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Eighth Doctor Adventures #59
Doctor Who: Camera Obscura
The Doctor sat alone and listened to the beat of his remaining heart. He had never got used to it. He never would. The single sound where a double should be. What was this new code hammering through his body? What did it mean? Mortal. No, he'd always known he could die. Not mortal. Damaged. Crippled. Through his shirt, his fingers sought the thick ridge of his scar. Human...
The Doctor's second heart was taken from his body — for his own good, he was told. Removed by his sometime ally, sometime rival, the mysterious time-traveller Sabbath. Now, as a new danger menaces reality, the Doctor finds himself working with Sabbath again. From a seance in Victorian London to a wild pursuit on Dartmoor, the Doctor and his companions work frantically to unravel the mystery of this latest threat to Time... Before Time itself unravels.
The Doctor's second heart was taken from his body — for his own good, he was told. Removed by his sometime ally, sometime rival, the mysterious time-traveller Sabbath. Now, as a new danger menaces reality, the Doctor finds himself working with Sabbath again. From a seance in Victorian London to a wild pursuit on Dartmoor, the Doctor and his companions work frantically to unravel the mystery of this latest threat to Time... Before Time itself unravels.
280 pages, Paperback
First published August 5, 2002
4 people are currently reading
381 people want to read
About the author
Lloyd Rose
15 books7 followersLloyd Rose is an American writer and one of the few female writers of Doctor Who fiction. She also contributed to the reference book Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It. She has also written for the American television series Homicide: Life on the Street and Kingpin.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 5, 2014
If this had been a TV story, a New Adventures novel or a Big Finish play, it would be lauded as a classic Doctor Who tale. Unfortunately, it’s a BBC Books novel; not only that, it’s the one that kicked off a frequently frustrating “alternative universe” sequence which did little to help the range improve its profile.
That’s a shame because it’s one of the best Eighth Doctor Adventures the BBC ever gave us, and it’s not until the end that the reader realises that things have not been as neatly tied up as everyone thought.
If I had to pick out the best thing about it, I’d say it was the setting. Doctor Who is always a good fit for Victorian England, and here we have a strong demonstration of why. From the early sequences which show the regulars at a séance, through scenes set in the theatre, various medical bases and remote Dartmoor, Lloyd Rose brings in the inherent prejudices of the era, and it’s not just Anji Kapoor who feels slightly sidelined by the very narrow Victorian view of the way things should be. There’s an ever-present air of menace in this, and it’s not just from the external threats, or even from Sabbath who, finally, gets something interesting to do. The real ‘animals’, as always, are mankind and what we can be tempted to do to each other…
Remarkably, this is even better than Lloyd Rose’s first Doctor Who book, which is no mean feat considering how good ‘The City of the Dead’ was. If there are faults, I can’t find them.
My only regret is that the book’s placing means most people won’t even look for it, let alone read it. That really is a shame.
That’s a shame because it’s one of the best Eighth Doctor Adventures the BBC ever gave us, and it’s not until the end that the reader realises that things have not been as neatly tied up as everyone thought.
If I had to pick out the best thing about it, I’d say it was the setting. Doctor Who is always a good fit for Victorian England, and here we have a strong demonstration of why. From the early sequences which show the regulars at a séance, through scenes set in the theatre, various medical bases and remote Dartmoor, Lloyd Rose brings in the inherent prejudices of the era, and it’s not just Anji Kapoor who feels slightly sidelined by the very narrow Victorian view of the way things should be. There’s an ever-present air of menace in this, and it’s not just from the external threats, or even from Sabbath who, finally, gets something interesting to do. The real ‘animals’, as always, are mankind and what we can be tempted to do to each other…
Remarkably, this is even better than Lloyd Rose’s first Doctor Who book, which is no mean feat considering how good ‘The City of the Dead’ was. If there are faults, I can’t find them.
My only regret is that the book’s placing means most people won’t even look for it, let alone read it. That really is a shame.
February 8, 2013
Okay, so maybe the first one wasn't a fluke.
I think pretty much everyone was surprised by how quite above decent Rose's first Who novel, "City of the Dead" was. Combining deft characterizations along with distinctive prose and a fine grasp of local detail, to me it sparked off the current run of quite excellent Eighth Doctor novels after a run of so-so books. Most people (me included) probably finished that book hoping that she would do another one, along with the simultaneous hope that it measured up to the high standards proposed by that other novel. I didn't even connect the two books at first (shows how much I pay attention) vaguely recognizing the name of the author but not expecting her to write another novel so close to the last one. It wasn't until a good chunk of the way through when I realized how much I was enjoying that that I checked which other books the author had written and finally made the connection.
She's a sneaky author, in a way, because she doesn't have the flashy brilliance of the Big Guns, your Lawrence Miles and Pauls Magrs or Cornell. The novels aren't obsessed with huge ideas or cracking open the potential of the setting and so don't immediately "wow" you with their audacity or by attempting to redefine everything you know about the character. What she does do right is have an impressive eye for details, an ability to make strangeness seem utterly normal while still conveying its own strangeness and a gift for dialogue that manages to be humorous with veering into sheer jokeyness and is capable of having people do more than shout cliches at each other. The crew of her TARDIS feel like people caught in a situation that they've accepted but aren't sure if they're used to and while I agree that Fitz and Anji aren't as essential as they've been in the past (more often than not either left out or coming along one step behind to yell at people for being left one step behind) we get plenty of scenes where its just the two of them talking to each other and its one of those rare times we get to see the friendship between them, an involuntary brother and sister where you first become friends with someone because they're the only person who can at all understand what you're going through and then actually become friends with them. Seeing then interact privately without the Doctor present lets them breathe on their own as characters and does more to ground them than most of the others books do.
Here, the situation is ostensibly that a time machine is operating in Victorian England improperly, which runs the risk of destroying the entire fabric of space and time every time someone uses it and is already doing weird things to people. There's a magician who can appear in more than one place at once, a woman with multiple personalities where some can see the future, an alienist with a crazy unseen brother, and a carnival barker bemoaning the loss of his greatest exhibit. But the time machine almost becomes a Macguffin as the true plot is the nature of the relationship between the Doctor and current foe Sabbath, and a good chunk of the plot takes a backseat while the two of them spar over ideas and philosophies.
Oddly enough, this is a good thing. One of the most maddening parts about Sabbath is how ill-defined he's been in previous appearances. Miles was able to get away with keeping him elliptically odd in his first appearance because the whole book was like that but now that we're forced to see him in more concrete settings, we need to know more about him and his motivations. Turns out he's in this time for both the same and different reasons as the Doctor. Oh, and he has the Doctor's heart, having taken it several books ago to save the Doctor, he has managed to find his own use for it. Here he gets what amounts to center stage and the animosity between he and the Doctor often becomes electrifying. This Doctor is never better when he has a moral cause to draw his ire and in the presence of Sabbath his humor becomes sharper and more biting, the stakes get higher and he becomes that much more dangerous and clever. Framing their arguments to each other as a choice between saving lives and forming order, Rose does more to define this particular incarnation of the Doctor than a lot of other writers have, giving him a point of view and a philosophy beyond the guy who wanders in every week to save the day simply because it needs saving. Their conflict here manages to be both contained and threatens to spill out over into other books, but here I think we're going to see the definitive push-pull that all the other appearances will be based on.
What's remarkably this time is how much help Rose doesn't need from the setting. With the last novel, New Orleans did a lot of the work setting up the atmosphere and while Victorian England isn't a place we can visit to get the full effect, she does a good job of conveying the bits that lurk on the side, the asylums and the carnivals, and makes them places where the Doctor can fit in but still has to find his footing. She pushes the tone to the very edge of science-fiction, keeping all the time travel stuff intact (and bonus points for working in the Dalek time travel experiments with mirrors from "Evil of the Daleks" without bogging us down in almost forty year old continuity) but gradually edging the proceedings to a more fantastic approach, which seems to work better for this Doctor. "Doctor Who" in general, at least in novel form, seems to thrive the more we push it away from spaceships and into realms even the Doctor finds bizarre and get small helpings of that here, a visit to the presumed realms of the dead, layering on the concepts of extra-dimensions without bothering with the psuedo-scientific babble that comes along with it. It never moves into outright fantasy, which is fine, but there has to be room for stuff that science can't adequately explain in order to keep the universe a fascinating place. He moves in unknown hierarchies and oblique circles, and that sits just fine with me.
With all that, the climax of it comes almost as just another part of the proceedings, instead of building to a grand climax. The villain here never reaches the heights that the grand debate between the Doctor and Sabbath suggests it might be and it almost seems besides the point, a way of getting to the tragedy that resets the status quo slightly. Maybe there winds up being no real villains here, just people projected onto false walls and seeing what they want to see, desperate to capture the remnants of a bright day they barely recall but seems so close they can step right into it, never seeing the wall that lurks behind the picture. The Doctor is the person who stops you from walking into the wall, or gives you the handkerchief when you bust your nose against it. That feels right. Rose obviously can't write every novel in the series, but giving her more work certainly wouldn't be a bad idea.
I think pretty much everyone was surprised by how quite above decent Rose's first Who novel, "City of the Dead" was. Combining deft characterizations along with distinctive prose and a fine grasp of local detail, to me it sparked off the current run of quite excellent Eighth Doctor novels after a run of so-so books. Most people (me included) probably finished that book hoping that she would do another one, along with the simultaneous hope that it measured up to the high standards proposed by that other novel. I didn't even connect the two books at first (shows how much I pay attention) vaguely recognizing the name of the author but not expecting her to write another novel so close to the last one. It wasn't until a good chunk of the way through when I realized how much I was enjoying that that I checked which other books the author had written and finally made the connection.
She's a sneaky author, in a way, because she doesn't have the flashy brilliance of the Big Guns, your Lawrence Miles and Pauls Magrs or Cornell. The novels aren't obsessed with huge ideas or cracking open the potential of the setting and so don't immediately "wow" you with their audacity or by attempting to redefine everything you know about the character. What she does do right is have an impressive eye for details, an ability to make strangeness seem utterly normal while still conveying its own strangeness and a gift for dialogue that manages to be humorous with veering into sheer jokeyness and is capable of having people do more than shout cliches at each other. The crew of her TARDIS feel like people caught in a situation that they've accepted but aren't sure if they're used to and while I agree that Fitz and Anji aren't as essential as they've been in the past (more often than not either left out or coming along one step behind to yell at people for being left one step behind) we get plenty of scenes where its just the two of them talking to each other and its one of those rare times we get to see the friendship between them, an involuntary brother and sister where you first become friends with someone because they're the only person who can at all understand what you're going through and then actually become friends with them. Seeing then interact privately without the Doctor present lets them breathe on their own as characters and does more to ground them than most of the others books do.
Here, the situation is ostensibly that a time machine is operating in Victorian England improperly, which runs the risk of destroying the entire fabric of space and time every time someone uses it and is already doing weird things to people. There's a magician who can appear in more than one place at once, a woman with multiple personalities where some can see the future, an alienist with a crazy unseen brother, and a carnival barker bemoaning the loss of his greatest exhibit. But the time machine almost becomes a Macguffin as the true plot is the nature of the relationship between the Doctor and current foe Sabbath, and a good chunk of the plot takes a backseat while the two of them spar over ideas and philosophies.
Oddly enough, this is a good thing. One of the most maddening parts about Sabbath is how ill-defined he's been in previous appearances. Miles was able to get away with keeping him elliptically odd in his first appearance because the whole book was like that but now that we're forced to see him in more concrete settings, we need to know more about him and his motivations. Turns out he's in this time for both the same and different reasons as the Doctor. Oh, and he has the Doctor's heart, having taken it several books ago to save the Doctor, he has managed to find his own use for it. Here he gets what amounts to center stage and the animosity between he and the Doctor often becomes electrifying. This Doctor is never better when he has a moral cause to draw his ire and in the presence of Sabbath his humor becomes sharper and more biting, the stakes get higher and he becomes that much more dangerous and clever. Framing their arguments to each other as a choice between saving lives and forming order, Rose does more to define this particular incarnation of the Doctor than a lot of other writers have, giving him a point of view and a philosophy beyond the guy who wanders in every week to save the day simply because it needs saving. Their conflict here manages to be both contained and threatens to spill out over into other books, but here I think we're going to see the definitive push-pull that all the other appearances will be based on.
What's remarkably this time is how much help Rose doesn't need from the setting. With the last novel, New Orleans did a lot of the work setting up the atmosphere and while Victorian England isn't a place we can visit to get the full effect, she does a good job of conveying the bits that lurk on the side, the asylums and the carnivals, and makes them places where the Doctor can fit in but still has to find his footing. She pushes the tone to the very edge of science-fiction, keeping all the time travel stuff intact (and bonus points for working in the Dalek time travel experiments with mirrors from "Evil of the Daleks" without bogging us down in almost forty year old continuity) but gradually edging the proceedings to a more fantastic approach, which seems to work better for this Doctor. "Doctor Who" in general, at least in novel form, seems to thrive the more we push it away from spaceships and into realms even the Doctor finds bizarre and get small helpings of that here, a visit to the presumed realms of the dead, layering on the concepts of extra-dimensions without bothering with the psuedo-scientific babble that comes along with it. It never moves into outright fantasy, which is fine, but there has to be room for stuff that science can't adequately explain in order to keep the universe a fascinating place. He moves in unknown hierarchies and oblique circles, and that sits just fine with me.
With all that, the climax of it comes almost as just another part of the proceedings, instead of building to a grand climax. The villain here never reaches the heights that the grand debate between the Doctor and Sabbath suggests it might be and it almost seems besides the point, a way of getting to the tragedy that resets the status quo slightly. Maybe there winds up being no real villains here, just people projected onto false walls and seeing what they want to see, desperate to capture the remnants of a bright day they barely recall but seems so close they can step right into it, never seeing the wall that lurks behind the picture. The Doctor is the person who stops you from walking into the wall, or gives you the handkerchief when you bust your nose against it. That feels right. Rose obviously can't write every novel in the series, but giving her more work certainly wouldn't be a bad idea.
July 28, 2024
The opening chapters feel like a dark, turgid piece of gothic phantasmagoria...and then, suddenly, both the plot and the Doctor snap awake as if someone flicked a switch. The rest of the story sees the Doctor as his snarky best, needling all the villains and obstacles in his path...and leaving everyone floored in his wake. He truly is on fire here, and it's one of the best characterizations of the 8th Doctor in print. It's not something you can really walk into cold -- you'll need to be familiar with where this is situated in the 8th Doctor's continuing storyline -- but if you are generally aware of the situation, this novel takes the story arc and leaves it slightly askew...in very Doctor-ish fashion.
May 6, 2022
This is, by any estimation, the perfect 8th Doctor novel - possibly any Doctor. I've read it many times now, and it is on each reading as fresh, funny, sad, disturbing, prosaic, clever, witty, intelligent, descriptive, and just plain genius as ever before.
Read. This. Book.
Read. This. Book.
September 22, 2020
Absolutely bloody brilliant. 12/10. Stunning.
July 25, 2025
A camera obscura describes how light through a pinhole into a dark space will invert an image projected through the dark interior. It’s a pinhole image and has had several uses throughout history to teach art, observe eclipses, and eventually during the development of photography and film. Camera Obscura is Lloyd Rose’s second Doctor Who novel, once again featuring the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji and like her previous novel, The City of the Dead, it is one of the best the series has to offer. In essence, Rose is exploring the reflection to humanity the Doctor poses, Sabbath as a reflection of the Doctor and their own identities, and in many ways the Victorian origins of the Doctor as a character. The plot of Camera Obscura is one involving alterations to the timeline, there’s actually a time machine going awry and the Doctor, Fitz, and Anji eventually have to work with Sabbath to stop it and save the day. Rose’s plot is simple when you actually lay it out, but she does what only can be described as obfuscating beautifully by slowly torturing the Doctor, suffering from the lack of heart and reveal in the novel that it’s in Sabbath linking them intrinsically as similar. Rose references Victorian and Victorina inspired literature such as “A Scandal in Bohemia”, The Hound of the Baskervilles, the works of Jules Verne, Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige, Harry Houdini, and the works of Edgar Allen Poe all as essential for who the Doctor is. He has fallen into this terrible depression, the novel putting him further through the ringer, positing that without his second heart he can be grievously injured and nearly die.
When a theatrical counterweight is landed on his chest, Fitz and Anji individually lose themselves to their own reflection in each other. They’re both humans who have been put through their own hell in their own right, neither quite knowing to do without the Doctor but also knowing that the Doctor has been irrational for a while. Rose doesn’t split the novel into subplots, so Fitz and Anji as characters are there to represent what the Doctor does to people instead of having their own arcs, which could be a problem but Rose never sacrifices what makes them work as characters. Early in the novel is a fairly classic sequence of logically working through the con of a séance, only to reveal there is something odd actually going on, mainly that Constance Jane is actually possessed. There is a magician called Octave doing impossible tricks with doubles of himself, a psychiatrist and his evil twin, and Sabbath has saved and hired a female serial killer to be his own assistant in another reflection of the Doctor. Rose employs a freak show with the Doctor as his own freak, though the freak characters are the representation of normalcy in Camera Obscura. Many characters have doubles, quite literally splinters due to breaking in the timestream, so that anything happening to one of them happens to the other. Some are splintered within themselves, as is the case of Jane in an interesting take on dissociative identity disorder, though attributing that to the science fiction aspects of the story manifesting in different ways.
Lawrence Miles did a lot of work in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street to establish who Sabbath was, but it’s Lloyd Rose here who really takes the character and makes him work. He is utterly charming, putting everyone at ease while simultaneously feeling like a predator on the prowl. The way Rose introduces him and the Doctor both play on similar descriptions to add to the parallels, the prologue and first chapter both taking their time to establish if it’s Sabbath or the Doctor we are following. There is a sense that you know exactly what Sabbath’s plans are and the power he has over the Doctor, having his heart means that he has claim to part of who the Doctor is. Camera Obscura under the surface becomes an examination of one’s sense of identity. That’s why dissociative identity disorder is used in the plot, though it is outdatedly called multiple personality disorder since this is a book from 2002. The Doctor has to reclaim his identity by the end, he needs to pick himself up through the support of Fitz and Anji. The implication at the end of the novel is that he is regrowing his second heart to regain his status as Time Lord, because with only one he feels too close to an odd human. The contempt for humanity is fascinating for the Doctor, yet as Rose presents it, completely in character. He’s barely a Time Lord and that’s been slowly killing him.
Overall, like The City of the Dead and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura is a high concept novel that filters its concepts through incredibly compelling character drama. The simplicity of Lloyd Rose’s plot once again makes this one of the best novels BBC Books has to offer, and once again is a shame that Rose only wrote four Doctor Who stories. It’s incredibly imaginative to explore ideas of identity, reflection, and just how the Doctor could never be equal to humanity (he is above us). 10/10.
When a theatrical counterweight is landed on his chest, Fitz and Anji individually lose themselves to their own reflection in each other. They’re both humans who have been put through their own hell in their own right, neither quite knowing to do without the Doctor but also knowing that the Doctor has been irrational for a while. Rose doesn’t split the novel into subplots, so Fitz and Anji as characters are there to represent what the Doctor does to people instead of having their own arcs, which could be a problem but Rose never sacrifices what makes them work as characters. Early in the novel is a fairly classic sequence of logically working through the con of a séance, only to reveal there is something odd actually going on, mainly that Constance Jane is actually possessed. There is a magician called Octave doing impossible tricks with doubles of himself, a psychiatrist and his evil twin, and Sabbath has saved and hired a female serial killer to be his own assistant in another reflection of the Doctor. Rose employs a freak show with the Doctor as his own freak, though the freak characters are the representation of normalcy in Camera Obscura. Many characters have doubles, quite literally splinters due to breaking in the timestream, so that anything happening to one of them happens to the other. Some are splintered within themselves, as is the case of Jane in an interesting take on dissociative identity disorder, though attributing that to the science fiction aspects of the story manifesting in different ways.
Lawrence Miles did a lot of work in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street to establish who Sabbath was, but it’s Lloyd Rose here who really takes the character and makes him work. He is utterly charming, putting everyone at ease while simultaneously feeling like a predator on the prowl. The way Rose introduces him and the Doctor both play on similar descriptions to add to the parallels, the prologue and first chapter both taking their time to establish if it’s Sabbath or the Doctor we are following. There is a sense that you know exactly what Sabbath’s plans are and the power he has over the Doctor, having his heart means that he has claim to part of who the Doctor is. Camera Obscura under the surface becomes an examination of one’s sense of identity. That’s why dissociative identity disorder is used in the plot, though it is outdatedly called multiple personality disorder since this is a book from 2002. The Doctor has to reclaim his identity by the end, he needs to pick himself up through the support of Fitz and Anji. The implication at the end of the novel is that he is regrowing his second heart to regain his status as Time Lord, because with only one he feels too close to an odd human. The contempt for humanity is fascinating for the Doctor, yet as Rose presents it, completely in character. He’s barely a Time Lord and that’s been slowly killing him.
Overall, like The City of the Dead and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura is a high concept novel that filters its concepts through incredibly compelling character drama. The simplicity of Lloyd Rose’s plot once again makes this one of the best novels BBC Books has to offer, and once again is a shame that Rose only wrote four Doctor Who stories. It’s incredibly imaginative to explore ideas of identity, reflection, and just how the Doctor could never be equal to humanity (he is above us). 10/10.
September 30, 2021
I do like the writing, this book does feel like this should have been a Doctor who Episode, but the further I went into this, there has been some stuff that I can't seem to shake off, killing the motive of continuing on as well lost interest with the story as well ngl
February 10, 2023
It was quite good! Very well written, captivating, and an interesting story. I can see this re-energizing my reading of 8th Doctor books and hopefully get me to finish the last few.
June 18, 2013
Could not put it down.
I won't argue that the Doctor's repeated escapes from the actual character Death strained even Whoniverse credulity to the breaking point, but . . . it was just so cool that I have to forgive the lapse into Fantasy.
Sabbath was every inch the fantastic anti-hero he was destined to be. I'm so glad he finally got a chance for some attention. Seeing the Doctor get outfoxed is also wonderfully disturbing. Fitz and Anji had a very back-seat ride in this story, but I'll trade them for a look inside the Doctor's head any day. His clausterphobia is a great reference all the way back to Doctor Who: Seeing I. A+ for continuity.
If you love the Doctor, this one is a MUST READ.
I won't argue that the Doctor's repeated escapes from the actual character Death strained even Whoniverse credulity to the breaking point, but . . . it was just so cool that I have to forgive the lapse into Fantasy.
Sabbath was every inch the fantastic anti-hero he was destined to be. I'm so glad he finally got a chance for some attention. Seeing the Doctor get outfoxed is also wonderfully disturbing. Fitz and Anji had a very back-seat ride in this story, but I'll trade them for a look inside the Doctor's head any day. His clausterphobia is a great reference all the way back to Doctor Who: Seeing I. A+ for continuity.
If you love the Doctor, this one is a MUST READ.
April 16, 2011
In all honesty, any review of this would mainly be me flailing incoherently. I know I'm generous with my ratings, but this deserves every one of those stars. An interesting plot! Side characters I actually care about! Fitz in period dress! Anji being a billion times more awesome than in The Domino Effect! Massive amounts of Doctor-angst! An overwhelming number of awful jokes about Sabbath's stealing the Doctor's heart! Weird pseudo-scientific magic! Cake! And enough downright brilliant lines to make me wish I was liveblogging it, a particular favourite being: Probably it was the view of the brains that was getting him down.
March 3, 2010
Another excellent book from Lloyd Rose. After City of the Dead, a hit rate of 2/2! Doctor Who done right in this format can be so very good.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews