Martin Day

My tradition for the last six years has been to read a Doctor Who book set at Christmas around Christmastime... the last three years have seen me scraping the bottom of the barrel, with Nightshade and K9 and Company, two books set at Christmastime, but otherwise no real Christmassy content. The Sleep of Reason's connection to the season is even more tenuous, as there are just a few chapters set on 24 and 25 December 1903.

The book starts out great: it's set in a psychiatric hospital, with show more parallel narratives in 1903 and 2003, and there's a very compellingly and disturbingly written history of a teenage girl practicing self-harm. Not the kind of thing you'd see in a Doctor Who novel post-"Rose," and not the kind of thing I associate with Christmas, but it sets the stage. The Doctor is suitably mysterious in this one, with lots of good lines. Things are set up well, with mysterious goings on at the hospital in both time zones...

...and set up is basically all that ever happens. On page 203 out of 281, the Doctor finally figures out what's going on... and then we're told that he, "far from proposing any plan of action, stated that he was still at the information-gathering stage." C'mon, Martin Day, kick this plot into gear sometime! As you might guess, things wrap up a bit too easily, and plus it turns out that everything's the fault of that overused Doctor Who standby, aliens who feed on negative emotion. A promising beginning, and some good touches here and there, and a nice companion-of-the-month, but a disappointing novel on the whole.

Thankfully, Penguin released a book of Christmas-themed Doctor Who short stories this year, so next year's read-- probably the last-- will be one with a direct connection to the season. show less

When the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe materialize at their latest destination, they find themselves on a stagnant world ruled by a group of armored warriors dedicated to holding their society to a medieval level of technology. Arrested soon after their arrival, they soon set out to decipher the mysteries of the place, particularly the lingering presence of an earlier, more advanced civilization of humans upon the ruins of which the existing society was but. As they investigate further they show more discover that underlying it all is a danger that threatens to wipe out all life on the planet, one for which the inhabitants of the world are singularly ill suited to stop.

Martin Day's novel is a book that is more successful than it has any right to be. The premise and setting draw upon elements from over a half-dozen Doctor who stories, all of which executed them in more refreshingly entertaining ways. The level of bloodshed is almost shockingly high, thanks to a threat that is very atonal for the Doctor Who universe. That Day pulls it off as well as he does is thanks in equal parts to his plotting (which keeps things moving at a decent enough pace and introduces enough elements to engage the reader) and the way in which he layers his antagonists, many of which display a degree of nuance that makes them different form the one-dimensional baddies that they might otherwise have been. While the end result may not rank among the best of the Missing Adventures series, it is one that makes for an enjoyable, if occasionally graphic, read for fans of the franchise. show less

This book was genuinely creepy. The Doctor and Martha arrive on a ghost ship in the middle of space. It was a prison ship, where experiments were routinely carried out on the inmates. Most of the ship's occupants died horribly. And then it gets worse from there, because there are Things in the dark, and part of the ship opens up into a forest full of nasty creatures. Where the hell did the forest come from?

More importantly, where the hell did the people come from? There's a village on the show more other side of the forest. They have some problems as well, namely that their children have started to go missing, and this mist stuff has been slowly encroaching on the village's territory. If it covers the village, everyone might die. The Doctor and Martha have to figure out what's going on, save the village, try not to get eaten by monsters in the forest, and get back to the TARDIS, which is still on the ship . . . It's a tall order.

I really did like this one, even though I had a hard time sleeping after reading it. It wound up being a little complex, but the characters were interesting and the story seemed pretty innovative. show less

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A Seventh Doctor / Ace novel set before Survival, thus outside the New Adventures continuity which I am used to. Despite the fact that Keith Topping is a co-author, I thought it was rather good, a sort-of sequel to The Awakening and to a lesser extent The Dæmons, with occult practices in a remote English village connecting both to ancient aliens and the highest levels of today's government; lots of good moments for Ace and her Doctor, and managing show more to engage with the genre of The Wicker Man while still being more or less a Doctor Who story. Two things I didn't like: the scene-setting seventeenth-century dialogue in the opening chapter is terrible (though oddly later chapters do it better) and there seemed to be a geographical delusion that Liverpool is the nearest large city to Wiltshire. But apart from that it worked for me. show less