James GossBesprekingen

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-fourteenth-doctor-novelisations-the-star-bea....

It’s no secret that I rate James Goss as one of the best Doctor Who writers currently in business (eg here, here and here), so I awaited his novelisation of The Giggle with eager anticipation.

I have to say that my high expectations were more than exceeded. Goss tells the story from the perspective of the Toymaker (first-person Doctor Who books are very rare and not always successful), smooths off the edges, throws in some extra pinches of emotion and also some shifts of genre and format – at one point the book becomes a choose-your-own-adventure for Donna, and there are other puzzles throughout. I suspect that the paper version will be even nicer and it’s the only one of the three that I plan to get in hard copy. It’s a real tour de force.

I'm giving this a 2.5 The narration was great, and most of the story was interesting but overall it just didn't strike me as much as some of the others. Kai Owen should be used more!

Good book, though as we all know by now, viruses mutate more when they are actually spreading, not when they lack hosts to spread through.

As a longterm Doctor Who fan who enjoyed Tom Baker's stories until the later ones which became rather hammy I was keen to read this. At first, it was interesting, and it was charming to see Harry Sullivan and Sarah Jane Smith accompanying the Doctor on a visit to a remote island with a beseiged community. Sinister scarecrows are stalking the island and, it seems, turning people into scarecrows like themselves. The story is told in a framing structure, where the Doctor is having to defend himself against the Time Lords accusations as he is on trial, something that cropped up a few times in the series and was here, I thought, a bit unnecessary and irritating.

In the second half of the book, where the Doctor confronts the force behind the happenings on the island, a thing that labels itself Scratchman (Old Scratch being a name for the Devil), things become rather more fantastical, taking place in a nightmarish world. I found this dragged a bit. There is a nod to the current Doctor who makes a couple of cameo appearances.

I believe the core of this story was an idea that Tom Baker and Ian Marter, who played Harry, had discussed in the 1970s as a possible film idea. The book is dedicated to Marter who died tragically young, though not to Elizabeth Sladen who also sadly died more recently. It appears to have been ghost written or maybe co-written with someone called James Goss. It is competently written but I found the whole fantasyland aspect rather over extended and it became a bit boring. The first half I could quite envisage being a Doctor Who story of the time. One irritation was the non grammatical use of 'sat' instead of 'sitting', as in "I was sat....".

One aspect that did not work for me was the omniscience of the Doctor who could describe in detail, including dialogue, what was happening to his companions when he wasn't present. This was necessitated by the clunky trial frame - if it had just been written in third person this would not have been necessary. I also don't think the first person narrative of the Doctor himself quite works: by necessity it can't be as alien as the Doctor really should be and makes him just seem human. So given these reservations, I can only award it an OK 2 stars.

Reading this made me feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Bizarre. Surreal. Far more wild and wacky than I was expecting, but who can fault the wild and wonderful imagination of Tom Baker? His sense of humour shines through? The theme of the book is fear, and this resonates by the end. I’m tempted to get the audio, just to hear this brought to life by the author/Doctor.

It was fine. Paul Magrs' story was weak, as usual, and not helped by his compulsive need to be meta.

I'm a bit disappointed that it's another "making dreams/fears real" kind of story. I'm kind of sick of those. A lot of this could've come from a Celestial Toymaker story with no changes.

The 12th Doctor is in prison on an asteroid repurposed as a facility for the most dangerous of criminals. The prison governor does not understand why “Prisoner 428” keeps trying to escape, or what the story is with the girl who keeps showing up on the launch pad of the asteroid to protest for the Doctor’s release. “Free the Doctor or the killings will start” seems like quite the threat — but then the killings do start, and the governor needs to trust that the Doctor has his best interests at heart.

This was an OK story, although personally I find Clara incredibly annoying, so any story where she plays a pivotal role I am bound to be at least partly grumpy about. I *was* properly surprised by some of the information revealed in Disc 4, and I did laugh out loud in a few places. However, audio does bring to light repetitive elements that the reader can gloss over on the page: for example, the Doctor gets nearly throttled a LOT by Bentley in this story, rather too much in my opinion, and some of the scenes where rapid-fire dialogue is presented in script form becomes monotonous to listen to when the narrator is repeating the character names before each bit of dialogue. I was also mentally yelling at the characters when they encounter one character in a wheelchair and push the chair around to get the character where they needed to go, but they didn’t ask the person in the wheelchair if they could touch the wheelchair! Argh.

As for the audio production, the narrator, Colin McFarlane, was a fine choice to portray the prison governor. He did do a few voices, putting on Scottish for the Doctor, an American one for one of the prisoners who was a former mercenary, and a sort of lighter voice for Clara. It was all fine, I guess, although these days I greatly prefer full-cast dramatizations, unless the single narrator is Peter Capaldi.

MEU DEUS DO CÉU, QUE LIVRO É ESSE???? O.O

QUE TROÇO DIVERTIDO!!!!

3,5

Muito confuso, muito cheio de gracinha desnecessária...

I'm really intrigued by this novella. After it was featured rather prominently in the first episode of season 7, part 2 of Doctor Who, and learning that BBC actually published it - I have to wonder was it just clever marketing ... or something more?

This was quick and fun, and I enjoyed pretending to read this with Amy's voice in my head. As with most DW novellas - too short!

This was a short audiobook ready by David Tennant of an adventure Ten had sometime after Donna. Plot-wise, this worked very well as an audiobook since the monster used sound as a weapon, stealing people's voices.

I think this would have been better if it had been longer, specifically if more time was given to explaining just how the monster killed. I am still a bit fuzzy on that bit.

However, brilliant opening sequence, which tied back nicely to the end bit, in a macabre "gotcha" kind of way.

A Doctor Who novel featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald. This one sees the Doctor being held in a prison on a remote asteroid, where dangerous power failures are increasing in frequency, and there may be something nasty stalking the corridors.

Very unusually, it's told entirely from the point of view of a guest character, the governor of the prison, who, while he is not exactly a villain, isn't a particularly good person, either. But the shades of gray present in all human beings is a bit of a theme here, which is a nice contrast to some of Who's more two-dimensional bad guys. Also, towards the end, there is some stuff about plagues, anti-vaccine movements, and dirty elections that seems eerily prescient in its topicality, given that this was published in 2014. It's a bit arguable just how substantial the plot is and how well it all hangs together in a coherent way, but that's often true of the show, too, and, as is also often true of the show, I think this novel does enough interesting things to get away with it. Among other things, there are some fun scenes between the Doctor and Clara, even if they do spend much of the story separated. Overall, I found it enjoyable, and appreciated it as an interesting departure from the norm.

I have been very bad with watching Doctor Who since they change the Doctor. Not that I didn't mind the change. I like Peter Capaldi as the Doctor; I just haven't had time to watch it. But among my countless ebooks did I find this book that I had requested from NetGalley and since I felt that I needed to get through some Netgalley books and since the book wasn't thick (a plus, take easy thin books first before the ones with many pages) did I feel that did was a good choice. Also, the book was interesting from the start, that's a plus.

I liked the story; I liked the fast-paced style of the book. I breezed through in a day and that felt good. The story was intriguing, why was the Doctor a prisoner, what was wrong with the prison? The ending was the only thing I felt didn't belong in a Doctor Who story. It was a lot more gruesome than I have ever experienced when it comes the show. Not bad, just yikes...

3.5 stars

I received this copy from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review!

Review also posted on And Now for Something Completely Different and It's a Mad Mad World

I have been very bad with watching Doctor Who since they change the Doctor. Not that I didn't mind the change. I like Peter Capaldi as the Doctor; I just haven't had time to watch it. But among my countless ebooks did I find this book that I had requested from NetGalley and since I felt that I needed to get through some Netgalley books and since the book wasn't thick (a plus, take easy thin books first before the ones with many pages) did I feel that did was a good choice. Also, the book was interesting from the start, that's a plus.

I liked the story; I liked the fast-paced style of the book. I breezed through in a day and that felt good. The story was intriguing, why was the Doctor a prisoner, what was wrong with the prison? The ending was the only thing I felt didn't belong in a Doctor Who story. It was a lot more gruesome than I have ever experienced when it comes the show. Not bad, just yikes...

3.5 stars

I received this copy from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review!

Review also posted on And Now for Something Completely Different and It's a Mad Mad World

This was a surprise. I didn't really know what to think, going in, but I was quickly swept up in the first-person perspective and the hint that there's something more going on than is totally apparent to our narrator (or that they may not be wholly reliable). That's an unusual trick for a Doctor Who book, especially post-2005, which are usually straight-down-the-line adventures, like the other two titles published alongside this one: Justin Richards' Silhouette, which might just as well have been an episode of the TV show, and Mike Tucker's The Crawling Terror, which is more expansive but still firmly in the vein of popcorn fiction.

There's something at least glancingly more literate about The Blood Cell, which feels less like a Doctor Who book and more like a regular novel the Doctor got stuck in. That's a plus, to me, although some reviewers seem to disagree. I don't really want to see through the Doctor's eyes: I prefer to see him interpreted and experienced by others, and here he's all high-energy and snappish humor. Like Tucker and Richards, I doubt Goss had any genuine footage of Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor to work from, and the character isn't always precise: sometimes his word choice seems a little more like Matt Smith or Tom Baker. But it's still the Doctor, for sure, and I think Goss' choice to put us in the head of an unfamiliar witness helps to blunt any issues with the characterization. Goss also gets Clara more "right" than either of the other two writers, not to mention the sparky, bickery relationship she and the Doctor share.

There's a lot of wit in the book. It's very enjoyable. Goss constantly uses irony and non-sequitur to undercut both our narrator's expectations and our own, which also helps to mask the fact that the book gets slowly darker and darker as it goes on. Not far from the end I realized it had turned into a thriller, and finally, into a nightmarish horror. This has unsettled some reviewers and I agree, it's very shocking—perhaps a little too shocking and abrupt for the page count Goss had to earn our trust in that shift. The climax would be traumatizing if we saw it on TV or in a movie, and although Goss talks "around" it a little, the effect is very intense. One particularly grotesque moment is a clear homage to the old Doctor Who novelization of Frontios, something that I'm sure is completely intentional—and which gave me nightmares as a child. I think this book could cause similar nightmares.

While I appreciate Goss' desire to swing the tone of the book so hard, I will admit that—along with an old-fashioned trope about people sacrificing themselves because their lives are "worthless"—the grisly aspect of that climax kept it from being a full four stars from me. But it did confirm my suspicions that this is a book written to an adult audience, not kids—and when that hasn't been the case for Doctor Who books in a long time, I really appreciated the change. I'll certainly look out for more from James Goss from here on.½

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-doctor-his-life-and-times-by-james-goss-and-...

One of the glossy volumes produced by the BBC in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who – and isn't it weird that we'll get to the 60th anniversary next year? This is really very nice indeed. For each Doctor, we get an account of the TV stories written from the perspective of one or more of the characters – Susan, Ian Chesterton, the Brigadier, occasionally the Doctor himself – combined with a collage of other mocked-up material, of which one of my favourites is the Salamander election poster.

Each chapter then includes a box on the lead actor, and an assembly of quotes about the making of the show from those who were involved. There are also a few short commentaries on individual stories by guest commentators, most of whom have strong connections with the show, the exception being Sir Tim Berners-Lee on The War Machines. As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss very highly as one of the best Who writers, and this really doesn't disappoint. It's the sort of thing that could, perhaps, be easily updated to include the next ten years and two Doctors for 2023; and would it be too much to hope that such an update could also include Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures and Class?

This story is told from the point of view of the Governor of a prison on an asteroid in first person narration. He's a sniveling coward, for all the justifications he gives himself. I really did not like this book, though at least it's not in present tense form!

A Doctor Who novel from the Fourth Doctor himself! (Well, with a little help from James Goss, apparently. Which is a good choice. He's definitely one of the best writers doing DW tie-ins these days.) Apparently this began life way back when Baker was filming the show, when he and Ian Marter, who played companion Harry Sullivan, started kicking around their own ideas for a script. Eventually he worked up a very rough version of a screenplay, which was considered for a movie version, but, of course, never actually made.

I am glad we finally got to see a version of it, though, because it's very enjoyable in novel form. The first half really feels like it would fit perfectly into that era of the show, with pitch-perfect characterization and just the right blend of scariness, silliness, and humor. I found it utterly delightful. The second half takes kind of an unexpected turn and gets downright surreal, which didn't work for me quite as well as the first part, but it was still imaginative and interesting, and entertaining in its own completely bonkers way.

I do recommend it for fans of Classic Who.

A good read, but this may just be nostalgia for an episode that firmly was stuck in my memory.

Fun to see how the story is every so slightly different in places compared to the aired version. On the whole they don't dramatically change the story, but they do give some insight into some of the characters motivations (except Duggan, he just likes hitting things).

This was a great book! I always liked Ashildr in the TV series! These stories were a great insight into her past.

One of the stories is linked to one of the episodes where the Doctor reads one of Ashildr’s journals he discover an entry with regards to her children and their deaths in the Black Plague. While reading this story I cried and that does not happen often.

The other stores isn’t he book are very good also and couldn’t recommend the book enough!

I throughly enjoyed this book. I love how it is told through letters, diary entries and memories. The Doctor was portrayed perfectly as was Amy and Rory.

The story was so well written that I could picture it in my head as if I was watching an episode on tv. There were some really good plot twists within the story with regards to Prince Boris and Maria.

I enjoyed this book

Disclaimer: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for an honest review.

The Governor, warden of an ultra secure prison on a remote galaxy, is used to dealing with some of the worst criminals. And he's certainly seen them all. When a prisoner 428 arrives--insisting on being called The Doctor and immediately taking to regular escape attempts--he knows this one is different. But as his arrival also seems to bring a sudden increase in system failures and other mishaps, the Governor soon realizes he's dealing with something far beyond one prisoner and the young woman who keeps showing up hoping to get a visit with him.

Though I am a long-time Whovian, this was my first foray into Doctor Who novels and probably the first novel spin-off/tie-in that I've ever read for a media franchise. And I count myself pleasantly surprised. James Goss has certainly captured the elements of a Doctor Who adventure here in these pages and the story itself is engaging. The characters at the prison are unique and well-developed (and some are even endearing).

As a book released early in the Twelfth Doctor's run, it was certainly interesting to get another glimpse at him to add to what I've seen on screen. That said, I struggled a bit with his character and felt that of all the characters, he lacked depth. Since this was a Doctor Who story, it's a little disappointed to feel that way about the starring character, even though the rest of the story was enjoyable. Which is precisely why I'm giving this three stars instead of four.