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Eighth Doctor Adventures #62
Doctor Who: The Domino Effect
The TARDIS lands in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, during Easter 2003. The city is almost at a standstill, its public services close to collapse and its people terrorised by a bombing campaign.
Within hours one of the Doctor's friends is caught in a deadly explosion, while another appears on television confessing to the murder of twelve people. The TARDIS is stolen by forces intent on learning its secrets. When the Doctor tries to investigate, his efforts are hampered by crippling chest pains.
Someone is manipulating events to suppress humanity's development — but how and why? The trail leads to London where a cabal pushes the world ever closer to catastrophe. Who is the prisoner being held in the Tower of London? Could he or she hold the key to saving mankind?
The Doctor must choose between saving his friends or saving Earth in the past, present and future. But the closer he gets to the truth, the worse his condition becomes...
Within hours one of the Doctor's friends is caught in a deadly explosion, while another appears on television confessing to the murder of twelve people. The TARDIS is stolen by forces intent on learning its secrets. When the Doctor tries to investigate, his efforts are hampered by crippling chest pains.
Someone is manipulating events to suppress humanity's development — but how and why? The trail leads to London where a cabal pushes the world ever closer to catastrophe. Who is the prisoner being held in the Tower of London? Could he or she hold the key to saving mankind?
The Doctor must choose between saving his friends or saving Earth in the past, present and future. But the closer he gets to the truth, the worse his condition becomes...
278 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 2003
2 people are currently reading
268 people want to read
About the author
David Bishop
141 books38 followersDavid James Bishop is a New Zealand screenwriter and author. He was a UK comics editor during the 1990s, running such titles as the Judge Dredd Megazine and 2000 AD, the latter between 1996 and the summer of 2000.
He has since become a prolific author and received his first drama scriptwriting credit when BBC Radio 4 broadcast his radio play Island Blue: Ronald in June 2006. In 2007, he won the PAGE International Screenwriting Award in the short film category for his script Danny's Toys, and was a finalist in the 2009 PAGE Awards with his script The Woman Who Screamed Butterflies.
In 2008, he appeared on 23 May edition of the BBC One quiz show The Weakest Link, beating eight other contestants to win more than £1500 in prize money.
In 2010, Bishop received his first TV drama credit on the BBC medical drama series Doctors, writing an episode called A Pill For Every Ill, broadcast on 10 February.
He has since become a prolific author and received his first drama scriptwriting credit when BBC Radio 4 broadcast his radio play Island Blue: Ronald in June 2006. In 2007, he won the PAGE International Screenwriting Award in the short film category for his script Danny's Toys, and was a finalist in the 2009 PAGE Awards with his script The Woman Who Screamed Butterflies.
In 2008, he appeared on 23 May edition of the BBC One quiz show The Weakest Link, beating eight other contestants to win more than £1500 in prize money.
In 2010, Bishop received his first TV drama credit on the BBC medical drama series Doctors, writing an episode called A Pill For Every Ill, broadcast on 10 February.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 12, 2024
Really enjoyed the writing in this book. The world-building was especially captivating. The depressing fascist regime of this alternate reality was conveyed depressingly well. While the fate of our heroes was never in doubt, I found myself fascinated with the changes to history, and the reaction of our heroes. This one will stay with me for a while.
November 6, 2023
Alternate timelines. Parallel Earths. Since Inferno on TV in 1970, Doctor Who has dabbled with exploring the concepts, right into Modern Who. It was in the novel ranges of the Wilderness Era, that stretch of time between 1989 and 2005 when new televised Doctor Who was few and far between, that the concepts were explored in full. Both Virgin and later BBC Books had authors take their incumbent Doctors (and their predecessors on occasion) to worlds that never were but might have been. The Domino Effect came out in the midst of one of those cycles and took readers to a world without the very thing you’re likely reading this review on: a modern computer.
Not that the TARDIS trio of the novel realize that initially. Coming to this novel in isolation thanks in part to availability issues for many of the EDAs, the fact that the Eighth, Fitz, and Anji don’t catch onto what was happening immediately made me more forgiving than those who read the novel some two decades earlier. At least at first it did. Watching Anji walk around the streets of a 2003 Edinburgh that owes more to the 1950s than the early 2000s began to wear thin, even more so when the lack of modern medical equipment is noted. That the novel reaches more than the halfway mark before the shoe drops for them about what sets this world apart so much from how it should be is remarkable. Remarkable not that it pulls it off but that one hasn’t entirely lost patience as a reader with the characters themselves. And not in the “Oh, you don’t know you’re in an X of the Daleks story, do you?” kind of way.
That one keeps their patience is owed to how otherwise solid the writing is. Doctor Who lends itself to pastiche and adapting other genres to suit the stories that it tells. In the case of David Bishop’s novel, that would be the thriller and dystopia. In The Domino Effect, Bishop combines aspects of both. The world it creates is a fascinating one, with echoes of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film Brazil, and the comic V for Vendetta. Being Doctor Who, of course, it finds its own way to put a spin on the idea of a dystopian (then) modern Britain by bringing them all together. Something that was made possible in part by the characteristics of the TARDIS crew, all outsiders here, but also the science fiction nature of the franchise allowed Bishop to present little interludes hinting at the alterations to the history. Bishop covers much of this alternate Britain’s society, from the librarian Hannah that the Doctor meets to the nurses around Anji when she’s injured to the security service thugs that Fitz encounters, and cutaways to the Prime Minister and a member of the cabal behind him (who may or may not be the familiar figure of the Brigadier, albeit unrecognized by a still somewhat amnesiac Eighth Doctor). Written as a thriller, albeit with SF elements (especially towards its climax), it also moves along at a fine pace, unfolding across a few days in a very different April 2003 in a most intriguing world.
Even so, The Domino Effect’s criticisms are not without merit. For all of the world building on hand, the plot that Bishop builds around it is rather lacking in places. It came as no surprise to learn, after reading the novel, that this had been something of an experiment for him as an author, writing each portion of the narrative by focusing on which of the TARIDS crew was present in that scene. Essentially, Bishop tried to build a railroad from multiple directions and meet in the proverbial middle by filling in the gaps in the narrative. The result is that, despite how well-paced the novel is, it can be a disjointed read, with the reader going over the literary equivalent of a pothole when things don’t come together just right.
At least, given I read it isolation, The Domino Effect was a largely standalone read. Something that made Anji’s inability to grasp she was in an alternate timeline more bearable than for most. Standalone until, suddenly, it wasn’t, as the novel’s last thirty pages or so brings the arc back into focus. So much, in fact, that it about sucks all the air out of the narrative. Plot and tension are replaced by exposition and ending atop ending until, finally, the cliffhanger arrives. It’s a frustrating ending for an otherwise decent read.
Doctor Who has done numerous alternate timeline and parallel Earths over the years. The Domino Effect presents, in concept, one of the most intriguing ones that the series has ever produced. It’s just a shame that the story around it doesn’t quite live up to the world that it’s built around. Even so, of the EDAs this reviewer’s encountered in the last fifteen years, it’s among the better ones and a decent alternate history story in its own right.
Not that the TARDIS trio of the novel realize that initially. Coming to this novel in isolation thanks in part to availability issues for many of the EDAs, the fact that the Eighth, Fitz, and Anji don’t catch onto what was happening immediately made me more forgiving than those who read the novel some two decades earlier. At least at first it did. Watching Anji walk around the streets of a 2003 Edinburgh that owes more to the 1950s than the early 2000s began to wear thin, even more so when the lack of modern medical equipment is noted. That the novel reaches more than the halfway mark before the shoe drops for them about what sets this world apart so much from how it should be is remarkable. Remarkable not that it pulls it off but that one hasn’t entirely lost patience as a reader with the characters themselves. And not in the “Oh, you don’t know you’re in an X of the Daleks story, do you?” kind of way.
That one keeps their patience is owed to how otherwise solid the writing is. Doctor Who lends itself to pastiche and adapting other genres to suit the stories that it tells. In the case of David Bishop’s novel, that would be the thriller and dystopia. In The Domino Effect, Bishop combines aspects of both. The world it creates is a fascinating one, with echoes of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film Brazil, and the comic V for Vendetta. Being Doctor Who, of course, it finds its own way to put a spin on the idea of a dystopian (then) modern Britain by bringing them all together. Something that was made possible in part by the characteristics of the TARDIS crew, all outsiders here, but also the science fiction nature of the franchise allowed Bishop to present little interludes hinting at the alterations to the history. Bishop covers much of this alternate Britain’s society, from the librarian Hannah that the Doctor meets to the nurses around Anji when she’s injured to the security service thugs that Fitz encounters, and cutaways to the Prime Minister and a member of the cabal behind him (who may or may not be the familiar figure of the Brigadier, albeit unrecognized by a still somewhat amnesiac Eighth Doctor). Written as a thriller, albeit with SF elements (especially towards its climax), it also moves along at a fine pace, unfolding across a few days in a very different April 2003 in a most intriguing world.
Even so, The Domino Effect’s criticisms are not without merit. For all of the world building on hand, the plot that Bishop builds around it is rather lacking in places. It came as no surprise to learn, after reading the novel, that this had been something of an experiment for him as an author, writing each portion of the narrative by focusing on which of the TARIDS crew was present in that scene. Essentially, Bishop tried to build a railroad from multiple directions and meet in the proverbial middle by filling in the gaps in the narrative. The result is that, despite how well-paced the novel is, it can be a disjointed read, with the reader going over the literary equivalent of a pothole when things don’t come together just right.
At least, given I read it isolation, The Domino Effect was a largely standalone read. Something that made Anji’s inability to grasp she was in an alternate timeline more bearable than for most. Standalone until, suddenly, it wasn’t, as the novel’s last thirty pages or so brings the arc back into focus. So much, in fact, that it about sucks all the air out of the narrative. Plot and tension are replaced by exposition and ending atop ending until, finally, the cliffhanger arrives. It’s a frustrating ending for an otherwise decent read.
Doctor Who has done numerous alternate timeline and parallel Earths over the years. The Domino Effect presents, in concept, one of the most intriguing ones that the series has ever produced. It’s just a shame that the story around it doesn’t quite live up to the world that it’s built around. Even so, of the EDAs this reviewer’s encountered in the last fifteen years, it’s among the better ones and a decent alternate history story in its own right.
February 8, 2013
"What is this?" I asked that question multiple times while reading this book, as I patiently flipped pages waiting for something, anything interesting to happen. Waited for the scenes of brutality to arc into something resembling beauty or insight. Waited for characters to make intelligent decisions and not decisions that the plot dictated they make. Waited for the stakes to clarify or just make plain sense. Waited for Fitz to get out of the stinkin' prison. Alas, only one of those came true.
I know Bishop is capable of writing a good novel. "Who Killed Kennedy?", while not a National Book Award winning masterpiece, was an interesting take on the show, rendering a point of view from outside the series and recasting what we thought was familiar into something even more alien and unsettling and creepy. But two novels past that high point, you start to wonder if it was a fluke, especially when the last novel I read of his ("Amorality Tale") had enough of an "ugh" reaction to make actively question my faith in ratings systems. This doesn't quite reach those lows, but it doesn't seem to aspire to much either. It aspires to fill pages with words, but so does the instructions for my tax forms. One holds my interest because it may mean I get money back. What does this have to offer me?
More parallel earths, as it turns out. Which is fine in itself and not the author's fault. That's the arc the series is working under, all he can do is do his best with it. But this it? The Doctor and company wind up in 2003 England where at some point scientific progress has stopped, or been severely curtailed. No computers, for instance. What's left is a more or less totalitarian regime that winds up being so bored that it resorts to blowing itself up to create headlines (indeed, when half the rebels seem to be double agents anyway, you start to wonder if the government is either doing their jobs too well or going about this the wrong way). Before long, Fitz is captured, Anji is injured and the Doctor is suffering chest pains like a senior citizen who's just realized he won the lottery. Meanwhile, nothing seems to have anything to do with the plot, which also includes the fat old white men who secretly run England and punctuate all their cliched statements with phrases like "Britannia rules the wave!" without the slightest hint that we're not supposed to take this seriously. There's a weird androgynous Oracle who says bizarre things and our actual villain hides in plain sight, not that he does anything until the last twenty pages anyway.
What brings this one down is how slipshod it all seems. Better reviewers than I have already pointed out the obvious notion, that it takes Anji Kapoor, seasoned time traveler and one who is already aware that parallel earths and alternate histories have lately been in the mix, far far too long to realize that she's on a parallel earth and not home, even as the whole world seems to be conspiring to tell her that. But while that's dumb, I find even more egregious the scene where she insists they all go down to the local pub for a pint since she's bored of sitting inside, aware that people have been looking for her and the Doctor for days. How has she survived this long? Fitz spends the vast majority of his time being utterly useless but getting all the good lines, as he's captured and then proceeded to be beaten or tortured at odd intervals whenever the plot starts to slow down. In fact, everyone in the book is hit or shot at at least once, as the book wants to hammer into us again and again that This Is Not a Nice Place. By the time they start wantonly massacring civilians you want to shout at the book, "Enough! I get it already!" but you breeze through that scene like every other short scene because it brings you one step closer to finishing.
Once again we're stuck in a modern England with a resistance force, sort of like "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" only without the Daleks to help balance things out and provide some menace. And "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" wasn't that good WITH the Daleks, so imagine a story just like it with the one possible redeeming factor removed. Even the comic relief never works, as I can only assume is intended when the local Keystone Kop, who ha-ha has a spotty memory, fails to even recognize wanted criminal the Doctor, who was recently profiled on TV. Maybe that's nitpicking but it only shows how colorless this all seems, so joyless, so intent on going through the motions that it's become stationary. Everyone searches for Alan Turing, who is kept alive for reasons that even the villain can't articulate properly (and then reverses himself two pages later) but the scenes where he discusses in prison with Fitz being a lonely gay man were done far better almost twenty years prior in Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta".
When the end does come, it arrives with a wave of science babble and reveals that seem to be made up as we went along (the villain has never met the Doctor but knows everything about him, because . . . yes), where plot twists pile upon plot twists in an attempt to keep us off-balance, but the resolutions can't get out of their own way fast enough to even let it sink in, if we even cared about these people. Which oftentimes we don't.
It seems like not that long ago I was praising the Eighth Doctor line for taking risks and being inventive and giving us novels that hit that mark between strange and special. Now, after two novels that have been increasingly struggling to be "okay" that run seems like a happy accident of circumstance. Maybe this was written under deadline pressure, maybe its bowing too much to the needs of the overall arc, but it feels oddly shallow and stripped of the wonderful strangeness that had been characterizing the line, giving us a generic that not only could fit any Doctor, but has pretty much been done before.
To me, the biggest crime is not even the plot, but that it does little justice to our stalwart trio, Fitz and Anji and the Doctor, who other authors have proven could lay claim to being one of the most cohesive and capable groups to travel in the TARDIS. Here they seem like strangers to each other and even while separated, barely seem like themselves. When the Doctor and Anji engage in another pointless argument that thrusts them apart, it should feel heartbreaking, two old friends finally reaching their limits in a stressful time, but instead it comes across as the plot's hammerblow attempt to stretch things out a little further, not from anything organic.
It's weird, most of the mediocre books in this line strike me as bits of good novels searching for better novels to be in. Here, it all seems to coexist quite nicely, in perfect harmony, and that may be the problem.
I know Bishop is capable of writing a good novel. "Who Killed Kennedy?", while not a National Book Award winning masterpiece, was an interesting take on the show, rendering a point of view from outside the series and recasting what we thought was familiar into something even more alien and unsettling and creepy. But two novels past that high point, you start to wonder if it was a fluke, especially when the last novel I read of his ("Amorality Tale") had enough of an "ugh" reaction to make actively question my faith in ratings systems. This doesn't quite reach those lows, but it doesn't seem to aspire to much either. It aspires to fill pages with words, but so does the instructions for my tax forms. One holds my interest because it may mean I get money back. What does this have to offer me?
More parallel earths, as it turns out. Which is fine in itself and not the author's fault. That's the arc the series is working under, all he can do is do his best with it. But this it? The Doctor and company wind up in 2003 England where at some point scientific progress has stopped, or been severely curtailed. No computers, for instance. What's left is a more or less totalitarian regime that winds up being so bored that it resorts to blowing itself up to create headlines (indeed, when half the rebels seem to be double agents anyway, you start to wonder if the government is either doing their jobs too well or going about this the wrong way). Before long, Fitz is captured, Anji is injured and the Doctor is suffering chest pains like a senior citizen who's just realized he won the lottery. Meanwhile, nothing seems to have anything to do with the plot, which also includes the fat old white men who secretly run England and punctuate all their cliched statements with phrases like "Britannia rules the wave!" without the slightest hint that we're not supposed to take this seriously. There's a weird androgynous Oracle who says bizarre things and our actual villain hides in plain sight, not that he does anything until the last twenty pages anyway.
What brings this one down is how slipshod it all seems. Better reviewers than I have already pointed out the obvious notion, that it takes Anji Kapoor, seasoned time traveler and one who is already aware that parallel earths and alternate histories have lately been in the mix, far far too long to realize that she's on a parallel earth and not home, even as the whole world seems to be conspiring to tell her that. But while that's dumb, I find even more egregious the scene where she insists they all go down to the local pub for a pint since she's bored of sitting inside, aware that people have been looking for her and the Doctor for days. How has she survived this long? Fitz spends the vast majority of his time being utterly useless but getting all the good lines, as he's captured and then proceeded to be beaten or tortured at odd intervals whenever the plot starts to slow down. In fact, everyone in the book is hit or shot at at least once, as the book wants to hammer into us again and again that This Is Not a Nice Place. By the time they start wantonly massacring civilians you want to shout at the book, "Enough! I get it already!" but you breeze through that scene like every other short scene because it brings you one step closer to finishing.
Once again we're stuck in a modern England with a resistance force, sort of like "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" only without the Daleks to help balance things out and provide some menace. And "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" wasn't that good WITH the Daleks, so imagine a story just like it with the one possible redeeming factor removed. Even the comic relief never works, as I can only assume is intended when the local Keystone Kop, who ha-ha has a spotty memory, fails to even recognize wanted criminal the Doctor, who was recently profiled on TV. Maybe that's nitpicking but it only shows how colorless this all seems, so joyless, so intent on going through the motions that it's become stationary. Everyone searches for Alan Turing, who is kept alive for reasons that even the villain can't articulate properly (and then reverses himself two pages later) but the scenes where he discusses in prison with Fitz being a lonely gay man were done far better almost twenty years prior in Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta".
When the end does come, it arrives with a wave of science babble and reveals that seem to be made up as we went along (the villain has never met the Doctor but knows everything about him, because . . . yes), where plot twists pile upon plot twists in an attempt to keep us off-balance, but the resolutions can't get out of their own way fast enough to even let it sink in, if we even cared about these people. Which oftentimes we don't.
It seems like not that long ago I was praising the Eighth Doctor line for taking risks and being inventive and giving us novels that hit that mark between strange and special. Now, after two novels that have been increasingly struggling to be "okay" that run seems like a happy accident of circumstance. Maybe this was written under deadline pressure, maybe its bowing too much to the needs of the overall arc, but it feels oddly shallow and stripped of the wonderful strangeness that had been characterizing the line, giving us a generic that not only could fit any Doctor, but has pretty much been done before.
To me, the biggest crime is not even the plot, but that it does little justice to our stalwart trio, Fitz and Anji and the Doctor, who other authors have proven could lay claim to being one of the most cohesive and capable groups to travel in the TARDIS. Here they seem like strangers to each other and even while separated, barely seem like themselves. When the Doctor and Anji engage in another pointless argument that thrusts them apart, it should feel heartbreaking, two old friends finally reaching their limits in a stressful time, but instead it comes across as the plot's hammerblow attempt to stretch things out a little further, not from anything organic.
It's weird, most of the mediocre books in this line strike me as bits of good novels searching for better novels to be in. Here, it all seems to coexist quite nicely, in perfect harmony, and that may be the problem.
June 5, 2015
My abiding memory of ‘The Domino Effect’ on first reading it in 2003 was how quickly I rattled through it. And that’s absolutely the case here – it’s one of the easiest reads in the entire series. I had wondered if this meant the plot itself was a little lacking, but no, it still seems very engrossing without too many obvious inconsistencies.
I’ve made no secret of the fact I didn’t like BBC Books’ multiple universe saga, but Bishop makes a good run at it here. The setting is at once familiar and disturbing – this may look like the Edinburgh we all know, but there’s something very dark at the heart of things, not least the appallingly xenophobic attitudes of its citizens.
It seems appalling that one change – the diversion of people and resources from a technological advance which would enable development and exploration – could make such a difference, but the end results seem all too believable. We pity the vilified Anji, the incarcerated Fitz and the bewildered and disabled Doctor as they struggle to gain the upper hand in a deeply corrupt, anti-technological dictatorship.
The return of a historical figure who’d been at the heart of a much earlier novel does feel a little unnecessary, and undermines the novel’s success in creating an unfamiliar setting from a familiar location. It would have been better without it. Other than that, though, this is a cracking read – undemanding yet engrossing.
I’ve made no secret of the fact I didn’t like BBC Books’ multiple universe saga, but Bishop makes a good run at it here. The setting is at once familiar and disturbing – this may look like the Edinburgh we all know, but there’s something very dark at the heart of things, not least the appallingly xenophobic attitudes of its citizens.
It seems appalling that one change – the diversion of people and resources from a technological advance which would enable development and exploration – could make such a difference, but the end results seem all too believable. We pity the vilified Anji, the incarcerated Fitz and the bewildered and disabled Doctor as they struggle to gain the upper hand in a deeply corrupt, anti-technological dictatorship.
The return of a historical figure who’d been at the heart of a much earlier novel does feel a little unnecessary, and undermines the novel’s success in creating an unfamiliar setting from a familiar location. It would have been better without it. Other than that, though, this is a cracking read – undemanding yet engrossing.
December 15, 2024
It's a decent enough idea: a series of alternate histories intruding into our own reality, and the Doctor fighting them off in a series of novels. Even the main villain of the range at the time -- Sabbath -- is affected by the changes, which is a nice idea. So why does it feel like so many people have taken stupid-slow pills in the early quarter of this novel? Anji has certainly been traveling in the TARDIS long enough to know that something has gone wrong with time, but she just appears to be angry and dense! It blights much of the remaining novel, and I wish another approach had been taken.
December 8, 2008
Another day, another parallel universe - sometimes it just seems too easy to hide a plot in a paradox.
On the whole, it was a good page-turner and not over-stuffed with nonsenses (something you can’t say for every EDA). It’s brutal, for sure, as much as any Doctor Who book I’ve read. The casual cruelty, the disregard for life and justice, the complete absence of compassion are all too real and happening in too many places in our own time, on our own planet, but it makes for an often uncomfortable read and the cliff-hanger ending would have been a nuisance if I didn’t already have the next book ready to read.
So, a pleasing pot-boiler; not one of the best, certainly not one of the worst. Heavily centred in the plot rather than the characters and subsequently, an easy read, but be prepared for the casual horror which I found overwhelming at times.
On the whole, it was a good page-turner and not over-stuffed with nonsenses (something you can’t say for every EDA). It’s brutal, for sure, as much as any Doctor Who book I’ve read. The casual cruelty, the disregard for life and justice, the complete absence of compassion are all too real and happening in too many places in our own time, on our own planet, but it makes for an often uncomfortable read and the cliff-hanger ending would have been a nuisance if I didn’t already have the next book ready to read.
So, a pleasing pot-boiler; not one of the best, certainly not one of the worst. Heavily centred in the plot rather than the characters and subsequently, an easy read, but be prepared for the casual horror which I found overwhelming at times.
Read
July 11, 2016Really enjoyed reading this book. A strong story which maintained interest throughout.
November 3, 2024
Not a Doctor Who adventure as I know and love them. It’s overtly violent, depressing and URGH so repetitive. All for what? The pay-off, the ending, did not answer any questions. You already knew who the antagonist was from the first pages. And you very early on understood what their intention was. The rest of the book is just filler, annoying you with repetitive details and interrogations and plot twists that any competent reader saw coming long before. And then at the very end it’s like the author gave up and decided that EVERYONE was really a double agent — woo! What a plot twist! No, it’s just insulting to a reader who forced themselves to finish such a long and dreary book. It’s not even about a historical event, it’s about an alt reality that just doesn’t feel real enough to make me care. Not having read any other 8th doctor books, I wasn’t familiar with the characters or their background, which seems to be somewhat important. I didn’t get much of a sense of any of their personalities through this story, both the companions were very two dimensional.
June 29, 2020
So it's all going well - the story starts in Scotland, yay! It's Edinburgh - less yay. And everyone is racist, not yay at all. Shenanigans ensue, and then inevitably the Doctor, Fitz and Anji get landed into a ton of trouble.
The Doctor and Anji's section of the story goes along pretty well, while I'm not as fond on Fitz's. The
Also shock horror To be fair, some fairly interesting stuff does actually happen around this point so like, fair enough, but still... moving on...
The Doctor and Anji's section of the story goes along pretty well, while I'm not as fond on Fitz's. The
Also shock horror To be fair, some fairly interesting stuff does actually happen around this point so like, fair enough, but still... moving on...
April 16, 2011
I don't know. I genuinely don't. See, I'm a complete sucker for alternative histories, which TDE provides in spades, and I'm also interested in the history of computing (in a sort of vague I-fangirl-Turing-and-Babbage-and-Lovelace way), so really the ideas here were rather brilliant as far as I was concerned. But the writing style, in parts, was so clunky that I stopped reading just to blink at it. Most of the time it wasn't noticeably bad, and possibly I only noticed the bits I did because I'd been warned about that, but neither was it ever noticeably good. Also, I am not terribly happy with the Doctor's explanation for why he was acting so uncaring about Fitz's fate. Anji seems to forgive him for it, but I'm not so inclined to. And they're arguments were painful to read, though I don't know enough of Anji to be able to say whether she was OOC or not.
So. OK. Fitz. Yay for Fitz being open-minded and horrified by the way the Empire is behaving. Somewhat less yay for his complete inability to just shut up in the face of repeated beatings. Seriously, if you've observed that saying anything tends to get the crap kicked out of you stop making snarky remarks. I probably could've accepted it if it hadn't happened about a dozen times, but really, Fitz is not stupid or brave-to-the-point-of-idiocy (the Doctor, on the other hand...).
And Turing. I can't work out whether I'm delighted by the idea of Turing surviving into his 90s, or whether what happens to him in TDE is worse than reality. Because seriously, 70-odd years in near-solitary confinement is a horrible thought, doubly so if he was forbidden from working on anything new and interesting after the shroud. But I did like his interactions with Fitz (especially how Fitz was totally cool with Turing being in love with Chris at school). It was really, really obvious, though, that Bishop had just read the Hodges biography before coming to write TDE. Thing is, I would've loved the anecdotes if they had actually expanded on what the biography said, but they... didn't. Or if they'd linked into the plot of TDE, but they seemed to be used mainly as a quick and easy way to set Turing up as an omg-3D-character so that his eventual fate would actually mean something. And I don't feel it worked.
So. OK. Fitz. Yay for Fitz being open-minded and horrified by the way the Empire is behaving. Somewhat less yay for his complete inability to just shut up in the face of repeated beatings. Seriously, if you've observed that saying anything tends to get the crap kicked out of you stop making snarky remarks. I probably could've accepted it if it hadn't happened about a dozen times, but really, Fitz is not stupid or brave-to-the-point-of-idiocy (the Doctor, on the other hand...).
And Turing. I can't work out whether I'm delighted by the idea of Turing surviving into his 90s, or whether what happens to him in TDE is worse than reality. Because seriously, 70-odd years in near-solitary confinement is a horrible thought, doubly so if he was forbidden from working on anything new and interesting after the shroud. But I did like his interactions with Fitz (especially how Fitz was totally cool with Turing being in love with Chris at school). It was really, really obvious, though, that Bishop had just read the Hodges biography before coming to write TDE. Thing is, I would've loved the anecdotes if they had actually expanded on what the biography said, but they... didn't. Or if they'd linked into the plot of TDE, but they seemed to be used mainly as a quick and easy way to set Turing up as an omg-3D-character so that his eventual fate would actually mean something. And I don't feel it worked.
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