Eddie RobsonBesprekingen
Auteur van Drunk on All Your Strange New Words
Besprekingen
Lydia is sharp and likable. Her relationship with Fitz is younger sister/older brother funny. The world-building is interesting and seamless and the story touches on the role of technology in our lives and its potentially damaging effect on our future. The plot is complicated but works well.
Love the British accent of audiobook narrator Amy Scanlon but she takes on an odd accent for female American characters.
Set near the end of the 21st century where we have had contact with another species and they have ambassadors and trade with us. People who can’t do VR turn out to be great at communicating with the Logi, mind to mind the downside is it makes the human act drunk if they do it for too long of a period of time. Lydia had been working for the cultural attaché for less than a year when she wakes up one morning to find he has been murdered and she was the only other person in the house and all video recordings are missing. While suspicion is on her she returns to the house and then hears the ghost of her boss in her head. With a few sentences she is off and running to find the real killer of her boss. This is a mystery but there is a lot of extrapolations of how society will be moving into the future. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in here and would certainly like to see a story that covers the first contact between humans and Logi.
Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss
I have loved meeting Eight, and his resigned but inspirational way of being. I love Lucy's moxy, and her mouth. Her mouth may be the best thing on the planet. Even though I know the episodes are roughly the same length as tv episodes, from single one hours to double-extended two hours, somehow they end up feeling like bite-size, leaving me wanting just a little more from every single one.
I have loved meeting Eight, and his resigned but inspirational way of being. I love Lucy's moxy, and her mouth. Her mouth may be the best thing on the planet. Even though I know the episodes are roughly the same length as tv episodes, from single one hours to double-extended two hours, somehow they end up feeling like bite-size, leaving me wanting just a little more from every single one.
I have loved meeting Eight, and his resigned but inspirational way of being. I love Lucy's moxy, and her mouth. Her mouth may be the best thing on the planet. Even though I know the episodes are roughly the same length as tv episodes, from single one hours to double-extended two hours, somehow they end up feeling like bite-size, leaving me wanting just a little more from every single one.
For its first half this is very strong. It has a weird setting: a city where everything is made of wood, ruled by a king with a talking cat, where the imperative is to just build build build. The parallel narratives follow the king and the chief architect, both of whom are beginning to suspect that their world doesn't entirely make sense. (What is... concrete?) The story is told with a dry, factual narrative voice that works well to highlight its absurdities.
About halfway through, though, the novel explains what's going on, and at that point, I was like, "This is just a Doctor Who story!" And indeed, when I flipped to the Acknowledgements page, I found Hearts of Oak was based on something Robson originally pitched to Alan Barnes, former script editor of Big Finish's Doctor Who range. At that point, the story becomes much less interesting; what's really happening is much less striking than what went before, and the disconnected style works against the narrative from then on, too, as to be interesting what comes next, we would need to be invested in the characters as people more.
That said, I like Robson in general and the first half of this novel in particular enough that I would give his original work another chance; I see that this is actually his second novel, so I'll have to seek out his first and see how it is.
This was a delightful little audio snack to keep me company while I knitted. It’s tightly plotted and controlled with a nice cast of characters. The Doctor and Lucie make an amusing combo: she’s super snarky, he’s very long-suffering. And I liked that this was set somewhat close to home (on Phobos, one of the moons of Mars). I decided to listen to this now entirely because the title popped into my head when I was looking for something to listen to, and I’m glad I followed that impulse.
Advanced readers copy provided by Edelweiss
I'm eager to read more by Eddie Robson.
This is an intriguing and quick read. Once it becomes clear what is happening, the world-building leaves a lot to be desired. The end felt a little rushed.
Charley Pollard, self-proclaimed Edwardian adventuress, is back and with the Doctor – except the Doctor is two regenerations too early to meet her. This wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey scenario kicks off a murder mystery of spooky proportions in The Condemned, the first in a series of audio plays concerning Charley and Six. For people expecting them to get on like white on rice . . . consider your hopes dashed. The Doctor is extremely suspicious of “Charlotte Smith” and suspects the girl is lying about a lot, which only raises his interests in the girl. As for Charley, it’s looking like the Doctor is her only way home, even if it’s the wrong one, and she’s doing everything she can to make sure she doesn’t screw up her past and his future – although, to be honest, Charley is a terrible liar, probably because she finds it hard to outright tell falsehoods to the man that will become her own respective Doctor.
Entering the scene for the first (but not last) time is DI Menzies, no-nonsense policewoman who, as the Doctor finds out the hard way, is hard to shake in the face of alien technology – although to be fair, her reaction at seeing the murder victim’s “transformation” is fair enough for just about anybody who isn’t the Doctor. She acts as the perfect foil against the Sixth Doctor – who is in excellent form in this audio. Seriously, Colin Baker should have gotten a pay raise after his performance in this. Meeting Charley for the first time, finding the dead body as well as the abandoned kitty in the room, the interrogation scene with Menzies and later showing her how he landed in the locked room to begin with, not to mention his short stint as a red-skinned alien risen from the dead, the Doctor is pretty much the most quotable and most fun character to listen to in the entire audio.
The story itself, once it gets going, really gets full marks for being creepy and haunting. Charley, separated from the Doctor, takes it upon herself in natural companion fashion to explore what is going on in Ackley House, guided by a chap named Ben who contacts her through the phone. It soon becomes clear that the inhabitants of Ackley House are off their rockers and that it’s all connected to the dead alien in the locked room. India Fisher does a wonderful job at playing out Charley’s reactions to the things she finds in the House, especially in the basement scene.
A combination of top voice acting skills and a subtle yet effective soundtrack optimizes every ominous scene to the maximum; this is certainly an audio worth listening to in the dark, when every gasp and bump is another chill across the viewer’s heart. It’s a shame, however, that these wonderfully creepy scenes require on occasion a scene in which characters are forced to explain to others what exactly is going on so the story can move forward on all fronts; once the Doctor and Charley meet up again, these scenes pretty much peter out into nothing. Putting these minor flaws aside, The Condemned is a great intro into a series of audios about Charley and an earlier Doctor, filled with both humor and suspense and some wonderful original characters like the pragmatically candid DI Menzies and the mysterious Sam. It will certainly have listeners looking forward to seeing how the Doctor will unravel the mystery of the girl who calls herself Charlotte Smith.
Story (4/5): This was a very unique book with lots of twists and turns. It' s pretty fast read and an intriguing one. I enjoyed it because it was so different from other books I have read. It reminded me a bit of a Dr. Who episode and is hard to talk about without spoiling the story. Suffice to say the story is the strong point of this book.
Characters (3/5): The characters are okay. We switch between The King and Iona (a master architect). Neither is very personable but are more devices to move the story forward. The side characters have very little depth. I felt like the characters were the weakest aspect of this story.
Setting (4/5): Set in a mysterious walled city that keeps growing and growing as more and more buildings are constructed, I enjoyed this mysterious setting. The twists and turns revealed as the book continues reveal more and more about the setting. Again, this is a great aspect to the story.
Writing Style (4/5): The writing style came across as pretty stark and simplistic to me but it works well for the story. The POV changes also worked well in this story.
Summary (4/5): Overall this was a fun little read, that was quirky and different with lots of surprising little twists. It’s a pretty quick read and I enjoyed it for its uniqueness.
A collection of Bernice Summerfield short stories, set in the middle of Season 11 of the Big Finish audio adventures, which I don't seem to have written up and can't now remember much about. The two audio stories that bracket the collection are both by Eddie Robson, who provides the framing narrative as well for Present Danger as well.
The premise is that the galaxy is under attack from the time-travelling Deindum, and the book fills the space between the appearance of the alien aggressors at the end of Resurrecting the Past and the fightback in Escaping the Future. Since I had missed out on the context, the stories and collection did not work all that well for me, though there are some nice flashes - the cave museum in Kate Orman's “Don’t Do Something, Just Sit There”, and Braxiatel's use of time travel and recorded history in Lance Parkin’s “Winging It”. But really I need to catch up on the Bernice Summerfield audio thread a bit more systematically.
So, it's kind of like Life During Wartime, but it doesn't work quite as well. Life During Wartime felt like a novel by many hands, showing the progression of the Bernice Summerfield range's cast of characters during the months (and months?) of Fifth Axis occupation. Present Danger is more spotty-- it often feels like things that ought to have been dramatized are skipped over in favor of things that are less important. Like, there's no story about how Bev manages to take control back of the Braxiatel Collection, which ought to be a key character point, and the refugees crowding the Collection is referenced in Escaping, but that's dramatized here in only a very cursory way. It would have been nice to see this in Present Danger; instead, the most we get for Bev is a story by Niall Boyce, "The Empire Variations," where she witnesses a time travel adventure Benny has by seeing how works of art in the Collection change as history does. It's a neat conceit, but if the book was going to tell just one Bev story, it doesn't seem like this is the one.
This goes for a number of stories. Like, I enjoyed a lot of them, but they often seemed like sidebars to the Deindum War. It's neat to have a sequel to Battlefield in Jim Smith's "Excalibur of Mars," but should working Brigadier Bambera in really have been a priority of this collection? There are a few too many Benny-on-strange-adventures stories that are tenuously incorporated on the basis of Benny scouring time for weapons to use against the Deindum. That said, Jonathan Blum's "The End Times" is a great Benny-and-Peter tale in the way that only Jon Blum can do, and I was unexpectedly delighted by the return of the tax assessor from Venus Mantrap in Mark Clapham's "In the Ledgers of Madness," where a group of reclusive monks keep their books in an ancient, dangerous language so that anyone who tries to audit them will go mad.
The book's best stories are those that deal with the Deindum War and the characters more concretely. "Winging It" by Lance Parkin focuses on Braxiatel figuring out how to fight the Deindum through time, and it's a clever time war story that I really enjoyed. Kate Orman's "Don't Do Something, Just Sit There" of course is a winner, with Benny trying to protect an indigenous population as Earth and the Deindum duke it out. Simon Guerrier gives us some Doggles and Adrian in "Six Impossible Things," a potent combination given their history; there wasn't just the space for this reckoning in the audio dramas, so I'm glad to read it here. (Is Doggles the worst? Yes.)
LM Myles's "The Better Part of Valour," Oli Smith's "Digital Dreams," and editor Eddie Robson's Hass-focused interludes were among the other highlights. But if this collection was meant to make us feel the immensity of Deindum threat in preparation for Escaping the Future, it didn't quite accomplish that as well as it ought to have.
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Started out as a basic slice-of-life sci-fi story of a translator working for an alien race that turns into a diplomatic conspiratorial murder mystery.
The stuff about truthiness and conspiracies online was prescient.
The story made sense when I read that the author has written for Dr. Who, because even when it was dark or scary at times, it was mostly a very funny, tongue-in-cheek book.