Nick Walters (1)

The Tardis makes a crash landing in rural Sweden, a place where coincidentally some strange things have started to happen. It's up to the Doctor, Sam, and Fitz to save the day, etc.

I enjoyed this more than the previous DW novel I read: the Doctor is much more of a presence here (with some really nice character beats, e.g. cushions and butterflies) and the POV shifts are more gracefully done. Nick Walters is also to be applauded for having Fitz read a bit more mature here, which is great show more because last time he felt like having to sit through Bashir-heavy episodes in early seasons of DS9 all over again. (Listen, Julian grew on me over time but he did not start out great.)

Some of the set-up and narrative choices are very '90s, and I think Dominion would have benefited from at least one more draft. For instance, Walters has a bit of a tendency to blow through some of his more dramatic moments and character grace notes, and lingering in them a bit more and cutting down the descriptions of trippy alien landscapes would have been a help. But, on the whole, perfectly cromulent. show less

Sweden in July 1999. Six people have disappeared, as in "vanished, along with everything within a three-metre radius around them", in the woods outside Strängnäs. At the same time, an elderly farmer in the area has found and been forced to shoot a nightmarish, hyper-aggressive creature in his barn. Meanwhile, the Eighth Doctor and Fitz have been forced to make an emergency landing after some unknown phenomenon has damaged the TARDIS badly, and Sam is missing after a strange whirlpool of show more chaos swallowed her. The Doctor must try to find out what happened to the missing Swedes (one of whom comes back — briefly), where the alien insectoid things come from, and where Sam is, and whether all those things are linked; unfortunately, the TARDIS is damaged to the point of severing its telepathic link to him while it is recovering, and the resulting disorientation doesn't make things easier...

On the whole a lightweight but enjoyable novel, set partly in Sweden, partly in a pocket universe, and the only time we have seen the Doctor visit these parts. Walters seems to have read up a bit on Sweden, maybe even visited here; still, a few of the Swedish names are slightly strange (the village outside Strängnäs is called Härad, not Harad, and I suspect "Olla Wenberg" should be "Ulla Wennberg"). One thing that really makes me feel as if even the parts from Sweden are set in a parallel universe is the description of Swedish tabloids as less predatory than the British ones. The difference is one in degree only; Swedish tabloids are no less sensationalist (if, thankfully, slightly more reluctant to pass moral judgement — you won't see them calling anything "vile" in so many words). I'm just saying that if six people disappeared without a trace one summer, Aftonbladet wouldn't just "carry a short article on the 'Strängnäs incident', reporting the bare facts and listing the names of those who had vanished". (We are never told whether newspapers exist in the Dominion.) show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/reckless-engineering-by-nick-walters/

this has the Doctor, Fitz and Anji arriving in a parallel universe – Bristol, to be specific – where a chronological disaster has wiped out most animals and devastated humanity. There is some good action between the macro plot of trying to fix things and the micro plot of the local politics of the (doomed) inhabitants of the parallel timestream. Despite the fact that this Bristol is depopulated and desolate, there is a show more real sense of place and space in this book and good characterisation of the main characters, including more than one parallel version of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I liked it more than some in this sequence. show less

A Doctor Who novel featuring the Eighth Doctor, Sam Jones, and Fitz Kreiner. Sam disappears and the TARDIS is severely damaged after an encounter with a dimensional anomaly; the Doctor and Fitz get stuck in Sweden where there's been a rash of mysterious disappearances.

I didn't much care for this one as it's mostly just running from monsters and people shouting at each other. That sort of thing can work okay on screen, but reading nearly 300 pages of it gets old.