Festival of Death

This was an excellent read. A very entertaining story. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward never let me down anyway and their voices and personalities really do come through in this book. I've said it before but I love the fourth Doctor and always enjoy reading his stories. This has it all really, the best Doctor, (one of)the best companions, an engaging storyline, some great supporting characters(hoopy is wonderful), and a lot of light-hearted fun all the way through.

If there's one thing that lets a lot of Doctor Who novels down a little, it's that the ones I've read so far tend to be set in places that involve the Doctor & Co. running through seemingly endless, same-ish corridors. However, I've not read enough Doctor Who books to be able to say that this is a feature/failing of most of them. Time will tell. I'm certainly planning on reading all of the 4th Doctor novels, I just miss Tom Baker so much in his role as the Doctor that it would be wrong of me not to continue with the rest ...and if they're as good as this and Shada I'll be glad I did.
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The Doctor and Romana arrive on an odd conglomeration of ships in hyperspace and learn that something has gone very, very wrong at a tourist attraction set up to give participants a taste of what it's like to be dead. Then they discover that it's not the first time they've been there, even though as far as they're concerned, it's the first time they've been there.

Jonathan Morris does a good job of capturing the feel of a Fourth Doctor episode, complete with spot-on dialog for both the Doctor and Romana. There's also a lot of interesting or fun science fictional ideas, as well as some good old-fashioned monsters, and a neatly constructed plot that ties a lot of disparate threads together rather nicely in the end. On the other hand, in capturing the feel of a Fourth Doctor episode so well, it also captures some of the less positive aspects, as well, including the sometimes slow pace of Classic Who, some things that get a little too ridiculously implausible or silly, a very 1980 take on computer technology, and the Doctor and Romana explaining things to each other that they really ought to both already know. It's also marred a bit by the fact that pretty much everybody except the regular characters is an idiot, and by what even the author admits, in his introduction, are entirely too many little references and in-jokes. Because, seriously, a few of those are cute, but this many just gets annoying and takes one out of the story. It also suffers, ironically enough, from the passage of time. When this was written, in 2000, the things it does with time travel would have seemed really fresh and clever, but have since been done, often much more thoughtfully and daringly, in the TV series itself, which removes a lot of the intrinsic appeal of the plot.

Rating: 3.5/5, although I do suspect if I'd read it in 2000, I'd have rated it higher. ( )

The Doctor, Romana and K-9 travel to a sort of intergalactic cruise ship where the main attraction is "the Beautiful Death" -- experiencing death without actually dying. A great catastrophe has occurred, and the Doctor is greeted as a hero despite not knowing what it is he's done. And then he finds out what he does. This will be his most wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimiest adventure yet.

This is a fiendishly complex plot. It's a rollicking read and there are plenty of amusing points (ERIC, for example, resembling both Eddie AND Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide). There are also the Arachnopods, which are possibly the most repulsive monsters I've read about in a Doctor Who novel. Not to say they didn't work well -- far from it. They were disgusting and creepy and an excellent addition to the story, especially for one being read near Halloween.

I recommend this for fans of the Fourth Doctor and those who like their time travel stories really complicated. Also those who enjoyed The Sands of Time, by Justin Richards, which is not quite as timey-wimey but still very complex (and which influenced this one). ( )

JELLY BABIES! OK, sorry, fan-girl moment over... not really. On this adventure we are joined by the Fourth Doctor with fellow timelord, Romana, and his trusty companion, K-9. The Fourth Doctor is my second favorite after Tennant, and Morris has captured him so faithfully. As always, the Doctor must confront the perils of traveling in time - he arrives in his own future only to have to travel back and see how he gets there. He confronts and questions authority no matter what the situation, but it usually gets into trouble.

I can't tell you how much I am loving reading this series of one book for each doctor. Somehow each author has captured the individual voices of every doctor without succumbing to writing mere caricatures. For those of you who have not watched the classic series, this book is a great introduction into the lore that many have missed by only watching the newer series. You get to see the Fourth Doctor in action while getting a complete story that you can read as a stand-alone. I highly recommend this book and all of the books in this series! ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1523021.html

I have grumbled occasionally about writers (particularly Eric Saward) who thought that they could channel Douglas Adams, and were wrong. But Jonathan Morris's first novel is an excellent tribute to the Douglas Adams era of Doctor Who - set between Shada and The Leisure Hive, but clearly a story that escaped from Season 17 rather than Season 18. I really enjoyed this: the Doctor / Romana relationship is sheer crack, and yet the book survives the potentially gloomifying element of killing off (and then revivifying) various characters as part of a tourism attraction. There is even a spaced-out lizard who talks like Zaphod Beeblebrox. Great lines include:

''Normally, when I arrive somewhere, people point guns at me and throw me in prison. Within about twenty-four and a half minutes of arriving, usually,' said the Doctor.'

and, in a homage to Hunter S. Thompson:

'It was somewhere around the bow star on the edge of the galaxy that the drugs began to take hold.'

Over a few days when I was wrestling with technological problems of my own, this story of convoluted timelines, suicidal computers, mystical intelligent plants and mellow reptiles reassured me somewhat about the benign nature of the universe, and I am grateful to Morris for that. ( )