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Thanks for the heads up. I've now fixed that.
An emotional roller coaster. Kate Orman explores the Doctor's feelings like no other writer thus far in the New Adventures, and does it during a terrifying epic adventure that gives up timey-wimey long before Steven Moffat was on the scene. The prose is a little rough in places but otherwise it's a damn fine story.
I was concerned about all the mentioned atrocities and disasters though. I hate when real-life disasters are given supernatural/alien origins, and The Left-Handed Hummingbird looked like it was about to become one of the most outrageous examples of this. However, Orman subverts this with Huitzilin claiming he was present at scenes of grief and pain to feed off them but didn't cause them himself. This was a relief to see.
There's a further link: Benny recalls Zamina telling her about catfood monsters when she observes a New York City bag lady with pet food (Transit).
there's not tegan in this story
he's not called 'the Monk', and he's not called 'Mortimus' either. Trying to bring the name 'Mortimus' into things creates numerous problems. Should we look at things....
1)'Mortimus' is first used in Paul Cornell's "novel" No Future. Here we learn that "Mortimus" FIRST met the Doctor in The Time Meddler(contradicting both the television serial AND its Target novelisation), and that he was stranded on the ice planet at the end of The Daleks' Master Plan(contradicting both THAT telesision serial and its Target novelisation). No Future also states that "Mortimus" left Gallifrey fifty years after the Doctor, which is inaccurate, which is Cornell completely mishearing what was ACTUALLY said in The Time Meddler.
2)Then, in Divided Loyalties, we find out that the Doctor and 'Mortimus' are very good friends ON GALLIFREY. Oh, and 'Mortimus' leaves Gallifrey BEFORE the Doctor.
3)'Mortimus' is reused by the Big Finish Audios....
First, the EIGHTH Doctor meets "the Monk"(never called 'Mortimus'), and it is stated that 'Mortimus' left Gallifrey fifty years after the Doctor, and that they haven't seen each other since The Daleks' Master Plan. And he very irritatingly introduces HIMSELF as 'the Monk'.
In 'The Rani Elite', the Sixth Doctor and the Rani discuss their time on Gallifrey, including their old friend, 'Mortimus'.
Then, in the "loco Doctors" trilogy, "the Monk" meets the FIFTH Doctor And here, he says that the Doctor is the ONLY ONE who calls him 'the Monk'.
Can it get more ridiculous? In 'The Black Hole' the SECOND Doctor meets another Time Lord who everyone starts calling 'the Monk', even though he's just said that that was a one-off disguise.
'The Monk' then pops up in a couple of BF short trips, meeting both the Third and the Fourth Doctors.
He then reappears in another Eighth Doctor audio box set, 'Doom Coalition 4', again called 'the Monk' by everyone.
But THAT'S all fine and dandy, isn't it? Sheesh.
Functionable enough but filled with that most irritating beginning writer's mistake: overreliance upon adverbs, especially to describe speech. 'Tom snapped irritably.' 'Vaiq asked slowly.' '[The Doctor] said quietly.' No more! Make it stop! Each instance is a finger leaping from the page to jab me in the eye. At least this one didn't make super obvious hints about the mysterious manipulator and it had actual chapters.
The Monk is actually called Mortimus, backing up my explanation.
He isn't the Monk like you said, he isn't The Master or The War Chief (Magnus) either. He is clearly another Time Lord who became a renagade. Look at The War Chief, he is obviously not called The War Chief but that is what we call him.
He isn't the Monk, but we still call him that. Forever that time lord will be called The Monk.
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A drab slog. It started off all right with the traumatised alternative Jo and the knowledge of the alternative Third Doctor's death, but it was all very numbing after so many pages of UNIT and the Silurians committing war crimes followed by Liz demanding peace. As much as Mortimore tries to sell us on the idea both sides have their points, it's heavily slanted towards the humans; the Silurians are immensely brutal and we see far less from their point of view, making it much harder to sympathise with them. To top it off, nothing the protagonists do matters in the end, and the identity of the villain behind the history changes is blindingly obvious thanks to poor wording. It also sees the return of the giant chapters that Deceit had, a feature I hate. It was kind of nice having illustrations again though.
'A lot of what happened before my second regeneration is hazy. Great chunks of my life are missing.'
You note the in universe factual content of the lines under Continuity above, but surely it should be mentioned (under 'roots', perhaps, or even 'Dialogue triumphs' - gave me the biggest smile in the story) that it's actually a metafictional joke - a reference to all the missing episodes, wiped by the BBC and unrecovered, from the First and Second Doctor's TV seasons.
There's a certain 60s scifi shout-out that's passed you by - must be deliberate by the author, it's so loud it's deafening to anyone who was a scifi fan kid in the 60s in Britain (as I was). He even teases: uses the name several times, causing a 'Hang on. Is he going to ...?', and dragging it out before finally the appearance and the description - 'Yes! He did it!' (big grin).
it's a shout-out to the science fiction future in the Gerry Anderson 'supermarionation' (puppet) scifi shows, specifically Thunderbirds - even more specifically the feature film 'Thunderbirds Are Go' - and also 'Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons' (same shared future history and universe as Thunderbirds, just a few years later), especially in the licensed official Captain Scarlet comic strips in the 'TV Century 21' comic (name changing to just TV21 part way through - presented as a newspaper from the mid 21st century in the shared future history of Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, and greatly expanding the background of the TV shows in a licensed, official way.)
In 'Thunderbirds are Go' the mid-21st century Zero-X mission to Mars, driving around in the MEV, find one native Martian life-form in the otherwise barren landscape ... which duly attacks them (possibly only because they were provoked by the Zero-X crew trying to break samples off something they don't realise is alive), forcing them to lift off dangerously and early to escape. Still a very memorable scene to me, for all that I was six at the time I saw it after the film's release (actually especially because I was only 6 and at that age it was very scary). What they had found (and tried to blow samples off) was .... Martian Rock Snakes. That's what they were called, and they also featured several times and quite luridly in the Captain Scarlet comic strips in stories that returned to Mars. And they looked like ... a string of boulders (easily mistaken for a rock pile when curled up), with a single large eye in the head 'boulder', and an attack consisting of blasts of superhot plasma. Sound familiar? Craig Hinton's Martian Rock Snakes have the same name, and the same description - he's just changed two things: made them smaller (the Thunderbirds/Captain Scarlet ones are vehicle size), and has his little ones fire the plasma from a sting on the tail rather than out of their mouths. (A Google image search on Thunderbirds Martain Rock Snake pulls up pics from the Thunderbirds Are Go film, and on Captain Scarlet Martian Rock Snake finds a whole page from a TV21 story they appear in, if you are interested.)
So - deliberate shout-out, and Thunderbirds Are Go and Captain Scarlet should be in 'Roots'.
You say, above, 'The Charrl, who now worship the Doctor, bring the Doctor's original TARDIS to the wedding - it escaped destruction in the Time Ram from Blood Heat thanks to the effects of the Fortean Flicker. Muldwych takes it at the end, intending to drop the Doctor off at a suitable planet. He suggests using a merge program to transfer the rooms and contents of the original TARDIS to the Doctor's new one.'
This is wrong in two respects.
Muldwych tells the Doctor that the Charrl have cleaned up the Doctor's original TARDIS so the Doctor can have it back now, then asks for the 'new' one (the alternate 3rd Doctor's one the Doctor's been using since Blood Heat), suggesting the merge so that the Doctor can move anything the Doctor wants from the 'new' TARDIS to his original one, not the other way round. Muldwych then takes the 'new' TARDIS - the Blood Heat alternate one - intendng to drop the CHARRL off on a suitable planet (not drop off the Doctor, which is what you've written above). The Doctor then goes back to using his original TARDIS - the one lost in the tar pit in Blood Heat, not the 'new one' as you've written.
Quoting from the text near the end at a point after Muldwych has gone with one TARDIS:
'Jason and Bernice were handing the wedding photos out to Roz and Chris, around a little table in the TARDIS console room. The Doctor had been wandering about, now that he’d dropped Keri off, delighted to have his original ship back. He was, however, making the occasional tutting noise at the mess that the Charrl had left it in.'
Emphaisis added, and note this TARDIS has some Charrl mess left in it - so it's the one the Charrl arrived in, which is the Doctor's original TARDIS recovered from the Blood Heat tar pit.
So - this is where The Doctor gets his original Tardis back, letting Muldwych take the Blood Heat 3rd Doctor one; the Doctor does NOT continue in the Blood Heat 3rd Doctor's one, just moves any wanted rooms and property accumulated since Blood Heat (like all of Roz and Chris's stuff, one would imagine) from the Blood Heat 3rd Doctor TARDIS into this, his original TARDIS during the merge. He would be delighted to get his original TARDIS back for at least two reasons: (i) as you've actually noted in your pages on earlier NAs, the Blood Heat Tardis the Doctor's been using from Blood Heat to now doesn't fully trust the Doctor, although it does trust Ace, and Ace can actually operate it better than the Doctor himself can, much to his annoyance; and (ii) the Doctor's original TARDIS had been upgraded by him over centuries beyond the Blood Heat 3rd Doctor's TARDIS, and it seems very unilkely that Ace would have known all about all of those changes/upgrades when the Blood Heat 3rd Doctor TARDIS reconstructed itself from Ace's memories of the original one as it was immediately before Blood Heat.
Pretty much anyone in the UK who lived through the 70s wil recognize that Sergeant Vim, with his 'You is a poof Gunner ------. What is you?', and ‘Does I look like a hofficer, Gunner -----?’, and 'Lovely shoulders. Lovely shoulders' to the one gunner he unaccountably likes, and to crown it all the ‘we’re a concert party. That’s what we are. Here to entertain you’ is a complete deliberate lift, for humerous effect, of the character of Battery Sergeant Major Williams, complete with his catchphrases (barring changing the names of the gunners addressed) in the sitcom 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum', from the BBC, originally broadcast from 1974-1980, which was a comedy following the (mis)adventures of a group of useless soldiers forming a concert party at a Royal Artilery depot in India during WW2. The writer would definitely have expected all British readers to recognize this, and laugh or groan (I groaned)..
I have to say i disagree with your 'bottom line'. I enjoyed Sky Pirates, but Death and Diplomacy is just terrible. On the one hand the author has a basically serious plot with some supposedly intense and serious scenes, but on the other hand he has completely non-serous elements and he writes it like he's trying to ape Douglas Adams's Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy ... and I',m sorry to break it to him, but he's no Douglas Adams. The whole mess veers jarringly in tone back and forth, sabotaging both the humour and the supposedly moving bits, and doesn't so much fall as plummet screaming between two stools.
To me the only redeeming quality is that it's setting the stage for the imminent departure of the odious Benny. Back in ... 1995/6/7 I first read the first 9 New Adventures, plus Deceit, Set Piece, Head Games and then Lungbarrow (after the first 8 I had an idea for writing one myself, but it featured Ace in a main role, and I gathered from SF magazines I read at the time that her character had gone, then come back changed, then left again, but popped back for some occasional reappearances, hence the NAs i jumped to after Love and War - figured I could still make it work, sent off to Virgin for the submission guidelines, which i still have somewhere, retooled my story a bit, wondered whether to submit it as a New Adventure, as it would be from Ace's timeline, or a Missing Adventure, as it would be from the Doctor's, wrote the detailed synopsis, and was just writing the sample chapters when the news came through that the BBC had pulled the plug on Virgin's license, all remaining new releases were already comtracted, and no new submissions would be accepted - grrrr - so I gave up, but did get and read Lungbarrow as it was supposed to finally explain the 'Cartmel Masterplan') so I'd only read 4 Benny stories back then. Didn't much like her then, but heard how she'd become a 'fan favorite' and got her own ongoing series, so I hoped other writers had made her a better character. For me - no such luck. She has been consistently dreadful - an arrogant, pompous and most especially SMUG complete Mary Sue of a character. I had to get right the way to The Also People to find one story i found her ... not good but just about tolerable in. Had my hopes raised that her torture in Just War might bring about a welcome character change (and it should have), but no such luck - the reset button was firmly pushed for the next one and all since. Mind you, much as I want her to go, I just don't believe that she (as written throughout the series) would fall for Jason Kane. (Then again, I suppose that's fitting as I didn't believe most of the sudden romances that had companions leaving in the original series either ... Susan, Jo, Leela et al, even when I welcomed the leaving of the character).
The most galling thing for me, working my way through reading all the New Adventures, most for the first time, is how my reaction on certain matters is the opposite of what i read in the SF magazines was the 'fan reaction'. Fans loved Benny, it was said, but hated Space Fleet Ace. I detest Benny, but ... well, I really like the IDEA of Space fleet Ace. I just think that Space Fleet Ace was written terribly by all the authors, none of whom appear to have any idea of what a soldier and soldier metality is really like, and none of whom can actually write a realistic close combat scene involving at least one well trained combatant to save their lives (plus all of them seemed to want to do down Ace and raise Benny as a paragon of companionhood to beat Ace over he head with, for whatever reason). For all the stories with Ace in from Deceit on, I'd have a special subsection under Goofs called something like 'Making Ace the worst supposedly well trained and skilled soldier ever'.
Oh no. Came back here to see what you have to say about the next three NAs, which I've now read, and remembered I'd meant to add the thing about It Ain't Half Hot Mum. Thought that after the next one I was done with Benny (I will NOT be reading Benny's own series of NAs), and I so enjoyed her absence from the next two, but she's back again in the next one for me to read! That's one less Benny-less one out of the few left to read.
I'm only a little way into this book as I work my way the whole NA series, and just popped onto this page to read your bottomline, not the rest yet. But I coudn't help noticing that while in the 'Roots' you mentioned the Star Wars' bar cantina scene for the Fatigue Shebeen scene, you appear to have missed that one of the domino players - 'Hammerhead' - is not only clearly described as the Xenomorph from the Aliens movies, but it includes a clear precis of the plots of Alien, Aliens and Alien3!
"But when you look like Freud’s worst slimy nightmare, are born by exploding spectacularly out of somebody’s sternum, can brutally slaughter the entire crew of a starship, the population of an exploratory colony and the inmates of a prison complex in an hour and a half and then hound any last survivor across half a galaxy until they kill themselves with their own flamethrower just to put themselves out of their misery and avoid the subsequent complications of the child-access rights ..."
I'd say that Alien, Aliens and Aliens 3 deserve a mention as much as Star Wars.
In some shots from the top of the Empire State building you can see the Empire State building.
A mess really. I don't care how much swearing is there (and I really didn't notice any other than the infamous "Fuck you, mate!" bit), Iceberg has far better reasons to dislike it. David Banks has an irritating "edgy" prose that results in long swaths where characters are only identified as he or she. We get extremely long stretches that don't go anywhere, especially regarding Mike Brack, making him as untrustworthy and creepy as possible just for a red herring. Instead Straker is the Cyberman agent, except he turns on them the moment the show up. Why was he helping them? Why did he betray them? The time spent with Ruby feels wasted since she doesn't join the Doctor, and the use of the snowbase and going through the trouble of establishing Pamela as Cutler's daughter have very little pay-off. It doesn't even make sense to keep the Doctor off-page for so long; it's not like he was working behind the scenes setting everything up for Ruby. How could any of Bono's personality remain in the Cyber Controller? It clearly states that all of Bono's brain was removed. I really think the Doctor's line "A kind of carat and stick approach," should be counted as a Dialogue Disaster, and Pah T'wa has to be some of the fakest Chinese I've heard since The Talons of Weng Chiang. Finally, there was no reason for any of that terrorist and Freedom Foundation nonsense; that had no relevance at all from what I remember.
What I did like was giving such a prominent role to a woman of colour like Ruby; it's just a shame that her development is for nothing in the end. I really like the Cyber Controller from The Tomb of the Cybermen so it was nice seeing the origin of that model. The scene with Ruby discovering the horrifying human experiments was amazingly well done, packing a visceral punch that makes the Cybermen so disturbing. Ultimately though, the negatives greatly outweigh the positives for me in Iceberg.
A rough but delightful romp, and truly the moment where Benny at last grows into the character so beloved today. The prose needs some work, what with the sudden changing of character perspectives, but making Benny the main focus was a brilliant move, allowing her character space to develop without the Doctor looming over her. Like Deceit though we get a little obnoxious slut shaming from her, which is interesting considering what her time period is apparently like. I've only experienced a few of Benny's solo adventures before, but if Birthright is any indication then she's got a splendid future ahead of her.
I quite liked Shadowmind, from the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers-style intrigue to the sudden shift into military SF. I loved the scene where the Doctor revealed the duplicates, blowing the lid off their conspiracy, and Ace's dilemma at the end was horrifying. Umbra was a bit of a mess though, feeling almost tacked-on when the evil Shenn faction made strong enough enemies on their own. We get no insight at all into them, and after Umbra's defeat the novel ends very abruptly. I also question the point of Bernice seeing the First Doctor for a moment instead of the Seventh. That never became important to the plot, so why have it? I also found it suffered from too many named characters, much like Lucifer Rising, making it hard to keep track of everyone. On the whole though, I'm glad I read Shadowmind.
Just for the sake of completeness - one bit of continuity you haven't mentioned. When Mel left the Doctor so abruptly in Dragonfire, she also left possessions, including clothes, in the TARDIS. Having nothing with her after being picked up abruptly by Jason and Dr Who from Avalone, she expects to find her old stuff, including a change of clothes she desparately needs, still in the TARDIS. She doesn't, because this isn't the original TARDIS but rather the alternate reality 3rd Doctor's from Blood Heat which she has never been in. Benny explains this to Mel and helps her find some clothes from the TARDIS wardrobe rooms, but Mel clearly doesn't believe this and still accuses the Doctor of having thrown all her stuff away after getting rid of her in Dragonfire, leaving her with nothing.
(Interesting question: what does happen to companion's rooms, and the stuff in them, when they leave? Do new companions have to clean out and redecorate the rooms of old ones? Does the Doctor go in and pack the stuff away? Does he just use the architectural reconfiguration system to move old companions' rooms away and bring new, as yet unused rooms close for the new companions so all the old rooms and contents are still filed away far from the console room? In Zamper, the Doctor mentions to Benny that some of Ace's weapons were still lying about in the TARDIS at that point.)
Now this is more like it! White Darkness is a vast improvement over the last two New Adventures and had me turning the pages in suspense. I simply could not wait to see what happened next! It really had everything: adventure, horror, mad science, conspiracy and Lovecraftian weirdness! I was surprised how understated the Lovecraftian elements were here, not even naming the Old One Mait was serving nor showing more than a brief glimpse. My sole complaint is that the zombies were not featured enough after a terrifying build up.
The Doctor claims no-one, not even the Time Lords, knows about the Old Ones, but the Sixth Doctor in Millennial Rites seems to know an awful lot right at the start, although that's Craig Hinton's fault rather than McIntee's. The Doctor also claims that the Old Ones never appear in person despite meeting several face-to-face, although that's probably more Andy Lane's fault. Also, isn't The Highest Science the first New Adventures novel to have a badly-drawn Seventh Doctor on the cover?
For Roots, at one point Ace thinks of Mortimer as having a "Smokey Bear hat" and the scene where the Doctor persuades Mortimer seems very similar to the Jedi Mind Trick from Star Wars (although it's likely a reference to the Master). The Golden Bough is a real anthropological text by Sir James George Frazer, unlike the other hidden books Ace discovers. For Links the Doctor demands the blaster that Ace didn't bring with her, similar to Remembrance of the Daleks.
While Lucifer Rising gets points simply for not being Deceit and beginning with a strong first half, I found it to suffer under the weight of so many named characters, antagonists that show up too late into the book and its own length. Ace getting her chance to be a grand manipulator is a great idea, but the Doctor lamenting how manipulating others has stained his soul was just silly, as is treating the Doctor personally killing an antagonist a big, shocking moment. This Doctor set off a supernova to destroy Skaro; shooting a weird alien isn't at all shocking after that. Lucifer Rising ultimately doesn't work for me in the end, but it was filled with some great ideas and I liked having a New Adventures with illustrations.
Anyone else, with all the hell symbolism and a location called the Pit, feel disappointed the Yssgaroth don't turn out to be behind everything?
Still in chapter 7, Jesus thinks of Alex Bannen as hijo de la puta ("bastard") when it's more properly expressed as hijo de puta or hijo de la gran puta. They really shouldn't have tried any Spanish...
Also, Jesus' full name is given as Jesus Garcia de Soto y Delporto; García is a more common spelling, and Delporto isn't a Spanish name but an Italian one, although having Italian ancestry isn't impossible for him; I just don't know if that was the intent.
In chapter 7 Jesus mentally describes Ace as "Fria como aqua de nieve: as cold as ice-water". A big mistake here is that the Spanish word for water is agua, not aqua. Also, his name really should be spelled Jesús. That said, Spanish has some vast regional differences, so maybe Jim Mortimore or Andy Lane was trying to convey Jesus was speaking a new dialect of Spanish (although if that's the case then English should have changed a little more too...).
Anyone reading stories like Ace of Hearts, Matrix, Prime Time etc. will see that 'Gale' is clearly the surname. In Ace of Hearts, Ace's mother's married name is 'Audrey Gale'.
We can discuss what is "more important", or whether "in-universe" is more significant than "real world", but the fact remains that in those stories Ace's surname is clearly and unambiguously 'Gale'. Not her middle name, her surname.
So there were thus two possible solutions., one the 'Bottled Universes' solution, which many people disliked, or trying, somehow, to reconcile the two sets of stories. Unless Ace was very briefly married to someone whose surname was 'McShane', and chose to keep her married name, something big was needed. So Dorothy Gale dies, and is replaced by the very nearly identical Dorothy McShane. Not ideal certainly, but it works, and it may also explain why the New Adventures Doctor spends so much time "testing" Ace.
Now what of Relative Dementias? Its proferred solution doesn't work, because it was clear that 'Gale' was Ace's surname, not her middle name. However, it does still fit into the continuity.
Because while Relative Dementias claims to take place during Season 26, Ace being 'McShane' must place it after Loving the Alien. This is far from unique in Who history. The novel Mission:Impractical's cover states that it takes place between the DWM comics War-Game and Funhouse. However, it also takes place after The Trial of a Time Lord, and features Glitz, who the Doctor first meets in Trial. While the comics War-Game and Funhouse take place before Trial. Thus, its stated placing has been ignored by just about everyone, and it is instead placed after Trial, before the Big Finish audio The Holy Terror.
Another oddity is the DWM story Future Imperfect, which is supposed to take place between The Mind Robber and The Invasion, and explain the Second Doctor's appearance in The Three Doctors. Except that for the Second Doctor The Three Doctors very clearly takes place after The Invasion.
Jonathan Blum stated that his The Fearmonger takes place between Nightshade and Love and War, yet very few people would place it there if they created a larger continuity.
And so, without listing all such stories, there is nothing that prevents Relative Dementias taking place, along with Atom Bomb Blues, between Loving the Alien and the Timewyrm books.
After all, you've made quite a strong case about 'Authorial intent versus actual in-universe content'. And actual in=universe content unambiguously gives Ace's surname in various stories as 'Gale'. Therefore meaning Relative Dementia's "Dorothy Gale McShane' can't occur when Ace is Dorothy Gale(as a surname).