Saturday, November 08, 2014

Raggedy Man

And so we come to the last of the series about the Doctor Who novels and stories. November is the month of the Eleventh Doctor, who at the time of the 50th anniversary was the last.

This month's short story was "Nothing O'Clock" by Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite authors. It features the Doctor and Amy, which puts it somewhere in the first year of their travels.

Unfortunately, it's not great. The issue is really that it's just too short - there's an interesting idea here, and it's written well enough, but just as it gets going it ends. It's almost as if the author had the nugget of an idea lying around, he was asked to do a Doctor Who story, and he just bashed it out. A shame.

This month's novel is "The Silent Stars Go By", by Dan Abnett. Abnett is an author I hadn't read before, but one I had heard of - he's regarded as the 'good' author of Warhammer novels. (Of course, since those are game fiction, 'good' is a relative term. Anyway, having never read his books, I can't say.)

This one features Amy and Rory, and fits somewhere in their second year. And, again, it's... okay. The story starts pretty well, and goes on just fine for a while, but then it seems to run out of steam. And although there is then one rather well-done twist in the tale, that's not really enough to redeem it. Worse, we have that twist and then, scarcely a few pages later, everything is neatly resolved and done. It's a shame, but it means that this novel fits with a lot of the others in the bracket of being "okay but not great".

And so we come to the end. As noted, the best novels were "Beautiful Chaos" (the tenth), "Only Human" (the ninth), "Players" (the sixth", and then "Last of the Gaderene" (the third). As for the rankings of the Doctors themselves... that's a post for another day - after I've seen the last episode of the current season.

#54: "The Silent Stars Go By", by Dan Abnett

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