Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Unnatural History (Doctor Who Series) by Kate Orman, Jonathan Blum ISBN: 0-563-55576-9 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: June, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Unnatural History
Comment: Quite naturally, it's a superior Eighth Doctor story, penned, as it is, by Jonathan Blum, and the slightly overrated, overappreciated, but nevertheless highly talented Kate Orman.
In this one, Sam has a problem with her biodata, and it is causing her to morph from one slightly-altered version of herself to another...while the original Sam is trapped inside "the Scar"--some sort of cataclysmic hole in reality, caused (allegedly) by the Earth suddenly passing through something it shouldn't have. There's also an even bigger problem with the Doctor's biodata--we learn it has been acting up, and tangled up, since his regeneration from Seventh to Eighth, appearing now as glistening, and highly vulnerable, strands throughout San Francisco ("appearing", that is, if you can spot things that hover in and out of our known three dimensions). Worse yet, the so-called Scar may have been caused by the Doctor's out of control essence, and his quickest solution is to wedge his beloved TARDIS in the Scar to prevent it from, uh, going bang and jeopardizing reality.
But the Doctor's stopgap is not foolproof, and incidentally may mean the destruction of his TARDIS. "Not foolproof" means that reality in San Francisco is not what it was: strange creatures--dragons and unicorns and mandlebrots, oh my!--and more, roam the city; the reality warpage has attracted the attention of the Doctor's old foes, Faction Paradox, or maybe they are there because they had a hand in causing this mess; the reality warpage has also attracted the attention of Griffin the unnaturalist who collects extra-dimensional life forms as specimens (and San Francisco is now crawling with wonderful potential prizes, including the Doctor, oh what a prize he would make!), or maybe the unnaturalist is there because he had a hand in creating this mess.
San Francisco needs drastic sorting out...or will it simply cease to exist when a creature called a Kraken arrives to eat the Scar? The beauty of Dr Who books like this--where reality is in flux, AND Faction Paradox is involved, trying to promote even more impossibilities--is that Anything Can Happen. The authors are free to invent and invent and invent, insert dragons, present a half-dozen different Sams, splay the Doctor's essence across the skyline where the enemies can tamper with it, have alternate-versions of main characters finally sleep with each other (or at least snog), and generally turn preconceived assumptions about what's allowed in a Dr Who novel inside-out.
The trick is: having it all patched up in satisfactory manner at the end, and having it all mean something. If much of what transpires in an amazing book like this is unreal--or tampered-with reality that will be erased, modified, set right, abandoned, whatever--then the danger is that the story ultimately will not matter. The pyrotechnics, the freedoms granted, may create nothing important. That was my worry. Fortunately, with all their imaginations poured recklessly into this one book, the authors are really only pretending recklessness. They are smart enough not to misplace logic completely, and we are treated to a story that somehow makes sense. Cracking and bending reality can indeed be used to formulate a seamless story (Faction Paradox would be impressed), if care is taken. The other issue is one of emotional vitality--caring what happens here, even if, by the very end, it is somehow all swept away, stowed in a bubble of unreality. First of all, that is not exactly how it ends--that would be too easy, let's face it. At the very least, this novel cannot possibly tie up all loose ends, because it sets the stage for the final revelations about Sam in two later books, Interference: Books One and Two. Secondly, this is unreality made real, maybe for a small while but with big emotional consequences, so it matters to all our characters, and to the reader. This reader, anyway.
Rating: 4
Summary: There's a lot going on here
Comment: There are a lot of things going on in UNNATURAL HISTORY. The good news is that the great majority are wonderfully intriguing, appealing and well written. The bad news is that because there are so many, they come across at times as being superficial and not fully developed. This is indeed very frustrating although the overall effect isn't enough to take away from the book as a whole.
First of all, we finally get to meet the oft-hinted-at Dark Sam. While the regular (blonde) Sam Jones is a squeaky clean (and at times dead boring) defender of causes, the Dark Sam is an altered version who has had thoughts and experiences that the original would never have dreamed of. Unfortunately, not much of this seems to affect her, and the Dark Sam is soon blindly trusting the Doctor and being innocuous in exactly the same way that she would have normally. She smokes, drinks and has done drugs in the past, but her character isn't significantly different - she still speaks and acts in the same manner. I had to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be a changed person.
Now I realize that one of the themes of the book is that the past is not as important to the present and the future as the present itself is. I get the impression that Dark Sam was deliberately made inoffensive to re-enforce this philosophy; Dark Sam can have a different and more dangerous, gritty past than Blonde Sam, yet she still is, at her core, the same person. This may indeed be an interesting train of argument (and it definitely works well in the confines of this story) but extending the theme into the Dark Sam subplot didn't seem to work as well. In fact, it took me almost the first hundred pages or so to figure out what they were doing with her. And coincidentally it was around the point at which I realized this that they started bringing some of the darker aspects into the foreground. Although this did begin to distinguish her from the Blonde Sam it didn't seem to quite do enough, though I realize that this was probably the point.
That said, I thought the rest of the story was quite enjoyable. There are some wonderfully written sequences that are a joy to read. The "Wild Hunt" effect when Sam's mind would react to her past being re-written was executed tremendous well. This section highlighted the things that I enjoy the most in Ormanblum books; it's slightly surreal, it's full of wonderful imagery and it's true to the character going through the experience. I thought that there was only a single piece of wasted potential and that was that we only saw the occurrence through Sam's eyes. Since it was a slightly hallucinogenic experience I would have been interested to see Fitz and the Doctor's reaction to going through the same phenomenon and how it compared to Sam's. But this is only a minor quibble and did not detract from my enjoyment of the sequences.
Unlike some of their previous books, there are not very many secondary characters in the story. Instead it focuses on the three regulars (well, two regulars and one altered) and gives more attention over to the plot. The only downside to this is that there seems to be too much going on to fully justify the inclusion of everything
Despite some imperfections this is a story worth reading and is the best book in the Doctor Who range since THE FACE-EATER.
Rating: 2
Summary: Once upon a time in USEnet
Comment: I used to read the usenet group rec.arts.doctor-who, in which the authors were frequent posters. They came under attack quite often, unfairly, because of the stories they told about Doctor Who. You could always find tremendous arguments about what was "canon" and what "didn't count," what the Doctor would and wouldn't do, and Kate and Jon often came under fire for defending the books. Some people said that the references to the Doctor's history in the books couldn't be official, because he'd never mentioned them in the series, or similar arguments. Their detractors insisted that the Doctor can't have had all these alternate origins and histories, and that the books made up too much new stuff to be official. I stopped reading the newsgroup because there was more personal insult and side-taking than actual discussion going on.
In some of their past books, Kate and Jon have made references in subtle ways to the discussions and arguments that have taken place on the newsgroup. This has usually been in lively and harmless but entertaining ways- unintrusive if you don't catch it, but amusing if you do. But there is a character in this book who is an embodiment of the books' naysayers, and who comes across as a ridiculous caricature of the poeple who have said bad things about them. The metaphor aside, the character, Griffin by name, doesn't stand out as a very good villain for the story anyway. His motives are a little dull, really, and even if the reader doesn't recognize what he represents, it's hard to believe that a person who can reach into several dimensions at once can't wrap his head around the idea that the doctor had a tool up his sleeve, simply because "there's no evidence" that he had it. This, to me, was such an obvious parody of the people who said in the USEnet group that aspects of the Doctor's history mentioned in the books can't be true because "there's no evidence for it" in the TV series. When, in the book, it makes Griffin look stupid, it seems arrogant on the authors' part in their insult against the people who argued with them. As if saying they don't agree because they're not smart enough.
Up to now, I have always liked Kate's books, and her collaborations with Jon have always been good as well. But I didn't like this one, and I'm kind of surprised. But there was a subtext to this story that I found kind of irritating, and a bit haughty. And perhaps because this book is a continuation of a multi-book story arc, it relied much more heavily on the continuity of the series. This was fine. But mixed in with the things that a long-time reader would recognize as a reference to the TV Movie, or to a previous book in the 8th Doctor sereis, there were other things that I got the feeling we were supposed to recognize, but I had no recollection of. The character of Dr. Joyce, for example, I spent much of the book trying to figure out the identity of, but at the end of the book I still don't know who this character really is or what other names we've seen him use in the series's past.
For these reasons, I got the feeling that Kate and Jon were writing to a particular person, and it wasn't me. I'm hoping their next effort will be back on par with the quality I'm used to from them.
 |
Title:Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion of Earth ASIN: B0000ADXG3 Publisher: BBC Video Pub. Date: 07 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $31.48 |
 |
Title: Reckless Engineering (Doctor Who) by Nick Walters ISBN: 0563486031 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
 |
Title:Doctor Who - The Talons of Weng-Chiang ASIN: B0000AGQ27 Publisher: BBC Video Pub. Date: 07 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $31.48 |
 |
Title: Doctor Who: The Last Resort (Doctor Who) by Paul Leonard ISBN: 0563486058 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
 |
Title: Camera Obscura (Doctor Who) by Lloyd Rose ISBN: 0563538570 Publisher: BBC Worldwide Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
