Lloyd RoseKirja-arvosteluja

An 8th doctor with Anji and Fitz novel. The Doctor visits New Orleans and immediately encounters a murder victim. This leads to participation in the police investigation as well as the local witches and sorcerers. This is one of the supernatural stories rather than scientific or even pseudo-scientific. The Doctor nearly gets sacrificed to a demon, Anji finally goes on a date and Fitz goes grave-robbing.
re-read 2/15/2024. .

While I like the 8th Doctor and Charley and C'rizz (not pronounced like one expects!) stories this particular arc is not quite to my taste. Still interesting and an unusual take on the Minotaur tale.

This is another Eighth Doctor Adventure from the era where he was traveling the universe with amnesia, accompanied by Fitz and Anji. Here he lands in near-future New Orleans and tangles with dark magic. I realized while reading it that this is the third book of this era I've read in a row... and all three of them have been written by women. Like Jacqueline Rayner and Kate Orman, one of Rose's high points is her characterization.

I really like how the Doctor comes across here: recognizably Paul McGann, but a different McGann than we might get in the audios. He's got the Doctor's insight and enthusiasm; what he lacks is the Doctor's self-confidence and certainty. After all, he doesn't know who he is. There are lots of good lines here. Rose does okay by Fitz, too, and I particularly liked her Anji. Anji comes in for a lot of stick in online discourse around the EDAs, but I've found her to be a strongly delineated, enjoyable character in each of the three books I've read with her.

I will admit I didn't entirely follow the turns of the plot here, but this is the kind of book that 1) has enough good stuff going on that you don't care, and 2) is good enough otherwise that you kind of trust that it does all work out if you want to follow it. (Plus, I read it in fits and starts between other books, and I'm sure it wasn't meant to be read across a couple months!) There's a lot of atmosphere, strong characterization, a neat sense of history, and a good sense of magic. The villain became a little obvious too quickly, but other than that, I enjoyed the journey a lot even when I didn't understand it. I remember really liking Lloyd Rose's other EDA, Camera Obscura; now I will have to track down her third and final Doctor Who novel, The Algebra of Ice.

The first Doctor Who book I have read in a while, this was the 68th BBC Past Doctor Adventure by Lloyd Rose (a pen name of Sarah Tonyn) and starred the seventh doctor and Ace (two of my favourite characters). The supporting cast was very small including Ethan, a geeky maths boy and love interest of Ace's and Molecross, a Sci-Fi blogger/journalist . Essentially the baddies were mathematical entities looking to reverse, deny or stop entropy, but of course the Doctor outwitted them and everything was okay. This is actually a cracking read, well written and the story skips along. There is a minor (and completely unnecessary) role for UNIT in the story. I do own many of the PDAs and EDAs and will definitely be reading more of them this year, and I hope they are as good as this one.

It's nice to hear C'rizz and Charley finally getting to be in the same scenes.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2692931.html

Lloyd Rose is a particularly good Who writer, who has published no other written fiction as far as I can tell (she has a non-fiction piece in a 2013 Sherlock Holmes anthology, and a couple of TV scripts). This is the last of her works that I have come to, having already greatly enjoyed The City of the Dead and Camera Obscura (and her audio play Caerdroia). I'm glad to say that I really enjoyed this as well; it starts with the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and from then on there are a lot of balls in the air: crop circles, weird ice, the Brigadier, the Riemann hypothesis, Ace having a fling with a brilliant mathematician, the Doctor as a partlially successful manipulator; also the flavours of both the last TV seasons and the first New Adventure novels inform the narrative and combine for a very tasty treat. I'm not completely certain that I can really tell you what the book was about, but it satisfied me on a lot of levels.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2371359.html

The Eighth Doctor Adventures were getting pretty self-referential by this stage, but this is a good case study - Rose brings the Doctor, Fitz and Anji to a very well realised Victorian Engliand, where they find a rogue time machine and a stage act very reminiscent of a Christopher Priest novel that came out not long before; and there are references to Evil of the Daleks and City of Death which are subtle and not pushed too hard. And Sabbath, a recurring character who had so far failed to engage me, turns into a very interesting adversary here, both a foe and an unwitting ally for the Doctor. One of the good ones.

Caerdroia was the best of this run. McGann seems to be back into it, and indeed playing three different versions of his own Doctor is surely a stretching experience. The initial mental battle between Doctor and Kro'ka is a good scene too. The baffling streetscape of the shifting city, rooted in Lewis Carroll and Franz Kafka, is also well portrayed. It doesn't all make a lot of sense, but I found it a welcome up-tick in quality.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/987730.html

I got this simply because it is the highest-rated Doctor Who novel of any epoch by LibraryThing users, and I wanted a) to assess whether LibraryThing ratings can be considered a reasonable guide to quality and b) if it is worth giving the BBC series of Eighth Doctor Adventures another go, having been underwhelmed by my previous samplings.

Well, the answer to both questions seems to be a reasonably firm Yes. The setting of the story in Who continuity is unfamiliar to me - the Doctor is suffering from partial amnesia for some reason, and I have read nothing else with either of the two companions, Fitz and Anji. But the portrayal of the Eighth Doctor (amnesia apart) is consistent with the Big Finish audios, and I thought Anji came across well as an interesting character (Fitz rather less so).

I also felt initially suspicious about the setting, among occultists in New Orleans. Indeed, there is no scientific hand-waving anywhere in the book to explain away the magic - spells and summonings work, and elementals are real. Yet in the end I was satisfied; there are plenty of sf stories (indeed, many Doctor Who stories!) where there is detailed technobabble to explain what is going on, but the means and motivation of the bad guys remain unconvincing, and this is not one of them. Also the New Orleans setting was well sketched out (I suppose - I've never been there), and the plot had some genuine surprises - Lloyd Rose clearly has a good knack of misdirection. Plus the Doctor actually, possibly, maybe, has an intimate encounter, discreetly described.

I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd read more of this series, but if this is the best then some of the others must be pretty decent too.

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http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2220618.html

enjoyed it well enough as effectively a standalone novel; I liked it even more as part of the series, having got to know companions Fitz and Anji rather better over the last few months of reading. In particular, the intense description of New Orleans as a setting really does stand out as an exceptionally good evocation of place. Good to return to it.