Peter Darvill-Evans

I enjoyed this one a lot more than I remembered! This one has touches of Ctuliana about it, with lots of gribbly tentacle beasts to fight. I found my way to the evil magician and chased her for a bit only to find that she'd gone to ground and would come back again in the future. It was a victory that was really a defeat, which felt appropriate considering that will be the feeling come July 4th.

I picked this up for the first time yesterday and played it through. I got all the way to the final boss before making a wrong choice. I did it again, the same same way, and made the wrong choice again. On the third attempt I made the right choice and completed the book. I think I was lucky, because this seems a complicated book. There is a riddle and a maze before you even begin, and it throws you quickly into a whole new universe, taking standard fighting fantasy tropes and playing with show more them, and YOU!. It was a lot of fun, with a variety of weird and wonderful illustrations. I do wonder if it was too easy though, or whether I just paid attention to the massive hint you're given early on (was that a hint? maybe it wasn't a hint). I hope to find the time to map this book at some point in the future and enjoy all the nooks and crannies of the multiverse!

2025 note: just as good another time around, I don't remember it at all from 2021! show less

This is a solid Doctor Who novel with Fourth Doctor and Nyssa set mostly in the 13th century Oxford, and what made it special for me were all the little bits about history of science and the lovely afterword discussing history, historiography and fiction as well as outlining where the divide between fiction and history goes in the this book.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1280906.html

A slightly odd Who novel, a bit out of joint with itself: the Fourth Doctor, travelling companionless, meets with Nyssa, years after she has left Terminus, and sets off to track down a time anomaly centred around Roger Bacon in the year 1278. Darvill-Evans (who of course was Rebecca Levene's boss at Virgin when they were publishing the New and Missing Adventures) has worked hard, perhaps a little too hard, at the medieval Oxford setting, and explains show more how and why in an interesting afterword to the book. It is a very good study of Nyssa as tragic heroine, a line taken also in a couple of the better Big Finish audios; the Doctor / Bacon exchanges are quite fun as well. But the plot is a thin compilation of Brother Cadfael and Inspector Morse, with a pinch of alien menace not very satisfactorily explained. Still, an interestingly different take on where a Who novel can go and a moderate success. show less