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Eighth Doctor Adventures #69
Doctor Who: The Tomorrow Windows
There is a gala opening for a new exhibition at the Tate Modern - "The Tomorrow Windows." The concept behind the exhibition is simple - anyone can look through a Tomorrow Window and see into the future. Of course, the future is malleable, and so the future you see will change as you formulate your plans. You can the see the outcome of every potential decision, and then decide on the optimum course of action. According to the press pack, the Tomorrow Windows will bring about world peace and save humanity from every possible disaster. So, of course, someone decides to blow it up. There's always one, isn't there? As the Doctor investigates and unravels the conspiracy, he begins a Gulliver's Travels-esque quest, visiting bizarre worlds and encountering many peculiar and surreal life forms...
288 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 11, 2016
Douglas Adams, the Doctor, the fate of civilizations, and Brian Blessed.
This is one of only two books that I've ever finished and immediately flipped back to page one.
I know the Eighth Doctor novels are a long series, but I picked up this one at random and understood it just fine. For some reason, everyone is trying to stop the Doctor from hearing the word "Gallifrey," but that never really mattered. The important part is the beautiful science fiction satire going on all around it.
The Doctor discovers a planetary suicide epidemic. Worlds throughout the galaxy, worlds that used to be peaceful paradises just a few hundred years ago, are killing themselves off in bizarre ways. Being the meddler he is, the Doctor races against time to try to stop multiple civilizations from imploding.
Aside from that:
A) A rich, smug bastard leaves his life behind, because It Is Time.
B) Prubert Gastridge, the bearded and bombastic washed-up galactic actor known for playing the King of the Buzzardmen in the movie Zap Daniels, is getting inordinately nervous.
Wait. Beard. Bombastic. Buzzardmen . . .
Ah. Yes.
C) A multispecies real estate auction hops from planet to planet.
D) God is popping in from time to time, offering unsolicited advice.
E) Someone's delivering giant windows that show people their future.
That's a lot of plot threads. Do they work together?
I don't want to try to connect the dots for you. It's too rewarding to watch all of those threads come together in a brilliant mix. It's a deliberate tribute to Douglas Adams' sense of smiling anger at the foolishness of people, and it succeeds spectacularly better that many others who just ape Adams's characters without Getting It.
It's wonderful to watch the Doctor jump from planet to planet, trying to wake people up to their better natures and giving great speeches. The story goes from funny to tragic, but it always feels like Doctor Who.
I've been waiting for years to see the new series adapt this. It's just too good a story. Keep an eye open for a Ninth Doctor cameo, a surprising find in a book published a year before "Rose" even aired.
That's just how time travel goes, you know?
This is one of only two books that I've ever finished and immediately flipped back to page one.
I know the Eighth Doctor novels are a long series, but I picked up this one at random and understood it just fine. For some reason, everyone is trying to stop the Doctor from hearing the word "Gallifrey," but that never really mattered. The important part is the beautiful science fiction satire going on all around it.
The Doctor discovers a planetary suicide epidemic. Worlds throughout the galaxy, worlds that used to be peaceful paradises just a few hundred years ago, are killing themselves off in bizarre ways. Being the meddler he is, the Doctor races against time to try to stop multiple civilizations from imploding.
Aside from that:
A) A rich, smug bastard leaves his life behind, because It Is Time.
B) Prubert Gastridge, the bearded and bombastic washed-up galactic actor known for playing the King of the Buzzardmen in the movie Zap Daniels, is getting inordinately nervous.
Wait. Beard. Bombastic. Buzzardmen . . .
Ah. Yes.
C) A multispecies real estate auction hops from planet to planet.
D) God is popping in from time to time, offering unsolicited advice.
E) Someone's delivering giant windows that show people their future.
That's a lot of plot threads. Do they work together?
I don't want to try to connect the dots for you. It's too rewarding to watch all of those threads come together in a brilliant mix. It's a deliberate tribute to Douglas Adams' sense of smiling anger at the foolishness of people, and it succeeds spectacularly better that many others who just ape Adams's characters without Getting It.
It's wonderful to watch the Doctor jump from planet to planet, trying to wake people up to their better natures and giving great speeches. The story goes from funny to tragic, but it always feels like Doctor Who.
I've been waiting for years to see the new series adapt this. It's just too good a story. Keep an eye open for a Ninth Doctor cameo, a surprising find in a book published a year before "Rose" even aired.
That's just how time travel goes, you know?
January 6, 2017
"Festival of Death" is the book that tends to get all the press, but "The Tomorrow Windows" is undoubtedly Jonathan Morris' true masterpiece. This is everything "Doctor Who" should aspire to be: exciting action-adventure, playful with concepts of space-time, populated by well-drawn characters, companions with meaty roles, huge cartloads of wit...and at the center of it all, a Doctor with great, heroic heart. But what truly makes this novel so wonderful is the deep well of humanity on offer. So much melancholy, poignancy, and genuine feeling tracks through this entire story, and lifts it to a level that transcends genre labels...just like all the best "Doctor Who" stories. Coming at the end of the 8th Doctor BBC Books line, it reflects all the greatness of what came before, and points to so much to come, post-2005.
June 25, 2013
As far as I'm concerned, Jonathan Morris is allowed to do whatever he wants with "Doctor Who". "Festival of Death" proved that you could write time travel twistiness without throwing it in our faces all the time how clever you are (it's heartening to see even the BBC recognized its quiet genius by reissuing it recently) and "Anachrophobia" had some wacky ideas that didn't fall apart under the weight of themselves, and some chilling setpieces to boot. He comes across as someone who knows the show up and down, but isn't so in awe of it that he isn't afraid to mess with it.
Here he seems to be attempting to fuse the lighter comedy of the Douglas Adams years with the sensibilities of the Eighth Doctor and, not surprisingly, it works. The Doctor and his Faithful Team of Companions runs into a exhibition of "Tomorrow Windows", pieces of glass that allow you to see your probable futures (kind of the opposite of Bob Shaw's "slow glass" concept). One bomb later hidden inside the mayor of London later and they're teamed with the exhibitor to try and uncover the culprit, not long before getting involved in an auction of worlds that seems to be resulting in the demise of the populations.
There's a certain vibe that only comes when you have absolute confidence in what you're doing and while maybe Morris was undergoing cold sweats every time he brought up a draft of this, but it doesn't show in the story itself. Comedy in SF is not the world's easiest thing . . . too close to the real world and comes across as clunky parody but get too strange and the audience doesn't have enough familiarity with the material to figure out what's supposed to be funny and what's merely part of the scenery. But Morris more often than not hits the mark once you get past the adjustment in the opening scenes that is going to be one of the stories that you don't have to take quite so seriously, as we whip through various planetary scenarios and their oddball cultures. At first glance you might think it was a Dave Stone novel, except that instead of being wacky for the sake of being wacky, Morris manages to write an actual plot, even if a lot of it is an excuse for him to discharge all his strange ideas, like the world where soup is sacred, or a planet of homicidal cars (like if David Cronenberg suddenly bought Pixar). Even the sequences where the "god" comes down to the various planets has its own amusement value, as everyone's reactions are realistic, yet tongue in cheek.
None of this would work if the characters didn't play it straight and most of the time Morris manages to hit just the right tone. The aliens involved in the auction are strange (a pair of balls named after the sound of a question, a nonviolent violent lizard, a lava lamp with a lisp) but all of them have recognizable qualities that make them both gut-bustingly funny at times (conversations between the lizard and Fitz are often hilarious) but relatable. It helps that the Doctor and Fitz aren't fazed by any of this, with the Doctor acting as the off-kilter center in a quieter way than Tom Baker would have done and Fitz being useful in a way that only someone who has traveled on the TARDIS for this long should be. The constant jumping of locations and concepts could have made the book feel scattershot, an excuse for the author to clear out all his random ideas, but his constant parceling out of other elements give the sense of a puzzle that can only be pulled together at the last second.
In the midst of this there's surprisingly few weak spots considering how much of a high wire act this one is. Trix remains the weakest link, as it were, and Morris gamely attempts to give her depth in her scenes by questioning whether she has an identity in all the roles she takes on, but increasingly she feels like a concept that sounded good on paper even as the authors prove they have no real good way to execute that concept. She does better here, and the reason behind her first person narration is clever but it's not clear that subtracting her from the novel would be a big loss. The ending ties it all together somewhat abruptly, with a minimum of fuss, and it was surprising how quiet the climax was, and slightly out of left field. I give him credit for being oblique but I wonder if he was hamstrung by the seemingly mandated page count.
Still, when the ride to get there is as fun as this one I don't really have too many quibbles. This late in the Eighth Doctor game you don't expect to find many gems so it's been heartening to see some of the newer, better authors getting a final crack at the Doctor with the great hair. I like searingly gut-wrenching psychological drama as much as the next person, but when "fun" is done right, that's quite okay too.
Here he seems to be attempting to fuse the lighter comedy of the Douglas Adams years with the sensibilities of the Eighth Doctor and, not surprisingly, it works. The Doctor and his Faithful Team of Companions runs into a exhibition of "Tomorrow Windows", pieces of glass that allow you to see your probable futures (kind of the opposite of Bob Shaw's "slow glass" concept). One bomb later hidden inside the mayor of London later and they're teamed with the exhibitor to try and uncover the culprit, not long before getting involved in an auction of worlds that seems to be resulting in the demise of the populations.
There's a certain vibe that only comes when you have absolute confidence in what you're doing and while maybe Morris was undergoing cold sweats every time he brought up a draft of this, but it doesn't show in the story itself. Comedy in SF is not the world's easiest thing . . . too close to the real world and comes across as clunky parody but get too strange and the audience doesn't have enough familiarity with the material to figure out what's supposed to be funny and what's merely part of the scenery. But Morris more often than not hits the mark once you get past the adjustment in the opening scenes that is going to be one of the stories that you don't have to take quite so seriously, as we whip through various planetary scenarios and their oddball cultures. At first glance you might think it was a Dave Stone novel, except that instead of being wacky for the sake of being wacky, Morris manages to write an actual plot, even if a lot of it is an excuse for him to discharge all his strange ideas, like the world where soup is sacred, or a planet of homicidal cars (like if David Cronenberg suddenly bought Pixar). Even the sequences where the "god" comes down to the various planets has its own amusement value, as everyone's reactions are realistic, yet tongue in cheek.
None of this would work if the characters didn't play it straight and most of the time Morris manages to hit just the right tone. The aliens involved in the auction are strange (a pair of balls named after the sound of a question, a nonviolent violent lizard, a lava lamp with a lisp) but all of them have recognizable qualities that make them both gut-bustingly funny at times (conversations between the lizard and Fitz are often hilarious) but relatable. It helps that the Doctor and Fitz aren't fazed by any of this, with the Doctor acting as the off-kilter center in a quieter way than Tom Baker would have done and Fitz being useful in a way that only someone who has traveled on the TARDIS for this long should be. The constant jumping of locations and concepts could have made the book feel scattershot, an excuse for the author to clear out all his random ideas, but his constant parceling out of other elements give the sense of a puzzle that can only be pulled together at the last second.
In the midst of this there's surprisingly few weak spots considering how much of a high wire act this one is. Trix remains the weakest link, as it were, and Morris gamely attempts to give her depth in her scenes by questioning whether she has an identity in all the roles she takes on, but increasingly she feels like a concept that sounded good on paper even as the authors prove they have no real good way to execute that concept. She does better here, and the reason behind her first person narration is clever but it's not clear that subtracting her from the novel would be a big loss. The ending ties it all together somewhat abruptly, with a minimum of fuss, and it was surprising how quiet the climax was, and slightly out of left field. I give him credit for being oblique but I wonder if he was hamstrung by the seemingly mandated page count.
Still, when the ride to get there is as fun as this one I don't really have too many quibbles. This late in the Eighth Doctor game you don't expect to find many gems so it's been heartening to see some of the newer, better authors getting a final crack at the Doctor with the great hair. I like searingly gut-wrenching psychological drama as much as the next person, but when "fun" is done right, that's quite okay too.
June 28, 2020
I really loved this! Jonny Morris's Who output has always been some of my favourite stuff and this doesn't disappoint. It's got some of the usual lot of chaos, mystery, death, and destruction, but it balances it out really nicely with a lot of fun elements without any of it coming across as jarring (apart from where its intentional).
A funny thing I noticed, especially reading this while Series 12 was airing, was Also some fun references and a bunch of cheeky cameos which gave me a giggle.
A funny thing I noticed, especially reading this while Series 12 was airing, was Also some fun references and a bunch of cheeky cameos which gave me a giggle.
February 6, 2015
So ... this is another "WTF did I just read" book from the EDA range. The homage to Adams is apparent and stays just the right side of pastiche or parody. I think the first time I read it, which was a lot closer to its original publication, I rated it 5* but I think 4 is more appropriate. There are a few moments where the book feels slightly too aware of itself as Adams-esque and occasionally it seems that this is more important than the actual story. Over all, however, its excellently written, and a great deal of fun.
December 14, 2009
Eighth Doctor Adventure (EDA) with Fitz and Trix. Non-arc, although like all EDAs it makes reference to other adventures. Somewhat Douglas Adams-esque in writing style, with a Dave Stone-esque body count. I like it.
September 5, 2015
Definitely Douglas Adams-inspired, and one of the more fun Who novels I've read in a while. The author created an interesting cast of aliens, and I liked seeing Fitz playing detective. I should note that most of the plot twists weren't big shockers, but the book is still a nice romp.
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April 20, 2016One word for this book is "fun".
Morris is at play with a lot of the traditional elements of Doctor Who here and is really jumbling it all up. There's some magnificent meta moments and all of the supporting characters are great.
Morris is at play with a lot of the traditional elements of Doctor Who here and is really jumbling it all up. There's some magnificent meta moments and all of the supporting characters are great.
March 3, 2010
Need to write a book with so many twists and confusions? Go to Jonathan Morris. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey before it became fashionable.
January 4, 2015
I liked the concept and some of the scenes, but the plot was a jumble and the resolution was confusing.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews