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The Cover of the Dying Days Virgin New Adventures Novel by Lance Parkin, showing the Eight Doctor and an Ice Warrior

The last Virgin New Adventure and the only one to feature the Eighth Doctor by Lance Parkin who was among the more highly regarded NA authors and who, at one point, had the beginnings of a successful career in television which would have made him an obvious candidate to contribute to the new series. Except it sort of stopped for reasons that have never been clear to me and he seems to have retreated into a career primarily writing spinoffery of various descriptions. Not quite the crash and burn of Lawrence Miles, but odd none-the-less.

Crossposts: https://louisedennis.livejournal.com/422114.html

One the whole I would rate The Eyeless as an above average NuWho novel, but it makes quite a strange read, particularly since I recall the author discussing it on Doctor Who book mailing lists as he was writing. If I remember correctly, Parkin deliberately set out to show that the NuWho tie-in novels could tackle the same kind of material that the Virgin New Adventures and BBC Eighth Doctor novels had tackled. The result is a wierd hybrid - something that takes the themes of NuWho rather more seriously than most of the tie-in novels but, at the same time, includes material that genuinely does feel out of place in a novel at least partially aimed at children.

( More under the Cut )

All in all, this is a strange hybrid between the Doctor Who novels of the 1990s and the NuWho novels. I'm glad I read it, and its certainly interesting, but in the end I think it is a failed experiment that demonstrates that, in fact, the NuWho novels can't do the same kinds of things that the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures did.

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/331931.html

The last segment of Time and Relative Dissertations in Space was the part that contained the most essays that read like articles out of DWM. This kind of journalistic article is very well but, as I've got older, I've become more aware of the way these things really are just opinion with no real theoretical framework to back them up and so they felt out of place to me in this volume which was otherwise working quite hard to present its material academically.

( The Talons of Robert Holmes )

( Why is 'City of Death' the best Doctor Who story? )

( Canonicity matters: defining the Doctor Who canon )

( Broader and deeper: the lineage of and impact of the Timewyrm series )

( Televisuality without television? The Big Finish audios and discourses of 'tele-centric' Doctor Who )

So, all in all, I found lots to interest me in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space. But, as I said when I started these reviews, I think it suffers from an uneven tone - veering wildly from very jargon heavy academic discourse to much fluffier, more journalistic pieces and the lasts quarter, in particular, didn't appear to me to have a great deal to offer beyond the articles you can (or at least used to, pre-2005) find regularly in Doctor Who Magazine.

WHO DAILY HTML: <lj user=louisedennis> <a href="http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/81978.html">reviews part four of time and relative disserations in space</a>

bunn asked about the Faction Paradox novels in a reply to my last post and my comment in return was too long so I'm putting it here as a new post

( Notes on the Faction Paradox (and related) Novels )

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Random Doctor Who Picture: The Dying Days

Doctor Who: The Eyeless by Lance Parkin

The Parting of the Critics: Value Judgements and Canon Formations

Faction Paradox Novels

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