).

Remember when I said that commuting to work by train would mean I did a lot more reading? Not so. Since I bought my MP3 player, I've been listening to a lot of Doctor Who - staring with canonical stuff, The Abominable Snowmen, The Web of Fear and The Space Pirates, and then (with so much to choose from) going for Big Finish's series of Doctor Who audio plays in which the history of the Whoniverse somehow worked out differently. I listened to the seven plays in order, but will review them out of order as they seemed to me to naturally group as follows:


( Alternate regenerations )

( Different beginnings )

( A Storm of Angels )

( Shada )

In summary, then, "Auld Mortality" and "Shada" are particularly recommended, though none of them is bad.

12) [Doctor Who] Timewyrm: Revelation, by Paul Cornell

Cornell's first novel, I think, and pretty good stuff, winding up the Timewyrm tetralogy (1, 2, 3) that kicked off the Virgin series of New Adventures of Doctor Who. A decent effort, certainly on a par with the first and second books of the series for quality (thr third being pretty dire). The Doctor has to confront his enemy, the Timewyrm, by hunting through the nooks and crannies of his own mind with help from his own past incarnations (and I liked the Doctor/Doctor interactions, not usually done this well). Many of the characters spend much of the book taking sanctuary in a church which is their only protection against a bizarrely hostile environment outside - a setting Cornell of course used again in the Ninth Doctor TV story, "Father's Day".

( why I am writing this now )

( The Abominable Snowmen )

( The Web of Fear )

( Downtime )

Summary: Get "The Web of Fear" - essential listening for the Who fan. And if you like it, get "The Abominable Snowmen" as well.

6) Timewyrm: Apocalypse, by Nigel Robinson

Not really great literature: Doctor and Ace on far future planet, where not all is as it seems, and the plot depends on an untold story from the Doctor's past. Still, I will read the fourth in this series.

19) [Doctor Who] Evolution, by John Peel
20) [Doctor Who] The Stealers of Dreams, by Steve Lyons

I have read some serious books recently, honest, and reviews of those are coming up Real Soon Now. But it just so happens that I have managed 14 Doctor Who books this month, the nine Ian Marter novelisations and five spinoffs; perhaps I need to admit to myself that I am a fan?

I got both of these as a result of recommendations. Evolution somehow fitted into my purchase of Managra months ago; it is a Virgin Missing Adventure featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, set immediately after "The Brain of Morbius". The Stealers of Dreams was recommended to me last week by loveandgarbage; it is one of the Ninth Doctor Adventures published by the BBC last year, featuring Rose and Captain Jack.

Evolution is much the better of the two, a glorious Victorian romp featuring the young Arthur Conan Doyle (just after I discovered my own obscure family connection with him) and an even younger Rudyard Kipling, combined with affectionate references to those classic Fourth Doctor stories, "Horror of Fang Rock" and "The Talons of Weng-Chiang".

The Stealers of Dreams takes us to a rather unlikely planet where both fiction and government have been outlawed, resulting in a heavily policed and medicated society. Some good ideas, and nice capturing of the Doctor and his companions, but my science-fictional soul prefers settings that feel a bit more alien rather than just London give or take a few features necessary to the plot.

9) Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter (published 1977, based on TV story shown in 1975)
10) Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment, by Ian Marter (published 1978, based on TV story shown in 1975)
11) Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation, by Ian Marter (published 1979, based on TV story shown in 1978)
12) Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World, by Ian Marter (published 1981, based on TV story shown in 1968)
13) Doctor Who - Earthshock, by Ian Marter (published 1983, based on TV story shown in 1982)
14) Doctor Who - The Dominators, by Ian Marter (published 1984, based on TV story shown in 1968)
15) Doctor Who - The Invasion, by Ian Marter (published 1985, based on TV story shown in 1968)
16) (The Companions of) Doctor Who - Harry Sullivan's War, by Ian Marter (published 1986; original fiction)
17) Doctor Who - The Reign of Terror, by Ian Marter (published 1987, based on TV story first shown in 1964)
18) Doctor Who - The Rescue, by Ian Marter (published 1987, based on TV story first shown in 1965)


(pictures copied, with much thanks, from Steve Hill's Doctor Who Image Archive)

( Read more... )

5) The Clockwise Man, by Justin Richards
6) The Monsters Inside, by Stephen Cole

( a brief history of Doctor Who novels )

So the BBC decided last year to publish original fiction featuring Nine and Ten, and I have read the first two this week. Neither is exactly brilliant literature (and of course they have completely dropped the more adult themes introduced by Virgin), but they are not total mind-candy either.

( The Clockwise Man )

( The Monsters Inside )

Anyway, I will not expend huge resources of time and money looking for the books in this series, but I'll certainly pick them up if I get the chance.