Kate Orman

This is another adventure for the amnesiac eighth Doctor with Fitz and Anji. Like Jacqueline Rayner (author of the last one I read, EarthWorld), Kate Orman is a deft hand when it comes to characterization, especially Anji; I also really liked Orman's eighth Doctor, who you can imagine as being played by Paul McGann, but who also does the kind of things that are unique to this prose version of the Doctor, a man obsessed but who also doesn't know his own past. I liked him on the music-obsessed show more space colony, trying to figure out a piece of music he could remember; the visual of the Doctor literally curling up with tigers and adopting cat body language is something one can't imagine the tv show actually being willing to do, but fits beautifully.

The story is a good one, with a human space colony discovering that native "tiger" life-forms they'd thought benign and nonsentient are actually intelligent and possess their own agenda; the Doctor and his friends must work to minimize loss of life and bring two sides together. Some good jokes, some beautiful prose, well written throughout. In general, I've picked and chosen from the post-Burning Eighth Doctor Adventures, but every one I have read shows off Doctor Who prose fiction at its best. show less

Blue Box features the sixth Doctor and Peri, seemingly some time in the run-up to The Trial of a Time Lord, in 1981 America. The novel is told in the form of a piece of long-form journalism by Chick Peters, who stumbles into a plot by a prominent D.C.-area hacker to acquire a piece of alien technology, and the attempts of the Doctor, Peri, and their friend Bob to stop her. It's got a lot going for it, and I really enjoyed it on the whole; surely one of the very best PDAs.

First, Orman as show more always has a good handle on characterization. Here we get some probing of Peri's tempestuous relationship with the sixth Doctor: why she likes him, why she wants to leave him, why she ultimately stays on. The sixth Doctor is in a bit of a different mode than normal (Orman perhaps channeling some of the seventh Doctor, with whom she cut her teeth as a Doctor Who novelist), but I could still imagine Colin Baker delivering his lines with gusto. (She does get him out of the coat, which was seemingly obligatory for PDA writers back in the day, though I did like the image of him wearing all black except for a rainbow cat tie.) The new characters, especially Chick, Bob, and the villain, Sarah Swan, all pop off the page. There's a pretty neat turn of events as regards Chick, one I wouldn't have excepted in a 2003 novel. Though it's not handled quite the way I would imagine for a 2023 novel, it was still pretty impressive.

Second, I really liked how the story was told. Peters writes in the first person from his perspective. Sometimes it's stuff he saw, sometimes it's stuff he reconstructed from his sources. It's a neat way to tell a Doctor Who story, and an effectively different way of getting into characters' heads. Orman does a good job of imitating the style of long-form journalism, like those occasional forays into people's backstories, the plucking out of their small idiosyncrasies, and beginning with a scene that occurs much later than most of the action. The book is able to give exposition in terms of both character and plot without it feeling belabored, and there is a nicely poetic recurring bit about someone riding a bull that wrong-foots the readers. As always, Orman reads smoothly and nicely. It feels like a novel, not a novelisation of a tv show, in the form of the story, too: the story here is about people, and the kind of action that is present, plays to the strengths of prose.

Third, I loved the topic. I watched War Games and Triumph of the Nerds a lot as a kid. I have a real fondness for the early computer era, an era where—as this book points out—individual people could still meaningfully comprehend and control computer programs and the emerging Internet. There are some good jokes about what was to come with computing, and lots of delving into the mechanics of hacking. I don't know if it was all plausible or not, but it felt plausible. (The "blue box" of the title is not the TARDIS but a real device that lets people manipulate phone lines.) I always get a kick out of this kind of thing, and Orman made it come alive.

Add to that a creepy concept and you have a winner. I don't know that I would give it "five stars" if I went around doing such things, but this seems to me to be the platonic ideal of a PDA. show less

This is the second EDA but (so people say) the first one worth reading. The Doctor and his new companion, Sam, fight vampires in 1990s San Francisco. I enjoyed it: it's a good mash-up of the sensibilities of the NAs with those of the 1996 television movie. It gets a little violent at times in ways I don't see as very eighth-Doctory, but outside of that it captures his character very well: there's a big emphasis on the sleights of hand he did in the TVM, and how his whole way of operating show more might itself be a sleight of hand. What's trickier: having a complicated plan like the seventh Doctor, or not having a complicated plan like the seventh Doctor... but everything still working out in the end? This isn't quite the eighth Doctor that Paul McGann would end up playing in the audio dramas (which didn't start for another four years), but this is a legitimate extrapolation of how he played it in the movie. It gets a little bogged down in vampire stuff at times, but it usually has a good sense of humor about it. (I was surprised to realize it was published four months after Buffy began, because it feels like Buffy must have been an influence, and yet it could not have been.) I remember liking Sam in the later Orman/Blum EDAs I've already read (Unnatural History and Seeing I), and that was true here as well; they give her that Rose-esque sense of someone who wants to do something in the world that the Doctor enables, but often feels overwhelmed by the realities of the universe. show less

A solidly entertaining entry in the series, Unnatural History finds the Doctor, Sam, and Fitz in late '90s San Francisco, dealing with some of the fallout from the manner of Eight's regeneration—ones which threaten both the city and Sam's sense of who she is. You can really see here how the writers of the rebooted TV series robbed out some ideas from the books (spoilers!), and I did enjoy how Orman and Blum both attempt to reconcile some of the contradictory parts of the series canon show more (biodata!) and kind of shrug their shoulders and say "but do the plot holes matter if the characters don't care about them?" (meta!) I did find some of the plotting a bit muddled and murky, and Fitz has yet to fully grow on me in a way that I know he has for others (for all that he's from the '60s, he's a very '90s character type), but the set pieces were enjoyable and this was a fun read. Some lovely moments of observation about the Doctor. show less